4 ms·

If we want to have an industrial economy with 24×7 heavy manufacturing then we need nuclear power for the base load. There's no need to change output much. The

by nradov 7mo ago

If we want to have an industrial economy with 24×7 heavy manufacturing then we need nuclear power for the base load. There's no need to change output much. The amount of batteries needed to keep a huge factory running is ridiculous.

epistasis 7mo ago
The need for nuclear is simply not clear. Storage has advance so quickly, while nuclear tech has remained stagnant or even gotten more expensive. Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar. Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.
- UltraSane 7mo ago
  Grid Storage is very expensive and right now only has a few hours of capacity. We would need weeks to really replace nuclear.
  - epistasis 7mo ago
    Saying that grid storage "only has a few hours of capacity" is like saying that a nuclear power reactor "only has 1GW of power." You solve both issues by deploying more. And if you want a longer lithium ion battery installation without the additional power capacity, you can save a bit on inverters. Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of battery storage deployed. 58GWh of new grid storage was added in 2025 alone, and the growth is still exponentialhttps://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-energy-storage-in-2025/ https://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-e...
    - UltraSane 7mo ago
      All current grid storage will fully discharge in less than 4 hours at max watts. It is designed to level daily demand variability. To make a 4 hour battery last for a week at the same wattage would make it cost 42 times as much.
      - epistasis 7mo ago
        Yes, this is how the basic arithmetic works. What's your point? I see now that your original post had a fantastical claim that we need weeks of battery storage, which is a fantastical claim. In reality we will need variable amounts of battery but a "week long" battery is not supported by a single detailed grid study I have ever seen. When I have asked Pell to justify claims of "weeks long battery" the only justifications have been "I heard it from someone else", or napkin math that contains many errors, and in places where there are not errors choices are made to estimate an upper bound rather than a lower bound, indicating that the calculator doesn't understand how napkins math can be useful. And for super cheap infrequently used storage, here's a recent purchase at $33/kWh of a 30GWh battery by Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841 I don't expect such batteries to be used much, despite being a fraction of the cost of current LFP batteries, because we really won't need much storage with such a low power:energy ratio.
        UltraSane 7mo ago
        My point is that no one is building 1 week batteries because they would be incredibly expensive. To make sure we are on the same page are you envisioning a grid powered 100% by wind + solar + batteries?
        epistasis 7mo ago
        People are building 100 hour (5 day) batteries because they are incredibly cheap, but they're not doing many of them because they're not needed. Don't forget existing hydro, new advanced geothermal, existing nuclear (until they all reach end of life), etc. etc. etc.
  - tstrimple 7mo ago
    Incredibly disingenuous for nuclear power proponents to state that grid storage is expensive. Your entire argument centers around the most expensive power generation available and one of the slowest to build.
    - UltraSane 7mo ago
      Grid storage is very expensive which is why all grid scale batteries discharge in 4 hours or less at full output.
      - epistasis 7mo ago
        Grid batteries are mostly four hours duration because that's the natural charging and discharging rate for current chemistries, and there's no financial case to store energy for longer right now, as in there's no demand for long term storage at all. Four hours of storage is super profitable, eight hours is just unnecessary and nobody pays for it. Plus, referring to this in terms of "hours" isn't exactly the most informative reference, the more underlying characteristic of storage is if it's meant for daily cycling, meaning that it makes mine every single day from arbitrage, or if it's multi day which is not a super profitable form of arbitrage at the moment. Daily cycling makes a ton of sense with solar. Longer term cycles make more sense paired with wind.
energy123 7mo ago
The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year. New nuclear sucks, and baseload is a false concept that can (and is) being synthetically replicated with over-building + storage + transmission + peaking.
- UltraSane 7mo ago
  Firm/dispatchable capacity that can run for arbitrary durations is required unless you've solved seasonal storage. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6 Firm low-carbon resources consistently lower decarbonized electricity system costs • Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases • Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits near zero • Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm low-carbon resources
  - energy123 7mo ago
    The solution mix needs to be tailored the location. Non-tropical equatorial countries don't have meaningful seasonality, so they don't need seasonal storage. For countries far north of the equator, it's more challenging, but there are multiple tools to address this, including: over-building so you have enough in winter, using wind which is seasonally negatively correlated with solar, importing power over HVDC, and diversifying wind spatially to reduce correlations which drop more than linearly in distance. For small countries very far away from the equator that have highly variable insolation and limited geography to decorrelate, nuclear may be better. But it cannot be asserted a priori without a simulation study tailored to the specifics of that location. When I said that nuclear is bad, I am talking in generalities about the common case (United States) at current market prices. The paper that you linked is old, we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar.
    - UltraSane 7mo ago
      "over-building so you have enough in winter" This makes wind and solar much more expensive to the point where nuclear is cheaper. " we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar." But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.
pydry 7mo ago
The cost of nuclear power is absurd. It's 5x the cost of solar and wind. If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power. https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-cheaper-and-greener-hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).
- zdragnar 7mo ago
  You need to overprovision solar and wind capacity by at minimum 5x for northern latitudes' winter months compared to the summer, plus another few multipliers to keep storage topped up, or invest heavily in HVDC and massively overprovision the southern states. For that scenario, nuclear is still marginally cheaper (at today's prices at least).
  - pydry 7mo ago
    Northern latitudes have low population density and plenty of hydro power which, unlike nuclear power, CAN actually operate as a battery at a reasonable cost. There is still nowhere in the world nuclear power makes economic sense.

by nradov 7mo ago

epistasis 7mo ago

The need for nuclear is simply not clear. Storage has advance so quickly, while nuclear tech has remained stagnant or even gotten more expensive. Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar. Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.

UltraSane 7mo ago
Grid Storage is very expensive and right now only has a few hours of capacity. We would need weeks to really replace nuclear.
- epistasis 7mo ago
  Saying that grid storage "only has a few hours of capacity" is like saying that a nuclear power reactor "only has 1GW of power." You solve both issues by deploying more. And if you want a longer lithium ion battery installation without the additional power capacity, you can save a bit on inverters. Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of battery storage deployed. 58GWh of new grid storage was added in 2025 alone, and the growth is still exponentialhttps://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-energy-storage-in-2025/ https://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-e...
  - UltraSane 7mo ago
    All current grid storage will fully discharge in less than 4 hours at max watts. It is designed to level daily demand variability. To make a 4 hour battery last for a week at the same wattage would make it cost 42 times as much.
    - epistasis 7mo ago
      Yes, this is how the basic arithmetic works. What's your point? I see now that your original post had a fantastical claim that we need weeks of battery storage, which is a fantastical claim. In reality we will need variable amounts of battery but a "week long" battery is not supported by a single detailed grid study I have ever seen. When I have asked Pell to justify claims of "weeks long battery" the only justifications have been "I heard it from someone else", or napkin math that contains many errors, and in places where there are not errors choices are made to estimate an upper bound rather than a lower bound, indicating that the calculator doesn't understand how napkins math can be useful. And for super cheap infrequently used storage, here's a recent purchase at $33/kWh of a 30GWh battery by Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176841 I don't expect such batteries to be used much, despite being a fraction of the cost of current LFP batteries, because we really won't need much storage with such a low power:energy ratio.
      - UltraSane 7mo ago
        My point is that no one is building 1 week batteries because they would be incredibly expensive. To make sure we are on the same page are you envisioning a grid powered 100% by wind + solar + batteries?
        epistasis 7mo ago
        People are building 100 hour (5 day) batteries because they are incredibly cheap, but they're not doing many of them because they're not needed. Don't forget existing hydro, new advanced geothermal, existing nuclear (until they all reach end of life), etc. etc. etc.
- tstrimple 7mo ago
  Incredibly disingenuous for nuclear power proponents to state that grid storage is expensive. Your entire argument centers around the most expensive power generation available and one of the slowest to build.
  - UltraSane 7mo ago
    Grid storage is very expensive which is why all grid scale batteries discharge in 4 hours or less at full output.
    - epistasis 7mo ago
      Grid batteries are mostly four hours duration because that's the natural charging and discharging rate for current chemistries, and there's no financial case to store energy for longer right now, as in there's no demand for long term storage at all. Four hours of storage is super profitable, eight hours is just unnecessary and nobody pays for it. Plus, referring to this in terms of "hours" isn't exactly the most informative reference, the more underlying characteristic of storage is if it's meant for daily cycling, meaning that it makes mine every single day from arbitrage, or if it's multi day which is not a super profitable form of arbitrage at the moment. Daily cycling makes a ton of sense with solar. Longer term cycles make more sense paired with wind.

energy123 7mo ago

The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year. New nuclear sucks, and baseload is a false concept that can (and is) being synthetically replicated with over-building + storage + transmission + peaking.

UltraSane 7mo ago
Firm/dispatchable capacity that can run for arbitrary durations is required unless you've solved seasonal storage. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6 https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6 Firm low-carbon resources consistently lower decarbonized electricity system costs • Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases • Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits near zero • Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm low-carbon resources
- energy123 7mo ago
  The solution mix needs to be tailored the location. Non-tropical equatorial countries don't have meaningful seasonality, so they don't need seasonal storage. For countries far north of the equator, it's more challenging, but there are multiple tools to address this, including: over-building so you have enough in winter, using wind which is seasonally negatively correlated with solar, importing power over HVDC, and diversifying wind spatially to reduce correlations which drop more than linearly in distance. For small countries very far away from the equator that have highly variable insolation and limited geography to decorrelate, nuclear may be better. But it cannot be asserted a priori without a simulation study tailored to the specifics of that location. When I said that nuclear is bad, I am talking in generalities about the common case (United States) at current market prices. The paper that you linked is old, we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar.
  - UltraSane 7mo ago
    "over-building so you have enough in winter" This makes wind and solar much more expensive to the point where nuclear is cheaper. " we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar." But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.

pydry 7mo ago

The cost of nuclear power is absurd. It's 5x the cost of solar and wind. If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power. https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-cheaper-and-greener-hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).

zdragnar 7mo ago
You need to overprovision solar and wind capacity by at minimum 5x for northern latitudes' winter months compared to the summer, plus another few multipliers to keep storage topped up, or invest heavily in HVDC and massively overprovision the southern states. For that scenario, nuclear is still marginally cheaper (at today's prices at least).
- pydry 7mo ago
  Northern latitudes have low population density and plenty of hydro power which, unlike nuclear power, CAN actually operate as a battery at a reasonable cost. There is still nowhere in the world nuclear power makes economic sense.