There is no easy way to economically produce a synthetic fuel at scale as you suggest. It is irrelevant whether breeder reactors work or not, I can point to dozens of countries with a significant impact of nuclear in their mix, but you cannot provide a single country that uses synthetic fuels or any other type of storage at scale (>0.1% would probably still be challenging).
My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.
Hydrogen can be produced and stored on a massive scale. Electrolysers are now below $300/kW.
"Economically"? Compared to current hydrogen from methane, sure that would be hard. But compared to electrical power from nuclear? Much easier. Exelon stated in 2005 that nuclear could be competitive if natural gas (with a $25/ton CO2 tax) were around $14/MMBtu (note that natural gas at the Henry Hub is a bit over $2/MMBtu right now). That's about $.05/kWh(thermal). Electrolysis could pretty easily make hydrogen at that cost, given today's cheap renewable energy. Given that those 2005 nuclear cost estimates were optimistic, I doubt existing nuclear could compete with combined cycle plants burning green hydrogen. Of course, on a renewable grid, a great deal of the energy will go directly from the renewable sources to the grid, not through hydrogen, so nuclear will do even more poorly.
Why don't you answer my question? Can you point to a country that uses electrolysis and hydrogen at scale currently? Because if we are going by estimates and projections, I can also talk about fusion and other pipe dreams on the nuclear side. Not to mention a lot of electrolysis is currently done with fossil fuels.
I don't answer obviously bad faith questions. It doesn't matter whether hydrogen is being done at scale right now. What matters is whether it could be done at scale when fossil fuels are out of the picture. And the answer to that is clearly that it can.
Indeed. And yet, there's the stubborn idea that the prices of electrolysers will not continue to decline along an experience curve. The same blindness occurred with critics of solar and wind.
My logic is that we are currently shutting down or creating regulatory hurdles for the cleanest base load technology, which is proven safe and reliable, in favor of pipe dreams such as that renewables plus storage is all we need.