If you want round trip efficiency higher than 30% you need prohibitive quantities of platinum and iridium (with some promising research to maybe replace the iridium with cobalt, making fuel cells about as sustainable as NMC batteries).

Storing it is also generally prohibitive. Small high pressure vessels have a hard expiry date shorter thna the expected life of a battery, take up more space and cost as much as LFP batteries. By the time you add a fuel cell stack and buffer battery there’s not really any weight saving either.

Geologic storage is an option, but use cases are limited. Large scale stationary tank storage is also a possibility for industrial chemical use.

Hydrogen hype is largely a greenwashing and delay tactic by the oil and gas industry.

PV energy in low cloud areas is <2c/kWh and dropping 7-10% p.a (a recent UAE ppa was 1.6c).

Crude oil is presently ~4c/kWh and frequently 6c. Distillates are often over $1/L before taxes or 10c/kWh.

20% one-way energy efficiency competes with oil. If the catalyst stack is significantly cheaper than water electrolysers it can use curtailed renewables and compete with oil at <10%.

Won’t replace batteries or electrification, but a solid choice for emergency storage or high capital, low-use assets (like a forklift that gets used twice a week or a bbq).

>50% efficiency would displace fossil gas with sufficiently cheap catalyst stack.

You’d have thought it was obvious, but everyone I’ve ever met IRL thought they’d be cheaper forever.

Tool built by narcissist gaslighters is good for bullshit but nothing else? Colour me shocked.

Researchers at weapons facility achieve 2MJ of heat for a cost of tens of MJ of electricity and chemical energy to power single-shot laser fired at target that took at least gigajoules to produce for method that will never have any relevance to energy generation.

But they pinky swear that at some point they might think about electricity so keep giving them a big chunk of the civialian energy budget.

Superconductors work because there is one state shared by a bunch of electrons separated by an energy gap from other states they could be in. To put thermal energy into an atom (ie. Resistance), you have to have a big enough shift in energy for all of the electrons to shift out of the state. Kind of like they unionized and you can’t give one a pay cut on its own. One way to achieve this is to make a regular material very, very, very cold. Lots of conductors will work, but only at or below liquid helium temperatures. Another way is to find a material where there are only a few ways for electrons to move around and cool it down or squeeze it until there’s only one. The latter works at hundreds to thousands of times higher temperature (tens of kelvin rather than millikelvin), but still really cold.

Conductors have a lot of states electrons can be in. It’s very easy to get one moving, but as they play pachinko through the atomic lattice they exchange tiny amounts of energy with each other and the rest of the material. Probably not a good candidate unless you’re really good at squeezing.

In some ways a high temperature superconductor is more like an insulator or a semiconductor than a regular conductor.

This new material is kinda weird in a few ways. For one, the main mechanism of traditional superconductors making all electrons “the same” so they have that grouping up effect is probably not present according to some very preliminary simulations (cooper pairs). Another is that the effect is limited to movement in one direction.

There’s 40 years of history and politics behind the theory, 30 years of experiments behind the leak from the korean project, and the material is very finnicky.

Part is the neoliberal economic model is really really bad at big projects. Part is the regulations and engineering complexity involved in not having them all shut down because they caught fire or the steam generators corroded (almost every program has “cheap” reactors at the beginning which have massive maintenance issues and leaks 10-30 years later, followed by expensive ones with massive delays). Part is corporate greed. Part is revealing and stopping rampant fraud and finding safety-compromising cost-cutting measures. Part is the lack of pressure from the military to make it happen as there is no longer a need for as much Plutonium. Part is that there actually are some semblance of environmental laws. Part is the fossil fuel industry interfering (as they do with all non-fossil-fuels).

If loss of expertise were the cause, then there would have been a cost minimum in the late 80s when the maximum number of engineers had 5-15 years of experience.

Instead costs rose for each new reactor (including repeat builds of each model).

This theory has no explanatory power over reality and predicts the opposite of what happened.

Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.

Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.

For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).

Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.

This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).

More deranged doublethink.

ARENH can’t be causing losses if the price it sets is profitable (so by citing it you are claiming that the french nuclear fleet has never broken even).

It also can’t be causing a production shortfall requiring buying expensive hydro if the reactors are off because of a “strategy”.

Your debt doesn’t go up every year if you’re making a profit.

Deferring maintenance doesn’t make costs magically vanish.

Decomissioning, waste management and hundreds of billions for license extensions are also completely unfunded. So the french people were just bilked another €10 billion for taking on a larger share of a half trillion dollar liability.

Yes it was a “strategy” for EDF to go tens of billions into debt, and the other 30-50% of french power infrastructure is there just for fun. These mental gymnastics are incredibly tiresome.

This is even more ridiculous.

It’s sand. Literally the most abundant element in earth’s crust. And quartz sand isn’t even as particular as construction sand, because only the composition is important, not the shape.

You’re literally pearl clutching about the scarcity of Silicon as a way of justifying calling it a rare earth.

The only limitation is manufacturing, and you can build manufacturing and the output faster than you can build a nuclear reactor. You’re also comparing an industry that’s adding >300TWh/yr to one that is adding zero net (and about 20TWh/yr gross) as if the latter is significant and the former is not.

The insane reaches that nukebros go to to justify their insanity would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful.

The myth they are dog whistling is just that. You can see it repeated everywhere the topic comes up and where they tried to conflate it with breeding. The method of lying is called paltering.

In reality reprocessing has no significant impact other than leaking Cs, Kr and Tc everywhere, increasing the volume of waste so it’s harderto handle and raising costs.

Instead we only have to worry about immediately running out of beryllium for breeding blankets just on the demo reactors.

Not only is the amount of land required insignificant, and optional (agrivoltaics and built up areas are capable of providing enough for marginally higher labour cost). Low yield uranium mines like Inkai (so most of them going forward) take up more space than a solar farm with the same energy output because the ore has lower energy density than coal.

If you’re going to pearl clutch about land use, pearl clutch about the idea of developing any of the 90% of Uranium resource that has abysmal yield.

Not sure what you’re even trying to say with the first bit. It’s completely irrelevant

No breeder reactor has ever produced enough fuel to run on and extracted it. Breeder programs get as far as half of a proof of concept and then run out of funding on the actually hard part.

Monocrystalline solar doesn’t involve rare earths at all, idiot.

If you want to pearl clutch about them, pearl clutch about gadolinium in nuclear plants.

The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn’t work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it’s a few tiny impure specks most of the time).

Why is it unbelievable?

All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.

Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it’s largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.

Intuitively you can frame this as “a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet’s temperature” which is basically a tautology.

You’re still trying to spread the “90% of nuclear waste is recyclable” myth, but now you’ve retreated to the bailey of “getting 10% more energy is technically getting something out of it so saying it is recyclable is totally true even though this has no impact on mining or the dangerous parts of waste!!” You’re also pretending it magically makes the Pu240 and Am241 go away.

Reprocessing yields a small fraction of leftover fissile material. It is in no way characterisable as recycling.

The strategy is a very boring and tiresome propaganda move that is part of the Duke Energy and Rosatom astroturfing playbook. As is the “who me? I couldn’t possibly be slyly trying to imply nuclear waste is actually fuel” act.