Solar and wind and storage can supply 100% of the grid more cheaply than a CO2-free solution also using newly constructed nuclear. Many nuclear advocates still don't understand this new reality.
The problem is, currently there is not enough economic activity spent on storage (or any CO2-neutral thing really). You probably know the numbers. To switch off CO2 emissions we would need to build CO2-free power plants about 10 per day for 10 years.
Total US electricity generated by nuclear power plants was about 807 TWh (~92GW), but just in 2010 the world used 41 354 TWh generated by coal. That's a factor of 50. The US has about 95 commercial plants. So to replace just coal we'd need about 4750 new power stations.
Basically at this point everything that's not fossil based is great. Build all of them. More wind, solar, storage, nuclear, geo, etc.
The problem is huge, but not quite as grim as this. I think that you may be confusing primary (thermal) energy in coal with electricity supplied by coal. In 2018, coal was used to generate about 10,000 TWh of electricity:
Renewable generators only need to displace the electrical output of combustion based power plants, not the greater thermal energy contained in source fuels. A highly electrified, renewables-dominated world would consume less primary energy at the same level of energy service consumption. There's a lot less energy going toward production of useless waste heat when renewable electricity displaces fossil combustion electricity.
The average American coal plant turns only 37.4% of coal's thermal energy into electrical energy:
What storage? The reality is that there is no storage solution that is capable of storing enough energy to power even a modestly sized city for days or even hours (or minutes for that matter). Certain approaches, like gravity-based storage, also require particular geography.
Did you notice that there is no region on earth that gets 100% of their power from solar/wind/storage? Why is that? Why is Germany signing multi-decade, mulit-billion-dollar deals to build pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades still? And any region that claims 100% fossil-fuel free power ALWAYS relies on hydro, nuclear or geothermal to achieve that level. Why is that?
Diurnal storage via batteries or pumped hydro, long term storage via hydrogen. The combinations now optimize to 0% nuclear. Hydrogen round trip efficiency is low but the very low cost per kWh of storage capacity makes it win for long term storage.
That no location is currently 100% renewable is an obviously irrelevant point. I m talking about 100% CO2-free solutions. And new nuclear not sunk costed existing power plants.
You're just throwing things against the barn door hoping something sticks. Every proponent of renewables has a favorite miraculous battery technology that solves the intermittency problem. And yet I look at world, and nobody has actually deployed any storage technology at scale (and by 'scale', I mean using some battery technology that stores enough energy to power a modestly sized city of a few hundred thousands people for even a few hours).
What I'm adding here is not miraculous new battery technology. It's hydrogen for long term storage. All the components of that exist and are proven. It's just a matter of integrating them. This is the most reliable and easiest kind of innovation, and it's the death knell for nuclear.
(1) Wind and (especially) solar have only recently become cheap enough for this case to be made. Utility scale solar fell in cost by a factor of 5 in just the last decade,
(2) The point I made was for an apples-to-apples comparison in which all the capital costs are considered. But in this transition time the renewables are competing against existing capacity, in which the capital costs are sunk,
(3) Fossil fuel sources are not being charged for their CO2 emissions. The point I made was for a CO2-free grid, which requires that fossil fuel sources not be allowed to emit CO2. Nowhere have CO2 taxes or regulations yet put us into this situation.
Today, there are very few, if any, places in the world where it would make economic sense to build a new nuclear power plant.
> All the components for solar roadways and hyperloop exist and are proven, doesn't mean either of those are viable.
Electrolyzers exist, and are being made and sold in rapidly increasing numbers. Hydrogen valves, compressors, turbines, pipelines, and underground storage caverns exist. This is integration of existing technologies, some with track records going back more than a century. The comparison you make there is silly in the extreme. It would be more appropriate if applied to the current hype about thorium and Hail Mary Reactors.
And for all the talk about how the technology is ready and proven, you can't even point me to a real-world deployment, existing or planned, that will provide storage at any sort of scale to replace natural gas as wind/solar backup.
Actions speak louder than words. Take Germany for example, why aren't they redirecting the billions they are spending on NEW natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades, on your 'proven' and 'ready' battery storage technology?
And you have not refuted the explanation I gave for why there was not a deployment yet. That explanation is why the argument you are sticking to there is nonsense.
Your last question there has the answer "because the cost of CO2 in Europe is not high enough yet." Hydrogen doesn't make sense until natural gas is quite expensive, but even then a renewable system with hydrogen will be cheaper than a CO2-free system with fully costed nuclear.
Are you employed by the nuclear industry, by any chance? If so, if you aren't too old, run do not walk to another career.
