I wonder why they don't use wind power in that case.
Or put another way the wind doesn't always blow at the same rate.
Those 10 % are because of maintenance though. A reactor that is online is normally run at ~100 % load.
Summary
Arguments that renewable energy isn't up to the task because "the Sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time" are overly simplistic.
There are a number of renewable energy technologies which can supply baseload power. The intermittency of other sources such as wind and solar photovoltaic can be addressed by interconnecting power plants which are widely geographically distributed, and by coupling them with peak-load plants such as gas turbines fueled by biofuels or natural gas which can quickly be switched on to fill in gaps of low wind or solar production. Numerous regional and global case studies – some incorporating modeling to demonstrate their feasibility – have provided plausible plans to meet 100% of energy demand with renewable sources.
That is indeed a great way to argue that renewables can do it all. Cynical individuals would even conclude that they just use renewables as a convenient talking point to shill for fossil methane.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that the CO2 level doesn't care about the time of the day the CO2 is emitted or whether you use 80% fossil fuels on one particular day and then 30% on every other day. Intermittency doesn't prevent renewables from reducing CO2 emissions, unless of course people ban the transition technology called natural gas. Then it doesn't even make sense to close the coal plants and we will have neither renewables nor will we stop using fossil fuels and the fossil fuels that are still in use, will be the dirtiest kind because coal emits more CO2 emissions per kWh than natural gas.
Once you realize the crucial difference between a peaker plant and a "baseload" plant you will start to realize that it's the baseload plants that are holding everything back. Peaker plants have low capital costs. They can be built in a short time frame. Unlike a baseload plant they do not have to run continuously to recoup their initial investment even if that means that renewables will have to be shut off (alternatively you shut off the coal plants but remember you still have to pay for them even if they produce nothing). The key aspect is that natural gas is more expensive, to the point that it never makes sense to deploy natural gas when renewables are available.
Now arguments around:
- nuclear waste management
- nuclear accidents / underreporting
- exploding costs and time lines for construction of nuclear reactors
- and so on
are being downvoted to hell.
Meanwhile pushing the agenda that everybody who doesn't want a nuclear reactor in their backyard is a coal loving and ignorant idiot. Oh and btw. Thorium. It'll be there. Soon...
It's such a programmer fallacy.
We need renewables yesterday, but instead of slowly pushing what we have now and what works, the lure of the shiny highly technical and complicated solution that promises to solve everything causes us to completely miss every deadline imaginable.
We need to be finished with leaving fossils behind in 10 years, and put all our resources into that, instead of researching nuclear reactors for 30 years and then starting to deploy those for another 10.
When you look at the current subsidies that fossil fuels receive and redirected all of them to investment in nuclear power it's probably possible to find a good solution but if you could convince all countries to use nuclear you can also convince them to use renewables.
And remember that by the time these new small, modular nuclear power plants come online, wind and solar will have become even cheaper. They will also be a larger part of the grid, which will mean there's more opportunity to get paid for load balancing services.
I think these kind of plants is one of the things that will help us get to 100% renewable. Not only can you balance out some of the demand, you could even put aside some fuel, and if it's one of those rare days that there's little wind or solar over a whole continent, you could burn some of that fuel in a gas power plant, and we already have those. That is, old gas power plants could be a part of the solution if you keep them around to burn renewable gas to balance the grid.
I have nothing against nuclear. It's safer than most people think and all that. But I really don't think we'll get the next generation reactors we need - for a low enough price - to solve the worlds energy problems before renewable alternatives and various load balancing solutions become cheap enough. And I really think renewables are the ultimate solution, especially once you start putting the wind turbines out to sea where the wind is more stable, and it doesn't affect wildlife and humans as much. Uranium mining is still quite dirty. So is mining for metals/minerals for renewable solutions, but they're generally recyclable. Renewables leads to a world where we don't need to continuously dig up stuff for energy.
In reality, they will use solar since it's cheaper and more predictable for this kind of thing.
You'll not get peak production in the UK but we already have infrastructure for shipping fuel from sunny countries.