[pydry]

It's also, like, 4x more expensive per kWh (probably 2x more expensive with variability taken into account) than wind or solar and is uninsurable without a government backstop.

I really wonder why people are so keen on it. It made sense to build them 40 years ago to deal with global warming. Today it's only financially viable if it's massively subsidized compared to wind/solar.

What is it that makes that extra cost so worthwhile?

[p1necone]

The impression I get is that people are still hung up on nuclear not getting widely adopted decades ago when it was the best option. So they're still trying to make that argument now despite there being better options because they feel wronged.

[rurounijones]

Or that we do not believe that full renewable grids are viable yet. Every single non-carbon solution (solar, wind, tidal) I have heard hand-waves away baseload and storage as something that will be solved soon(tm) by liberal application of technology(tm).

Either by magical storage solutions or massive continental / intercontinental "smart" grids that are politically unviable (No country will give up energy security by relying on a source hundres / thousands of miles away).

I would rather we start on something we know works now. Perfect is the enemy of good enough and cost is not a critical factor if you believe climate change is an existential crisis to civilisation / great filter.

I would rather have future generations be in a situation where all they have to have to deal with is decommissioning those plants.

[pydry]

There's a variety of non magical storage solutions which are already being used (pumped water storage, molten salt) but demand shifting and overproduction will probably handle the majority of the variability. Thermal storage heaters will make a comeback, industrial users will vary when they consume electricity and car chargers will be programmed to listen to the price and charge when prices are low/free/negative.

A market driven response combined with upgrading grid infrastructure and finer grained pricing will be more than enough and will be cheaper than binge building nuke plants.

Meanwhile we can gradually ramp down usage of natural gas as markets adapt to the new reality.

[rurounijones]

We are just going to have to disagree on the wide-spread viability of the storage mechanisms and political / market reaction-time here.

However I hope I at least demonstrated that it is not always a case of "So they're still trying to make that argument now despite there being better options because they feel wronged."

[iSnow]

Well, the idea of an energy source that never fails, is abundant and reliable has some allure. Solar and wind seem capricious in comparison.

Nevertheless, nuclear has some big issues: try to switch to it now and it will take decades for the power plants to be build. Expensive as well and leaves a lot of toxic and radioactive waste.

[Miraste]

The biggest thing it has going for it is constant power without fossil fuels. The grid needs backing power. I've seen a lot of other efforts at this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) there are still none that work, scale, and are affordable.

[rswail]

The grid needs consistent power that is transferrable and responsive to load.

Point sources like nuclear plants add baseload, but are not flexible in supply.

A more resilient grid will have much more interconnection between sources and sinks and much more dynamic control and feedback loops.

Solar power is currently the cheapest form of new power available, it is limited by the hours of daylight.

Wind power is weather limited, but offshore wind power can provide relatively constant generation.

Batteries and equivalent energy storage (eg pumped hydro) provide the short term grid stability requirements that are currently provided by gas-powered peak plants, but with much faster response time and much cheaper capex and opex costs.

As rooftop solar and household battery (including stationary vehicles) expand, dynamic usage will also capture a lot of the energy market from large baseload generation.

All of these are affordable now, work, and, with investment in the grid/network, scale.

[Miraste]

I should have phrased that differently; my understanding is that the problem isn't whether renewable energy is relatively affordable, it's whether it beats natural gas plants, and that so far the generation part does but the storage does not--the reason Germany's removal of nuclear energy resulted in an increase in fossil fuel use.

[pydry]

Germany's increase of fossil fuel use was temporary. It's been going down since about 2017.

[8note]

The backing power requirement is speed though. Nuclear plants are slow to start up and shut down.

Nat gas plants that can be swapped out for storage solutions makes the most sense to me to solve that problem.