> The cost of nuclear is artificially high because special interests have lobbied hard against nuclear, draining western countries of the experience to build nuclear facilities rapidly and also taking away any opportunities for efficiencies of scale.

Hinkley Point C is build in cooperation by China and France, the at the moment most active countries in building and maintaining nuclear power plants. It doesn't get more "economy of scale"-ly than this.

Smaller, safer, modular reactors should have been our focus decades ago. We are several generations behind where we ought to be, because we haven't prioritized it. The zero-nuclear agenda, combined with cheap natural gas and a (to me) strange fixation on renewables* has held us back.

*I say strange, because renewables have only just now started to get to make sense at scale, despite the reliance on fossil fuels to provide a base load, when we could have had a clean grid by now without them had we tried.

It certainly could get a lot more “economy of scale”-y than a single bespoke reactor project. Indeed, look into small modular reactors—they’re designed to be built at scale in factories (rather than individual bespoke plants). The levels ed cost of energy for these is projected to be well below $100/MWh which compares favorably with fossil fuel sources.

One unsolved problem with those small reactors is security. How do you prevent some terrorists from building dirty bombs with material stolen from a company's basement reactor? How do you trace the vast amount of radioactive material at so many sites?

One solution to it from mid-1990s was sealed reactors that are refueled by sending them back to manufacturer, fitting on single railway car. Combined with being rather hard to extract the material due to coolant used (liquid metal solidifying when shut down or leaking) and various anti-proliferation poisons used, it makes a pretty good solution.

I am dubious. Something that fits on a single railway car can be stolen in its entirety, and then the question is “is it valuable enough someone might just do that?”

It’s the same reason that puts me off houseboats: “thieves stole my house”/“my nuclear reactor has gone missing” should be Onion headlines and Pratchett storylines respectively, not things that actually happen.

individual fuel assemblies are much smaller, and by this logic easier to steal.

There's a reason why logistics for certain materials include security services, and it's much harder to abscond with multiple-tens-of-tons container that can have tracking beacon than a single fuel assembly.

One-off megaprojects are the opposite of economy of scale. Standardized production in large numbers allows you to amortize the costs of development and validation as well as maintain a healthy ecosystem of suppliers and employees who can compete for contracts.

> The cost of nuclear is artificially high because special interests have lobbied hard against nuclear, draining western countries of the experience to build nuclear facilities rapidly and also taking away any opportunities for efficiencies of scale.

This is also why we are building HUGE reactors.

The bureaucracy for building a nuclear plant is pretty much the same whether you build a 1 watt plant or a 1 terawatt plant.

Thus, it's more cost-effective to build the biggest m-f:n plant you possibly can.

> I doubt [battery] supply will be able to keep up.

Any tech that exists today can be made in almost-limitless quantities given a few years and customers willing to pay.

Eg. Say you want to make 100x the worlds current production of nuts and bolts. You just count up how many nut and bolt factories there are, how many steel works, how many mines, etc, and you multiply that by 99 and build them. Provided you have financing (which you will have if enough people are happy to buy nut and bolt futures ahead of time), they're all parallel projects so can be done independently, almost eliminating schedule risk.

The only time it doesn't hold true is when the need for a product is short term, unpredictable, unexpected, or where someone desires to pay less than market price.

We’re talking about enough batteries for the entire world’s total energy needs for weeks at a time. That means the battery industry needs to increase in size by many times it’s current state, which implies many new factories built and so on, never mind contention over natural resources. Meeting such demand seems likely to take many decades and untold trillions in investment.

You should look at the amount of battery plants that are being built right now. This is just in Europe. Economies of scale at work. https://mobile.twitter.com/ZennRoland/status/135382169441102...

An annual production of 600 GWh worth of batteries, that will be mostly used in vehicles. For reference, annual EU power production is roughly 2778000 GWh, it's a drop in an ocean.

Li-Ions are frankly a terrible solution for grid storage, pumped hydro is the only thing that makes sense on these scales.

We don’t need a year of storage, and any unit can be used at least 1000 times (I forget the exact number).

PV being as cheap as it is, it isn’t totally crazy to suggest so much overproduction that 24h of storage is enough. I expect not optimal, but not wildly so.

That reduces the 2778000 GWh to 7610 GWh, which only needs replacing at most every 3 years.

I’m supporting nuclear (and brought up hydro in the first place) because something might get in the way of scaling up battery production or prevent batteries from getting much cheaper (last I checked there’re more expensive per lifetime unit stored than nuclear is per unit generated), but it definitely isn’t crazy to think it will scale up to the required level and come down in price.

The production will likely increase if the demand is there and we're not trying to replace the yearly power production. It has its downsides but it's easier to implement than huge hydro infrastructure projects. We'll see a mix of different technologies I guess, depending on the local possibilities.

I don’t think you appreciate how small that is compared to what would be required for global grid storage. Using numbers from Wikipedia, the world uses something like 2200 TWh of energy every week. The figure I’ve heard thrown around for necessary grid storage is “weeks”, so we’ll say 1 week of storage is required. That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years. Or if you prefer, we need to produce an annual 44TWh of batteries a year globally for the next 50 years, which means we need 75-Europes-worth of production capacity. Further still, energy demand is projected to increase as the global population grows and as standards of living increase.

Even worse, scaling anything isn’t linear. It’s likely a lot easier to scale from 1GWh/year to 10GWh/year than it is to scale from 10 to 100. For example, in the first 10x scale, you might be able to pull a certain kind of skilled labor or raw material from other industries, but for the next 10x you now need to increase the global supply of said skilled labor or raw material.

> That means it would take Europe 3700 years to produce enough batteries to build the batteries we need in the next 50ish years.

It would probably help to show the working here:

600 GWh/year times 3700 years is 2220 TWh, but if you really do need them to last a week, 1000 cycles at one per week means they last about 20 years. As 1000 is an underestimate, this seems broadly correct to me given current battery construction.

However:

First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever.

Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them. After all, that is what has happened so far, and as for workforce there will be a lot of coal miners available to switch to copper etc.

I’m not saying this is certain to happen, just that it’s at least plausible.

Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC — shift time zones or hemispheres and you don’t need to care about night or winter, but even much shorter links will connect you with a desert with a completely different climate and weather. Every 1 GW of capacity is 1 GW * (your desired storage duration in hours) of storage you no longer need (same for every 1 GW of nuclear, obviously). If we need a week of storage as you suggest, a single 1 GW line would save on 168 GWh of batteries.

I’m only expecting us to do HVDC in the order of length of e.g. EU to Sahara and therefore only limiting our storage requirement to about a day of storage, perhaps even as good as just overnight storage, but the longer the storage period we need the better relative value a planetary scale grid looks like.

(Downside: an antipodal ring big enough for world power use about a decade of worldwide aluminium production, or alternatively five decades of copper[0]. Again, this is why I prefer mixed approaches).

[0] One of my older comments did the maths for just Europe and just to the Sahara, so multiply the “3 months” and “about a year” in the linked comment by 10 for antipodal and another 5 for global electrical demand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28474201

> It would probably help to show the working here:

Fair enough, I was on mobile. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum..., the world consumed 9,717 Mtoe or 112,717.2 TWh of energy in 2020. Dividing that number by 52 weeks/year gives us 2,167 TWh--the amount of energy we need for a week's worth of storage. 2,167 is about 3612 times the amount of capacity that Europe is slated to produce annually (previously I rounded various figures before doing the math, so my number rounded up to 3700 rather than down to 3600).

But as previously mentioned, this doesn't account for growing energy demands or wear on battery stock or many other pertinent factors.

> First, we will occasionally want them to last a week; most of the time you’d only want a day. This gives us longer to build out whatever solutions, more battery factories or reactors or whatever.

My "week" figure is based on the assumption that we need to be able to manage with near-zero wind/sun for a week. While most of the time you won't need a week, we're not concerned about "most of the time", we're concerned about the worst cases. By the way, I have no idea if a week is accurate. I've just heard "weeks" slung around, so I assume that "one week" is the low end. I would be surprised if we could get this down to a day on average. Mind you, this doesn't mean we need 1 week of storage, but it means we need 1 week of something besides solar/wind.

> Second, it is very plausible the non-linearity of scaling will reduce costs rather than increase them

I agree. The specific dynamics depend on the market and the supply chain, but I'm pessimistic, especially after seeing the havoc covid continues to wreak on supply chains the world over.

> Third, my personal favourite combo with batteries is intercontinental HVDC

This is really interesting. I always been a bit surprised that electricity isn't more fungible from region to region, and wondered why this was never really talked about as a serious mitigation against regional weather patterns. I've been thinking about clean energy as Europe's key to energy independence, but it would be cruelly ironic if Europe came to depend on simply a different region for its energy (and also for Africa, if its sunshine had the effect that oil tends to have on poorer countries).