> Nothing bad happens if an electrolyser for fertilizer goes offline for a week.

If you can only run your smelters, factories, and chemical plants 9 months out of the year then that's going to cut production by 25%. This is going to drive up commodity prices, which is a cost that needs to be calculated as part of levelized cost of energy. This indirect cost of load shifting is almost always ignored.

Furthermore, heating is one of the big uses for non-electric primary energy. And guess when heating demand is at its highest? During the winter, when solar is producing the least amount of energy. Wind may also be producing its lowest amount of energy, it depends on the region. You can't load shift heating unless you're fine with your people freezing.

> EVs _are_ a week of storage.

No, they are not. You cannot control when people plug in their electric vehicles. No sane grid operator would accept the idea that a large portion of their energy storage might up and leave when people go on vacation for the summer. Plenty of people drive their cars during the day and charge them overnight, and will thus be a burden on energy storage rather than a benefit.

> And above all you're still somehow claiming that battery production can't grow. 400GWh last year. 1TWh in the immediate future and 7TWh in the pipeline.

These are promises, not actual production figures. And those promises were made before the cost of lithium jumped 400%. Battery production has already optimized manufacturing costs to ~25% of the total cost of batteries. Thus battery production is rapidly becoming a mineral extraction challenge.

> Current raw Uranium price is $116/kg. This is about $4/MWh in the current fleet or $1.70 in an APR. Increase it 20-fold and you're barely competitive just on fuel.

The cost of fuel is mostly in enrichment, not raw uranium. The $4/MWh is mostly comprised of the cost of enriching that uranium to ~20% U235, not extracting raw uranium.

> Which is almost all U238 ie. Worthless waste. The 1% Pu and remaining U235 is what matters and that only adds 20% even after repeated cycling. Please at least try to understand the solution you're pushing.

Nuclear fuel is mostly U238, even before it's been burned by nuclear reactors. Most plants are designed to use fuel enriched in the 3-5% range (for civilian power generation, naval reactors a different story). Nuclear plants only burn a small fraction of U235 before fuel is rotated out, because they're designed to work in a narrow enrichment range. The majority of the U325 is unburnt and can be reclaimed. More than 90% of the potential energy in the fuel can be reclaimed through reprocessing [1]. I'll same the same thing to you: please try to understanding the solution you're criticizing.

> Now that we've firmly established that PWRs are completely untenable even at the current level of renewable production,

You've done nothing of the sort.

> Or would you like to acknowledge that electrolysers for long term storage are at least as likely to be scalable as PWRs?

In the same vein that fusion is viable. Sure, if it can be made to work. There are presently zero electrolyzer used for grid storage right now. If they're scalable, build them and show me how cost effective they are by pointing to actual operational electrolyzer storage facilities. But instead, it's just wishful thinking.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...