It’s also not great short-term because building reactors (to proper standards, mind you) takes ages. Much longer than expanding renewables.
It’s also not great mid-term because, well, mid-term is too slow to have much of a climate impact, anyway, also, in that kind of time frame we’ll have fusion.
It’s also not great long-term because Uranium deposits are quite limited, especially if everyone were to switch to nuclear.
Then it’s also not great in general because no matter how safe you design the reactor, humans not prone to institutional failure have yet to be invented. Are you sure your country is able to be better at running plants than Japan. About the only country I actually trust with that stuff is Ukraine – because they have Chernobyl to remind them.
Then it’s more expensive than renewables, yes also those fancy new mini reactors, and that’s with the hidden subsidy of not actually having to insure against fall-out. States cover it because if operators had to buy insurance, well, they couldn’t operate because no insurer, or reinsurer, is willing to bankrupt themselves over a single claim.
Demands for energy storage are only going up, and lithium batteries is where it’s at, currently.
Nope. The vast majority of storage necessary for my utility to provide energy is Scandinavian hydro dams, we pump them full of wind energy and then get it back. Not to mention that with proper wide-area transmission networks wind is baseload-capable (you can’t have no wind anywhere, physically impossible) and with proper overcapacity the need for seasonal storage shrinks.
Speaking of seasonal storage: Germany’s gas pipeline network can store three months of total(!) energy usage, and is generally hydrogen-capable – parts of it are currently switched over. Call Siemens they’ll sell you turn-key plants off the shelf.
The reason you see so many lithium installations is because it’s good short-term storage. Noone is going to use them for seasonal storage makes no sense at all they have quite high self-discharge rates.
