Massive? Where in Germany would you store 1,000 GWh of energy, to run the country for half a day or so?
This kind of abject extremism is sadly par for the course on topics like this due to the kind of propaganda that the nuclear industry spews out. It generates zealots.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Profile-of-wind-power-ge...
If you disagree with the view that half a day of backup is reasonable, then provide a specific number and justification.
I find it amusing that when I cited a study that modeled exactly this scenario you poured scorn on it because it was modeled around a specific country. You didn't respond with actual figures demonstrating that this altered the results significantly, you just said "AUSTRALIA EASY MODE".
Seriously?
Yet the guy that presumed that the wind doesnt blow... ever? You didnt respond to that.
It's an interesting insight into the mind of a nuclear activist.
Renewables reduce oil and gas use. Period. You still need just as much generating capacity and you still release a lot of CO2.
And in that other comment what I said is that going pure renewable would get people lynched for how badly they wrecked the economy. The "green" approach is basically "pay no attention to the fact that the storage tech does not exist." In the real world we see it *increasing* emissions. (Shut down nuke, the load falls onto gas because it actually exists.) What would happen to our economy if power was dollars per kWh?? Because that's what it would take to ensure the lights always stay on in a pure renewable environment.
It's the exact opposite.
I actually provided a link to a model which explicitly calculated required storage using real production data.
Meanwhile, you said "16 hours! The sun doesn't shine at night!" and handwaved away the existence of wind turbines.
Solar + wind + nuke, might as well simply use nuke for just about everything.
An environment with a bunch of renewables is effectively forced to use fossil fuel.
But, if you assume the existence of wind turbines (I hope that isn't too much of a stretch for you):
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
>With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage
Germany has very few renewables, so do the math for them.
Report in Swedish though: https://www.svk.se/siteassets/om-oss/rapporter/2024/lma_2024...
Where will you move the goalposts now?
The roundtrip cost of electricity generated this way is expensive (it's ~50% efficient) but even then it is still cheaper than the cost of baseload nuclear power electricity.
Give up already.
Whatever happened to the notion of local/decentralised energy? Plus it relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection. Sweden and Norway are not so happy about other countries taking their hydro energy when it suits the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorthConnect
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-government-s...
When it comes to gridpower working at continental-level is, and for quite a while, the best way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Network_of_Transmissi...
> relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection
Exactly as, right now, each and every country in the continental grid sometimes starts a production unit in order to help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
> taking their hydro energy
Because, right now, the system is far from being complete: not enough production units deployed on the continent, interconnections, lines, storage... This transition, a huge ordeal, is in progress.
The larger the interconnection the bigger the failure domain. See also https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/european-clock... which shows that power is political.
> help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
Not so for Norway, where electrical prices have gone up as a result of all of these inter-connectors and a drought. Norwegian people and businesses have lost out. Politicians have taken note.
True, however we have to consider the chances of a given proportion of the grid to fail: a more spread-out and heterogeneous (wind, solar...) fleet of production units is way more robust.
> power is political
True, however such incidents are rare (this one dates back from 2018) and their extent more and more reduced as grid-control devices and backup plants are continually enhanced.
As already shown there is no way for nearly all nations to ever hope to obtain an autonomous grid, and even those able to plan on this will obtain a less-robust and more expensive grid. Team play is becomes more and more mandatory and efficient, on all accounts, and bad players may lose the support of the biggest group.
> electrical prices have gone up
Yes, because there now are not enough ways to store, causing some over-pressure on existing ones. Storing in order to sustain the grid when production isn't sufficient only makes sense if we store overproduction, and overproduction remains rare (esp. at continental-level) because way too few renewable are producing. We reached the very first step: more and more overproduced renewable electricity, which triggers investments towards the next step: massive storage. V2G is a major contender.
2) Not even in the ballpark of economic.
3) You'll really crater our economy, you'll get lynched and people will go back to the old way.
4) You realize the low efficiency of the loop you are proposing and big storage headaches it causes?
And nuclear power isn't "just that expensive". Rather, US nuclear power is by regulation defined as too expensive. There is a horrible provision in the nuclear world: "as low as reasonably achievable." Sounds good, and probably is good in the medical side. But on the power side it inherently defines nuclear as too expensive because if it wasn't too expensive then additional "safety" (which I find questionable, there comes a point where additional "safety" means more to break and thus doesn't really work) would be reasonably achievable.
The Republicans keep crusading about "too much regulation" but because they're not actually interested in the best possible outcome they miss the biggie: We should define that which is say 2x as safe as the status quo is deemed safe enough. And the flip side of this, that which is 2x as dangerous as the status quo is deemed unsafe. (I'd be open to different ratios, I just need to put something down.)
Let's look at the reality.
Nuclear safety? It's about 10x as good as natural gas. (5x if you count Fukushima--but all of those deaths are from the evacuation. Staying put had an expected death toll of zero.)
Natural gas is about 10x as safe as oil.
Oil is about 10x as safe as coal.
Yes--coal is 1000x as dangerous as nuclear.
(And note that these numbers do not include any harms from climate effects and thus are actually an understatement.)
Waste? There are two basic types:
Low-level: stuff that might have been contaminated. Compare it to ambient (things which aren't hotter than ambient shouldn't be treated as nuclear waste) to see if you need to care, usually you don't.
High-level: Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. But we are handling it wrong. The problem is that in the name of preventing proliferation we made reprocessing a dirty word. Plutonium is plutonium, isn't it? No. Bombs need Pu-239 with low amounts of Pu-240. It's extremely hard to make a bomb from reactor plutonium because it's got gobs of Pu-240. Yes, they can be separated--but anybody who can separate them can also separate U-235 from U-238. Pretty much the same thing, it's just the plutonium is 3x harder to separate.
Reprocess the spent fuel. 90% of it goes back into the reactor, even more if you're using a breeder design. Of what's left there are some commercially useful isotopes. Cobalt-60 would be pretty nasty spread over the environment but it's pretty darn good at killing things you really want dead. Say, to make shelf stable meat and dairy products. Once you get done with that you have some actual waste. Which will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and note that most of that decay is in the early part. You simply don't need elaborate precautions.
2) Batteries
3) Charge more money for electricity so people shift their demand.
4) Make hydrogen, store it and burn it to make the electricity.
Surprisingly, if you only did 4 (which is the most expensive) all of the time for every watt of power generated from solar and wind it would be very expensive, but would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear power is just that expensive.
And the price only gets more horrendous if you try to use it as a peaker.