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The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy

The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents of renewables. If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.

socialdemocrat 6y ago
Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
  - Muanh 6y ago
    Ignoring the fact that we don't need 5-10 year development for batteries. You are ignoring the 5-10 year build time for a nuclear reactor.
    - jnxx 6y ago
      Five years is extremely optimistic. The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.
  - jnxx 6y ago
    There are a lot of things which are already employed, like generating hydrogen by electrolysis and feeding it into natural gas storage and gas distribution networks. This is not a full solution but works and is being used in Germany now. Also, we will need many transition technologies to make every step ecomonical, it won be a single technical break-through.
- opo 6y ago
  >...It is all about nuclear no matter the cost. Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables. Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. The cost for renewables + storage is at least the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.) https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term and there are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one seriously thinks that natural gas is a long term answer to climate change. It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    I’m an advocate for taxing carbon and letting the utility companies figure out what is really cheaper. They have the expertise and the incentive.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Exelon has stated that for new nuclear plants in the US to compete with NG CC, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton. To compete with NG for filling in around renewables, CO2 taxes would have to be much higher than that. Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton. There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.
spockz 6y ago
Nuclear is not really geographically independent though. The plant has to be constructed to withstand earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It also has to be near a reliable water source so that it can be cooled. The bigger the power plant the more geographically constrained it is. France faces low river flow rates in the summer because of climate chance and this forces them to take some of the nuclear plants offline. Otherwise the waste heat would make it impossible for aquatic life to live near those power plants. Ever wondered why someone make an "obvious" mistake such as building Fukushima directly near the tsunami prone coast? Because the ocean is a reliable heat sink.
  - jnxx 6y ago
    Reliable cooling is also a big problem for the nuclear plants in the US East coast. They are away from the shore but well in reach of different types of disasters, like hurricanes, winter storms and flooding. They need reliable cooling and for that they depend on a working electrical grid. There are many ways in which the Fukushima disaster could repeat itself there - in a region which is rather densely populated.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      The US east coast does not suffer from earthquakes. A tsunami is a geological event, not a weather event.
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        While earthquakes on the east coast are uncommon, they do occur. For example, Virginia experienced a magnitude 5.8 quake in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake The US east coast faces a tsunami risk from undersea avalanches on the edge of the continental shelf: https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html "An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet (8 meters), [...] Underwater canyons and bays could focus these waves and make them even bigger."
_Microft 6y ago
Middle Ages called, they want their concepts back. Why is "geographical independency" desirable here? We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#) Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today. Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process. (#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Renewable energy production is not as centralized as production of physical goods. There is no need to transmit energy that far.
7952 6y ago
I wonder which is easier? Large scale battery deployment or scaling nuclear. I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. It is already an area of massive research. It is something we need to scale anyway due to electric cars. And it is very easy to deploy to the existing grid. You just need a concrete pad, some power gear, and a substation. Being optimistic about nuclear does not mean we cannot be optimistic about batter storage.
- jnxx 6y ago
  > I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. I only need to look at how long my laptop lasts compared to 15 years ago.
- manfredo 6y ago
  The US currently has less than 10 seconds of battery storage relative to it's 11.5 TWh average daily electricity consumption. The scale required relative to the scale we're capable of providing presents a staggering difference. We're talking about a 1,000x to 10,000x difference between current battery storage and required battery storage.
- godelski 6y ago
  > I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. That's not my issue. My issue is that we currently have working nuclear technology. That we can build and deploy now. Bullish means we're relying on future inventions. With the potential catastrophe we have ahead of us I don't think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket. It may not pan out. It may not pan out in the timeframe we need it to. Nuclear is a relatively cheap risk reduction strategy. Be bullish on battery, but have a backup because in the mean time we're still using coal/oil/gas.
  - 7952 6y ago
    The UK already has around 1GW deployed and has 10GW+ in the pipeline. All of Which should be built before Sizewell C starts to generate. I dont doubt that we can build nuclear plants. But right now the number of nations that can actually pull it off is small. Changing that would require new tech, modularisation, mass production etc. That is great and we should do that. But will it happen quickly?
guerby 6y ago
"geographically independent" Well nuclear needs water, not a very strong constraint I agree but one nevertheless. In France when it gets too hot they have to stop the nuclear plants since by environnement regulations they cannot pump out too hot water in the river. By now offshore wind is still behind in capacity factor compared to nuclear but it's closer and closer. For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1) For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2) (1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor (2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
- roenxi 6y ago
  Capacity factor isn't the issue as much as correlation. 2x nuclear plants with 50% capacity factor due to planned maintenance can work fine, one covers the other. 2x solar panels with 50% capacity factor due to night is a problem, because now something else is needed to deal with night-time power.
nicoburns 6y ago
Nuclear has problems with the load being intermittent because it's too inflexible (you can't realistically run a nuclear plant for 12 hours and then turn it off, you really want it to be running the whole time). If you have nuclear capacity for peak load, then what do you do with that extra energy at off peak times? The solutions for this end up looking a lot like the solutions for dealing with the intermitency of solar/wind.
- manfredo 6y ago
  For the third time, the solution is to just save money by ditching the intermittent sources and only using nuclear. Nuclear makes renewables redundant, not the other way around. Nuclear generates power round the clock. Nuclear doesn't suffer from the duck curve, so it doesn't need storage or gas backup plants.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Nuclear does suffer from the duck curve. It has the opposite problem of what to do with the excess power when demand is lower.
    - sir_bearington 6y ago
      No it does not. The Duck curve refers to the sinusoidal production of solar power (and wind power, to a lesser extent) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve. The duck curve refers to the problem of the fact that energy consumption is mostly flat, but solar solar produces a big curve from dawn to dusk. This is why renewables need so much storage, to take overproduction during peak hours and use that excess energy during the off-hours. Matching a flat source of energy generation to a mostly flat demand curve is much easier than adapting a sinusoidal source of energy generation to a flat demand. The disparity between peak energy load and minimal energy load is only ~25%. Excess energy is an easy problem to solve. Nuclear power plants' thermal output is largely fixed, but their electrical output can be modulated by more aggressive cooling. Basically, deliberately produce more waste heat. If this nuclear plant is on the coast it can use this waste heat for desalination - the waste heat gives you freshwater as a bonus.
jnxx 6y ago
> The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.
- manfredo 6y ago
  It needs a source of water to run heat exchangers, but it doesn't need to be fresh water. It can run on seawater (which can also be used for desalination with the waste heat), or on wastewater.

socialdemocrat 6y ago

Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.

manfredo 6y ago
Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
- Muanh 6y ago
  Ignoring the fact that we don't need 5-10 year development for batteries. You are ignoring the 5-10 year build time for a nuclear reactor.
  - jnxx 6y ago
    Five years is extremely optimistic. The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.
- jnxx 6y ago
  There are a lot of things which are already employed, like generating hydrogen by electrolysis and feeding it into natural gas storage and gas distribution networks. This is not a full solution but works and is being used in Germany now. Also, we will need many transition technologies to make every step ecomonical, it won be a single technical break-through.
opo 6y ago
>...It is all about nuclear no matter the cost. Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables. Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. The cost for renewables + storage is at least the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.) https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term and there are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one seriously thinks that natural gas is a long term answer to climate change. It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I’m an advocate for taxing carbon and letting the utility companies figure out what is really cheaper. They have the expertise and the incentive.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Exelon has stated that for new nuclear plants in the US to compete with NG CC, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton. To compete with NG for filling in around renewables, CO2 taxes would have to be much higher than that. Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton. There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.

spockz 6y ago

Nuclear is not really geographically independent though. The plant has to be constructed to withstand earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters.

imtringued 6y ago
It also has to be near a reliable water source so that it can be cooled. The bigger the power plant the more geographically constrained it is. France faces low river flow rates in the summer because of climate chance and this forces them to take some of the nuclear plants offline. Otherwise the waste heat would make it impossible for aquatic life to live near those power plants. Ever wondered why someone make an "obvious" mistake such as building Fukushima directly near the tsunami prone coast? Because the ocean is a reliable heat sink.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Reliable cooling is also a big problem for the nuclear plants in the US East coast. They are away from the shore but well in reach of different types of disasters, like hurricanes, winter storms and flooding. They need reliable cooling and for that they depend on a working electrical grid. There are many ways in which the Fukushima disaster could repeat itself there - in a region which is rather densely populated.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    The US east coast does not suffer from earthquakes. A tsunami is a geological event, not a weather event.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      While earthquakes on the east coast are uncommon, they do occur. For example, Virginia experienced a magnitude 5.8 quake in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake The US east coast faces a tsunami risk from undersea avalanches on the edge of the continental shelf: https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html https://www.livescience.com/24813-east-coast-tsunamis.html "An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet (8 meters), [...] Underwater canyons and bays could focus these waves and make them even bigger."

_Microft 6y ago

Middle Ages called, they want their concepts back. Why is "geographical independency" desirable here? We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#) Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today. Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process. (#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
- _Microft 6y ago
  Renewable energy production is not as centralized as production of physical goods. There is no need to transmit energy that far.

7952 6y ago

I wonder which is easier? Large scale battery deployment or scaling nuclear. I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. It is already an area of massive research. It is something we need to scale anyway due to electric cars. And it is very easy to deploy to the existing grid. You just need a concrete pad, some power gear, and a substation. Being optimistic about nuclear does not mean we cannot be optimistic about batter storage.

jnxx 6y ago
> I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. I only need to look at how long my laptop lasts compared to 15 years ago.
manfredo 6y ago
The US currently has less than 10 seconds of battery storage relative to it's 11.5 TWh average daily electricity consumption. The scale required relative to the scale we're capable of providing presents a staggering difference. We're talking about a 1,000x to 10,000x difference between current battery storage and required battery storage.
godelski 6y ago
> I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. That's not my issue. My issue is that we currently have working nuclear technology. That we can build and deploy now. Bullish means we're relying on future inventions. With the potential catastrophe we have ahead of us I don't think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket. It may not pan out. It may not pan out in the timeframe we need it to. Nuclear is a relatively cheap risk reduction strategy. Be bullish on battery, but have a backup because in the mean time we're still using coal/oil/gas.
- 7952 6y ago
  The UK already has around 1GW deployed and has 10GW+ in the pipeline. All of Which should be built before Sizewell C starts to generate. I dont doubt that we can build nuclear plants. But right now the number of nations that can actually pull it off is small. Changing that would require new tech, modularisation, mass production etc. That is great and we should do that. But will it happen quickly?

guerby 6y ago

"geographically independent" Well nuclear needs water, not a very strong constraint I agree but one nevertheless. In France when it gets too hot they have to stop the nuclear plants since by environnement regulations they cannot pump out too hot water in the river. By now offshore wind is still behind in capacity factor compared to nuclear but it's closer and closer. For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1) For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2) (1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor (2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

roenxi 6y ago
Capacity factor isn't the issue as much as correlation. 2x nuclear plants with 50% capacity factor due to planned maintenance can work fine, one covers the other. 2x solar panels with 50% capacity factor due to night is a problem, because now something else is needed to deal with night-time power.

nicoburns 6y ago

Nuclear has problems with the load being intermittent because it's too inflexible (you can't realistically run a nuclear plant for 12 hours and then turn it off, you really want it to be running the whole time). If you have nuclear capacity for peak load, then what do you do with that extra energy at off peak times? The solutions for this end up looking a lot like the solutions for dealing with the intermitency of solar/wind.

manfredo 6y ago
For the third time, the solution is to just save money by ditching the intermittent sources and only using nuclear. Nuclear makes renewables redundant, not the other way around. Nuclear generates power round the clock. Nuclear doesn't suffer from the duck curve, so it doesn't need storage or gas backup plants.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Nuclear does suffer from the duck curve. It has the opposite problem of what to do with the excess power when demand is lower.
  - sir_bearington 6y ago
    No it does not. The Duck curve refers to the sinusoidal production of solar power (and wind power, to a lesser extent) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve. The duck curve refers to the problem of the fact that energy consumption is mostly flat, but solar solar produces a big curve from dawn to dusk. This is why renewables need so much storage, to take overproduction during peak hours and use that excess energy during the off-hours. Matching a flat source of energy generation to a mostly flat demand curve is much easier than adapting a sinusoidal source of energy generation to a flat demand. The disparity between peak energy load and minimal energy load is only ~25%. Excess energy is an easy problem to solve. Nuclear power plants' thermal output is largely fixed, but their electrical output can be modulated by more aggressive cooling. Basically, deliberately produce more waste heat. If this nuclear plant is on the coast it can use this waste heat for desalination - the waste heat gives you freshwater as a bonus.

jnxx 6y ago

> The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.

manfredo 6y ago
It needs a source of water to run heat exchangers, but it doesn't need to be fresh water. It can run on seawater (which can also be used for desalination with the waste heat), or on wastewater.