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Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge

Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a small nuclear design is about to be approved in the US that would be useful. But in the big picture of over all power generation nuclear will continue to fade away.

otikik 4y ago
Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.
p_l 4y ago
A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.) Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.
- entropicgravity 4y ago
  The larger the geography of the grid (tied with HVDC) the more supply and demand average out. This minimizes the need for pumped storage (and its variations). To give just one example the UK is building an underwater HVDC directly between Morocco (solar) and the UK. So the known solutions are already available they just have to be implemented.
  - p_l 4y ago
    Except those solutions tend to ignore the cost of failures and that even with interconnects balancing the grid is not trivial - just inside european grid the problems are considerable, and there's still the issue of interconnects failing. And even then, you now need to overbuild not just for replacement of local plants, but also for replacement of plants on the other end of the continent. Great if you're selling gas or gas power plants, I guess, not so great if you want zero CO2 emissions especially with how powerhungry the replacement techs can be.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Nuclear isn't dispatchable. If it's not always running the cost/kWh escalates dramatically. Solar and wind with storage are somewhat dispatchable, because you can decide when to discharge the storage systems.
  - p_l 4y ago
    It's much more dispatchable than renewables, it's just cheaper to run it always at full capacity. Solar/wind/storage combination requires overbuilding in range of 15-25 times the nameplate capacity. Personally I'm of the opinion that we should have nuclear+renewables with less focus on storage and more on opportunistic production of, for example, green hydrogen - not for grid storage but for all other uses like steel production, off-grid power systems (including cars/trains that have needs beyond battery capability) etc. Current approach with renewables always being graded on their lowest possible price point and silently ignoring the growing gas generation required to smooth them and larger and larger grid instability is not great.

otikik 4y ago

Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are only clean if their backup is clean, too. Otherwise they are an incomplete solution. Nuclear a better, greener backup.

cesarb 4y ago
> Solar and Wind need a backup. Solar only works for 1/3 of the day, at most. It needs a backup. At the moment our backup is burning fossil fuels. It depends on where you live. In my country (which is a huge country), the backup is hydroelectric dams. Burning fossil fuels (and nuclear) is mostly kept constant during the day, it's the hydroelectric dams which follow both the load and the changes in solar and wind.

p_l 4y ago

A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW wind + 840 MWh battery at 170MW output + 50MW hydrogen turbine backed by 10186 MWh stored hydrogen. It's also 1.5x the cost of plonking EPR-based NPP.) Depending on smoothing from elsewhere is going to be also tricky - already considerable amounts of money are being paid out for curtailment because the grid can't take it.

entropicgravity 4y ago
The larger the geography of the grid (tied with HVDC) the more supply and demand average out. This minimizes the need for pumped storage (and its variations). To give just one example the UK is building an underwater HVDC directly between Morocco (solar) and the UK. So the known solutions are already available they just have to be implemented.
- p_l 4y ago
  Except those solutions tend to ignore the cost of failures and that even with interconnects balancing the grid is not trivial - just inside european grid the problems are considerable, and there's still the issue of interconnects failing. And even then, you now need to overbuild not just for replacement of local plants, but also for replacement of plants on the other end of the continent. Great if you're selling gas or gas power plants, I guess, not so great if you want zero CO2 emissions especially with how powerhungry the replacement techs can be.
pfdietz 4y ago
Nuclear isn't dispatchable. If it's not always running the cost/kWh escalates dramatically. Solar and wind with storage are somewhat dispatchable, because you can decide when to discharge the storage systems.
- p_l 4y ago
  It's much more dispatchable than renewables, it's just cheaper to run it always at full capacity. Solar/wind/storage combination requires overbuilding in range of 15-25 times the nameplate capacity. Personally I'm of the opinion that we should have nuclear+renewables with less focus on storage and more on opportunistic production of, for example, green hydrogen - not for grid storage but for all other uses like steel production, off-grid power systems (including cars/trains that have needs beyond battery capability) etc. Current approach with renewables always being graded on their lowest possible price point and silently ignoring the growing gas generation required to smooth them and larger and larger grid instability is not great.