The polymer is the sorbent. Please actually read the sources you send. Normally it is on a higher strength belt, but this scheme puts it in a plastic shell. That's the bit their charts show with tens of thousands of tonnes needed per fuel load (which turned out to be optimistic when someone checked).
> For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates.
You're off by over a factor of 3. There's around 1TWh/yr now, and 5TWh/yr under construction due before 2030. And only a few hours needs to be high power. The rest can be thermal, PHES, CSP dispatch, virtual batteries via load shifting, hydrogen for emergencies, and so on.
> I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
It's happened, if it were a nuclear project then it'd be at the stage where they've already declared it finished, but shut it down straight after loading and said it will reopen in a month. Other industries do things a little differently, but either way it'll mostly be running around 2028
I'm not sure why you're fixating on the plastic shell, that's just one of several delivery mechanisms for the adsorbent polymer. The belts attached to weights is a more common proposal. Regardless, each elution cycle - that is cycles of putting the polymer out to sea, and harvesting the captured uranium - does decrease effectiveness. But after several elution cycles the polymer is refreshed. Even the more pessimistic study you linked to found that it'd cost $830/Kg on the upper bound. This is only 8x the cost of existing mining methods, and wouldn't substantially increase the cost of nuclear power because enrichment is a bigger component of fuel cost than extraction. And construction is a bigger cost than fuel, too.
We also don't make a terawatt of batteries per year. 2021's total lithium ion battery production was less than half a terawatt [1]. Most estimates place it between 300 and 500 GWh. Don't confuse predicted capacity with actual production figures. Production is often half of projected capacity or even less [2]. You're overstating battery production by at least a factor of two.
And as far as predictions about battery growth goes, we can't build an electricity grid on predictions. People said we'd be harnessing fusion by the end of the millennium. People said we'd all be using VR headsets as the primary means of interacting with computers back in the mid 2010s. People make all sorts of predictions about what could happen. Actually making it happen is a whole different story. The way to make the case that battery production can reach 5,000 TWh per year is to deliver 5,000 TWh of batteries. We haven't even accomplished a tenth of that.
By comparison several countries have transitioned most of their electricity generation to nuclear, and plenty more have built 30-40% of their generation capacity with it and don't need any more because they have hydroelectricity. The viability of nuclear power isn't a prediction, it's historical precedence. Nobody has built any significant amount of grid storage. Nobody developed countries has generated more than 50% of their electricity from wind and solar. This has, on the other hand, been done with nuclear. Demonstrated precedence vs. eager predictions. I'm much more keen on betting the future of planet on the former.
> I'm not sure why you're fixating on the plastic shell, that's just one of several delivery mechanisms for the adsorbent polymer
The sorbent is the polymer. The polymer is the sorbent. They're the same thing. There is no separate regeneration cycle if you use alkaline for the elution because the alkaline cycle is the regeneration. Read the document you linked.
> But after several elution cycles the polymer is refreshed. Even the more pessimistic study you linked to found that it'd cost $830/Kg on the upper bound. This is only 8x the cost of existing mining methods, and wouldn't substantially increase the cost of nuclear power because enrichment is a bigger component of fuel cost than extraction.
It's small at $120/kg. $830/kg brings raw uranium cost for existing fleet to around $20/MWh or $12/MWh for a modern reactor. It'd be a little less because the tails would become less concentrated, but this is still significant. But what do you keep saying about promises? Why do we believe without question a wild-ass guess for something that has never happened in an industry that consistently overruns costs by a factor of 2 or 3?
> 2021's total lithium ion battery production was less than half a terawatt [1]
What year is it? In what year will factories built this year have been running for a year? How much more does an industry growing at 25-50% produce after two years? How many times has the claimed capacity been lower than the subsequent net production in the last five years?
The largest growth in the nuclear industry ever was around 30GW net. At this rate it would take decades to provide enough power, and 2021's battery production could easily cover diurnal storage. There's no precedent for anything close to the current renewable install rate, there is no precedent for mass expansion of mining, and you still haven't said where the fuel is supposed to come from after 2040.
> For what it's worth I am confident that lithium ion battery production will continue to increase and double, triple, or even quadruple over the next century. But that will be barely enough just to satisfy EV demand for batteries. Even just provisioning 12 hours of grid storage worldwide would need 30,000 GWh at present electricity demand. That's close to a century of production at present rates.
You're off by over a factor of 3. There's around 1TWh/yr now, and 5TWh/yr under construction due before 2030. And only a few hours needs to be high power. The rest can be thermal, PHES, CSP dispatch, virtual batteries via load shifting, hydrogen for emergencies, and so on.
> I'm confident about battery production doubling or tripling, it's the factor of 10 to 20 that I'm more skeptical of - and that's the kind of increase we'd need to make battery grid storage feasible.
It's happened, if it were a nuclear project then it'd be at the stage where they've already declared it finished, but shut it down straight after loading and said it will reopen in a month. Other industries do things a little differently, but either way it'll mostly be running around 2028