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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

The design we are talking about here has the capability to load follow:

  The unique features of a NuScale plant allow its modules to respond to meet the power generation demand in the evenings by increasing from 20% to 100% power in 96 minutes

[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-winter-2019/...

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Nuclear reactors aren't fundamentally incompatible with load following: you can stick some control rods in or out and get more or less heat energy distributed to your turbines.

Nuclear power plants are generally used for base load for economic reasons: they are really expensive to build and have close to fixed hourly costs to operate, compared to say natural gas plants which are cheap to build and have operating costs proportional to the amount of gas they burn. Consequently we only build nuclear where we expect it can be utilized pretty much all the time, and we don't optimize nuclear plants for quick scaling up and down.

Thank you! I'm surprised that I've not heard this before, and I never noticed it the many times I've been to NuScale's site.

I'm clearly in left field when it comes to concerns about nuclear, in that I mostly am worried about wasted effort and capital on a tech that I do not foresee being able to keep up, rather than concerns about "safety" or belief that it is in anyway necessary for decarbonization. So I appreciate seeing some new information that make me more hopeful that SMRs will succeed.

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