It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will.
Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024:
https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-...
Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs.
1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.
Your Storage does only need to be for 1-2 days (or more precisely until your renewables come online again to recharge them).
I don't see a massive shift to battery manufacturing any more crazy than building a crazy amount of nuclear power plants.
Even the much vaunted France doesn't have 80% nuclear on their grid.
Plus, energy storage production capacity is growing at an exponential rate. It's doubtful that we could grow our nuclear construction crews at that pace.
It's going to be very hard to nuclear to scale as fast as renewables and storage are, if there's even an economic case to be made for nuclear construction, and somebody finally solves the logistic problems of large construction projects in the modern Western world.
We know we can build storage and renewables, but we don't know how to build nuclear anymore, and none, absolutely none, of the nuclear proponents have any proposals to fix it. The best is an entirely new type of small reactor that has been rejects in the past because of its high per unit cost. Perhaps it will work, but who knows? It's a big risk, whereas storage and renewables are a sure bet.
It really isn't. For reference, across Europe we're currently having a meteorological phenomenon with bad weather, clouds, little wind, and low temperatures. It has been ongoing since ~october and is projected to continue into the winter. When Texas was hit with terrible weather last year, it lasted a few days. Multi-day storms, which take out solar and wind, aren't unheard of. 3 hours of storage is OK to even out things, but isn't nowhere near close enough to guarantee reliable electricity.
Personally I think small mass manufacturable fission reactors are the best bet but why are we hung up on either/or? We should aggressively pursue both nuclear and solar/wind generation.
Millions of lives are at stake.
Maybe, maybe not. We know nuclear works so why not also make nuclear in case something happens and we can't build enough storage.
Adjusted for capacity factor this is maybe going to keep up with solar deployment, but definitely not with wind capacity growth in the same country. And China has been the world leader in nuclear deployment for a while now.
Renewables win on a "worse is better" basis - yes, they're intermittent, but they're cheap and deploy in a matter of months without too many specialists involved.
But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid?
Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
