> The current capacity of lithium battery production operating or opening next year is around 1TWh/yr.

We'll see. The price of lithium went up by 300% in 2022, and it's still rising: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

It's true that batteries only contain a few grams of lithium, but cathode materials do make up half of a battery's cost. Once battery manufacturers exhaust existing inventories and have to place new orders we'll see how well these predictions pan out.

> If 50GW of reactors was brought online per year it would require doubling current Uranium mining and enriching facilities to provide the first load for each.

Where did you get these figures? The existing nuclear power production is 3,000 GW [1]. An increase by 50 GW would be less than 2% increase. On the note of uranium, the energy density of uranium is such that fuel extraction is less than 1% of nuclear's total cost (fuel enrichment, is a different story, but that's not a mineral extraction problem).

1. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... 27,000 TWh per year production = 27,000 / (365 * 24) = 3,080 GW of production.

> The _current_ world battery production can provide 10-20hrs of storage each year for 50GW of new renewables (most analyses show you can replace most of your energy with about 4hr storage if you keep the gas turbines for emergencies). 100s of GWh of new production are coming online each year with new chemistries scaling up to ease strain on lithium extraction.

I don't think you realize how pitifully small 50 GW is. the United States' electricity production is 500 GW on average. So the entire world's battery production would take 10 years to provision just the United States' demand. And the figure of 4 hours of storage is way more optimistic than realistic explanations. The output fluctuations from wind and solar vary both by the hour, and seasonally as weather changes. Estimates for a de-carbonized grid go as high as 3 weeks [1]. It's hard to criticize your plan of 4 hours of storage when you don't cite a source or explain how this will function. Usually a storage figure that low would assume some amount of load shifting. But then the cost of energy interruptions to industries needs to be a cost factored in - shutting down industries means increased costs borne by customers and load shifting needs to include this cost.

> Looks like Nuclear power can at best match current renewable and storage production. By all means build as many PWRs as you can as a small suppliment to the renewable production, but the nuclear industry just does not have anywhere near the scale needed and we can't afford to wait for the industry to figure out MSRs and then build them in serial.

Not only can nuclear match the scale that's required, it did match the scale required in France, Sweden, and other countries. The US has demonstrated its ability to build plants on the necessary scale, and we'd have a completely nuclear and hydroelectric grid today if nuclearization wasn't interrupted in the 1970s.

By comparison wind and solar combined are still outproduced by nuclear power both in the US and in the world as a whole [2]. No country has produced the majority of its electricity through renewables other than hydroelectricity. The amount of storage to provide just 1 day's worth of electricity storage (4 hours is not a reasonable assumption for a de-carbonized grid without frequent blackouts) amounts to 60,0000 GWh as compared to just 400 GWh of current annual production. I have no doubt you are convinced in the idea that it's easier to increase battery production 50-100 times greater than humanity has ever achieved is more attainable than building 3 nuclear plants for each one that presently exists, but that requires an incredibly optimistic attitude towards battery production. And I mean "incredibly" in the literal sense: I do not find it credible.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...