Why does nuclear have a niche in a green future? I don't see it surviving. Locations with insufficient wind/solar will be supplied externally, either by grid or by transport of synthetic chemical fuels. Places like very high latitudes (where wind is often very good, btw) are so sparsely populated they cannot by themselves sustain a nuclear industry.

> Why does nuclear have a niche in a green future?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

If we string solar plants all around the planet, the sunny side can always supply the night side.

> If we string solar plants all around the planet, the sunny side can always supply the night side.

Does this include stringing them across the Pacific Ocean, which covers thirty percent of the Earth's surface?

Awfully optimistic when we can't even get one 200-mile HV line greenlit after 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_–_New_England_Transmiss...

Building cables across the ocean raises much more demanding engineering problems but much less demanding political problems than building them across multiple states. You don't have to please a bunch of different regional governments and land owners when you're building across the ocean. If you have a government that can dictate national projects like in China you can build long cables over land even faster, but that political alternative also comes with its own problems (to put it mildly).

That would require world peace

And lossless energy transmission.

And several large floating sea cities full of engineers to maintain it all.

Naa, we use gigantic mirrows in space to bring light to the night side.

in theory SMRs don't need much maintenance so could work in these situations. And on the plus side, when they do melt down - not many casualties.

When the entire Railbelt grid in Alaska (the largest grid there) has an average load of 600 MW, there simply isn't much market for SMRs at high latitudes.

> Nuclear fits in locations with insufficient wind and solar resources and provides reliable base supply.

So remote islands basically (places not worth adding to a super grid). Fair enough. That's a very small niche though.

Is there currently any region in the world where wind and solar alone are capable of providing a reliable base supply?

Is that a rhetorical question? It sounds like an oxymoron.

Neither solar nor wind can provide base power. Unless you can make hyperefficient batteries and guarantee that we'll see cloudless skies and constant wind.

yes. plenty. north america, europe, china - to name three examples.

The larger your grid, the more reliably you can source renewables. It's not cheap to install the necessary high frequency inter-connectors but it is still waaaay cheaper than nuclear (see a different thread where i posted a link on an MIT study).

Edit: also, you still need a lot of storage (probably 12-48 hours worth) but i posted another link showing how that's also way cheaper than nuclear.

You only need 3 hours worth of storage. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Take a look at the graphs at the back. It shows a 99.99% reliable grid made up of an optimal mix of solar & wind, 3x over-provisioned along with 3 hours of storage and a continental grid.

I'm skimming this rightn now, but a quick question: do they take into consideration the space required by wind and solar farms?

Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.

They don't take space requirements into consideration probably because it's trivial to dismiss. 40,000 square miles would provide enough energy to power the entire US with solar, in a country with 3.6 million of them. That's less than the space taken up by cemeteries.

And continental is what makes 3 hours possible. The wind is always blowing somewhere.

> They don't take space requirements into consideration probably because it's trivial to dismiss.

Ah yes, so trivial.

> 40,000 square miles would provide enough energy to power the entire US with solar

No, it wouldn't. As the document yo link shows, even countries with similar makeup have very different solar and wind profiles.

Also. You can't just wave your magic wand and say: "here, we now have 40k square miles". You're saying "oh, let's just randomly find an area larger than Austria (population: 9 million people + farmland + industry + ...) and cover it entirely in solar panels (without taking into consideration the place for all the required infrastructure to go with them".

It is so, so trivial to dismiss, true.

> The wind is always blowing somewhere.

Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain? Will the grid be able to switch fast enough? (answer is: no, because renewable sources are notoriously slow to ramp up production)

The power generation capacity in the US is worth trillions. That kind of money is a magic wand that can makes obstacles like 40k square miles pretty trivial.

> Only... What is the amount of that wind? Is there enough wind in Denmark to cover non-windy days in Spain?

That is the question the paper answers, but on a national basis.

>Also, three hours of storage for a continental grid? Nice dream.

Comon, if we can't store energy for 3 hours that's an armutszeugnis. The battery of my electric bycicle can store the energy needed to power my flat for 3 hours.

The UK normally gets 25% of their electricity from wind but just the other night they were only getting about 2.7% of the demand fulfilled by wind turbines. They had to start up coal plants to fill the gap.

I don't think over provisioning would fix that and you'd need about 12 hours of batteries to cover the shortage.

See for yourself.

https://model.energy/