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> So you're overbuilding nuclear So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding? > Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make

> So you're overbuilding nuclear So are complaining about changing demand or about overbuilding? > Wouldn't it make sense to take some of that power and make hydrogen or something that can be stored for later peaks? Yes, you could probably do that if any if those solutions scaled in any meaningful shape or form. > But of course if you admit these things exist, it kind of puts a big hole in your argument My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie. None of the weird tangent you went off on makes a hole in this argument: nuclear power can scale quickly and is literally used to do that right now. The fact that it isn't used for something that you want it used for is completely orthogonal to whether it can be scaled or not. For example, no one stores nuclear power in hydrogen or whatever because it's literally not needed because nuclear power can be scaled quickly on demand.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie. That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true. The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries. So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage. Just like you'd do with excess renewables.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%. And yet, it does ramp up quickly. > It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries. 5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future. Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day). How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess? (Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those) > Just like you'd do with excess renewables. Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. Nuclear can't deal with the short spikes, and while it can deal with the long spikes, it's not efficient to do so since roughly 100% of the costs of nuclear are initial construction and personnel so running at reduced power levels doesn't save any cost. Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles). Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      > Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report). Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance". Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage. > Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required. > and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale. > Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently. Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much). Once again: - it's the highest energy density we know - it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables) - it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes) - it requires significantly less area to build - the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage. Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> My argument was that your claim that "demand isn't flat and nuclear can't scale quickly enough to meet the daily peaks and troughs" is a lie. That was someone else's argument, and the second part is kind of irrelevant, but it's also true. The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries. So even if you ramp nuclear, at an increased cost, you still need gas or batteries or hydro for fast ramps. So you might as well use the power you ramp down to fill batteries, make syngas or hydrogen or fill pumped storage. Just like you'd do with excess renewables.

illiarian 4y ago
> The speed that Nuclear can ramp, even in the best case is not enough to match demand spikes. Because Nuclear isn't 100% of all power output. Of course it can't ramp up from, say 20% to 100%. And yet, it does ramp up quickly. > It doesn't ramp as fast as gas plants and gas plants don't ramp as fast as batteries. 5% of rated power per minute is plenty fast. Not as fast as gas plants, true. And for batteries... There's this funny little things of: there are literally no batteries at scale required by demand spikes. And won't be in any near future. Meanwhile if you followed the links, you could see the graph showing how nuclear power plants go from ~650 MW to ~1400MW to meat demand (which is mostly predictable day to day). How many batteries you need to have extra ~800 MW per plant every day? And how many renewable sources to provide that excess? (Edit: largest energy storage seems to be Ouarzazate Solar Power Station with 510 MW of storage, thermal storage. Everything else is lower. To keep up with a single nuclear plant in the report you'd need two of those) > Just like you'd do with excess renewables. Except, for "excess renewables" you need to both overbuild them significantly more, and provide significantly more batteries because besides fast load following (which they can't do, and nuclear can) their base load is literally zero (and it's never zero with nuclear unless you take the plant completely offline).
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. Nuclear can't deal with the short spikes, and while it can deal with the long spikes, it's not efficient to do so since roughly 100% of the costs of nuclear are initial construction and personnel so running at reduced power levels doesn't save any cost. Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage (that said there's a bunch of R&D currently into better grid batteries since they have very different performance requirements than portable batteries since weight and volume don't matter, just cost and cycles). Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > Spikes occur at various timescales. There are seasonal spikes (due to heating/AC), daily spikes (more power in morning and evening), and spikes on the millisecond to minute level due to random chance. The first two are easily handled by nuclear (which you'd know if you read the report). Literally nothing can handle "millisecond spikes due to random chance". Renewables like solar and wind can't really handle any of the three because their power generation is intermittent. So you have to overbuild both them and their storage. > Batteries already exist that handle demand spikes on the shorter timescales (e.g. in Australia). Of course they don't exist. Not anywhere near the scale required. > and hydro is currently the best for medium timescale storage Ah yes, hydro. That is so easily available and easy to build just about anywhere, and on the required scale. > Nuclear is pretty much the worst tech to overbuild because it's already expensive and it's price per kwh goes way up if you use it infrequently. Of course it's the best tech to "overbuild" (because you don't need to overbuild much). Once again: - it's the highest energy density we know - it's stable power generation (not intermittent like most renewables) - it requires significantly less storage (because it can scale up quickly: most renewables can't even handle daily power spikes) - it requires significantly less area to build - the costs for renewables somehow never include the costs for the required overbuilding and the costs for required storage. Again: in the report you can see just one of the power plants easily scale from 650MW to 1400 MW during the day. And that's for power plants built 45 years ago. What are your renewable + battery solutions capable of that, and their cost?