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Comment by Kelteseth | Hacker News Reader

Renewables + batteries scale way faster and cheaper than nuclear these days.

Right now renewables scale with gas turbines.

Yes, there is some investment in batteries, but due to how the market is structured, they are either equivalent of local large scale UPS, or mainly operate grid frequency stabilization while fossil fuel plants spin up or down (some of the "spin down" support can be also done with modern wind turbines, as they can operate as "sinks" on energy).

Unless we reset the way energy market operates in EU to prioritize dispatchable-but-fossil-free[1], I think we won't see neither proper nuclear resurgence, nor appropriate battery build up.

[1] My personal idea is that we should promote and prioritize sources that offer stable and dispatchable power without emissions. Such conditions would be fulfilled both by nuclear and renewables combined with energy storage, promoting build up of energy storage.

You're not up to date anymore I'm afraid. Two-three years ago your comment would be correct, but things change FAST in this area. Grid-level battery has changed a lot. Look at this graph: https://archive.ph/Vj2py

That's a great link about what's happening with grid-scale battery storage ("giant batteries the size of shipping containers"), supporting solar and wind power replace other source of energy in states like California, Arizona, Texas, Florida.

Sorry, should have been more specific about location (thought it was implied from topic of discussion regarding EU Parliament).

But as it is now, that's not something that is happening in EU, as far as I know. Some of the more recent projects turned out to have a tendency to go on fire.

As for USA, I have no idea how well it works out, as USA seems to have wildly different market setup than EU. My usual sources show under 1% for California.

Battery plants at the scale of conventional nuclear power plants are very few so it's not as proven as a technology. Ideally we should build both since we don't want the EU to be dependent on a single material for its base load (i.e. lithium or uranium).

I really doubt that battery plants for longer duration storage will be lithium based, something redox-flox based will be the future. But with batteries (especially grid scale, where energy and power density matter much less) there are a multitude of feasible options, some more, some less economic, which means in case of material shortages we can switch in the medium term. I also think hydroelectric storage is an underappreciated opportunity, which, if there is a serious issue with chemical battery supplies, could be reasonably quickly expanded.

It's also silly to use batteries as base load, as is the concept of base load in general in combination of cheap, but non-dispatchable, renwables, which is one of the things that hurts the economics of nuclear plants.

Nuclear is cheaper than renewables+storage. Europe routinely has periods of 2 weeks with little to no wind across the continent (<10% capacity usage on wind power) during winter, when solar production is abysmal. You'd need batteries to store MONTHS of production, and build massive amounts of solar and wind power plants that would all overproduce at the same time and thus not be profitable in the slightest when they're at capacity.

I dont necessarily disagree with you, but there is the safety concerns that need to be addressed for the nuclear energy option to become more acceptable. A nuclear powerplant must be able to explode and not kill a lot of people and render a large piece of the earth uninhabitable. If you solve that for me, then I will wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.

I'm not aware of anyone having a solution for "batteries" at the required scale. We'd need several TWh of storage, there could be a month without wind.

The only reason nuclear scales so slowly is because of the bureaucracy.

There can't be a month without wind. That's just not how any of this works.

Actually there can be a year without a wind - see low winds in Europe in 2021

"Low" is a far cry from "no".

There actually have been many months without more than half of nuclear reactors in France in 2022 - beginning 2023. And in France there are not enough different energy sources to compensate.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...

Taking down such reactors is a periodically routine for maintenance. The question is only how fast you can bring them up again (especially in case of serious repair needs).

But that can be easily rectified by building cooling towers, instead of using river for cooling. What are you going to do with wind not blowing?

> easily

That can be easily rectified by building energy conservation facilities for wind (and other renewables) instead of halting wind generators.

But your point about French NPs is technicality which can be rectified. Time of low wind can't be rectified unless we are able to control the weather.

> But your point about French NPs is technicality which can be rectified.

No, you cannot avoid using electricity few months in summer to have electricity for the rest time. And you cannot double the number of extremely costly NPs to have one half online while another half is being maintained/repaired.

Right, this must be the reason why Germany is back to coal these days after decades of heavy investing in renewables.

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