Energy infrastructure

One of the other problems is nuclear outages. Overall, the capacity of Britain’s ageing nuclear fleet of reactors is down by about one-third (5.2GW compared to 8GW) this week amid planned maintenance and unexpected problems. And it's unseasonably warm for this time of year. It's like the energy companies are trying to make money rather than investing in the network

The other problem is that At the beginning of 2021 there were 70 energy suppliers in the UK. Industry sources say there may be as few as 10 left by the end of the year.

But it's OK because No chance lights will go out, says government

But the UK steel industry is getting hammered by electricity costs. UK Steel said electricity costs accounted for up to 20% of the price of converting raw materials into steel.

There's an old joke about a communist utopia in the desert "It was OK for a few years but then there was a shortage of sand"

Boris, leader of the party that will cut £30Bn in development aid is calling for "concrete action" on climate change. My irony meter then broke because the UK carbon dioxide shortage could 'cancel Christmas',

You are going to need some strong evidence to back those extraordinary claims. ( there's enough gold in the planet to cover the surface several meters deep, but only the stuff from meteorites is accessible cf. Hank Scorpio Elon Musk & co )

You can't make a cost competitive thorium breeder yet. And they've been trying since 1946.

You can't make a thorium breeder yet. You even can't make a proper plutonium breeder yet even with virtually unlimited cold war budgets and patriotism and best brains on all sides. NASA are making very heavy weather or putting people back on the moon if you want to compare the drive back then with now.

Some raw materials for some specialised PV systems are in short supply in the sense that current production won't handle 100's of GW of those panel types. But rare earths aren't rare and raw materials for the high volume panels aren't scarce (except in the sense that Covid has disrupted supply chains for now)

Technically you don't need rare earths for wind turbines, but using them means slightly better efficiency and a lot less weight on top of a tall tower. Taipei 101 is a skyscraper with a titanium roof because it's cheaper than steel when you include the cost of supporting the extra weight of steel and supports on each and every one of the 101 floors below.

Nuclear needs a capacity factor of 80% at twice the average wholesale price to be remotely economic. And it can only supply base load and base load is only guaranteed to be 25-30% of minimum demand and dispatchable plant will be competing on price and nuclear needs more spinning reserve than any other power source and for the first decade it won't deliver a single watt of power and will be a nett carbon source during that time. ( Because of the need to be selling almost full power almost all the time I would not consider nuclear to be 'dispatchable' as you are limited in when and for how long you can turn it off )

There's a thing 'Peak Mining' which like 'Peak Oil' means that a material becomes uneconomic to extract even if there's loads of it still in the ground. Uranium is a classic example. You can detect it from low flying aircraft, but a lot of the remaining reserves are in granite which takes a lot of energy to process.

On the first picture the first red element is helium. Trump sold off US stockpiles. For many industrial purposed it could be recaptured/recycled for about 4? times it's current cost. Or you can extract it from the atmosphere if you really need it. It's just cheaper when it's part of natural gas and fracking means the supply should go up.

Li is lithium. Big for batteries, fuss over opening a new mine in Portugal. This really needs to be recycled more. I can't see it being a long term solution for grid storage though. Mg is magnesium. Can be extracted from seawater.

Zn is zinc. Ga As Ge In Te all used in solar panels and electronics , BUT silicon keeps catching up on GaAs and if you don't mind doing a bit more work then 2/3rd's of the earths crust is silicon dioxide. Ag is silver, widely used in solar panels until panels got so cheap that it was 10% of the cost at which point you go back to copper or transparent coatings.

Rare earths aren't rare, they are messy to process, new tech should help wind energy there. There are so many different types of solar that a bottleneck in one material isn't a showstopper.

BTW Zr is zirconium. It can be used to make overhead lines stand up to heat better. So you can run 50% more power through the same infrastructure at the expense of more heating.