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 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-...
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.
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)?
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.