Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/okotoks-drake-landing...
Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.
How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.
Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
Geothermal is also a great shift for natural gas utilities. Delivery of weak heat sources to heat pumps is being explored in many areas.
Nuclear is the equivalent of throwing down 100k on a house for a massive custom-drilled ground-source heat pump solution. So in these difficult areas, we need to consider the alternatives.
I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.
If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.
But if you compare the predictability of nuclear to that of wind/solar, nuclear is a lot easier to plan, and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.
Also, I would argue that the current prices for building nuclear plants is at least 2-4x higher than they should be (depending on location).
If the regulations for nuclear were to be scaled back to a point where the net average harm caused per GWh was just slightly less than for the alternatives, and if we allowed a free, competitive market for the construction, nuclear would become a lot cheaper than today.
This part is wrong. Electricity demand is varies about 50% over the course of the day and about 50% over the course of a year, so a 100% nuclear grid would only be operating at ~50% capacity which would double the costs.
On a local scale, renewables aren't predictable, but over large areas (e.g. US/EU), almost all of the variability cancels out (especially since wind and solar are anti-correlated with each other). Both nuclear and solar/wind grids (or a combination of both) will require some amount of over-capacity/hydro storage/battery storage/gas-peaker plants to economically provide consistent power. My guess is that we'll settle on some combination of over-provisioned solar/wind for seasonal variation combined with hydro/gas for daily and battery for hourly and faster variation. (and possibly using demand side shaping like desalination/water heating to use excess energy).
I find it somewhat hard to believe that nuclear plants could easily be made dramatically cheaper and easier to build if regulation wasn't a problem because if that were the case, we would expect to see China and India building lots of nuclear reactors cheaply. There's obviously further room for reactor design optimization, but I don't think it's as simple as just blaming regulation.
> This part is wrong.
France used to provide 75% of their electricity demand from Nuclear. Add their hydro power, and it was 85-90%. I'm not aware of any other country reaching similar figures using wind/solar, ever.
Some countries (like Denmark) have surpassed 50% from wind/solar, but at least in the case of Denmark, that relies heavily on supplementing it with hydropower from Norway/Sweden.
> On a local scale, renewables aren't predictable, but over large areas ....
The continent wide grid capacity needed for this is not only expensive, it's also fragile. If you add the extra grid costs to wind and solar, it's no longer very cheap.
Nuclear also benefits from a grid, but rely a lot less on it than wind/solar does. Even if you cut off the grid (due to an EU breakup, let's say), countries with nuclear power would be fine.
> I find it somewhat hard to believe that nuclear plants could easily be made dramatically cheaper
Almost anything of that sort CAN be made a lot cheaper, as long as a free market is allowed to operate and economies of scale are achieved. On top of that, technological progress makes it possible to get more from less over time (including safety).
As for China and India, well China IS building a lot more Nuclear than anyone else (probably everyone else combined). Cost estimations for them are uncertain, but seem cheaper than Korea. (Korean prices are assumed to be ~$40/MWh).
I believe that there is a lot left on the table in terms of efficiencies to be gained if competition and innovation across countries were encouraged, but even if you chose NOT to believe that, well at least nuclear has shown that it can deliver up to 75%.
Wind + solar has not shown anything similar, at least not yet.