Renewables (wind and solar) are intermittent. The storage technology to make them reliable without a backup source of power generation, does not yet exist at the scale that would be needed. For now, any viable plan for full decarbonization must include nuclear.

You have the same issue with nuclear as it cannot load-follow and technical issues can lead to massive shutdowns like in France last year.

There exist several answers that have to be combined:

Using biogas to load-follow. Currently biogas produces around 8% of electricity but mostly as base-load.

Directing the use of electricity. This was already done to deal with nuclear‘s similar issue by offering cheaper prices in the night. With smart meters we can offer hourly based billing.

Batteries for intra-day storage is already getting deployed as it’s already economical and we will see much more in the future.

For seasonal low-points we will probably first continue to use gas but in a much smaller quantity if the other points also get deployed. At some point hydrogen will make sense.

You don't have to load-follow when you can use the power to mine bitcoins. /s

In all seriousness, nuclear power plants are also very controllable within a certain bound, you just can't turn them completely off or else they take a long time to turn back on. Control of power output is what reactor control rods are for. Coal power is similar - you can control the temperature of the boiler but you can't stop the turbine completely if you want to turn it back on any time soon.

Nuclear costs are predominantly fixed costs though. Reducing output makes electricity from nuclear even more expensive. On top of that it leads to faster deterioration.

You're busy looking for a perfect solution where there is none. The same arguments about upfront costs and usage-based depreciation apply to batteries, too, for example. They would apply to coal and natural gas plants too except that their fuel is really expensive per kWh.

I'm sorry this is incredibly misleading. " Load following" ?

Nuclear power is the most reliable and consistent energy source in the world. It's not even close! If you are going to spew garage, please cite it. This isn't reddit.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the average capacity factor (which measures the actual electricity output of a power plant compared to its maximum potential output) for nuclear power plants around the world was 81% in 2019.

This is higher than most other types of power plants, including coal-fired power plants (which had an average capacity factor of 53% in 2019) and natural gas-fired power plants (which had an average capacity factor of 46% in 2019).

The reason why there were "massive shutdowns" was because they didn't do maintenance during COVID as well as noticed abnormal corrosion.

Regarding uptime, heres some data.

Nuclear Reactor Up Time.

User What is the average up time of a nuclear reactor in France?

ChatGPT As of my knowledge cutoff date of September 2021, the average up time of a nuclear reactor in France was about 75%, according to data from the French electricity company EDF. This means that, on average, the reactors were operational and producing electricity for about 75% of the time. However, it's important to note that this figure can vary from year to year and from reactor to reactor, depending on factors such as maintenance schedules, unexpected shutdowns, and other issues

User Can you cite your sources for uptime of nuclear power in France? chatGPT Sure, here are some sources for the uptime of nuclear power in France:

According to the French electricity company EDF, the average availability rate for its nuclear fleet in 2020 was 75.9%. Source: https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/edf-in-france/the-nuclea...

The World Nuclear Association also reports an average capacity factor (uptime) for nuclear power plants in France of 73.3% in 2019. Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

The French government's Ministry of Ecological Transition provides a quarterly report on the performance of the country's electricity generation sources, including nuclear power. The latest report, covering Q4 2020, states that the availability rate for the nuclear fleet during that period was 71.2%. Source: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/Performance...

Sources for other statements. https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220825-france-prolongs-...

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/13/frances-nuclear-...

Electricity use isn’t constant throughout the day or the week, so you also have to produce less. This is called load following and a good thing.

Nuclear reactors are pretty bad at it, but if you have a lot of nuclear reactors like France does you have to do it anyway, which is why France has a lower capacity factor for nuclear than other countries.

For fossil-fuel- and biogas-driven plants a low capacity factor usually isn’t a big problem as fuel costs dominate. For nuclear fixed costs mostly dominate which means that a low capacity factor also means much higher costs.

Nuclear plants can load follow just fine. They just prefer not to as the capital costs and not fuel is biggest factor. So might as well keep producing power if the grid stability accepts it.

> biogas

If your objective is to eliminate carbon emissions, this won't do that. I'm not a purist though, if a small amount of natural gas or biogas needs to be burned at peak load that's not a huge deal.

> Batteries for intra-day storage

What do you do when cloudy + no wind lasts for much more than a day (as can happen in winter)?

The storage technology to make nuclear cost-effective also does not yet exist, as demand is also not constant. Nuclear is a pretty bad complement to renewables on a grid: it loses terribly to renewables in a free market, relying on subsidies to get built and operate, and also does not actually make up for the intemittency of renewables. People keep saying that we need both but frankly it's one or the other.

Yes, wind and solar are highly volatile; coal, nuclear and natural gas are not. When they decided to disable nuclear power, they wanted to replace it with natural gas from Russia (that's why they promoted Nord Stream 2), since it produces less CO2 than coal, but those gas deliveries were largely cut off because of the Ukraine war. So now only coal is left as a stable energy source.

Before making claims, please look up numbers. In the same period nuclear was shut off in Germany coal-use also went down.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutsch...

So what? It went down much less than it would have if needed nuclear wasn't disabled.

Is it possible that something large scale happened to the economy in the 2020-2022 timeframe that affected that baseload? Do you have absolute usage numbers rather than relative?

No, they decided to actively disable nuclear power before coal power. Renewable energy has nothing to do with that.

The Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz for building out renewables was decided for together with the nuclear phase—out as part of the Energiewende under Schröder. Of course they are strongly linked.

That's not a justification.