It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time.
To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity.
On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more.
So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
Aluminum production, for one example.
Bauxite is so cheap and abundant that the cost of aluminum is almost entirely in the electricity required for smelting. And because aluminum is such a critical material for industry, it is effectively equivalent to energy exportation. This is why tiny Iceland is a top 10 global exporter of it: abundant free geothermal energy with nowhere else to go.
On my mind, the main problem of scaling down production for nuclear plant is that a nuclear plant is very expensive, and if it produces only at submaximal capacity, it means that the construction cost is spread on less electricity production.
Nuclear takes hours to days to respond to load change, so there has to be much more reactive power available. And nuclear plants need to be able to draw megawatts of power from the grid any time they're not generating power. You can't "cold boot" a nuclear power plant without a massive external power supply and it takes days to weeks to do so.
It's so bizarre hearing people advocating for nuclear talking about storage like it's some barely-understood, dangerous, hideously expensive sci-fi pipe dream. Grid-scale energy storage is almost 100 years old and battery based systems have been actively deployed for many years at all levels of the grid, right down to residential.
Days? Seriously? You know that is not true, don't you? The French nuclear power plants are an existence proof of that.
Nuclear does need to be supplemented with something else with low construction/fixed costs for handling the rare, extreme peaks. That will most often be some sort of gas-powered plants. This has nothing to do with nuclear powers "inability" to "respond to load change" and everything to do with the cost of building enough nuclear power capacity that will almost never be used.
On the other hand, we are still very, very far from being able to do really large-scale battery storage. We don't have the manufacturing capacity for the enormous number of battery cells needed and even if we did, the cost would be prohibitive. This will of course change for the better in the future but that is how things are for now.
I believe the French facilities have the capacity of doing load following, but are not doing it because it is less efficient (and therefore more expensive). So I would also not say "days", but it is also true that one cannot directly take a situation where nuclear has, so far, being used only for base load and pretend that load following will work exactly the same way.
I'm not sure why you say "rare, extreme peaks": the current demand is non-flat every day, with a difference between the trough and peak that is typically ~50% of the peak.
I agree that large scale battery storage is challenging. Maybe the solution would be to have some storage and some "wasted efficiency" by using nuclear plants in load following and turning them in stand-by every day during off-peak hours.
[0] https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...
Just getting that to an hour means a three order of magnitude change in the amount of connected grid storage. Good luck finding that much pumped hydro! The easy spots are taken already!
An hour is not enough, of course. That might handle some small variations in wind only. Of course, one diurnal solar cycle means you need to store power for 8-12 hours. That is another order of magnitude. So in order to do this, we need to increase our battery capacity by four orders of magnitude. Multiple days? Weeks?
Now consider that the demand curve will become even more extreme, as climate change increases demand for electric heating and cooling. And consider that you will also need to account for electrifying the cars on the road (because building out storage like this is a multiple decades project), which will place additional capacity demands on the grid.
The thing with storage is not that it's difficult, it's that it's big. Like the scale is you need to nationalize your extraction industries and turn your economy into a wartime economy whose singular purpose is producing batteries big. It's not a Tesla or Google or even a DOE scale problem.
I also don't understand your argument about solar cycle: solar is producing close to peak hours, while nights are non-peak hours. So, in practice, it's not like you need to store the electricity locally for more than a couple of hours. I guess you are talking of a situation where the grid is 100% solar, but that's obviously a ridiculous scenario that no one has never pushed for.
I agree with the fact that the demand curve will become more extreme, and it is exactly the reason of my intervention here: this is a complicated situation, and it does not matter if the grid is mainly nuclear or mainly renewable, it is still problematic.
I agree that the storage problem is tricky and that the scale is a challenge. But this challenge still exist in full nuclear grid, unless we end up with a lot of idle nuclear plant running only few hours per day.
If you can turn a nuclear plant off (summer) and on (winter) once a year, the storage requirement for solar drops by a lot.
1) week storage and 3-6 months storage are extreme events, similar in probability as overlapping technical shutdowns in nuclear facilities. In practice, with interconnection, it is even arguable that such long term storage are even needed.
2) the technology built for short term storage is usually not that bad for medium term storage either. In any case, if you want a nuclear grid, you will need to invest in storage technology, and there is no reason the progress in those technology will only improve short term storage solutions.
But I 100% agree: a nuclear plant turned on during winter will help. I'm not against nuclear, I just want to react to the incorrect view that storage is just a renewable problem.
NG backup works fine, and will continue working fine indefinitely. Storage cuts the fraction of time the furnace needs to run.
Eventually, synthetic fuel will displace NG. It will be imported at need, same as NG today, but with no possibility of cartels.
And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.