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.