Also, not sure if you’re aware, but most modern reactors don’t need storage. They can vary load generation dynamically and so don’t actually need storage. France’s reactors are all very old as they’ve been infected with the same disease of failing to take on large public works projects in a timely and cost efficient manner. It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.
What matters is that the upfront capital costs of nuclear are so insanely high that any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.
I’m not convinced that load following nuclear makes economic sense compared to next generation energy storage solution. Say Ambri’s molten metal batteries.
Nuclear had better pray that these energy storage solutions never become economically competitive, because if they do then solar/wind+storage will beat nuclear in almost every application. And if that’s the case, nuclear just won’t have the economies of scale necessary to be competitive at all.
Nuclear energy also has to pray that advanced geothermal doesn’t catch on, as it competes directly with nuclear, but has the benefit of being able to take direct advantage of skilled labour from the oil and gas industry that’s soon becoming increasingly redundant.
Yeah, electricity pricing for consumers is mismatched in terms of how energy demands work. Solar has the opposite problem where it may be unable to supply energy when you need it which is a much bigger problem - instead of losing money your energy grid goes down. Of we turn on peaker power plants because while batteries can weather short outages I don’t believe anyone has demonstrated running a grid off stored energy for any reasonable amount of time.
And again, I’m going to call it an unsubstantiated claim that hybrid nuclear plants that can scale energy output as needed are uneconomical. I know they’re slightly more expensive but I’m not aware of any data suggesting that it is actually intrinsically uneconomical. Same goes for any claims that solar or wind is cheaper than nuclear - all the data I’ve found had solar as way more expensive and wind as slightly more expensive vs nuclear.
And I wouldn’t hold my breath on storage. I think we’re less likely to get a crazy new battery technology that solves all the things we need from it in a cheaper and safer way than nuclear research. There’s lots of crazy battery ideas but those ideas have been around for a long time and we have no indication that can scale. China is building a molten salt reactor right now. And additionally we don’t need government R&D dollars flowing into battery research as much as we need it flowing into figuring out how to make nuclear even safer and more economical. Normal market economics are already a big enough prize to cause private R&D dollars to go after that (batteries are everywhere and the essentially the same battery tech that’s in your smartphone is what’s in an EV which makes the market opportunity massive and obvious - that’s not as obviously clear for private investors for nuclear energy because it need regulatory approval to build a plant which means we don’t know how big that market would actually be). It’s not nuclear vs solar. It’s nuclear vs fossil fuels and renewables vs fossil fuels and so far fossil fuels has kicked renewables’ butt and had it butt kicked by nuclear. If this were a fight, where should the actual smart money be in terms of achieving net zero?
That 10 percent of fossil, plus the controllable hydro in France is working in tandem with the nuclear to match demand.
Remove that gas and hydro and a nuclear grid needs storage just as a mainly solar and wind grid does.
Yes in theory, if price is no object, both can just overbuild so much you avoid needing storage but that would be stupid.