8 ms·

But it doesn't matter anyway - wind and solar should complement to nuclear, not to replace it. This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of

But it doesn't matter anyway - wind and solar should complement to nuclear, not to replace it. This year we saw weaker summer winds in Europe which is part of what has caused the current energy crisis. These weaker winds are expected to become more common as climate change continues.[1] Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather. [1] https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-winds-mean-for-the-future-energy-grid-170135 https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is. The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  > No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Do you have a source for this?
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Every summer in France
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Source? Is this inherent in all nuclear plants, or only in certain designs?
      - maccard 5y ago
        Not OP but I google dit and found this [0] from almost 20 years ago. No mention of it being every summer though, and it was during a heat wave that disproportionately affected france. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
      - b3orn 5y ago
        All designs that take water from rivers and return it there. There usually is a regulation for the maximum water temperature in the rivers, so during the summer they can't heat up the water as much, leading to lowered energy output to the point where they have to shutdown some or all reactors of a plant.
        throwaway894345 5y ago
        That doesn’t imply that nuclear plants regularly get close to this threshold nor that it’s common for all nuclear plants of this type (consider 2 identical plants positioned on differently-sized rivers: the larger river will be able to absorb more heat than the smaller river, ergo reliability of this sort varies).
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        mikeyouse 5y ago
        It's not just the river's ability to absorb the heat, it's also the plant's design criteria. The river water is the coolant in the secondary loop, warm water obviously has less capacity to absorb heat, so the plant will either get hotter (not great!) or will have to slow down the reaction to produce less heat (also not great during the summer when demand is the highest!). This isn't just an environmental concern but a design problem.
    - infamia 5y ago
      That sounds good, predictability is what you want when designing a power grid.
  - sampo 5y ago
    Nuclear plants use water from a local river, or sea, for cooling. Or some plants use air and have cooling towers. Nuclear plants are also tightly regulated by law. So there is a limit on how warm cooling water the plant is allowed, as per environmental regulations, to release into the river, or to the sea. If weather gets hot, the temperature of the incoming cooling water gets warmer, too. And having to operate within the limits of the maximum allowed temperature for the outgoing cooling water, the plant may have to regulate its power output, or maybe entirely pause operation. The temperature limit is mostly a legal one: There is concern about the environmental effects of releasing warmer water to the water bodies. From an engineering point of view, the plant would probably be able to operate, and just release warmer water.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Why can't they just refrigerate the water before releasing? Nothing too crazy just a few degrees. Run it through cooling pipes are something to dissipate the heat.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        They could evaporate some of the water to cool the rest. This is why many nuclear plants in the US have cooling towers. But cooling towers consume water, and are fairly expensive.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      I'm not debating the mechanisms; I'm after a source that hopefully reliably cites the frequency and severity of it. Wind and solar power drop to zero regularly, as we would expect. If nuclear does the same, then the comparison is totally valid. If it's something else then the comparison becomes less valid or invalid.
      - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        Why are you so keen to defend one particular power production method on one narrow stat? This isn't a game of Top Trumps where you need to find any one stat that's higher than your opponents to declare victory. Nuclear has to be better than wind and solar and hydro and batteries and everything else (demand response, better insulation, undersea grid connectors etc.) all working together across a wide range of metrics to find a place in a modern grid. It is failing at this. The alternatives are cheaper, better, greener, safer, quicker to build. Narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect does not change this big picture reality.
  - niea_11 5y ago
    I found this article : https://energyforhumanity.org/en/resources/reports-en/effects-heatwaves-nuclear-plants/ https://energyforhumanity.org/en/resources/reports-en/effect... Curtailment of nuclear power due to periods of extreme heat has had the effect of reducing European nuclear power output by approx. 0.1% since the year 2000. For France specifically, which with its many inland river-sited plants has been the worst hit country, the corresponding figure is approximately 0.15%
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Thanks. This doesn't sound appropriate to compare with how weather affects most renewables.
  - drran 5y ago
    In my country (Ukraine), 3 nuclear power plants out of 15 are competing with cities for fresh water because of drought.
- schnitzelstoat 5y ago
  I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables. But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work. Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1] I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general. [1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/ https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-Mountains/dp/1605986801 https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...
  - caoilte 5y ago
    Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Citation? In particular, small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas (but we can’t know for sure because anti-nuclear folks have prevented us from seriously testing it) which is almost certainly less than the cost of solar/wind and tens of thousands of km of massive copper cables.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        > small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Could you please expand on this? What is the ideal uptime for a nuclear plant vs wind/solar?
- ageofwant 5y ago
  You have invented a fictitious enemy in your own made up "culture war" to rage and rail against what you believe is the one true answer. Thousands of hectares of pristine remnant bush are bulldozed to move, note not install, move, wind turbines into place. Nobody blinks an eye when thousands of hectares of remnant bush gets covered in solar panels. I'm the greenest person I know, a self identifying eco-facist. And I want a nuclear power station in every suburb. And so should you, if you gave a rats arse about the actual environment, and not some fake "war" raging in your meme-space while actual living things get ground into dust in the actual real world.
  - VyperCard 5y ago
    That sounds really deranged.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where we have 10,000 MW of nuclear (click "Supply"): * https://ieso.ca/power-data https://ieso.ca/power-data This does not happen here.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    Probably because Ontario has ample access to water cooling, probably from the lakes. That's not the case for many countries in Europe.
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      No doubt. But it's important to differentiate "inherit" limitations of a technology versus situational ones. Plenty of EU countries have coast lines too.
      - Fnoord 5y ago
        Yeah, and they have floods, too (Re: Fukushima). I'm a proponent of nuclear fission energy (to complement solar/wind/hydro) but it has to be done safely. Hopefully in the future we don't have to rely on it (switch to nuclear fusion or something else), or solve the nuclear waste issue somehow.
- infamia 5y ago
  Green energy and nuclear are in different product categories. They are in no way comparable. It's like trying to compare an electric scooter to a work truck. This is because green energy is mostly fine for transient demand, but at this time, is completely unsuitable for base load applications. Nuclear is a base load product (base load pricing is quite expensive) and needs to be far more reliable. Its failure modes are such that we can build a reliable energy grid around it, and have done for decades. You can't say the same for green energy (right now) as evidenced by its multiple failures as of late, which is now responsible for decreasing the security of Europe.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    In 2021 there are only two useful types of power: cheap power and peak power, and nuclear is neither. Base power is only a useful term if it's cheaper than peak power, since you can fill 100% of your power needs solely with peak power.
    - option_greek 5y ago
      How about something like an SLA for power? Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
      - phicoh 5y ago
        There are a number of issues: 1) Short term, the faster we avoid CO2 the better. If SLAs make that more complex, then it is a net loss. Long term, the situation will be different because cheap gains will be gone. 2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA? 3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that? 4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear. Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are: - how do we get cheap storage - how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  > The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables “Modern renewables” aren’t competitive at all, you can’t build a grid based on them. The ginormous amount of renewables in Germany compared to how much CO2 per kWh their grid produces (https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ) is everything you need to know. Even in places like California (where I live) where Solar is viable, renewables will require so many battery storage to remove gas plants that it’ll push their co2/kWh way higher that nuclear.
Gwypaas 5y ago
They don't. They explicitly compete for the same spot, the cheapest most inflexible power generation. Nuclear obviously loses here and are pushed closer to the peaker side and is hampered by the insanely costly initial investment. The closer to peaker you are the more you want the price to only be operating costs.
- caoilte 5y ago
  dunno why this got down voted. Nuclear is a terrible peaker tech and yet pairing it with solar/wind requires it to be flexible and so you end up overproducing. There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unfortunately but storage does the trick instead.
Zigurd 5y ago
"Do everything" is wrong. This is why: You want the most power per dollar of capex, and you want to have it come on line as fast as possible. Electricity is fungible. You can't tell a coal watt from a solar watt from a nuke watt. If you want to avoid coal, oil, and gas for externalities, you want the thing that costs the least and arrives soonest. That's renewables. Every dollar spend on nuclear would deliver more power sooner if spent on renewables.
- flawi 5y ago
  Except you can't just invest it all into renewables and expect to have a stable power grid, the equation isn't quite as simple as "avg_power / $ capex". Last analysis I saw of this argued that the amount of "over-provisioning" needed to cover baseline demand with renewables made them prohibitively expensive as the sole solution. Peaker and storage solutions aim to solve that, but you need to build that capacity in addition to renewables.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    Renewables are nowhere near to running up against the need to buy more grid interconnection, storage, synfuel technology, or other ways of using surplus power and providing power from storage or from other regions. Until renewables displace a lot more fossil fuel power, those costs are not a consideration. That might happen within a decade in places like New Zealand. Still, capex on grid scale storage is up and costs are trending down: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-trends-in-grid-scale-battery-storage/#gref https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-tren...
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Here's a fully costed plan to green the grid. It only requires over-provisioning of 20%. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify Here's an anti-renewable paper that quite ironically makes the point quite well that battery storage is quite viable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid. We don't need 3x over-provisioning because the paper doesn't include hydro or existing nuclear. And 3 hours of storage is a lot of batteries, but it's a lot cheaper than building new nuclear.
major505 5y ago
The main power grid should be always from a predictable source. wind and solar are far from that. And there's the problem of disposing solar panels and old wind turbines. We came a long way, but there's a lot of space for improvements. Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a stable and mature technology.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  There is no need for a base load source to supply a base load of demand. Intermittent sources + storage to fill in the gaps can work just fine. The new thing is that this latter approach is looking like it will be cheaper.
  - major505 5y ago
    Im no expert on batteries, but I don't see giant watery banks working in large scale, in most cities in the world. Today the better way to store energy still is with water reservoirs, and its expensive as hell, and you need a gigantic space that will be flooded.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    That’s a LOT of batteries…
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      The world is going to spend maybe a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. Big problems have big solutions.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        Physics couldn't care less about your "big solutions". All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce. Of course, you can close your eyes, and pretend this will be solved by magic in the nearest future. It won't. And we need solutions now.
kitkat_new 5y ago
well, don't you get more solar power in the summer? seems like that can minimize seasonal storage requirements once higher level of renewables are in the grid
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Solar panels are less efficient when they get warm.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
Agree completely. It seems very naive on the one hand to say that climate change is making climate more chaotic and and then turn around and say that we will put all our eggs in the baskets of tech that literally doesn’t work if there isn’t suitable climate (wind and solar).
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather. Unless, of course, the weather is an earthquake followed by tsunami. Or political weather.
- ThunderSizzle 5y ago
  Although a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines on the coast that are washed away by a tsunami isn't reliable either. Or when there's no wind or sun. If it takes a tsunami to turn off a nuclear plant, it's about as reliable as it can be.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. The main problem seems to be that people have invented an entirely ficticious nuclear power that does not and has never existed, just so they can slag off renewables and "elite culture" whatever the heck that is. The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables is apparently irrelevant to people who have bizarrely joined a one sided culture war on the side of fossil fuel companies and think this makes them cool, well informed and counter-cultural despite reality leaning the other way.

robertlagrant 5y ago
> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Do you have a source for this?
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Every summer in France
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Source? Is this inherent in all nuclear plants, or only in certain designs?
    - maccard 5y ago
      Not OP but I google dit and found this [0] from almost 20 years ago. No mention of it being every summer though, and it was during a heat wave that disproportionately affected france. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear
    - b3orn 5y ago
      All designs that take water from rivers and return it there. There usually is a regulation for the maximum water temperature in the rivers, so during the summer they can't heat up the water as much, leading to lowered energy output to the point where they have to shutdown some or all reactors of a plant.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        That doesn’t imply that nuclear plants regularly get close to this threshold nor that it’s common for all nuclear plants of this type (consider 2 identical plants positioned on differently-sized rivers: the larger river will be able to absorb more heat than the smaller river, ergo reliability of this sort varies).
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        mikeyouse 5y ago
        It's not just the river's ability to absorb the heat, it's also the plant's design criteria. The river water is the coolant in the secondary loop, warm water obviously has less capacity to absorb heat, so the plant will either get hotter (not great!) or will have to slow down the reaction to produce less heat (also not great during the summer when demand is the highest!). This isn't just an environmental concern but a design problem.
  - infamia 5y ago
    That sounds good, predictability is what you want when designing a power grid.
- sampo 5y ago
  Nuclear plants use water from a local river, or sea, for cooling. Or some plants use air and have cooling towers. Nuclear plants are also tightly regulated by law. So there is a limit on how warm cooling water the plant is allowed, as per environmental regulations, to release into the river, or to the sea. If weather gets hot, the temperature of the incoming cooling water gets warmer, too. And having to operate within the limits of the maximum allowed temperature for the outgoing cooling water, the plant may have to regulate its power output, or maybe entirely pause operation. The temperature limit is mostly a legal one: There is concern about the environmental effects of releasing warmer water to the water bodies. From an engineering point of view, the plant would probably be able to operate, and just release warmer water.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Why can't they just refrigerate the water before releasing? Nothing too crazy just a few degrees. Run it through cooling pipes are something to dissipate the heat.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      They could evaporate some of the water to cool the rest. This is why many nuclear plants in the US have cooling towers. But cooling towers consume water, and are fairly expensive.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    I'm not debating the mechanisms; I'm after a source that hopefully reliably cites the frequency and severity of it. Wind and solar power drop to zero regularly, as we would expect. If nuclear does the same, then the comparison is totally valid. If it's something else then the comparison becomes less valid or invalid.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Why are you so keen to defend one particular power production method on one narrow stat? This isn't a game of Top Trumps where you need to find any one stat that's higher than your opponents to declare victory. Nuclear has to be better than wind and solar and hydro and batteries and everything else (demand response, better insulation, undersea grid connectors etc.) all working together across a wide range of metrics to find a place in a modern grid. It is failing at this. The alternatives are cheaper, better, greener, safer, quicker to build. Narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect does not change this big picture reality.
- niea_11 5y ago
  I found this article : https://energyforhumanity.org/en/resources/reports-en/effects-heatwaves-nuclear-plants/ https://energyforhumanity.org/en/resources/reports-en/effect... Curtailment of nuclear power due to periods of extreme heat has had the effect of reducing European nuclear power output by approx. 0.1% since the year 2000. For France specifically, which with its many inland river-sited plants has been the worst hit country, the corresponding figure is approximately 0.15%
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Thanks. This doesn't sound appropriate to compare with how weather affects most renewables.
- drran 5y ago
  In my country (Ukraine), 3 nuclear power plants out of 15 are competing with cities for fresh water because of drought.
schnitzelstoat 5y ago
I like the engineering of nuclear power plants, but I'm not particularly biased towards them over renewables. But we need to greatly improve energy storage if renewables are going to work. Places like Scotland have generated equivalent to around 97% of their entire electricity consumption from renewables - yet still consume around 13% of their energy from fossil fuels as they export the renewable energy at peak production.[1] I also just really don't like the misinformation that surrounds nuclear energy. I majored in Physics and it's just irritating to see people so confident in their ignorance. I recommend the book "Atomic Accidents"[2] as an excellent book on the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear power plant engineering in general. [1] https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/ https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-Mountains/dp/1605986801 https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-...
- caoilte 5y ago
  Yeah. We need a better transmission grid before we can go to 100% renewables (balancing out Scottish wind with Spanish solar). But a better transmission grid is miles cheaper than nuclear, so it's still a no brainer.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Citation? In particular, small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas (but we can’t know for sure because anti-nuclear folks have prevented us from seriously testing it) which is almost certainly less than the cost of solar/wind and tens of thousands of km of massive copper cables.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      > small modular reactors are estimated to produce energy at a cost which rivals natural gas You'd be foolish to believe those projections from salesmen. NuScale's attempt at new reactors has already doubled in cost.
dahfizz 5y ago
> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. Could you please expand on this? What is the ideal uptime for a nuclear plant vs wind/solar?
ageofwant 5y ago
You have invented a fictitious enemy in your own made up "culture war" to rage and rail against what you believe is the one true answer. Thousands of hectares of pristine remnant bush are bulldozed to move, note not install, move, wind turbines into place. Nobody blinks an eye when thousands of hectares of remnant bush gets covered in solar panels. I'm the greenest person I know, a self identifying eco-facist. And I want a nuclear power station in every suburb. And so should you, if you gave a rats arse about the actual environment, and not some fake "war" raging in your meme-space while actual living things get ground into dust in the actual real world.
- VyperCard 5y ago
  That sounds really deranged.
throw0101a 5y ago
> No, nuclear plants are regularly taken offline for weather related reasons. As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where we have 10,000 MW of nuclear (click "Supply"): * https://ieso.ca/power-data https://ieso.ca/power-data This does not happen here.
- coliveira 5y ago
  Probably because Ontario has ample access to water cooling, probably from the lakes. That's not the case for many countries in Europe.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    No doubt. But it's important to differentiate "inherit" limitations of a technology versus situational ones. Plenty of EU countries have coast lines too.
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      Yeah, and they have floods, too (Re: Fukushima). I'm a proponent of nuclear fission energy (to complement solar/wind/hydro) but it has to be done safely. Hopefully in the future we don't have to rely on it (switch to nuclear fusion or something else), or solve the nuclear waste issue somehow.
infamia 5y ago
Green energy and nuclear are in different product categories. They are in no way comparable. It's like trying to compare an electric scooter to a work truck. This is because green energy is mostly fine for transient demand, but at this time, is completely unsuitable for base load applications. Nuclear is a base load product (base load pricing is quite expensive) and needs to be far more reliable. Its failure modes are such that we can build a reliable energy grid around it, and have done for decades. You can't say the same for green energy (right now) as evidenced by its multiple failures as of late, which is now responsible for decreasing the security of Europe.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  In 2021 there are only two useful types of power: cheap power and peak power, and nuclear is neither. Base power is only a useful term if it's cheaper than peak power, since you can fill 100% of your power needs solely with peak power.
  - option_greek 5y ago
    How about something like an SLA for power? Clearly, placing any country's energy security in the hands of ever changing climate (less winds and high cloud cover) or at the feet of dictators has to factor in some where.
    - phicoh 5y ago
      There are a number of issues: 1) Short term, the faster we avoid CO2 the better. If SLAs make that more complex, then it is a net loss. Long term, the situation will be different because cheap gains will be gone. 2) Europe has mostly privatized energy. Who is suppose to set the SLA? 3) Nuclear plants need to be refueled. Does the SLA include a couple of months downtime every few years? That would suggest that the SLA is uniquely tailored to nuclear. 100% uptime? How is nuclear going to deal with that? 4) Power consumption varies over the day. A constant load again favors nuclear. A load that can handle daily and seasonal variation would be quite bad for nuclear. Basically what we need is flexible electricity production. On their own, nuclear, solar and wind are all equally bad at flexible electricity production. So the questions are: - how do we get cheap storage - how do we minimize the amount of storage we need
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
> The real actual nuclear power, which is better than coal, but not particularly competitive with modern renewables “Modern renewables” aren’t competitive at all, you can’t build a grid based on them. The ginormous amount of renewables in Germany compared to how much CO2 per kWh their grid produces (https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE ) is everything you need to know. Even in places like California (where I live) where Solar is viable, renewables will require so many battery storage to remove gas plants that it’ll push their co2/kWh way higher that nuclear.

Gwypaas 5y ago

They don't. They explicitly compete for the same spot, the cheapest most inflexible power generation. Nuclear obviously loses here and are pushed closer to the peaker side and is hampered by the insanely costly initial investment. The closer to peaker you are the more you want the price to only be operating costs.

caoilte 5y ago
dunno why this got down voted. Nuclear is a terrible peaker tech and yet pairing it with solar/wind requires it to be flexible and so you end up overproducing. There isn't a perfect scalable peaker / clean generation tech unfortunately but storage does the trick instead.

Zigurd 5y ago

"Do everything" is wrong. This is why: You want the most power per dollar of capex, and you want to have it come on line as fast as possible. Electricity is fungible. You can't tell a coal watt from a solar watt from a nuke watt. If you want to avoid coal, oil, and gas for externalities, you want the thing that costs the least and arrives soonest. That's renewables. Every dollar spend on nuclear would deliver more power sooner if spent on renewables.

flawi 5y ago
Except you can't just invest it all into renewables and expect to have a stable power grid, the equation isn't quite as simple as "avg_power / $ capex". Last analysis I saw of this argued that the amount of "over-provisioning" needed to cover baseline demand with renewables made them prohibitively expensive as the sole solution. Peaker and storage solutions aim to solve that, but you need to build that capacity in addition to renewables.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  Renewables are nowhere near to running up against the need to buy more grid interconnection, storage, synfuel technology, or other ways of using surplus power and providing power from storage or from other regions. Until renewables displace a lot more fossil fuel power, those costs are not a consideration. That might happen within a decade in places like New Zealand. Still, capex on grid scale storage is up and costs are trending down: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-trends-in-grid-scale-battery-storage/#gref https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/investment-tren...
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Here's a fully costed plan to green the grid. It only requires over-provisioning of 20%. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify Here's an anti-renewable paper that quite ironically makes the point quite well that battery storage is quite viable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid. We don't need 3x over-provisioning because the paper doesn't include hydro or existing nuclear. And 3 hours of storage is a lot of batteries, but it's a lot cheaper than building new nuclear.

major505 5y ago

The main power grid should be always from a predictable source. wind and solar are far from that. And there's the problem of disposing solar panels and old wind turbines. We came a long way, but there's a lot of space for improvements. Meanwhile, nuclear energy is a stable and mature technology.

pfdietz 5y ago
There is no need for a base load source to supply a base load of demand. Intermittent sources + storage to fill in the gaps can work just fine. The new thing is that this latter approach is looking like it will be cheaper.
- major505 5y ago
  Im no expert on batteries, but I don't see giant watery banks working in large scale, in most cities in the world. Today the better way to store energy still is with water reservoirs, and its expensive as hell, and you need a gigantic space that will be flooded.
- FredPret 5y ago
  That’s a LOT of batteries…
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    The world is going to spend maybe a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. Big problems have big solutions.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      Physics couldn't care less about your "big solutions". All energy storage solutions we have are low capacity, slow to charge, slow to bring online, and often are extremely harmful to the environment to produce. Of course, you can close your eyes, and pretend this will be solved by magic in the nearest future. It won't. And we need solutions now.

kitkat_new 5y ago

well, don't you get more solar power in the summer? seems like that can minimize seasonal storage requirements once higher level of renewables are in the grid

missedthecue 5y ago
Solar panels are less efficient when they get warm.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

Agree completely. It seems very naive on the one hand to say that climate change is making climate more chaotic and and then turn around and say that we will put all our eggs in the baskets of tech that literally doesn’t work if there isn’t suitable climate (wind and solar).

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

> Nuclear has the benefit that it's reliable. If you design a plant to output X gigawatts - it'll still be able to do so regardless of the weather. Unless, of course, the weather is an earthquake followed by tsunami. Or political weather.

ThunderSizzle 5y ago
Although a bunch of solar panels or wind turbines on the coast that are washed away by a tsunami isn't reliable either. Or when there's no wind or sun. If it takes a tsunami to turn off a nuclear plant, it's about as reliable as it can be.