6 ms·

>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables This is not the cheaper option. You need to have batteri

by noosphr 6mo ago

>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables This is not the cheaper option. You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.

ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
Even with Danish insulation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-renewables-are-53-cheaper-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
- noosphr 6mo ago
  Thanks pv magazine. I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
  - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
    Read the scientific article the entire post is about if you want the cut and dry version? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
- selfmodruntime 6mo ago
  This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
  - epistasis 6mo ago
    Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000. Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization. Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
    - Manuel_D 6mo ago
      Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required, it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can. The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
      - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
        Not economically. EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds. And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
        Manuel_D 6mo ago
dalyons 6mo ago
naw, we'll just build enough battery to cover the nights and then use gas as emergency backup for any rare wonky weather events. that could easily get us to 90+% clean, which would be absolutely amazing. Constant base load only supply like nukes are economically obsolete. On a modern grid you need a rapid response backup. Which is gas for now, and hopefully we'll come up with something to replace that later.
- selfmodruntime 6mo ago
  As you have been reminded of in other comments, there is no "enough battery backup". These weather events aren't exactly rare either. Germany for example has on average multiple episodes of both subnormal wind and sun energy production in high-pressure systems.
  - dalyons 6mo ago
    Did you read my comment? 10% budget for gas backup buys you 35 days, if on those days there is 0% other production (extremely unlikely). Seems pretty conservative to me?
- Manuel_D 6mo ago
  Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh. Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage. Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
  - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
    Given a 10-15 year lifetime of the batteries, with BEVs being flexible storage consumers that seems well within reach in a couple of years? We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.
    - Manuel_D 6mo ago
epistasis 6mo ago
> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility. What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible. > There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country. Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year. So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
- dahart 6mo ago
  > By 2031 or 2032, we’re going to have 20-30TWh of battery production What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time… https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-capacity-134000198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca... https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-growing-strongly-and-so-are-the-supply-risks https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
  - epistasis 6mo ago
    Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections. I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong. Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here: https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020 https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...

by noosphr 6mo ago

ViewTrick1002 6mo ago

Even with Danish insulation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-renewables-are-53-cheaper-than-nuclear-power/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

noosphr 6mo ago
Thanks pv magazine. I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
- ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
  Read the scientific article the entire post is about if you want the cut and dry version? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
selfmodruntime 6mo ago
This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.
- epistasis 6mo ago
  Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000. Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization. Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
  - Manuel_D 6mo ago
    Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required, it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can. The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
    - ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
      Not economically. EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds. And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
      - Manuel_D 6mo ago

dalyons 6mo ago

naw, we'll just build enough battery to cover the nights and then use gas as emergency backup for any rare wonky weather events. that could easily get us to 90+% clean, which would be absolutely amazing. Constant base load only supply like nukes are economically obsolete. On a modern grid you need a rapid response backup. Which is gas for now, and hopefully we'll come up with something to replace that later.

selfmodruntime 6mo ago
As you have been reminded of in other comments, there is no "enough battery backup". These weather events aren't exactly rare either. Germany for example has on average multiple episodes of both subnormal wind and sun energy production in high-pressure systems.
- dalyons 6mo ago
  Did you read my comment? 10% budget for gas backup buys you 35 days, if on those days there is 0% other production (extremely unlikely). Seems pretty conservative to me?
Manuel_D 6mo ago
Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh. Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage. Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
- ViewTrick1002 6mo ago
  Given a 10-15 year lifetime of the batteries, with BEVs being flexible storage consumers that seems well within reach in a couple of years? We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.
  - Manuel_D 6mo ago

epistasis 6mo ago

> You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility. What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible. > There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country. Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year. So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.

dahart 6mo ago
> By 2031 or 2032, we’re going to have 20-30TWh of battery production What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time… https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-capacity-134000198.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca... https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-growing-strongly-and-so-are-the-supply-risks https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
- epistasis 6mo ago
  Projection from past performance. There are two types of predictions when it comes to solar and storage: 1) naive, exponential, and correct, or 2) expert, with unexplained fudge factors, and wrong. What you'll see published in PR releases will be from "experts". Even Jenny Chase at Bloomberg NEF points out how "experts" always underestimate performance, and then goes and does it herself with her own projections. I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong. Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here: https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020 https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...