3 ms·

If you really mean that "it's the absolute lowest you need to worry about.", then Nuclear plants working 99% of the time, but going off-line for maintenance mus

by biehl 9y ago

If you really mean that "it's the absolute lowest you need to worry about.", then Nuclear plants working 99% of the time, but going off-line for maintenance must really worry you? Seems like a huge disadvantage for nuclear? Also the fact that nuclear works best when outputting constant amounts of energy doesn't really seem to be an advantage - https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-nuclear-damage-shows-atomic-and-renewable-power-are-unhappy-bedfellows/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-nuc... ?

vlehto 9y ago
It's advantage practically everywhere else except on a suddenly windy day in Germany. https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&month=6&year=2017 https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&mo... Consumption naturally spikes, when you add the natural volatility of wind power, you have greatly increased need for quick adjustment. Germany is using practically everything else than wind and solar to adjust. They also sometimes have to sell power with negative price. As a result even nuclear gets pushed into a role it's poorly suited to.
mabbo 9y ago
These are good points, but I think you may be falling into the Nirvana Fallacy. These problems will still exist for any power source (planned outages and following demand). Nuclear is no worse than wind power at these things, so why does it matter that it doesn't perfectly solve these issues as well? When there's a planned outage, you can schedule other sources to scale up as needed. Following demand is hard no matter where the power comes from, but for wind it's even harder as you can control neither supply nor demand. There's no ultimate, perfect solution. But I see Nuclear as a good option to be the major strength of our power systems.

3 ms·

If you really mean that "it's the absolute lowest you need to worry about.", then Nuclear plants working 99% of the time, but going off-line for maintenance mus

by biehl 9y ago

vlehto 9y ago
It's advantage practically everywhere else except on a suddenly windy day in Germany. https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&month=6&year=2017 https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&mo... Consumption naturally spikes, when you add the natural volatility of wind power, you have greatly increased need for quick adjustment. Germany is using practically everything else than wind and solar to adjust. They also sometimes have to sell power with negative price. As a result even nuclear gets pushed into a role it's poorly suited to.
mabbo 9y ago
These are good points, but I think you may be falling into the Nirvana Fallacy. These problems will still exist for any power source (planned outages and following demand). Nuclear is no worse than wind power at these things, so why does it matter that it doesn't perfectly solve these issues as well? When there's a planned outage, you can schedule other sources to scale up as needed. Following demand is hard no matter where the power comes from, but for wind it's even harder as you can control neither supply nor demand. There's no ultimate, perfect solution. But I see Nuclear as a good option to be the major strength of our power systems.