[theshrike79]

Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind. These require power in the scale of Terawatts each year. 24/7.

Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century.

Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365.

And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.

[the_why_of_y]

What is needed as a complement to renewable energy is dispatchable generation, i.e., plants that can be quickly turned on and off as the supply from renewables changes. Nuclear (and also coal) is a really bad option for this because the time to turn these plants on an off is measured in days.

[theshrike79]

There really aren't any of these in the scale we need, they're used even today to offset peak loads. And all of them still burn fossil fuels.

The US has a fancy water pumping station in the scale we'd need (3000MW)[0], but it relies heavily on the local geography and wouldn't be economically feasible in the Netherlands for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

[pfdietz]

The reason peaking turbines use fossil fuels is the lack of a carbon tax sufficient to drive them to other inputs. In particular, they'd migrate to renewable hydrogen in a CO2-constrained situation.

[imtringued]

Intermittency is completely irrelevant because reductions in CO2 can still happen if you switch from coal baseload to load following gas which produces half as much Co2 and is only used when renewables don't produce energy.

[Amygaz]

Except than China and Australia are doing exactly what you said cannot be done.

Also Canada is complaining that they have a massive surplus of hydroelectricity, that they would like to sell us, but it’s apparently very complicated to get anyone to agree on anything, even if the total infrastructure cost and the energy would be cheaper than a nuclear plant.

[Gravityloss]

Modern electric arc steel mills can be stopped and started easily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_mill#Minimill

[pfdietz]

| Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind.

Ah, the Argument from Bad Engineering. If you stop and think real hard I'm sure you could imagine many ways to do this. And they'd be cheaper than trying to run steel mills off nuclear reactors.

[wtallis]

Ok, then: What's you're preferred form of industrial-scale energy storage?

[pfdietz]

For this application? Pumped hydro, high temperature thermal in firebrick (a technology used by the steel industry in the 1920s), and hydrogen.

Also, adapt iron/steel production to use direct electrolytic methods, although that's going to require more R&D. The potential for dispatchability of demand is enormous.