5 ms·
Nuclear is a terrible "backup" for renewables. Renewables fluctuate. Nuclear is not great at scaling, and most reactors cannot be shut down without taking week
by bipson 5y ago
Nuclear is a terrible "backup" for renewables.
Renewables fluctuate. Nuclear is not great at scaling, and most reactors cannot be shut down without taking weeks and months for safe re-starting.
Nuclear is good for base load. And countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables, since its output would just become surplus.
For broad adoption of renewables, we need to accompany it with (hopefully clean) solutions that can buffer and restore surplus energy efficiently and most importantly scale up and down really fast, to smooth out the fluctuations. Keeping a constant 50 Hz is becoming increasingly difficult with renewables.
In the past Austria used to store (nightly) surpulus energy from german nuclear reactors and (more recent also renewables) and getting paid to do so, to feed it into the own network and also selling abroad during daytime.
This was stopped because it was putting a lot of strain on the north-south bottlenecks in the German power network, aggravated by large wind farms in the north, that became capable of covering the whole German power use for short periods of time.
- adrianN 5y agoModern nuclear is actually reasonably good at scaling. It's just that the capital costs are so damn high that you want to run your reactors at 100% all the time to have a chance of making profits.
- sokoloff 5y agoIt seems like subsidies (perhaps in the form of carbon taxes) could solve that problem entirely.
- fsflover 5y ago> countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables Nuclear energy is green energy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987
- bipson 5y agoLet's say there are different opinions on that. I won't adopt definitions forced by countries that also want natural gas plants to be categorized as "green" ("who cares what they emit?!")
- fsflover 5y agoThis is ad hominem. Nuclear doesn't generate the CO2.
- bipson 5y agoHm, no, I don't think that's ad hominem. I didn't say nuclear does generate CO2. I said it produces waste, and that I have a definition of renewable that does not include nuclear. You first shifted the goalposts and said it is "green" (what is "green"?? who defines "green"?), citing sources. I discredited the sources, since it these are just announcements, made by (political) institutions, where politicians lobby for a re-labeling of certain energy sources, because it suits their agenda. None of this makes nuclear "renewable" in my book. IMO the world renewable implies something in the line of "self-regenerating"/"grows naturally"/"replenishes" and producing toxic waste in my world-view is orthogonal to that meaning. And don't try to explain that nuclear waste is non-toxic, I think my interest in discussing this really ends there.
- tremon 5y agomost reactors cannot be shut down without taking weeks and months for safe re-starting. That's a design issue, not an inherent problem. There is no reason (other than cost) why the steam turbine can't be temporarily decoupled from the generator -- instant shutdown. You could even design a generator where the rotor can be (partially) retracted from the stator coils. Retracting or inserting more of the rotor would give you continuously variable control over the conversion factor from steam pressure to electrical power.