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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

The research and tech actually exists for large scale nuclear power. It's essentially a solved problem, unlike large-scale energy storage.

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But if we look at actual nuclear projects in finland and france, they are expensive and mostly failing and take far too long (think decades, not years). End storage of fuel rods is also not a solved problem of nuclear power, esp. in germany.

So I would rather take the fast-to-build solar and wind plants and research "large scale" energy storage alongside. Storage also does not have to be large-scale, you can just subsidise a lot of decentralized storage and invest in more flexible energy consumers (aka wash your clothes when the sun is shining).

We can always create methane or ammonia from hydrogen. That's a solved problem. The only research left to do is to bring down the price.

I.e. the "only" remaining problem is to do it at large scale at a reasonable cost.

Right now there is little demand for storage because we don't have sufficient renewable generation capacity. It is no surprise that storage technology hasn't been deployed at large scale and is still relatively expensive. But since we know how to build MW scale electrolyzers it's really just a matter of building more of them.

You can do hydrogen, but ammonia production is like 16% efficient?

Efficiency is less important than cost. Maybe ammonia is so much easier to transport and store that it's worth the efficiency penalty.

If I have this right, Ammonia is 2x more expensive than petrol per tonne, and has half the energy density of petrol, so it seems to be 4x more expensive?

I am not sure how to compare with hydrogen, as you say costs for it are in storage and transportation

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