[tremon]

some supply simply cannot reduce quickly (e.g. nuclear)

What is it about nuclear that makes it impossible to reduce as fast as gas or coal? From my layman's point of view, they all use comparable (steam) turbines to power the actual generators, so I would expect them to be equally capable of disengaging the generator from the turbine.

Is this perhaps due to design decisions, or simply a size problem? A foolish question perhaps, but I don't have more knowledge to draw from.

[_ph_]

The nuclear part of the reactor is slow to react to control input. Even when completely switched off it produces hundreds of megawatts of thermal energy. This is what doomed the Fukushima reactor. After the earthquake it was technically switched off, but required a lot of cooling as the nuclear reactions continue to go on even with the control rods completely extended. But with the failure of the power supply there was not enough cooling and the reactor eventually melted. Theoretically it should have been possible to passively cool this reactor, but due to operators mistake, one important valve was in the wrong position for that.

Beyond shutting down slowly, nuclear reactors are even slower to start up again. So after a complete shutdown it can take up to two weeks to put a reactor back into full production.

It is conceiveable to build nuclear reactors which are a bit quicker to ramp up and down - I guess more like the reactors of nuclear submarines, but our existing reactors are not suiteable for that, as this was not a requirement when they were designed. They were designed to be combined with quicker providers like gas and water plants.

[redblacktree]

I don't think you answered the question. The way I read it was "Why can't the nuclear power plant simply vent the steam they create instead of turning turbines with it?" In order to switch off power generation, even if the reactor is still creating thermal energy.

[_ph_]

That could possibly done, but then, no one had created such a design yet. It is also not trivial to cool in the gigawatt range. Actually, many power plants even run into cooling issues in some time of the year, as they often rely on local rives to provide the cooling and the water supply as well as maximum water temperatures (animal and plant live) limit their cooling capacity in normal operations.

In Belgium there were even streetlights being installed along all highways to use up nuclear energy when the grid was not consuming it.