4 ms·

The French can only do that because they have so many reactors. If you ramp down a reactor, it poisons it's own fuel with radioisotopes and you can't safely ram

The French can only do that because they have so many reactors. If you ramp down a reactor, it poisons it's own fuel with radioisotopes and you can't safely ramp it back up - at least not quickly. You need to wait for the neutron poison to decay naturally, which takes days or even weeks, depending on how much you turned down the reactor. The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned. Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.

adev_ 3y ago
> So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned. They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1] > Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX. Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail. Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap. [^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId=1&var-unit=17W100P100P0104X&var-unav=10888&from=1704353270468&to=1708472596410 https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...

adev_ 3y ago

> So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned. They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1] > Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX. Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail. Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap. [^1]: https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId=1&var-unit=17W100P100P0104X&var-unav=10888&from=1704353270468&to=1708472596410 https://energygraph.info/d/gr_6-QW4z/unit-availability?orgId...