Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of...
by Ericson2314 on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @04:06PM
(#29655196)
It would be great to have that infrastructure of course, but if we're going to say "OK we need to do mammoth projects which require lots of up front capex and ongoing administrative competence", that same argument applies to old-school nuclear reactors too.
The most grating thing about the renewable fad is that "herp durp churn out more wind and solar at the margins decentralized" and "massive coordinated grids and/or huge batteries" are utterly different modes of infrastructure production. There is no sense in which getting really good at the former makes one any better at the latter.
Re:Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of...
by dane-pgp on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @06:09PM
(#29656656)
> ongoing administrative competence", that same argument applies to old-school nuclear reactors too.
Well, except that "ongoing" for nuclear means "100+ years".
https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/science-engineering/202...
The problem with this approach is that you need to overbuild the total installed capacity massively, so that every "somewhere" could, in need, play the role of an energy producing and exporting center for all the other regions.
If 70 % of Europe is calm and dark at one point, the remaining 30 % would need to produce enough energy for the entire continent. (This also means having very high capacity cross-continent links to move that energy around from anywhere to anywhere else. Not easy to build or maintain.)