Just comparing MW when wind is blowing is never going to be useful or result in a productive discussion. You need compare nuclear with other useful, base load generation methods in terms of build cost/time/CO2 per MW.
Here’s a better number: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-homes-can-average-wind-tu...
> At a 42% capacity factor (i.e., the average among recently built wind turbines in the United States, per the 2021 edition of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Land-Based Wind Market Report), that average turbine would generate over 843,000 kWh (843MWh) per month—enough for more than 940 average U.S. homes
For comparison, an actual nuclear reactor in practical use produced 4,697,675 MWh in 2017. That’s the equivalent of 5572 of those wind turbines.
That’s a lot of wind turbines. But if we can build 278 wind turbines per year and it takes 20 years to build a new reactor. They’re even.
USA currently builds 3000 turbines per year. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-wind-turbines-are-install...
So I think even with 42% capacity, wind is winning. We’d need to build 10 reactors per 20 years (1 every 2 years) for nuclear to beat wind.
It depends. If you're adding wind or nuclear to an already existing grid (which is usually the case), the already existing power plants can usually take over whenever the new power plants are offline or generating less power, and you don't need to budget for any extra storage. In these cases, the average output is the most relevant metric; it shows how much fuel (for a mostly fossil fuel grid) or water (for a mostly hydroelectric grid) it will save.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
It basically found that you can get close to 100% relatively easily with minimal storage (5 hours average demand).
The issue with getting over the mid-90s and to handle 100% is that you need to cater for the edge-cases (conditions that may occur 1-2 times per year max).
Either way from memory, LCOE (in $/MWH) for grid-scale solar is around 50-60, adding storage brings costs up to 80-120. Nuclear is in the range of 200-300+, so even with storage the economics of renewables are better with costs trending downward. Especially when you can build them and scale them up quickly (compared to 10-15 years of nuclear builds).
Possibly, but nuclear TCO is also extremely well understood, and it's possible that the TCO for these new systems is not. I'd say the error bars are likely to be much longer on the renewables for the next 20 years or so, as we flush out the details.
It doesn't; for instance, the nuclear reactors near where I live have to power down for a whole month once every year, for refueling and maintenance. That's around a 92% capacity factor.
Wind turbines have additional maintenance downtime too.
It’s a shame we aren’t building more smaller reactors quicker. I think it would solve a lot of the problems that come from treating every plant as a unique one off megaproject.