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Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cogman10 on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:08AM (#21482835)
Not quite.

The bigger problem with solar and wind isn't baseline but rather the fact that they are variable in nature. That makes it harder to have a baseline power plant.

The reason natural gas is taking off is that it can quickly respond to differences in production vs demand (it's a peaker plant, as in it handles peaks in demand). Solar and wind make those peaks more pronounced while lowering what baseline can do.

This is why coal plants are dying, they are slow to respond to demand and renewables decrease the baseline that can run at (well, that and fuel costs keep rising due to inflation).

Storage solves both problems. Baseline can be higher, storage will consume it, and peaks are less a problem, storage can handle those.

Alternatively, load based demand would make sense (at least to solve the baseline problem). We could, for example, eat excess energy doing CO2 extraction (though, that only makes sense if baseline doesn't produce more co2 than what we are consuming).

Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by malpighien on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:25AM (#21483014)
Coal plants are dying as gas became cheap due to all the fracking and shale gas in the usa. Germany is about to start a brand new coal plant in 2020 https://www.power-technology.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fir... They need the coal plants to compensate lack of nuclear and alleviate the intermittent issue of the renewable.
Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by DiogenesKynikos on Friday November 08, 2019 @11:31AM (#21483787)
That's because if the German government canceled the new coal plant, they would have to compensate the owners. The German government doesn't want to do that, so the plant is going forward. There's also political pressure from coal-mining regions in Germany to keep coal going.

This has less to do with electricity demand than with politics.

Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cygx on Friday November 08, 2019 @12:25PM (#21484448)
Also note that construction of the plant started in 2007 (ie years before Fukushima and the subsequent decommissioning of some nuclear plants). It was supposed to go online in 2011, but there were legal as well as technical problems that led to a significant delay.
Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by sanxiyn on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:17AM (#21482920)
Storage can solve any problem, but we don't have good enough solution yet. I agree energy storage research is the highest priority item.
Re:Nuclear energy is a vital part of solving the climate crisis by cogman10 on Friday November 08, 2019 @10:24AM (#21483007)
We have a few promising ones IMO. Lithium will probably win out due to cost, but liquid metal storage is what I wish would win. It is more expensive, yet it also has basically infinite cycles (it doesn't wear out). That seems like an ideal characteristic for grid storage.