Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we’re bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.
Some of the smartest people in the world have been working for over half a century to get better. And yet it’s still getting more expensive to build them.
Maybe it’s just hard and a dead end. Like the paddlewheel or dirigibles. At the time they felt like the future but there were unforeseen problems in scaling them up to meet expectations, and we found better, safer ways of doing the same thing.
Small nuclear reactors seem to work pretty well. Using them for deep space or disaster response would make sense. Just park a Seawolf off the coast and hook it up to support the grid.
It is not hard due to lack of knowledge, it is hard due to politics, and the fact that they require trained / skilled builders and operators.
So it’s a cold start problem. As we aren’t making many, we don’t have much trained staff.
Haven’t we been building reactors for decades though? Are all those guys dead along with the COBOL programmers?
They don’t think that. Take South Australia for example - it’s moving towards 100% renewables with the help of a mix of sources including battery storage. There’s no need for non-renewable nuclear energy in the mix.
Nuclear solves one of the biggest issues with renewables because the energy output can be adjusted.
This in turn means that you need less energy storage capacity in order to supplant existing technologies.
Honestly I’m just happy we’re moving away from fossil fuels.
I’m taking a course on power generation, transmission, and distribution, and you basically said what I wanted to say.
If you look at generation in California, there’s a huge peak during the day (due to the increased supply of power from solar) and a decreased demand for power in general (because needs are being met by individual solar). The extra power needs to be stored/used or wasted. No other options, which is what makes solar weaker (than it could be) right now - we don’t have the storage capacity to be keeping the excess for nighttime.
Yes, power output can be regulated in nuclear energy. It is, however, not economical to do so most off the time. Building a nuclear reactor is a massive capital investment, so any time you’re not running at 100% you are increasing your payback time, which leads to more expensive electricity.
Nuclear is a great supplement to wind and solar PV.
Especially when the share of renewables get close to 100%.
Going from 85-90% to 100% imply to almost double the capacity of renewables energy available, even with batteries and thermal power stations as a backup.
On the other hand having 10-15% of nuclear really helps to stabilize the grid and lower the need to oversize the renewables power production.
