> Your link says nothing about a first load taking 100 tons of fuel Page 8. Fuel Weight. > Only 2,000 GW is necessary for the world to achieve a 100% decarbon

> Your link says nothing about a first load taking 100 tons of fuel Page 8. Fuel Weight. > Only 2,000 GW is necessary for the world to achieve a 100% decarbonized energy production (the remaining 500 GW is fulfilled by hydroelectricity). That's current electricity demand. What about the other 14TW of primary energy? What about a kW or two each for the other 4 billion people that don't have that resource yet? Also once you build your 2TW you still need to run them. If they all get around 65MWd/kg you'll need 300,000t of Uranium a year (6x current production) so you have 16 years left. > Again, your figure of 4 hours is overly optimistic and you give nothing to back it up. 4 hours is a benchmark to roll out a grid with majority wind and solar without destabilization. Depending on existing hydro/etc it permits 50-80% wind and solar share. The actual solution for long term storage (hydrogen and ammonia) can be discussed once what is possible has been established. We can assume 12hr storage if you please. Last year's battery production would provide 12hrs for 33GW (historic peak of nuclear construction) and current manufacturing base would provide 80GW (quite close to the renewables that have been installed in the last year but not run for a whole year to get capacity figures). > And that's 20 years of dedicating 100% of global battery production to storage. That means a complete stopping of EV production and no batteries for electronics, etc. This is not feasible. That's just the rate from the factories that have been online for a year, there's almost a TW online now and several more TW being built. And that's only lithium battery (other technologies are not yet proven at scale but are building their first 100MWh~20GWh demo projects now which put together exceed the scale of new nuclear builds substantially). > Expanding a mineral supply chain by 300% is more than an order of magnitude easier than the 5,000 - 8,000% expansion that renewables require. That's 300% to match last year's production (which is 50GW of new net generation with 8hrs of battery produced per GW). To match your claimed need of an 80x multiple (so 32TWh/yr of battery for some reason you've never stated) you'd need 4TW of new nuclear per year which is 65x current production. You'd also need to triple sulfuric acid production, add 50% to silver production and double indium production. Luckily we only need a few hundred GW a year (of which the nuclear industry is capable of providing 10% or so). And even more luckily the gas infrastructure won't vanish overnight, so a few hours or even no storage can replace the majority with the rest to follow later. Even more luckily there's 500GW of hydro that can become pure dispatch or virtual storage for up to 2TW of pure renewables and 300-400GW of nuclear that can help. > Furthermore, the energy density of uranium is such that alternative extraction methods are viable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... You can process 250 trillion litres of water and extract the rare minerals for under a quarter billion dollars to bring 1GW of nuclear power online and run it affordably? That's great, we can use the 50000t of lithium you'll find to make 700GWh of batteries. Shortage solved. We don't even need sodium ion. Thanks. Edit: I just read your source. The exotic polymer you mentioned can gather 10g/kg of Uranium before it wears out. So you're effectively saying just pour 1% of global plastic production directly into the ocean to match current renewable capacity growth, or 10% of global plastic production for 500GW/year (and then continue pouring 40,000,000 tonnes of plastic into the ocean every year).