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Comment by bosie | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)

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Nuclear doesn't scale quickly. It already adapts from 4GW to 7GW in Spain, but it does it slowly and ahead of weather conditions. What is needed is more co-located battery storage, and more gravity (solid or water) storage.

Nuclear is never meant to scale, you want to run the plant at 100% as much as possible to recoup costs. It is baseload power and you deal with peaks using peaker plants and batteries.

Maybe I don’t understand the requirement, but can’t a constant-rate supply provide stored power for peak demand and support baseline consumption off-peak?

If you build all the storage and peak capacity anyway you might as well use renewable power to fill the storage, it’s cheaper than nuclear.

There is no need for backup fossil power to account for more than a few percent of electricity production in the medium term.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining

Nuclear is different to fossil fuel power. It comes from a renewable source. It is bad only because it produced waste, but we're working towards solving this issue.

Uranium is not a renewable resource. All of the uranium on earth was formed in another star’s supernova and seeded in the proto planetary nebula before the earth coalesced.

That's why you use a fast neutron (breeder) reactor to extract up to 90% of the potential fissionable "fuel" from that uranium instead of just a few percent. Another option is the use of thorium of which is there is ca. 3 times as much. By the time both uranium and thorium run out there'll either be practical fusion energy or one of those new battery technologies which are always popping up.

Now we just have to invest a few hundred billion for a few decades until er have practical commercial breeder reactors, while still burning coal and gas while we wait and see whether the engineers can figure it out.

So you need nuclear to be scaled to the maximum demand?

People always forget that a mostly nuclear grid also require a some kind of storage or demand scalability.

With nuclear you have the option of running the reactors at 50% peak and produce energy at approximately twice the cost per kWh.

That's it. If you need to have nuclear capacity for a grid for say 30GW, despite average usage being just 10GW, your price is now $300/MWh rather than $100/MWh if you can run them 24/7

Why? All modern nuclear reactors do load following. I believe it’s even an EU requirement. And certainly the practice in France.

Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.

Meeting peak demand with Nuclear (including the maintenance time) increases the cost of nuclear to even higher levels than it currently is.

Yeah nuclear costs the same, that’s the point. If you overbuild by two or three x to meet peak demand then per kWh you pay two to three times as much.

Honestly a big issue in my view is that we don't have more dynamic sinks.

Let's overbuild a mix of renewables and nuclear, then use the excess power to do things like green hydrogen.

Or maybe we will find other uses when electricity becomes too cheap to meter.

Doing that is part of the plan for the switch to renewables, and people are actively working on it. A friend of mine at Siemens energy for example is involved in such projects.

Yes, there are people working on that.

Unfortunately they aren't the people who drive energy policy in practice or who fund new generation (most of the time, at least).

From capitalist point of view, it's always easier to turn profit by market speculation[1], with providing gas turbine backup second.

[1] I work for considerably big wind power company building off shore wind turbines. Our main revenue source is market speculation :<

Nuclear bomb can produce peaks of energy, while nuclear stations are good for base load only due to safety reasons.

A nuclear power plant does not suddenly give you the capacity to create a nuclear bomb.

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