5 ms·

Exactly, 100% nuclear is not achievable without storage: nuclear can do baseload but not daily peaks.

• littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Exactly, 100% nuclear is not achievable without storage: nuclear can do baseload but not daily peaks. Fabulous how you get that from my comment. Talk about confirmation bias. It's literally the opposite, as illustrated by France doing most of its daily load variations from nuclear.
• Krssst 3y ago
  70% is the capacity factor of the plants, not the ratio of nuclear-generated electricity in France's grid (though it's also around this value if I record well). Nuclear can do load following: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#N... Capacity factor of 100% is not feasible because you need maintenance of the plants (probable true for every single form of electricity production). Regarding whether or not stricly 100% of nuclear in the grid is feasible, I don't now enough about grids to say whether only using load-following nuclear power plants (without hydro/gas turbines) could do the job. We have hydro in France, might as well use it rather than have only NPPs, and dams are great for load-following.
  • littlestymaar 3y ago
    > whether only using load-following nuclear power plants (without hydro/gas turbines) could do the job. It is feasible, but the problem would be the peak in winter: that would mean having more than twice as many nuclear reactors to be able to deal with a few winter nights with about 100GW of consumption. That'd be very wasteful. > We have hydro in France, might as well use it rather than have only NPPs, and dams are great for load-following. Depends on what kind of hydro though: mountain barrages are, but not really Run-of-the-river hydro.
• rcxdude 3y ago
  It can do it if you have enough load following and overbuild plants, it's just expensive.