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A comment on Nuclear plants in the US keep closing. Parent comment

Re:Nuclear plants in the US keep closing by jjoonathan on Friday May 02, 2014 @05:11PM (#7688188)
They already do that. There just isn't any industry that can singlehandedly soak up all the excess power (subject to constraints of proximity to power plants, distance from cities, etc). There's a chance electric cars will change this.
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Re:Nuclear plants in the US keep closing by NickNameNick on Friday May 02, 2014 @11:35PM (#7689461)
Paper mills are pretty good at providing large amounts of instantaneous interruptible load. I'm sure there are others, but you're probably right, soaking up ALL the excess baseload in a baseload only grid i would be a challenge.

Energy storage, using electric car batteries as grid smoothing utilities is an interesting approach. Grid sized flow batteries[1] are another interesting option.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

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Re:Nuclear plants in the US keep closing by cwkoss on Friday May 02, 2014 @05:21PM (#7688246)
Bitcoin mining to the rescue!
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