Well, I cannot currently foresee a situation where we’d need to apply this technology to store several orders of magnitude more energy. Even storing 50% more en

Well, I cannot currently foresee a situation where we’d need to apply this technology to store several orders of magnitude more energy. Even storing 50% more energy this way in the West would have significant self-reinforcing positive effects on the renewable energy industry. You might be thinking in an all-or-nothing way. Some solutions don’t need to scale well on cubic scales, etc. Moreover, there is hardly a reason pumped storage power plants can’t be done along side nuclear investment. There isn’t a dichotomy of choice, expanding use of both — or either — would benefit us all. In fact, there are synergies between pumped storage and nuclear power — pumped storage allows nuclear to more closely meet the peaks and valleys of electricity demand throughout the day. I think the biggest problem is that the energy sector isn’t making big plant investments due to capitalistic incentives. Why invest into plants if less supply of electricity means a higher unit price, and any state investment into private power companies can go straight into retained earnings/dividend? It would be improving things for technological advancement sake, against investor interests. Things work differently when the power companies are state-owned, of course. But that doesn’t completely flip the script either — technological advancement for advancement sake is still not often pursued. And it’s often even seen as wasteful by the electorate. If we wanted technological advancement, we have several clear ways to achieve it, even without scaling the current technology exponentially. The problem is that we didn’t want it enough. But now some companies do.