Viable storage is already here. It's called green hydrogen or hydrogen-from-seawater, and pilot plants are coming online or being built right now.

The storage is limited only by tank size, and we already know how to store and use large quantities of hydrogen. The hydrogen produced from the process can be pumped elsewhere by pipeline and used as fuel for gas turbines to balance the grid, or combined with carbon dioxide or nitrogen from the atmosphere to produce zero net carbon methane and ammonia for use as denser fuel sources, or feedstock for industrial processes. You can even make zero net carbon synthetic jet fuel this way.

That statement definitely needs some numbers to check out, it's a claim that needs backing up. The full nuclear power "pipeline" isn't CO2-neutral either and depends on resources we'll eventually run out of, probably within the next hundred years, maybe sooner [1].

I also don't think that "but what about space requirements" is an argument with enough weight to dismiss the long list of advantages given by the GP. We have so much unused space on roofs. We could get rid of a few parking lots if you're concerned for ground.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...

> spending the same amount on nuclear power plant would made Germany zero emission economy.

Power generation is only a small part of Germany's emissions. Germany would still be a large CO2 source with full nuclear power generation, just like France is because of transportation, food, heating, industry, etc.

There are safety-related limits to this flexibility: one cannot at will reduce/augment the "power" (thermal) delivered by a reactor. After each small set of tweaks a somewhat durable stable state (or a complete shutdown) must be respected. In the proposed SFEN document it corresponds to the mentions "palier d’au moins deux heures" (at least 2 hours between tweaks) and "deux fois par jour" (max two tweaking sequences per day).

The real (observed and useful) ability to follow load at a useful extent is offered by the float (tens of reactors simultaneously active => more flexibility towards tweaking limitations).

At this game nothing beats a gas turbine (hydraulic dams are serious contenders).

I am not saying load following isn’t possible, I was trying to say nuclear isn’t ideal for load following. It’s definitely not comparable to a gas turbine.

I think the issue with load following is that as most of the costs of nuclear are fixed costs, it increases the cost per unit of energy in proportion to the amount you "turn down" the output. As nuclear is already struggling to be cost competitive with solar+wind + storage, that makes it hard to justify.

That's not really the problem with solar. Storing energy in batteries from day to night is a solved problem, it doesn't even double the price of electricity. The round trip efficiency is about 80%. The big problem is storing electricity from summer to winter at higher latitudes; it's difficult because the day is much longer during the summer than the winter, the incidence angle higher, so you may end up producing as much as 10 times less energy in the winter, while the energy demand is actually higher; storage losses over 6 months are very high, but that's not the really big problem. The big problem is that you are not getting the bang for the buck. For batteries used from day to night, you get MWh of energy into and out of them every day, and you can charge for that, so you can get a decent ROI. For batteries used from summer to winter, you'll charge for the energy once a year; you need to charge much, much more, and this becomes uneconomical by a huge distance.

There's an alternative to storing energy from summer to winter: you simply overbuild solar capacity so that even in the winter you can produce enough during the day to last you through the night. At high latitudes, you need to overbuild by a factor of 10, and solar may be cheap, but not 10 times cheaper than other sources of electricity. However, if you find something to do with the excess summer energy, you may end up being profitable.

India, being at a lower latitude, has a much easier problem. First, it's very likely the demand during "winter" months is not much higher than during "summer" months if at all. Then the day length during winter is not that short. So the overcapacity that you need may be only a factor of 3x. This guy wants to manufacture green hydrogen. Even if he sells it at a loss, the overall venture may still be profitable.

Rivers are shaded? What kind of rivers are you thinking of? Are you talking about a flowing river, several hundred feet in width having shade in the middle of it?

these are not rivers, they are canals

Irrigation channels ... eco systemic rivers.

Actually, these panels are placed on irrigation canals, where concrete embankment alreadyy exists.