Hydrogen is not used yet, because we don't have enough renewables to have significant overproduction. For now storage is not needed.
Truly this is a topic where everyone feels comfortable to throw in strong opinions without having even the slightest idea of how any of it works.
There is no causal relationship between high share of renewables and high electricity prices in Germany. If you have any argument or evidence that supports the causal link, please share. If not please acknowledge that you are operating on gut feeling without a factual basis.
Wholesale prices for electricity have been higher in France than in Germany, they have been much lower in Sweden, which has more renewables than Germany in the system already.
Also see https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2325/ML23258A145.pdf "Fusion Systems Rulemaking: United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Preliminary Proposed Rule Language". The NRC are already proposing to regulate fusion reactors much more like particle accelerators (which can produce medical radioisotopes, for example), and less like fission reactors.
The allegedly low cost of solar energy comes from ignoring battery cost. And the relatively high cost of fission comes largely from overregulation.
Here's another graph of the same thing, but updated with the actual rather than predicted value for one year after your link was published — and the price decline is back: https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-io...
> The allegedly low cost of solar energy comes from ignoring battery cost.
Can also solve the same issues with other storage options, hedge with other renewables that are also cheap, and electricity transport is a political issue rather than an economic or engineering problem.
> And the relatively high cost of fission comes largely from overregulation.
The low cost of fission is it being subsidised by the military value.
The regulations exist because even though the mean cost of accidents per TWh is tiny, the upper bound of the damage when they do happen is sufficient to bankrupt superpowers.
Renewables will be cheap even with storage costs included. Adding batteries to a utility scale PV field now actually saves money, because the cost of inverters and grid connection can be amortized over several times more energy.
Nuclear apologists never actually explain just what regulations would be removed to achieve the putative cost savings. It's all just "it was cheap before, and now isn't, therefore... regulations!"
Some of it does, the decay chains are wildly variable. Fortunately, the longer the half life, the lower the power output. If Cobalt-60 and Plutonium-242 released the same energy per decay event and you had the same number of atoms at the start, the radiation from the cobalt would be 72,000 times as intense to start with, but equal after 84 years.
But the main point, all things nuclear are so energy dense that in practice there's (relatively speaking) so little of the waste it basically doesn't matter. I've been in single rooms large enough to contain all the world's high level nuclear waste.
> The original bomb scientists really wanted to go with thorium as it has several safety features. One it needs to be pushed to criticality so it can't go runaway. Two its waste is much safer in its duration.
That seems like a flaw for a bomb, which is specifically it going runaway.
But also, it's quite hard to crush uranium or plutonium hard enough to do that. Even with Chernobyl, the fuel was surrounded by stuff designed to make it more energetic (although not as energetic as the actual accident, obviously).