3 ms·

What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based)

What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet. The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize). Nuclear has to be part of the solution.

pfdietz 8y ago
Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear. The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe. I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Some non-trivial nuclear capacity is expected to make high-renewable deep-decarbonization scenarios significantly cheaper [1]. That hydrogen and battery storage stuff quickly adds numbers to the system cost. Solar alone with no storage doesn't work even a little (because of night time). [1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/ http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...

pfdietz 8y ago

Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear. The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe. I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Some non-trivial nuclear capacity is expected to make high-renewable deep-decarbonization scenarios significantly cheaper [1]. That hydrogen and battery storage stuff quickly adds numbers to the system cost. Solar alone with no storage doesn't work even a little (because of night time). [1] http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/ http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-...