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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Profitable compared to what, that provides base load?

If energy prices are too high, industry suffers. If you let the price rise, maybe China just eats your lunch.

What's the option value vs risk of gas price rises? Gas sets the marginal price of electricity in Italy today for 60% of the year [1]

[1] https://www.terna.it/DesktopModules/AdactoBackend/API/direct... "However, the electricity system remains significantly exposed to gas price volatility, which in 2024 determined electricity prices for more than 60% of the hours."

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Neither nuclear nor gas or coal will matter any more in a few years. It took California only six years to install 41% of the battery capacity goal it has for 2045[1]. As batteries are becoming part for new solar and wind installations, they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.

[1] https://www.emi-bg.com/en/battery-storage-in-california-has-...

> they will push nuclear and gas out simply by being cheaper and more predictable as an investment.

Unfortunately, this probably won't work everywhere. Particularly in Northern Europe winter is tough as there's very little sunlight (manageable) and often very little wind (not manageable,as it lasts longer).

Nuclear is an expensive way of solving this problem, but it's carbon neutral which is super important.

Even that would be manageable with enough solar panels and batteries, no? Or is it certain that too much surface area would have to be covered with panels?

Batteries work for 1-2 days right now. These wind breaks can be 1-2 weeks.

Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).

Okay, so scaling batteries up would work, got it.

> Okay, so scaling batteries up would work, got it.

Maybe? Only if there are pretty large breakthroughs in storage, so we need a backup plan.

Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing? I know that most people subscribe to your position, but I can't say I've really seen convincing analyses that show the numbers:

- What thresholds of $/kWh, charge speed, power density etc. do we need to reach before scaling becomes viable? What are those thresholds based on?

- Where are we now on those metrics, and how did they evolve over the last 2-3 decades?

People seem to forget that we've already been making pretty huge breakthroughs in storage for decades: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

Still, everyone seems very confident that scaling is non-viable now. But IMO it should be possible to demonstrate the non-viability using the approach above - even if the exact numbers are wrong, the orders of magnitude should be good enough, right?

> Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing?

I'm just guessing. But absent some kind of path to get there, I'd prefer to plan for needing to cover this situation with nuclear or other storage (I feel like pumped storage may make sense, but again haven't done the numbers).

Like, if you're correct then we'll end up with lots of power we don't really need. That's great, as we can use it to decarbonise other parts of the economy, however, if I'm correct and we dont build some kind of baseload/storage solution then we'll be in trouble in the winters, which I really want to avoid.

If you're correct, we'll end up with tons of extra power, since the nuclear plants would have to cover everything on their own anyway! But it would also take unbelievable amounts of money, and thus delay the energy transition by decades. We don't have that much time left.

Instead of guessing, maybe it's worth looking into the numbers?

Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.

A couple points. No, entire plants aren't taken offline at once typically, individual reactor cores are, and modern designs work to minimize that. They still maintain extremely good uptime, especially if you're comparing them to intermittent renewables. Secondly, Italy isn't super tiny, and you need redundancy for outages and such in any grid regardless of its components.

A large fraction of all nuclear power stations only have one reactor.

> maintain extremely good uptime

Not from a capacity planning standpoint.

> Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling

CANDU reactors, for one, can be (and are) refuelled live:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_refuelling

Every few decades they do need to be refurbished though.

Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.

It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.

> So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues.

There are several situations:

* refuelling occurs

* maintenance and/or inspection needs to happen

* refurbishment may be desired

Some of these things take downtime, some do not, depending on the design of the reactor and other factors. A blanket statement of "refuelling forces a downtime" is incorrect in many situations. Depending on the maintenance (or inspections) needed, this may or may not need downtime. Refurbishment generally means tearing things apart, so usually means downtime, but if a site has multiple reactors they can be done one at a time, e.g.:

* https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1006993/ontario-delivers-...

Eh, again, I disagree. As an example: Many CANDU reactors have insanely high availability. Example: Qinshan CANDU Unit 1 only had a planned outage of less than 27 days in 2023. There are many other examples. That is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. And to be clear, if you come at me with "Oh, what about the major maintenance required every 10+ years?". Thermal (coal/gas) has the same issue.

Your average hydroelectric power station measure yearly downtime due to maintenance in hours.

Moving the goal posts?

Not at all.

You said 27 days of planned outage is crazy uptime in the world of electricity production. Hydro routinely beats that by an order of magnitude.

I had a discussion with ChatGPT about this concern. When comparing a modern EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) to a modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant, the required maintenance cycles look fairly similar. For the nitpickers/tomato throwers (I see you!): I am using EPR because it is state-of-the art for nuclear power, and I am specifically using the term "modern" for thermal power plant because the newest ones (China, Japan) are nearly at the frontier of efficiency possible for that type of electricty production.

Roughly: EPR runs for 18 months, then requires 1-2 months of maintenance (which includes refuelling about one third of its fuel assemblies). A modern coal or natural gas thermal power plant runs 12-18 months, then requires 1 month of maintenance.

Next, I could not resist as other commenters already mentioned it. You wrote: "small country". As the Aussies say: Yeah, no. Italy is 300,000 sq km. That is not small. If compared to the United States, it would be the fifth largest state.

Finally, why does it seem that all discussions about electricity production on HN always devolve into the "Base Load Wars"? For me, it is starting to feel like a meme. (Are there LLM troll bots trained to enter HN discussions and make a bunch of "base load" arguments?) Seriously, can someone please create a text-based role playing game that revolves around a future society locked into eternal "Base Load Wars"? (See: PhD Simulator[1])

[1] https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html

But is this the intended maintenance duration, or the actual one? Because the construction of every EPR project has been a disaster. Construction took 20 years in Europe and 9 years in China.

Well, there are only four EPRs in the world. It is too early to say. Frankly, as a non-expert "armchair observer", Finland was dumb for starting the EPR project before the design was finalised.

From what I read no further EPRs are planned and they fully want to go ahead with a streamlined EPR2 design.

I think the problem of the Finns was that they really wanted energy independence and tge inly ones that were on the market were the french. No doubt the frenched used much diplomatic muscle to attract them as a first experiment.

> That is not small.

There are 70 countries larger than Italy, Russia is more than 50x the size.

America the 4th largest country is still 20x the size of Italy.

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