New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power

Because we only have limited resources and they have to be used wisely. So if it is cheaper to build solar, rather then nuclear, we should use our workers to build solar. The other problem is that nuclear reactors do not last forever, so over time, they will be phased out, just due to economics.

No reason to fight the tide. Renewables and storage are enough.

Profit is the only real problem with nuclear. The US navy has 7000+ years of operating nuclear reactors without a major incident, and with minimal enviromental impact.

Our government is busy to make people pay for owning solar panels. So yeah profit is always more important and literally no government or company gives a shit about the environment.

I'm pretty sure people will start removing their solar panels here soon since no one wants to pay more for doing good.

Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized

All true.

require massively less infrastructure

Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact.

have no millennium length waste storage dangers

Neither does nuclear, really. Waste storage is a non-issue, that has had effectively zero observable impact over the decades we've been doing it.

But the bottom line is that this is a distraction. The longer we continue focusing on short term profit, repeating the previous generations' mistakes, the harder it will be to get to zero emissions. Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The more diverse our energy sources, the more robust our fossil-fuel free grid will be.

Are there any nuclear plants today that implement energy storage? I know molten salt reactors would be capable but none actually exist as far as I can find.

Even with massive overprovision and the rest of europe the inflexibility and geographic concentration of nuclear makes it unable to beat solar + wind with mere minutes of storage in terms of grid penetration.

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.

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.

Are you counting the even higher storage costs for running an all nuclear grid?

You can’t infest every house on every street on every neighborhood with door to door nuclear power plant salespeople

God bless 'em though, they're trying,

For the article, which you apparently didn't read:

“Given enough time, it may be possible to build a nuclear power plant to the highest safety standards and remain economically relevant, even taking into account the costs of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years,” the scientists concluded. “However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”

Yet studies show that renewables decarbonise faster and the only way for nuclear to complete is basically in a majority renewables grid. Oh, and also be 25% cheaper. Which is not ideal.

renewables need fossile to provide consistent output

If only we had invented energy storage!