this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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We need to do both. The amount of renewable energy that we need to decarbonize or economy is enormous.
Right now we don't have the industrial capacity to manufacture the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries needed for the transition. We need to ramp up the production, it means new factories, new trained engineers and technicians, new mines for the ore... All of that takes years or even decades to setup. The estimates I saw for the amount of lithium needed implied that we need to multiply the production by a factor of 20 !! Renewables energy also requires a lot of copper. New mines can take decades to open.
We already have some industrial capacity for building nuclear reactors do we should use it. Same for renewables and ramp up as much as we can.
I'm 2020 this is the world primary energy mix :
Right now fossil fuel are still above 80%, it needs to be close to 0% in 25 years. We need to use all the tools we have available: nuclear, solar and wind.
Diverting resources from solar and wind which are growing ~25-50% and currently 2EJ/yr per year to nuclear is a net loss given that a 20 year build up of the nuclear industry resulted in <1EJ/yr increase in the 80s. By the time any new reactor is online, the annual production of new PV will exceed the entire nuclear fleet builtnover 70 years.
Just the first fuel load for that much nuclear requires more than doubling uranium mining. Not to mention the iridium, gadolinium etc. or anything outside the core. And this is in uranium resources that are significantly worse than those currently being mined.
The "so much copper" for solar is about 0.4kg/kW for distributed (10% of current mining would cover all electricity in 2 years).
Similarly current lithium production is producing about 1TWh/yr of batteries. 10 years of that is overkill for lithium's role in grid storage (although about an order of magnitude more is needed if the goal is for everyone to have an EV and we ignore sodium ion, both unrelated to cancelling renewable projects and instead pretendingnto build a nuclear reactor).
You're also making fossil fuels seem like a bigger contributer than they are. 1J of electricity will provide 5J of space heating or the same travel distance as 5-8J burnt to refine petrol and make an ICE car go. 20% hydro/renewables/nuclear means that only 50% of the actual stuff done is via fossil fuels. Which is not to say heat pumps and electrified transport are trivial transitions, but they are necessary either way.
Is lithium still that important with the new battery technologies emerging?
I've been reading that sodium based and even solid state batteries are making leaps and bounds while at the same time we are actively reducing the amount of lithium required to manufacture large capacity batteries, by introducing new formulas based with much cheaper and plentiful elements.
What I would like to see is a ramp up on recycling more and better.
Sodium ion is commercial now and in the scale-up phase. It's usable for anything a lithium battery was usable for in 2015, but with some advantages (cheaper, longer lasting, shippable fully discharged, less fire-prone). Other grid scale technologies (ZnBr, Fe, NaS, V, Na-flow) are in the demo stage.
In either case the current scale of the lithium battery industry exceeds the scale needed for diurnal grid storage significantly. Mining a kg of lithium is both lower environmental impact and larger in scale of application (in terms of energy per year delivered by the associated system) than mining a kg of Uranium.
You don't need to remember me the downsides of mining lithium or uranium.
If the numbers are true, my country has the richest reserves of lithium in Europe and one of the richest in the entire world. But the idea of strip minning it does not appeal to anyone and we have a village actively campaigning to not have a mine set up there, regardless the number of jobs ot could bring there.
Regarding uranium, I actually live in an area where it was once mined the land bears the scars. Nobody really remembers how much rock was cut, crushed and hauled away by train in the day.
But this always brings this to mind: why are we not investing in technology to harvest lithium from salt water? I remember hearing it was a viable option growing up.
The answer to your last is the same as why we didn't just move a lot of industry to wind in the 40s and relax sometimes or solar-thermal in the late 19th century. Those with power want more for less and in a form they can monopolise.
Demonizing grid storage because of the lithium is a bit of a misdirection though, >90% of it goes to those cars which could easily be replaced with rail/human powered/light vehicles at minor or no inconvenience.
I agree, especially with respect to batteries. It's not about nuclear vs renewables, it's about nuclear vs batteries. We can probably scale up energy storage to meet the world's baseload needs - but we haven't done that before. It might take a long time, we might hit some dead ends, and it might not end up being as cheap as we hope. But we have seen nuclear power on a large scale so we know what it takes. To be certain we can get zero carbon as soon as possible we should pursue every promising avenue.
Also note that the cost of, for example, solar energy has decreased 94% in the last 35 years because we have (rightly) put lots of resources into research and scaling up production. Meanwhile nuclear investment has been way down for decades. Maybe the cost of nuclear would come down with economies of scale, and newer designs.
Energy storage is a really important piece of the puzzle that unfortunately gets often overlooked. We should be investing in it a lot more and try to find new solutions that don't involve mining all the lithium in the world.