Tow Vehicles - Toyota Goes Turbo

One of the big problems with nuclear power is waste disposal.  Everyone seems to want to put the waste in someone else's back yard.  It appears that they have come up with a pretty good waste burial system in Norway that should be good for a very, very long time.  I don't think it'd work, though, in areas with a lot of active seismic events.  Also, with rising sea levels, coastal installations are more problematic.

I've always thought that nuclear energy isn't given a fair shake. It's certainly more reliable from a power delivery standpoint than either solar or wind and it's carbon neutral.

That is in fact the lay version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder) in a system always increases.

The first law is conservation of energy, the third is that the energy in a closed system goes to zero at absolute zero, which can never be reached. So, a physicist has famously expressed those 3 laws as:

1) you can't win, 2) you can't break even, 3) and you can't get out of the game.

Hydrogen has been explored plenty, it's a waste of time. It cannot ever be anywhere near as efficient as batteries. The fossil fuel industry has lobbied for it for years because it's made from their products. It is not more efficient when made using renewables. It's really quite like corn ethanol, a dead end that has been kept alive by special interest groups far too long.

As for lithium mining, none of what you are describing is as bad as the environmental impacts of petroleum production are, not even counting the burning of the stuff. As I said all options have negative impacts, it's a matter of which are worse. The only other option is less vehicles on the road driving less miles, so we can all take public transportation when possible. But that's not likely to happen.

For stationary grid storage there are many options that might be and probably are better than Li batteries. Pumped storage for one is very well proven and efficient, but it's difficult to site because you need reservoirs at the top and bottom of a mountain. That raises NIMBY issues yet again. Nothing comes for free.

Re energy replenishment time, for me, if I save that 5 minutes at the gas pump 90% of the time by charging at home I'll happily accept 25 minutes the other 10% of the time. If you do the math I've cut my total energy replenishment time in half compared to using gasoline. If I spent 90% of my time on the road travelling long distances that would be different, but again that is an unusual use case.

If hydrogen can be obtained using solar and wind, then it may be more viable.  The technology needs to be explored.  It may not pan out, but I seem to recall people saying the same thing about electric cars many years ago.  Who knows what efficiencies will be developed.  Clearly, we should not use it if it can only be obtained with the burning of fossil fuels.