Actually, no, you're the one stuck on a misconception.
Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)
An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.
> Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places,
Try actually calculating this. Last I did I got around $100 billion per year needed for storage+renewable for the UK, which was triple the wholesale electricity annual revenue.
Got the numbers for hydrogen (energy conversion loss, storage costs per kwh, drain, cycle numbers, costs per kw)? The 2019 US department of energy storage costs paper I used didn't include it and I suspect this was because the numbers are atrocious. Compressed air storage seems like the best for day+ energy storage with batteries for hourly storage.
What do you mean by "storage"? Short term storage only, like batteries? This would lead to an overly large renewable installation to power the country in the winter.
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is indeed bad, but for long term storage that's is overwhelmed by the much lower cost of hydrogen storage capacity, vs. batteries.
The round-trip efficiency isn't actually that bad once you realize that we're dealing with large installations here. For instance, heat can be used to make hydrogen, which is why you sometimes hear about nuclear power making hydrogen. Large installations can recapture heat, either as co-generation or use it to drive a gas turbine.
You can look at the assumptions under https://model.energy/ which were based on cost data in Europe (I believe there's a link to the source).
Per-kW cost of electrolysers is already 1/2 of the total per-kW cost given there in the 2030 assumptions (but that may include other equipment).
Cost of storage caverns is well known from natural gas, as little as $1/kWh of capacity. Cost of combined cycle plants to convert the hydrogen back to power is also well known, as these will be nearly identical to natural gas fired CC plants (just the details of the combustors will change.)
Can you point me to a country that can store even 1% of their energy needs currently? If not, you're talking about unproven technologies that may or may not fix this problem. I hope they do, but until then we are in a world where closing a nuclear plant means opening up a carbon-intensive one. Renewables are not currently a replacement for nuclear, and this is not a misconception, it is a fact.
Pretty much all of them? That's because they burn fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are also storage. There's no sense making a synthetic fuel for storage when you're still burning a natural fuel.
Care to show me a country with a breeder-based nuclear cycle? Oh gosh, by your logic nuclear cannot use breeders, since it hasn't been done yet. I guess nuclear is ruled out so we're totally doomed. Fortunately, your logic is entirely specious.
There is no easy way to economically produce a synthetic fuel at scale as you suggest. It is irrelevant whether breeder reactors work or not, I can point to dozens of countries with a significant impact of nuclear in their mix, but you cannot provide a single country that uses synthetic fuels or any other type of storage at scale (>0.1% would probably still be challenging).
My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.
Hydrogen can be produced and stored on a massive scale. Electrolysers are now below $300/kW.
"Economically"? Compared to current hydrogen from methane, sure that would be hard. But compared to electrical power from nuclear? Much easier. Exelon stated in 2005 that nuclear could be competitive if natural gas (with a $25/ton CO2 tax) were around $14/MMBtu (note that natural gas at the Henry Hub is a bit over $2/MMBtu right now). That's about $.05/kWh(thermal). Electrolysis could pretty easily make hydrogen at that cost, given today's cheap renewable energy. Given that those 2005 nuclear cost estimates were optimistic, I doubt existing nuclear could compete with combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen. Of course, on a renewable grid, a great deal of the energy will go directly from the renewable sources to the grid, not through hydrogen, so nuclear will do even more poorly.
Why don't you answer my question? Can you point to a country that uses electrolysis and hydrogen at scale currently? Because if we are going by estimates and projections, I can also talk about fusion and other pipe dreams on the nuclear side. Not to mention a lot of electrolysis is currently done with fossil fuels.
I don't answer obviously bad faith questions. It doesn't matter whether hydrogen is being done at scale right now. What matters is whether it could be done at scale when fossil fuels are out of the picture. And the answer to that is clearly that it can.
Indeed. And yet, there's the stubborn idea that the prices of electrolysers will not continue to decline along an experience curve. The same blindness occurred with critics of solar and wind.
Renewables + storage can provide "synthetic baseload" at a cost that will likely be lower than nuclear in most places, especially for a new nuclear plant whose construction has not started yet (it will compete with renewables + storage of the future, since they are installed much faster and don't have to start now to be done at the same time.)
An important reminder is to not use just batteries for storage. Many bogus attempts to show renewables can't do it assume batteries are used for long term storage. This is a technological strawman argument. Use e-fuels instead. With renewables and electrolysers crashing in price, green hydrogen will become remarkably cheap.