My understanding with the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia is that you could buy solar and batteries for cheaper and deploy sooner. You could throw in a subsidy for electric cars too which can feed back to the grid in an emergency. That said the small reactors of this article will hopefully have lower costs and faster deployment times.

Another advantage of wind and battery is that they aren’t national security targets in the way nuclear is.

I'd hate to be relying on cars feeding back into the grid when a natural disaster happens which encourages people to evacuate, or prepare to evacuate such that they want to ensure their batteries are charged.

I would hate to weather another large and close wildfire where in addition to the normal grid instability and power issues it's exacerbated by lack of expected car feedback resources because people have evacuated or are standing by to.

On the other hand. Nuclear is not immune to natural conditions either. Look at France, currently turning off reactors because of lack of cooling water due to the drought.

Right now the European grid is operational and demand is being met. When winter arrive it is expected that multiple countries will have to start to shut down part of society in order to save the grid.

Thankfully the cooling issue won't hopefully exist during winter, and given how much political outcry will occur if the grid do collapse, France might actually step up and fix their reactors given enough political pressure.

I'm glad the issues in France won't have too bad of an impact. But that's somewhat besides the point. The cause of the electricity shortage is the enormous overreliance on Russian gas and oil. It's not about renewables vs. Nuclear.

The comment I responded to argued nuclear is superior in a situation of crisis, and selects as an example a natural disaster. Wanted to point out that this seems to depend rather sensitively on the kind of crisis.

No, I didn't argue nuclear anything. I merely noted that I would be worried about relying on a resource which we might expect to get scarce during a time when energy instability is already high.

As long as the natural disaster isn't affecting a large part of the continent, the electric grid should be able to handle it.

French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is.

British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.

Nuclear plants may or may not be reliable, but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated.

Solar is corellated around time of day on a large scale and cloud cover on a more localized scale. Lack of wind sometimes happens to fairly large regions; interconnections to farther away wind farms helps though.

Weather extremes outside the design can result in outages for all kinds of plants though, so a relatively geographically small and isolated grid like Texas, that has many plants unprepared for cold will likely have outages at plants of all types during a bad cold snap; a particularly bad heat wave might cause issues as well.

On the other hand an advantage that solar and wind have is that they are predictable in the medium term. Weather forecasts are fairly reliable predictors of solar & wind output about a week or so out. They also ramp up and down smoothly.

So while grid operators have to be constantly adjusting for solar & wind output variations, they can do so without panic and without customers noticing.

Reactor shutdowns, while rare, are sometimes very unexpected and drop a lot of capacity from the grid very quickly.

This isn't really any more or less true of Nuclear than any other facility. A power outage which took out many of the railways in London a few years back was caused by one of the offshore wind fields tripping from the grid.

Lack of water to cool down is unfortunately correlated across the country.

Which country?

Every country. Lack of water in a river is usually correlated to lack of water in the other river close to it (a common cause could be very hot and dry season with no rain for instance)

France

>> Nuclear plants may or may not be reliable, but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated.

Japan has seen a decade-long shutdown of most plants following a single incident.

> but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated

Unless you start mass manufacturing them and the identical reactors start failing in identical ways...

... and one has to mass-manufacture them in order to lower the total cost.

Outages at multiple nuclear plants can be correlated. Right now: https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...

Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source.

> British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.

Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.

Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...

Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event.

Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point".

Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time.

I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing.

Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.

> Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it ...

The people could demand a resolution to the politician's issues which are holding five turbines in Montreal that could be installed in a pipeline which supplies gas to parts of Europe. It is almost like some political segments don't want a resolution before winter.

Edit: I had read one was returned, five being repaired, and Germany restarting ten coal plants. https://globalnews.ca/news/9002839/canada-turbines-return-ru...

Those turbines were sent back to Germany a couple of weeks ago.

It is almost like the news is more interested in reporting on ongoing problems than solved ones.

At some point, "Breaking news : everything is pretty much ok" is going to be a thing.

I'm ready to bet that when all the turbines are back (some already are), if the geopolitical situation is still as complicated, Russia will find another good reason to limit the amount of gas sent to western Europe.

I think the Kremlin is expecting the German electorate to push pressure on their government to ask for a return to the "normal" flow of gas, Ukraine be damned.

That seems like a reasonable bet, but I'm not going to rule surprises out any more.

No one is saying that the grid should be fully nuclear. What we are saying is that wind and solar require another technology to pick up the slack when they have low generation. Currently, that is gas or coal in most places. In the future, it may be large scale long term storage, but that doesn't generally exist.

The only green technology we know about that could replace coal and gas as slack for wind and solar today is nuclear.

Does nuclear cost more than wind and solar? Irrelevant, since wind and solar can't power the whole grid. Does it cost more than coal and gas? Irrelevant, since those need to be stopped or the effects of global warming will destroy our industrial life in 50 years.

Does nuclear cost more than large-scale long-term storage? This is an interesting question, and we don't yet have a good answer, as no one has really tried creating storage for hundreds of megawatts for something like half a year. There is one such storage location in Switzerland, and in fa t it took 14 years to build compared to South Korea's newest nuclear reactor taking 10 years (while also producing 1350MW compared to Switzerland storing 950MW). Is that representative of such costs? Probably not, but who knows.

Well, I should mention hydro as well, though that is very geographically dependent, so it's often not an option at all.

Why the heck would you create half year storage? No place ever goes sun and wind free for 6 months.

Maybe 6 months is too much, but for example in Europe, you do need more than a month to ensure that your grid actually works even if you have low wind and low sun for that long - at least until you can over-generate so much that you have enough production on a ~14h of sunlight on a cloudy day in winter with low wind you can ensure enough power for the whole day. The farther north you go, the bigger this problem gets - places like Norway or Finland have far less than 14h of sunlight in winter per day, for example, for months.

Why the heck would you rely on solar power in Northern Europe? The North Sea has some of the most reliable winds in the world, and Northern Europe is full of mountains. Use excess winds to pump water up the mountain and use the head to turn a generator on the rare windless days.

IDK what your definition of green is but I'm fine with using gas (methane) to pick up the slack for wind/solar/nuclear if it is made with electrical surpluses from wind/solar/nuclear in a carbon neutral way.

That still requires you to store that gas on bright windy days so you can use it weeks or months later on overcast still nights, so I am lumping it with "storage technologies".

Today, "coal and gas" means using fossil fuels, not renewable coal and gas produced out of CO2 in air, and I expect this to remain true for quite a while longer - the temptation will be too large, given the price difference.

> Nuclear has the opposite problem of wind/solar in that it needs to be run at 100% capacity as much as possible in order to amortize its absurd building costs over its low operating costs.

Can you not make the same argument for wind/solar? If any power generator isn't capable of dumping it's full output onto the grid when possible, it's not going to be profitable. This pdf seems to indicate that wind is allowed to just dump all of their output onto the grid and everyone else has to ramp up or down. Which doesn't give realistic comparisons of cost between the two. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/61721.pdf

Wind and solar are unique in that their fuel has a cost of $0, which is why they’ve been putting some fossil fuel plants out of business.

Nuclear still needs some fuel that costs money to obtain and handle.

Nuclear also has higher "fixed" O&M costs, from all that staffing.

Bad phrasing on my part. Wind/solar/nuclear are all basically pure capex with no marginal cost to producing max energy so they all need to be run at 100%.

To handle daily/seasonal energy demands though, you'll want to run any of those all the time and thus dump surplus energy into some type of storage to reduce capex costs and dynamically handle demand with some type of peaker.

So your options are nuclear surplus + storage or wind/solar surplus + storage but why light your money on fire with nuclear creating said storage when wind/solar are 1/3 the cost.

In particular wind is very inexpensive.

Sometimes wind is free, but some other times, you can’t get it for love or money. Same with solar. This is why they can never be a solution by themselves.

(Until battery technology improves, and please, let me know if that ever happens.)

The point, in this particular subthread, is that wind is so inexpensive so there's no problem if we have to "dump" a lot of unused power windy day. And we can have enough wind so even when it delivers say less than 50% of max, it will be enough. And windy days with a lot of extra capacity, we make hydrogen (or pump mass to higher elevation where practical), even though the efficiency isn't particularly good. When the energy we put in is for free, it doesn't matter that the efficiency is 30% or even 20% for the full cycle.

And this can't be said for nuclear power. It's so expensive to build and run, so it has to run most of the time to make a profit. And this will of course be problem when it sells it output on the same market as wind, where many days the cost of electricity is almost zero.

> The point, in this particular subthread, is that wind is so inexpensive so there's no problem if we have to "dump" a lot of unused power windy day.

Fair enough.

> And windy days with a lot of extra capacity, we make hydrogen (or pump mass to higher elevation where practical), even though the efficiency isn't particularly good.

From what I understand, those are not worth the cost. Is is even remotely feasible to even produce, let alone build, enough solar and/or wind electricity production plants which give enough hydrogen to be able to handle the world’s energy needs? Even in places with extended periods without sun and wind? Until that is true, nuclear seems to be the only alternative left which is not oil, coal, or natural gas.

(Left out is hydro, which, from what I understand, is already built everywhere it can be built.)

Answered my own questions, posting in case my thoughts match someone else's.

Did I understand correctly: Wind and solar are better than nuclear because nuclear isn't cost effective at having enough slack for a polar vortex?

But if that's the case, don't wind and solar fail in a polar vortex? Ah, you're saying that nuclear, wind, and solar all require storage. Got it.

Then the question would be how much storage do they require. Which I guess is what you're saying.

Yes, wind/solar require more peaker plants to handle their unreliability compared to nuclear but seeing as nuclear is 3x as expensive, I don't see it as the optimal solution to getting carbon neutral.