Svante

@Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.

@MattMastodon @Sodis

I’ll try to explain the 40%, sorry for the parts that you already know.

Electric energy is always produced at the same time (and »place« roughly) as it is consumed. (You can’t pump electricity into some reservoir to be consumed later, you always need a different energy form for storage.)

The problem with volatile sources is that they mostly (more than half) produce energy at the wrong time and/or the wrong place, and at other times produce nothing.
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@MattMastodon @Pampa @AlexisFR @Wirrvogel @Sodis

A few points to factor in:

- A nuclear power station has a much longer lifetime than batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.

- You need not only the batteries, but also the panels/turbines to fill them.

- Conversion and storage losses are significant. Attached is a rough overview for H₂.

- Transmission infrastructure costs to/from individual cars are significant.

- 24 h is not enough by far to balance out usual fluctuations.

@MattMastodon @Sodis Careful about labels. »Renewables« often includes biomass (which is just fast-track fossil tbh) and hydro (which is not so volatile). I’m talking about wind and solar specifically (volatiles).

40% is roughly the mean capacity factor of a good mix of volatiles. This is what you can directly feed to the user from the windmill/panel, without storage. You can expand a bit by massive overbuilding, but you can’t overbuild your way out of no wind at night.

@MattMastodon @Sodis Again: that demand is lower at night is already factored in. Roughly 40% of demand can be directly met by volatile sources. You may think nuclear is slow to deploy, but it’s still much faster than anything that doesn’t exist.

The gap is 60%. Gas is a fossil fuel. Varying use is mostly a euphemism. If you hurt industry, you won’t have the industry to build clean energy sources.

@Emil You know, in a sane world, moving a handful of effectively harmless concrete blocks around wouldn’t be newsworthy.

But even in our world, I think that the message should focus more on how little that actually is, how it is all there is, and how obviously it can be successfully done.

Leave some burns on fear-mongers while you’re at it.

@tomtrottel @Emil @Tylerdurdon

Well, there we are at the divide between facts and opinion, and that between a civil discussion and ad hominem attacks.

Fact: nobody was ever harmed by spent nuclear fuel. Really. Look it up wherever you like.

Fact: that is not by chance, but by engineering.

Fact: the total amount of all the world’s spent nuclear fuel ever, in the shape of a cube, would have a side length of about 35 m (before recycling).

Fact: I have no money invested in nuclear energy.

@Emil Funny thing, the onboard reactor probably produces more power than the gas it carries could.

But anyway, yes, again, nuclear propulsion for ships is quite obviously a very good match.

@tomtrottel @Emil @Tylerdurdon No, it is a classification.

It’s like saying »human feces is a huge problem« — well, yes, but that’s why we have toilets and sewage plants and so on — it’s solved.

As is nuclear waste.

@Brownboy13 @Emil Not perfect, but definitely better in every way than oil.