Re:California's Last Nuclear Power Plant to Be Shut Down
by desdiv on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @02:35AM
(#11951968)
What you're describing is only true of previous generation nuclear plants, where there was no need to implement load following.
There is nothing inherent in nuclear power that makes it impossible to throttle and indeed there are currently operating plants designed with load following capabilities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuc...
Re:California's Last Nuclear Power Plant to Be Shut Down
by eigenvector on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @02:42AM
(#11951989)
Some nuclear plants, including the largest in the world (Bruce NGS in Canada), have steam bypass systems allowing electrical output be curtailed without reducing thermal output. You just dump the thermal energy into a lake.
I completely agree that we should be ramping up nuclear generation, but nuclear alone also has a timing issue that requires either batteries or a hybrid approach to generation. Unlike fossil fuels where the plant can be dialed up and down to cope with demand, the output of a nuclear reactor is generally fixed (at least on the timescales relevant to demand fluctuation).
Solar can be a big help here, because demand tends to be higher during the day and lower at night. Some sort of energy storage technology would likely still be needed even with a full nuclear/solar grid, since energy usage in developed nations tends to peak in the early evening.