That consistent output isn’t as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they’re available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I’m turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren’t being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There’s some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
This is the trap. The fossil fuel industry has co-opted wind and PV solar by way of filling in the gaps and transitioning to net zero emissions. Of course, the gaps will always be there and the transition will never complete and “net zero” seems to just leave the door open on fossil fuels forever.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, has the reliability that @FireTower@lemmy.world mentioned and it closes any of the gaps from wind and solar right up. You don’t have to quickly cut the power on a reactor if it’s sunny or windy, just divert it to hydrogen and ammonia production. Even if the efficient high temperature electrolysis tech isn’t ready yet, it doesn’t really matter since it’s emissions free. Furthermore, nuclear power produces good heat/steam to support cogeneration and various industrial processes.
Nonsense. Conservatives have brought up nuclear for decades as a way to play “gotcha” with anti-nuclear progressives. Maggie Thatcher, for example, embraced the science of climate change early on as a way to push nuclear. It was never serious, though. Always a political game that resulted in no new nuclear being built while coal and oil continued to ramp up.
I think Thatcher just wanted to privatize, deregulate, and liberalize as much as she could, all fundamentally bad moves from the perspectives of both labor and greenhouse emissions concerns.
I totally agree with this. A lot of places have cheap electricity in off-peak hours, as a workaround to this limitation (steady output).
I think that this obsession about intermittent power comes partially from the idea that any new sources of power must be drop-in replacements for the systems that we’ve had for so many decades. However those systems run the way they do as an accident of technology, not because of a careful analysis and design to match optimal usage patterns.
im assuming by “winding down” you mean production of power? Not shutting down the plants, nuclear plants operate the most efficiently at high capacity factor, when they aren’t producing power the fuel is still decaying, thus you should be producing power for AS LONG as possible. This is why if you ever look at capacity factor >80% is really common, i’ve even seen >100% a couple of times, as well as the term “baseload plant” being used almost always in reference to nuclear.
That wouldn’t make sense for an existing nuclear plant, the nuclear plant should stay running in place of solar/wind. As you would be burning money actively otherwise, or you could just shut it down permanently, thats the other option.
Yes, running them at a lower level, and yes, that would be my point. You can run them down when renewable sources pick up, but that’s inefficient. Solar/wind don’t mix well with nuclear; you’re leaving something on the table if you try.
That’s not a particularly complex way of looking at it. the nuclear plant is a base load plant, meaning you can pretty much just subtract its output from the predicted consumption, and then you can simply have less renewable energy, load peaking is midday anyway, which is when solar is productive. (or have less energy storage, since the nuclear plant will combat that), you would have a more consistent and regular power production at that point, and waste less money. (since you aren’t burning money on running a nuclear plant at a reduced/no output, you would technically be burning solar energy (you cant burn wind energy, you just stop the turbine, and it wont produce power) but that’s cheaper anyway, and besides beyond install costs, very low continual maintenance)
Though if you were going to shutdown the nuclear plant at its EOL then you would need to increase production of renewables, which is easy enough. Saying that “nuclear and solar/wind don’t mix” is just kind of weird. Realistically the only better mix would be solar/wind and gas since gas can manage peak loads super trivially, which is of course not very green. So arguably nuclear would be your ideal match unless you went explicitly solar/wind.
That consistent output isn’t as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they’re available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I’m turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren’t being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There’s some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
This is the trap. The fossil fuel industry has co-opted wind and PV solar by way of filling in the gaps and transitioning to net zero emissions. Of course, the gaps will always be there and the transition will never complete and “net zero” seems to just leave the door open on fossil fuels forever.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, has the reliability that @FireTower@lemmy.world mentioned and it closes any of the gaps from wind and solar right up. You don’t have to quickly cut the power on a reactor if it’s sunny or windy, just divert it to hydrogen and ammonia production. Even if the efficient high temperature electrolysis tech isn’t ready yet, it doesn’t really matter since it’s emissions free. Furthermore, nuclear power produces good heat/steam to support cogeneration and various industrial processes.
Nonsense. Conservatives have brought up nuclear for decades as a way to play “gotcha” with anti-nuclear progressives. Maggie Thatcher, for example, embraced the science of climate change early on as a way to push nuclear. It was never serious, though. Always a political game that resulted in no new nuclear being built while coal and oil continued to ramp up.
I think Thatcher just wanted to privatize, deregulate, and liberalize as much as she could, all fundamentally bad moves from the perspectives of both labor and greenhouse emissions concerns.
I totally agree with this. A lot of places have cheap electricity in off-peak hours, as a workaround to this limitation (steady output).
I think that this obsession about intermittent power comes partially from the idea that any new sources of power must be drop-in replacements for the systems that we’ve had for so many decades. However those systems run the way they do as an accident of technology, not because of a careful analysis and design to match optimal usage patterns.
im assuming by “winding down” you mean production of power? Not shutting down the plants, nuclear plants operate the most efficiently at high capacity factor, when they aren’t producing power the fuel is still decaying, thus you should be producing power for AS LONG as possible. This is why if you ever look at capacity factor >80% is really common, i’ve even seen >100% a couple of times, as well as the term “baseload plant” being used almost always in reference to nuclear.
That wouldn’t make sense for an existing nuclear plant, the nuclear plant should stay running in place of solar/wind. As you would be burning money actively otherwise, or you could just shut it down permanently, thats the other option.
Yes, running them at a lower level, and yes, that would be my point. You can run them down when renewable sources pick up, but that’s inefficient. Solar/wind don’t mix well with nuclear; you’re leaving something on the table if you try.
That’s not a particularly complex way of looking at it. the nuclear plant is a base load plant, meaning you can pretty much just subtract its output from the predicted consumption, and then you can simply have less renewable energy, load peaking is midday anyway, which is when solar is productive. (or have less energy storage, since the nuclear plant will combat that), you would have a more consistent and regular power production at that point, and waste less money. (since you aren’t burning money on running a nuclear plant at a reduced/no output, you would technically be burning solar energy (you cant burn wind energy, you just stop the turbine, and it wont produce power) but that’s cheaper anyway, and besides beyond install costs, very low continual maintenance)
Though if you were going to shutdown the nuclear plant at its EOL then you would need to increase production of renewables, which is easy enough. Saying that “nuclear and solar/wind don’t mix” is just kind of weird. Realistically the only better mix would be solar/wind and gas since gas can manage peak loads super trivially, which is of course not very green. So arguably nuclear would be your ideal match unless you went explicitly solar/wind.