4 ms·
Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.
by heraclius 6y ago
Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.
- fsh 6y agoNuclear plants are enormously expensive to build and maintain. Having them idle would be economic suicide for the operators.
- jdxcode 6y agoNuclear isn't something you can just turn on and off like gas
- finiteseries 6y agoYou can build out backup gas without decades long political battles over one of the most singularly controversial issues over the past century or so.
- adamcstephens 6y agoA nuclear plant was also taken offline due to the cold.
- heraclius 6y agoWell all sorts of things were taken offline due to the cold—anything can be made to work properly in cold weather.
- adamcstephens 6y agoRight. Clearly much of Texas was built with “it’ll never be below freezing for multiple days in a row”, which unfortunately has caused for an even greater disaster.
- edbob 6y agoNuclear was outputting about 75% of its capacity, which was pretty good performance compared to the other sources. At that rate, if we'd had 25 GW of additional nuclear capacity instead of 25 GW of wind capacity, we would have had another 15 GW of power available during the cold night hours, when wind was outputting only 3.5 GW of its 25 GW capacity.
- maxerickson 6y agoWe haven't figured out how to control costs with nuclear. Known costs of a new project make them pretty much untenable, and they don't quite account for spent fuel (not for the full amount of time it will be dangerous). There's likely solutions to storing the spent fuel, but we aren't doing them. Hopefully regulators take a look at resiliency and do things to improve it that would take less time than building new nuclear. In Texas it seems a modest improvement in natural gas pipelines would do a lot to improve the system. A study estimating the relationship between cold weather and available production would probably be seen as worthwhile by even the most radical anti-regulator.