> as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline

Source ?

Nuclear is around 90% of Capacity factor in the USA, 75% in Canada, around 70% in France and UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...

So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels. And roughly the same numbers are other kind of plants (gaz, coal…).

>So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels

This is a pretty facetious comparison. You install solar knowing that the sun won't shine all the time, and turbines that the wind won't blow. No one installs it expecting 100%. The cost to install is low.

Nuclear, on the other hand, is a massive capital expenditure. When nuclear is down, that is a major problem because you don't overbuild. An unplanned outage can be a disaster.

This whole conversation is a bit rich given that many of France's reactors are nearing EoL and France has no plans on replacing them.

Regardless, I soundly and overwhelmingly debunked the nonsense that Germany "went back to coal" so now it's on with strawmen and shifting goal posts. Such is always the nature of any discussion involving the magical panacea of nuclear.

France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision". And indeed now we are reaching the point where we don't have the knowledge and industrial level to "jump back" into the flow.

Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;) Germany is indeed planning to phase out coal "by 2035" (lets see how this goes, there is an election going on). Germany is currently building natural gas plants on the other hand. Gaz that is mostly (around 45%) imported from Russia, a nice diplomatic thing they're getting into.

"France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision"."

Bullshit. Nuclear died outside of China because it was oversold and an economic calamity. You can't even install nuclear without massive government subsidies (not least a huge liability waiver where the state basically takes on all liability, not done for any other energy source). The cost to build, operate, retrofit and decommission is always massively over the expected, and it has only gotten worse.

There are places where nuclear is by far the best option, and its extreme costs and safety needs are acceptable. There are many others where it just never yielded the promise.

"Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)"

That is the root of this thread that you jumped into, making several seriously wrong claims that you either just shifted goal posts or edited out along the way.

"This is a pretty facetious comparison." Is it? A few weeks ago I noticed that the wind in my state was below 5mph over the entire state, for the entire day, with temperatures in upper 90's. You literally can't overbuild wind enough to account for this.

Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last wind turbine installation, if you compare actual power produced over the year instead of simply comparing max rated production.

That's when I realized that you literally can't have enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is the only reasonable answer.

The economics of wind, solar, gas, and nuclear are very well documented and known. Making a robust grid is well known.

"That's when I realized"

You understand how utterly ridiculous this sounds, right?

"That's when I realized that spacecraft should be made out of aluminum foil"

Who am I to believe? The published costs of installations coupled with power company records or studies which don't look anything like real world data, but always unerringly tell me wind is cheaper.

I based my opinion on real world data, and only real world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous where you're standing, but I'll never know.

And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud are alive and well - endemic in the life or death sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of something to see if a study is even close to being accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal conditions, pick an established utility with public records, and do the work yourself.

> with temperatures in upper 90's

The implication here being that air conditioning will be using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's rarely hot and not sunny.

>and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline

Did you perhaps confuse wind and solar with nuclear? The design of a nuclear plant is precisely the opposite of what you describe.

No, I didn't confuse them. How, exactly, does a nuclear power plant design prevent being offline?

You understand they have to take the plant offline to do major maintenance, even refuelling, right? In April, 75% of New England's nuclear power plants were offline, for instance, most unplanned.

When a single plant costs billions of dollars and becomes a significant or overwhelming contributor to an area's power mix, it can be a problem.

The tone of your replies is needlessly aggressive.

A typical nuclear plant isn't designed to be cycled regularly. What you are suggesting is that most nuclear plants are not generating power for more than 50% of the time.

A cursory search of capacity factors will show that this is the opposite of reality. A typical wind or solar installation on average, generates zero power for more than half the time.

And that's exactly why you have several nuclear reactors in a plant and several turbines, and several power lines…

Please be a bit serious about what you're saying, you don't have to actually turn of a plant when you need to refuel. If any kind of plant (including hydro) need to be completely turned off for maintenance its really because you had a major design flaw.

Most of the nuclear power plants that Germany built were single-reactor plants and would shut down for refueling. Multi-reactor plants will stagger shutdowns so that the plant continues to generate at reduced power. It is the same in the US. Only a few reactor designs like CANDU are capable of online refueling without interruption. Planned shutdowns for refueling are scheduled for low-demand times of the year.

Here's a nuclear industry blog post explaining the practice: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-happens-dur...

Interesting, thanks for the link :) !

I believe we only have two active nuclear plants in New England - Seabrook NH and Millstone CT. Seabrook has one reactor, Millstone has two I believe.

It's remarkable how much power these plants generate with a relatively small footprint.