3 ms·
Usually you'd vary the concentration of boric acid being injected in the reactor's core instead, since that doesn't involve wear and tear on safety-critical ele
by delroth 3y ago
Usually you'd vary the concentration of boric acid being injected in the reactor's core instead, since that doesn't involve wear and tear on safety-critical elements of the reactor.
Nuclear reactors absolutely can vary their output to match demand, this is what France has been doing for 50+ years (and what Germany was doing before switching back to coal). It's not as reactive as coal/gas, but you can still vary within 30-100% of output power at a speed of 5% change per minute. Way more than enough to react to 1-day-ahead forecasted supply/demand, and way more than enough to react minute-by-minute if you've got a tiny bit of storage to stabilize the grid's frequency (e.g. pumped hydro).
- ViewTrick1002 3y agoIt is a hugely complicated system where reactors which are earlier in their fuel cycle ramp more leaving the later ones to run at 100% around the clock. Ramping once is easy. Ramping continuously through the entire fuel cycle requires a meticulously planned fleet.
- _ph_ 3y agoFrance is balancing their reactors with a massive amount of water power, so they are not doing it alone on the reactor side. But I think France is indeed one of the countries with the highest relative amount of nuclear in the grid. Germany went never over 30% nuclear in the mix, so demand matching was way less of a problem. But also, both countries tried to make demand mostly constant like with pushing inefficient heating systems which would consume electricity at night. This is very far off from working well together with a mostly renewable grid, where renewables can cover 100% of the load on most days, but there are larger gaps to be quickly filled.