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Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by Workaccount2 on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:14AM (#32398255)
You mean the "green" party that relentlessly fear-mongered nuclear and got Germany addicted to russian fossil fuels? The one that is going to be forced to start burning coal again?
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by _ph_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:40AM (#32398656)
No, you are mistaking them for the CDU and SPD which got us addicted to russian fuels and at the same time curbed the deployment of renewal sources. The Greens is the party whose minister Harbeck has now to clean up the mess left to him and on short notice, Germany has a reasonable amount of coal power plants which can be reactivated to prevent blackouts. But this is only necessary due to Russia not delivering the agreed amound of gas.

(And ironically on the French nuclear power plants failing due to wear and heat, so that Germany had to produce an additional 20TWh of electricity to keep the grid alive)

Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by Workaccount2 on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @12:53PM (#32400460)
Germany isn't a barren desert with copious wind and sun. Demonizing nuclear will be looked back upon as cataclysmic fuck-up fueled by pure ignorance.
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by _ph_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @01:04PM (#32400628)
Germany has enough wind and sun to cover all electricy needs. And the fact that the nuclear-friendly France is not able to replace their aging fleet of power plants shows, that nuclear isn't such a simple or cheap solution. If Germany would push renewables, electricity would be carbon neutral before the first new nuclear power plant could come online.
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by Workaccount2 on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @02:14PM (#32401657)
The issue is that neither wind or solar provide baseline generation.

Frances issue aren't with nuclear, but with funding.

Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by pfdietz on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @02:52PM (#32402276)
Storage to address the intermittency of renewables will still leave renewables cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear is just that bad.
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by _-david-_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @04:26PM (#32403790)
How much storage are you talking about? With the impacts of climate change causing more serious events, can you guarantee you will have enough storage?
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by pfdietz on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @04:42PM (#32404018)
As much as is needed.

Rare events can be backed up with hydrogen-burning turbines. A simple cycle turbine power plant has 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output, so this doesn't cost much compared to the all-nuclear solution.

Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by _-david-_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @04:59PM (#32404218)
How much is as much as needed? 1 week worth? 2 weeks? A month?

If we are going to have hydrogen turbines how much should we have? Enough to cover a quarter of a city?

Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by pfdietz on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @06:18PM (#32405218)
The time required just dictates how large the underground storage caverns should be, not how much the turbines cost. There is enormous space for these, and they can be very cheap. As you may know, natural gas demand is seasonally leveled using such caverns.
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by _-david-_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @07:27PM (#32405991)
You never answered my question. How much do we need? 1 week worth? 2? A month?
Re:France experiencing worst drought on record by pfdietz on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:47PM (#32407368)
Well, natural gas storage is months worth, so that capacity would be there if we needed it. It's going to depend on latitude.

We can look at a model to see how much long term storage is optimal (under various cost assumptions) to deliver a constant output, using historical weather data.

https://model.energy/

For the US, the minimum cost model using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions uses 6 hours of battery storage and 106 hours of hydrogen storage. For someplace at high latitude, more hydrogen gets used, since it becomes economical to save energy from summer to winter. In Finland, for example, the optimal solution has 2 hours of batteries and 275 hours of hydrogen. On the other side, the solution for Saudi Arabia uses 10 hours of batteries and 48 hours of hydrogen.