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Comment by jsharf | Hacker News Reader

You can't just buy more wind farms -- the wind in an area is correlated. That means if one wind farm isn't producing power, the wind farms nearby aren't likely to be producing power either.

But nuclear power plants? Completely uncorrelated. If each one produces power 85% of the time, then you need two, and you'll almost always have power.

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> But nuclear power plants? Completely uncorrelated. If each one produces power 85% of the time, then you need two, and you'll almost always have power.

Not really true. French nuclear output drops every time there's a European heatwave. It used to be the only time that the cross-channel link rank backwards (UK powering France).

I think France responded to this in the context of climate change by changing the protection standards for their rivers?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/12/france.nuclear

I don't think wind is a panacea, but I think you're over-simplifying things - you can't just buy more nuclear power plants either; at least in the Western world, cost overruns in multiples of the original price are inevitable, the total time from planning to operational is decades, and it's difficult to find places where their presence is accepted.

If only we hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, we'd be at 100% instead of 20% market penetration. We would be free of CO2-heavy electricity today, not maybe 30 years from now optimistically. We knew how to build nuclear, but then Chernobyl and TMI happened and we decided we didn't want to. Which, in a vacuum, seems reasonable, until one remembers that the "cool-headed alternative" we settled on was to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 while we waited for solar and wind to eventually become viable and continue to wait to deploy them.

We made our bed and now we get to lie in it.

Your portrayal is so slanted. Here's an alternative take: if the many, many, many billions of dollars that were squandered on the nuclear fission industry around the world had instead been invested into wind, solar and storage then we could be at 100% renewable today. Nuclear had incredible top level support and still failed. Renewables are now succeeding and besting nuclear (fission) despite being neglected for so long.

In what way has nuclear failed anything? It’s working fine.

It’s not the technology’s fault we decided not to build any more power plants.

FWIW, I completely agree. Nuclear power in much of the west became a "toxic" issue after Chernobyl in particular. Here in the UK, I don't think we've had a new reactor built since the mid 90's - if we'd been more rational, we could potentially have saved the environment a lot of damage while solar and wind matured and became viable.

Oddly enough, buying more wind farms in the same area can solve the power supply issue some of the time. For example, say there is a low wind day when winds farms are not effective enough, but still generating power. If wind farms are cheap enough, one can over provision. This means on high wind days too much power is available, but on low wind days enough is available. This doesn't solve the no wind day, but it does make the not enough wind day less common. And making the not enough wind day less common means the energy storage and generation solutions need to be used less often.

However, having said this, I would like to see a model of this with all the generation potential and costs involved, because right now we are all speculating. One can think of a multi-generation options, with wind and solar being the first and default option, battery (and other storage options) being the next option if wind and solar aren't enough, and gas being the third option if required.

Someone must have created a model like this?

"Wind it up: Europe has the untapped onshore capacity to meet global energy demand" is "maximalist" but shows that there is potential: https://archive.sussex.ac.uk/news/press-releases/id/49312

In-depth studies petition that "the European energy system would strongly profit from exploiting the implications of these regimes for continent-scale wind generation patterns." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5540172/ and "Such a pan-European wind power system would provide a stable output across a wide range of large-scale weather conditions" "but also requires enhanced transmission". This enhanced european grid network benefits to other forms of power production and is already planed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318476478_Balancing... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...

There are ways to reduce loss induced by long powerlines, mainly HVDC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )

All this is also true for solar, and there is even at least one megaproject: https://www.suncable.sg/

Right. It is not disputed that one wind farm doesn't have the same availability as one (modern) nuclear power plant. My point is that you have to look at availability from a whole-system perspective point of view. Offshore wind farms spread out over large areas, coupled with tighter net integration and backup power sources can make renewable power just as reliable as nuclear.

Nuclear power is not magic either and can also suffer from disruptions. For example, if the delivery of uranium fuel is delayed, if there is a CODID-19 pandemic so workers are unavailable for maintenance work, if there are strikes, if there are Greenpeace activists who have breached the security lines sitting on the roof, etc...

In fact, I believe that the reliability of the German grid has gone up after Energiewende. Though it was a long time since I looked at it so I don't have a source handy. Reason being that the main source of power outages is disruptions in the electricity grid and not in the electricity production.

They need water source for cooling if the water is shared in a region and water temperature goes up, all the nuclear plants using that water lose their production.

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