> If you can only run your smelters, factories, and chemical plants 9 months out of the year then that's going to cut production by 25%. This is going to drive

> If you can only run your smelters, factories, and chemical plants 9 months out of the year then that's going to cut production by 25%. This is going to drive up commodity prices, which is a cost that needs to be calculated as part of levelized cost of energy. This indirect cost of load shifting is almost always ignored. Good thing I'm not suggesting switching it off a quarter of the time then. Also $300/kW electrolysers (being produced now) only have to run a few thousand hours a year. > Furthermore, heating is one of the big uses for non-electric primary energy. And guess when heating demand is at its highest? During the winter, when solar is producing the least amount of energy. Wind may also be producing its lowest amount of energy, it depends on the region. You can't load shift heating unless you're fine with your people freezing. Germany just put in a 2GWh thermal storage system. Sand thermal storage can last months and finland is trialling a 200MWh system. There are a variety of other GWh scale systems around the world. Even a system as simple as a big tank of water inside the heated volume can load shift by days. > These are promises, not actual production figures. As is 'the price will go down and not up this time, just give us another trillion in tax money'. The difference is the renewable and battery industries have been consistently exceeding their promises, whereas the nuclear industry consistently does not. > And those promises were made before the cost of lithium jumped 400%. Battery production has already optimized manufacturing costs to ~25% of the total cost of batteries. Thus battery production is rapidly becoming a mineral extraction challenge. One that is a much smaller mineral extraction challenge than scaling Uranium mining. I have never claimed that it can be overcome, only that aquiring the Uranium just to meet the same scale that already exists is atleast 10x harder. > The cost of fuel is mostly in enrichment, not raw uranium. The $4/MWh is mostly comprised of the cost of enriching that uranium to ~20% U235, not extracting raw uranium. I gave you the figures you needed. Here is the method https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec... An AP1000 uses about 6.5 SWU (which have also doubled in price) with a ratio of 7.4:1 of natural to refined Uranium. Burnup is 60-65MWd/kg or 5.6TJ/kg thermal. This is about 1.8TJ electric or 250GJ per kg of natural Uranium. 250GJ is 66MWh and costs $850. Or about $1.70 if you don't round a bunch of times. Older reactors have higher U235 content and lower burnup. Last time there was a tiny blip in demand and a small dip in production, prices spiked to $250 or $10/Mwh ($4/MWh for an APR). This was far smaller than what you are proposing. > Nuclear fuel is mostly U238, even before it's been burned by nuclear reactors. Nuclear plants only burn a fraction of U235 before fuel is rotated out, because they're designed to work in a narrow enrichment range. Only a small portion of the U235 is burned by the time the fuel is removed. More than 90% of the potential energy in the fuel can be reclaimed through reprocessing [1]. Astonishingly incorrect. You can't use the fuel efficiency of a 65MWd/kg plant and the leftover fuel of a 25MWd/kg plant. APRs use 4% fuel and burn almost all of the U235 http://nuclear-power.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Fuel-Depletion-Isotopic-Changes.png http://nuclear-power.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Fuel-Dep... the 0.7% or so fissile material that remains is mostly Pu239. The remaining U235 is about as concentrated as enrichment tails. The 90% figure is for a breeder which has never been demonstrated (this is when you jump to MSRs, PBRs, LFTRs, and HTGRs right? it has to be coming soon). > No, they are not. You cannot control when people plug in their electric vehicles. No sane grid operator would accept the idea that a large portion of their energy storage might up and leave when people go on vacation for the summer. Plenty of people drive their cars during the day and charge them overnight, and will thus be a burden on energy storage. A car can charge any time it is parked. Extension cords cost vastly less than nuclear reactors. No sane grid operator would give up the opportunity to sell curtailed energy rather than pay to offload it. For the 5 days a year of unusual load we can fire up the gas generators. > In the same vein that fusion is viable. Sure, if it can be made to work. No, you're thinking of sea mining or profitably extracting 0.01% ore. Or building a modern PWR without $5bn in taxpayer handouts. Gas generators are profitable and have minimal capex. Wind and solar can come in under $20/MWh, in some areas these overlap. Electrolyzers are profitable for feedstock. It's a desperate reach to say a 5x drop in NPP price where the trend is up is certain while a 25% reduction in renewables and a 50% reduction in electrolysers is impossible. > There are presently zero electrolyzer used for grid storage right now. If they're scalable, build them and show me how cost effective they are by pointing to actual operational electrolyzer storage facilities. All of the parts exist at scale, and the learning curves are clear. It will happen when it makes economic sense in about 2030. Ie. Before any not currently permitted PWR will come online. If you want to offer $200/MWh that recent nuclear cost, it will happen immediately.