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hydrogen power plants ?



Yes. Of course the hydrogen needs to be made and stored, but storage of hydrogen underground is very cheap, about $1/kWh of storage capacity, two orders of magnitude lower than batteries.


that seems stupid compared to breeder reactors ??


The reverse is the case. In what way do you think this is stupid? It enables very cheap renewable energy to exploit its huge levelized cost advantage over nuclear yet still be able to cover the rare dark/calm periods the nuclear stans like to angst about. The key observation is that a simple cycle turbine power plant is about $0.50/W, some 20 times cheaper than a nuclear power plant. The fuel is of course much more expensive, but for backup supply that hardly matters.


What is a breeder reactor?


It's something that's even more expensive than today's burner reactors (which is why people built burner reactors, not breeders). It's a way to limit the increase in cost of power from nuclear as uranium gets scarce. It's not a way to make nuclear energy cheaper than it is today.

Why did you think that breeders are better than using hydrogen for long period smoothing of renewable/demand mismatch?


wow nuclear fuel is so plentiful it's cheaper to just burn it up? amazing


The reason there's so little reprocessing these days is that separated plutonium has negative value. You have to pay more to fabricate fuel elements from it (MOX fuel) than you save in the cost of enriched uranium.


Something that doesn't exist and would still need tonnes of fissile material to come online if it did and can't breed new material to bring other reactors online by 2030.

How do you bring 2TW of new nuclear generation online by 2030 to even play catch up with renewables when you need to extract from tens of millions of tonnes of ore and use hundreds of millions of litres of sulfuric acid for one reactor?




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