Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

> There is already a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen on an industrial scale

If by "a great deal" you mean "a fraction of one percent of what is required". No, the issue I'm raising is not well solved. Currently hydrogen is used shortly after it's produced, typically for chemical manufacturing or oil refining. It's not being stored for long periods of time, nor is it being transported in anything close to the amount of natural gas.

> The great majority of methane storage is underground as compressed gas, not cryogenic. Underground storage is cheap; the capacity in the US is a good fraction of the annual consumption of natural gas here. It is this long-proven technology I am referring to, which should have been clear from what I wrote earlier.

That's assuming these underground storage will work with a substance that has greater permeability. And storage is only half the problem, it's also a matter of the infrastructure used to transport gas to the end user. Simply pumping hydrogen through the same pipelines as natural gas isn't as easy as it sounds. Hydrogen has greater permeability and turns metals into hydrides at pressure. Hydrogen pipelines need to be much more corrosion resistant.

To put this in comparison, the US has 2 million miles of natural gas pipelines [1]. It only has 900 miles of hydrogen gas pipelines [2]. Most hydrogen is produced near areas of demand, and is not transported for long distances or stored for long periods of time. There's research into carbon-fiber pipelines that could better resist corrosion, but this is not a mature level of technology. It's more feasible to pipe methane, and then use steam reforming on-site.

> The density of hydrogen gas at STP is less than 0.1 kg/m^3. Divide to get 7.0e11 m^3.

Volume doesn't matter, I converted the volume of methane produced to mass.

> Globally, 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen. I wasn't talking about hydrogen production by electrolysis; I was talking about total hydrogen production, to show that hydrogen is a material that global industry already has vast experience with.

Excellent point, total hydrogen production is 70 million tons with most of it produced through steam reforming (which produces carbon dioxide). Electrolysis only accounts for 4% of hydrogen production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Methods_of....

The fact that 6% of natural gas production is used to make hydrogen doesn't mean that our hydrogen production equals 6% of our natural gas production. Most of the natural gas used in steam reforming is used to produce heat. And methane is 75% carbon by mass.

To recap, we have 3 orders of magnitude less hydrogen production and hydrogen transport infrastructure. Even less if you only count hydrogen produced through electrolysis. This is in no way "a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen at scale".

1. https://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/state-gas-pipelines.asp...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_pipeline_transport

The only way to effectively offset energy demand is with a very large temperature range, which is not a comfortable temperature range.

This is largely and unavoidable problem. It's a big part of why Germany mostly heats it's houses with natural gas while France mostly heats with electricity.

History demonstrates otherwise. Not one country generates the majoirty of their power from solar or wind. By comparison, France and Belgium generate the majority of their electricity from nuclear power. Similarly the claim that nuclear is too slow to build is false. France constructed the majority of their reactor fleet over the course of 15 years.

Solar and wind are only viable with storage. Hydroelectric storage is currently the most popular, but it's geographically limited. Batteries don't provide anywhere near the scale of storage requires. The US would need 12 hours of storage to reach 80% renewable generation and 3 weeks of storage to reach 100% renewable generation [1]. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. But global lithium ion battery production is only 300 GWh per year [2]. Even if we contributed 100% of global battery production to grid storage in the US, it would take 800 years to fulfill 3 weeks of storage. Sure, battery production is set to increase to 2,000 GWh per year some time in 2030, but that only brings this time down to 120 years. And remember, this is just the storage demands for the United States.

If we're worried about the time it takes to decarbonize, then solar and wind are very poor choices.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

2. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

You missed a huge part of my comment: it would take 20 (not 15) years of global battery production to get the United States to have enough storage to reach 80% renewables generation.

As in, if we stopped manufacturing smart phones and electric vehicles and dedicated all batteries produced in the entire world, then it'd take 20 years to fulfill the storage required to reach 80% renewables for just the United States. We would still need to build storage for the rest of the world! And that still leaves us with 20% of our power coming from fossil fuels. To get to 0% we need 3 weeks of storage not 12 hours. Even if battery production increased tenfold, it'd take 80 years of global battery production to fulfill the storage demand to get only the United States to 100% renewables.

And the US only makes up ~1/5th of the world's energy consumption. To get the entire world to 100% renewables it would take 4,000 years at current levels of battery production. Even if battery production increases tenfold, or one-hundredfold it would still take much longer than the 15 years it takes to set up a nuclear power plant. Like I said, if you're worried about how long it would take to decarbonize, stay well away from intermittent sources of power.

Nuclear power plant construction has high latency, but you can build multiple plants at once: France took about 15 years to bring it's nuclear power generation from 10% to over 80%. Each individual plant took year to builds but in aggregate France built a nuclear plant every 100 days.

The average price I paid for electricity in Ontario over a couple years vs. the average of a number of sources I found for cost of electricity across Germany. I don't have any links saved, but yeah it was like ~0.05 CAD vs 0.55 CAD per kWh iirc.

You're right that solar has become very price competitive. We're pushing that at Tesla & I do think as the current regulatory environment around nuclear continues to stay roughly the same, solar will be much cheaper in the coming decade.

It should be noted that subsidies, regulatory fees, and economies of scale play a MUCH larger role in the LCOE of energy sources today than the fundamental physics, efficiency, material costs etc do.

Therefore it is wiser to look at the options from a first principles perspective and consider the potential costs of sources after equally large effort is put into scaling and optimization, and ignoring political factors. When you analyze the options in this way, nuclear wins every single time.