[kragen]

It's unavoidable that if you get almost all of your power from some source, but demand varies, you will have a lower capacity factor for that source, unless you have utility-scale power. France does indeed have to curtail nuclear power plant output, because they get almost all their electrical power from nukes, and they don't have big enough resistors to burn up the excess electrical energy that would be produced otherwise. The US has a higher nuclear capacity factor because it gets most of its power from other sources.

> This characteristic is called being dispatchable.

While I mostly appreciate your contributions to this conversation as being informative, a dispatchable plant is one that you can turn on and off to respond to demand, not one that cannot be higher than the wind itself.

[acidburnNSA]

If we do get serious about intermittent renewable scale-ups without fracked gas backup we will have to build giant energy storage systems that the nukes will be able to feed into just like the solar PV and wind.

Additionally, nukes can be used for district heating, seawater desalination, hydrogen production, and lots of other non-electric things when the electricity demand is low by using steam bypass techniques.

Regarding correction: I meant to say that but thank you for pointing out that it made no sense as written. I have edited accordingly.

[kragen]

That's an excellent point about the fungibility of energy storage. But I don't think the lower capacity factor of nuclear plants in France is a reasonable argument against nuclear energy anyway.

The non-electric uses of nuclear thermal energy you mention are potentially interesting, but essentially they're just a slightly different form of demand response. If you're doing demand response in your desal plant, you can do it regardless of whether it's an MSF plant driven from nuclear thermal power or an RO plant driven by electric pumps. (And RO is usually considered more efficient.) I think it's more common for waste heat from power plants to be a nuisance that results in cooling towers rather than an asset that results in district heating, although I'm not entirely sure why that is.