> The unreliability of solar and wind plus the state of modern batteries means that nuclear and coal are still better choices for large scale baseload generation.
I'm not convinced that's true. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty good, and as far as I can tell they're expensive outside of China for artificial reasons. (Chinese manufacturers have a deal with the owners of the LFP patents something like: if you don't enforce your patents in China, we won't export our batteries outside of China. The last major patent expires in April I believe, so maybe the situation will change then.) If you could reliably buy LFP batteries in the U.S. for under $100 a kwh, I would expect that to change the economics of grid storage quite a bit. Maybe coal would still be cheaper, but coal has some pretty significant externalities.
It might be possible to do nuclear more cheaply than we've done it in the past, and if so that would be great, but so far it's fairly expensive and we still don't have a good political solution for the problem of what to do with the waste. I'm generally in favor of more nuclear being built, but renewables are a viable alternative if grid storage is cheap enough and/or our power grid is capable of moving power around over long distances efficiently. (There was a story a couple months ago[1] that Chile is planning to export solar power to China via an undersea cable. If they pull it off it would mean China wouldn't need to buffer 12 hours of energy to get through the night because they literally have solar installations on opposite sides of the Earth.)
I'm not convinced that's true. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are pretty good, and as far as I can tell they're expensive outside of China for artificial reasons. (Chinese manufacturers have a deal with the owners of the LFP patents something like: if you don't enforce your patents in China, we won't export our batteries outside of China. The last major patent expires in April I believe, so maybe the situation will change then.) If you could reliably buy LFP batteries in the U.S. for under $100 a kwh, I would expect that to change the economics of grid storage quite a bit. Maybe coal would still be cheaper, but coal has some pretty significant externalities.
It might be possible to do nuclear more cheaply than we've done it in the past, and if so that would be great, but so far it's fairly expensive and we still don't have a good political solution for the problem of what to do with the waste. I'm generally in favor of more nuclear being built, but renewables are a viable alternative if grid storage is cheap enough and/or our power grid is capable of moving power around over long distances efficiently. (There was a story a couple months ago[1] that Chile is planning to export solar power to China via an undersea cable. If they pull it off it would mean China wouldn't need to buffer 12 hours of energy to get through the night because they literally have solar installations on opposite sides of the Earth.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29230066