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Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by toast0 on Saturday August 06, 2022 @12:10PM (#32369288)
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.

Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by bryanlarsen on Saturday August 06, 2022 @12:40PM (#32369569)
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.

Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by VBprogrammer on Saturday August 06, 2022 @01:20PM (#32369881)
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.
Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by elcomet on Saturday August 06, 2022 @01:23PM (#32369908)
Lack of water to cool down is unfortunately correlated across the country.
Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by jtlisi on Saturday August 06, 2022 @01:50PM (#32370130)
Which country?
Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by elcomet on Saturday August 06, 2022 @11:35PM (#32373682)
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)
Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by njarboe on Saturday August 06, 2022 @02:30PM (#32370444)
France
Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by lovemenot on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:27AM (#32374612)
>> 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.

Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by adrianN on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:48AM (#32374436)
> 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...

Re:The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved... by natmaka on Sunday August 07, 2022 @09:56AM (#32376499)
... 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...