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A comment on Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says former spokeswoman. Parent comment

Re:Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says fo... by Erlich_Bachman on Friday September 11, 2020 @06:22AM (#24441087)
"post-energy-generation storage" is only a problem for the intermittent generators like solar and wind. This is exactly why nuclear is a solution. It doesn't suffer from problems of storage and can easily offset intermittence of other power sources by varying its power, as long as those different kinds of generators are on the same grid.

This is the key reason we are talking about nuclear, it is not simply about levelized cost.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says fo... by jka on Friday September 11, 2020 @06:32AM (#24441156)
Do you have any references (i.e. quantative statistics) for how much of a problem storage is?

It'd be really useful to understand how large a gap exists there - it's not something I'd claim to know about at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says fo... by jka on Friday September 11, 2020 @07:26AM (#24441512)
Self-replying; perhaps the downvote(s) were for not doing my own research...? :)

Here's a starter reading resource from the National Renewable Energy Lab in the US: https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/declining-renewable-...

And some more reading material from OpenEI: https://openei.org/wiki/Solar+Storage

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Extinction Rebellion: Nuclear power 'only option' says fo... by ZeroGravitas on Friday September 11, 2020 @09:54AM (#24442833)
Nuclear (and everything else) has the same problem, demand is not constant. You want to cover the yearly peak even if its a 1 in a hundred year snowstorm or heatwave thats causing it.

So you can either build 10x as many nuclear plants and run them at .1 capacity most of the time or build 5x as many and use some of the surplus energy to create stored power like hydrogen.

Doing either of those things with renewables will be massively cheaper than nuclear.

There doesn't seem to be anyone who is actually enthusiastic about nuclear, only people who are misinformed about renewables because their news sources have been trying to prop up fossil fuel interests for the last two decades.

[ Parent | on HN ]