Soon someone will enter here and tell why nuclear anyhow is the answer to all problems and worries.
Great to see this in Texas! Didn’t know they were big in this
Great to see this in Texas! Didn’t know they were big in this
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/fed-report-says-texas-grid-...
Remember when they had the power outage and people died? Wind turbines in Texas aren’t winterized so usage drops to around 10% in the winter. The natural gas also stopped working because it wasn’t winterized either.
Remember when the governor of Texas blamed frozen wind turbines for the disaster?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/17/texas-abbot...
Remember 45 years ago we were warned not to burn all that coal or we would cause climate change?
We’re still at 40% coal for electricity globally and it’s now too late to prevent a significant amount of warming.
But hey, the batteries are almost ready? We can’t be more than 10-20 years from widespread adoption?
Thermal generation was and is the leading cause of the outage - namely a lack of gas supply which offlined much of the states thermal generation.
My understanding wasn't that our gas supply wasn't winterized, but that with residential heating usage, the pressure in the lines was too low to safely turn on the auxiliary powerplants. Apparently it is bad if instead of leaking tiny bits of gas out of the pipes, you start leaking tiny bits of air in...
Failure of feedwater supply attributed to cold-related failure of sensors.
Once the rolling blackouts started, the rolling blackouts shut off the gas wells as the wells weren't on critical circuits... and even if they were winterized with heaters, they wouldn't be able to heat as there was no power.
The only thing the federal government has done to make it impossible is to fail to escalate subsidies.
Maybe it's closest to competitive in eastern Europe? Except the cheapest nuclear plants from Russia aren't going to be a thing now.
The only place on planet earth right now where nuclear might be financially sustainable is China, where highly skilled construction labor is very cheap, where they are building dozens of nuclear reactors in bulk, and where regulatory hurdles don't exist on account of their... administrative system.
But that is only my speculation. We don't have insight into their cost figures, and any data released by the CCP has probably been massaged.
They're also far lower capacity factor than the US (whether that's a symptom of lower reliability or of lower costs permitting curtailment is a different matter) and we know of at least two instances of cost cutting and forgery on safety critical parts.