[mulmen]

Thanks for this, it is very informative and not something I had considered before.

I'm curious about the statement about renewables though because it seems that with wind or solar the production is very irregular even in normal operation. Doesn't that mean there has to be some technology to balance individual generator differences which would make re-starting those installations easier?

Re: Nuclear, how much energy is required to start up a nuke plant? If decaying toxins are a risk shouldn't those be prioritized? I might misunderstand what you mean by toxins, does that reduce production for some time?

[Filligree]

"Nuclear poisons" refers to neutron-absorbing substances produced through transmutation. When the reactor shuts down, it will continue to produce these for some time after the shutdown -- Xenon-135, particularly.

This proves problematic during reactor startup. Since it's absorbing neutrons, the controllers would need to retract the control rods further out than during steady state in order to achieve a replication rate of 1.0. However, xenon-135 stops being a nuclear poison after absorbing its neutrons... which means the replication rate will increase, and the reactor might run away.

This is part of what happened in Chernobyl, though they'd also disabled most of their safeties. (And dismantled the others.)

Regardless, nuclear poisons are something to keep a very careful eye on.

[dredmorbius]

True.

Xenon poisoning was discovered at the Hanford, Washington, B reactor during the WWII Manhatten Project.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

[sunkensheep]

There can be issues with a line-commutated inverter or asynchronous generation (wind-farms might have both) if the fault level is too low (synchronous plant too small or too distant). More recent research has shown the benefits of adding grid support (reactive power control, fault response) to the control system of renewable generation.

In future I would expect renewable and storage elements to provide black-start frequency reference.