It's a bad idea because after renewables have satisfied their share of demand, the residual demand will be very unsteady. And unsteady demand is the opposite of what nuclear is good at satisfying.
fundamentally disagree, this is taking simple facts and changing the narrative around the facts to make renewables look bad.
Renewables are cheaper and faster to invest, build and use.
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to invest, build and use.
there is a use for nuclear, but common widespread rollout is not it.
Peak heating demand is in winter and at night, when solar production is at its lowest. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear can be done by you building nuclear plants, using cogeneration (steam pipes) to distribute heat to the population with reasonable distance of the plant and electricity generated by the plant to operate heat pumps for people who live more distance away.
To do this reliably with solar you need enough solar generation capacity on the coldest day of the year with the least sunlight to generate an amount of power on the order of the size of the entire existing power grid, just for heating. Then you need to store the majority of it for use at night. Then you need an entirely separate backup system in case it's cloudy for too long, because if solar doesn't generate enough power then people freeze. I've heard suggestions of maintaining an entirely redundant set of traditional fossil fuel generating stations to bring online in the event of undersupply -- these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
How is that combination supposed to be cheaper? Also, how is it supposed to be built in parallel when battery production capacity is already being consumed to electrify transportation and do peak shaving to allow renewable sources to replace fossil fuels in the existing grid?
Ultimately The storage part is actually a huge improvement to existing design with modular design and decentralized layout giving societies DR capability that would be horrendously expensive in the more centralized designs we use now.
> these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
This is completely wrong. A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality. Diurnal storage of heat from PV is quite feasible. Sorry Europe, nuclear won't save you.
I will also note that 2/3rds of industrial heat demand is at < 300 C, which means heat pumps can be used (particularly if the process has a warm waste heat stream to feed into the heat pumps.)
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/solar-industrial-process-heat....
But the premise was "solar is getting so cheap". Wind costs more than solar, and is still intermittent so you still need the backup.
> A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
That's just the capex for the plant itself. It doesn't include whatever you're using to produce and store the fuel. The capex to store a week's supply of hydrogen in particular would well exceed the capex for the plant itself. Plus the "operating costs" which largely still exist even if the plant is only operated 1% of the time. It still has to pay for full-time security and maintenance and have a full complement of staff on-call at all times in case the plant has to be brought into service.
And many of those costs go up rather than down as usage declines. Right now we have a network for the production and distribution of natural gas which gets funded by domestic use for heating and cooking and existing power plants can tie into those pipelines at minimal incremental cost. If we stop using fossil fuels for heating, now you have to justify the opex on all those pipelines just for the infrequently-used combustion power plants, or you have to build and maintain a different distribution system for the fuel.
The low cost thing to do would be to have have a production and distribution system that can replenish the week's worth of fuel over the course of three months, but now you can get a period of undersupply in November and the tanks won't be replenished until spring. Whereas if you want to be able to produce a week's supply of fuel the next week, add another billion+ dollars per GW of capacity for electrolyzers.
Even if this still costs less than a nuclear plant, this is the cost of the backup system by itself. You still have to add the cost of the renewable sources to be used the other 99% of the time. And the efficiency advantage if nuclear is used for heating via cogeneration.
> We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality.
Industries are fine, the question is how to heat homes in Europe or the northern half of the US.
And while cost is a big deal, long-term waste isn't that much of an issue, and reactors are not good military targets.
Solar is cheaper and easier, so when the sun is shining you get essentially free energy while the nuclear cant be ramped down so you are now producing excess energy during the day.
solar eats nuclear's lunch during the day... with the long term waste issue and military target danger of nuclear thrown in.