[hk1337]

Nuclear power is good for providing base power not for reacting to spikes in demand. You cannot just spin up production of a nuclear power plant when you need it and shut it down when you don’t. They’re always producing so when demand is low, they’re producing too much and wasting it. If the California grid cannot meet its demand at its lowest, then yes, base power like nuclear would be a good solution. Heatwaves generally pass though.

[tjansen]

That's pretty much the same issue you have with renewables, especially wind. Sometimes it will just produce more than you need. The solution is the same: use overproduction to produce hydrogen or for desalination plants. It's actually easier in the case of nuclear, because demand is more predictable than weather, and you have excess energy day, not only on a few days per week or month.

[zibby8]

> The solution is the same: use overproduction to produce hydrogen or for desalination plants.

Does anywhere actually do this? Storing hydrogen at scale seems insanely difficult and desalinating water wouldn't let you use the energy later. AFAIK, most places deal with surplus energy by putting it into a big battery, usually the physical kind of battery like pumping water up hill and holding it behind a hydroelectric dam.

[tjansen]

> Storing hydrogen at scale seems insanely difficult

Yes, it's difficult, but at least in Germany hydrogen is considered as the most likely carbon-free fuel for trucks.

> desalinating water wouldn't let you use the energy later.

Storing desalinated water shouldn't be difficult, you can fill up lakes.

> like pumping water up hill and holding it behind a hydroelectric dam.

That would make sense as a backup for an unreliable power source like wind, but probably not for nuclear power.

[ZeroGravitas]

Many pumped hydro station were originally built to use cheap overnight electricity from nuclear plants when demand was low, and timeshift it to spikes of demand later.

[ZeroGravitas]

Its likely that industrial users of Hydrogen will buy electrolizers and generate and store their own hydrogen when off peak energy is available.

This both lets then act as distributed demand and saves on transport costs. Simce they use hydrogen anyway, they already need to store it.

[zibby8]

Ok, so industrial users buy hydrogen. And then how do you convert the currency they give you into energy when you need it later? If you're just trying to find an economic use for excess power, you might as well mine Bitcoin.

[MagnumOpus]

> You cannot just spin up production of a nuclear power plant when you need it and shut it down when you don’t. They’re always producing so when demand is low, they’re producing too much and wasting it.

Yes you can, pretty much any plant built in the past 20 years does that and in France/Germany even older plants have been designed to do it.

(Economically it's undesirable of course, because the marginal operating cost of a nuclear plant is very low.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...

[im3w1l]

I think the financial markets can solve this. People like me who like the luxury of having reliable electricity every day of the year can buy futures from a nuclear operator. And people who don't mind cooking in the middle of the night or having a week-long power outage now and then can buy solar or something on the spot market.

[DisjointedHunt]

A surplus of energy is always better than a deficit.

You could have scheduled applications to divert the energy to if storage is not built out. Desalinate the pacific, for example, pump the water inland for drought time when supply exceeds demand.

[ZeroGravitas]

You could charge the EVs.

But it seems very hard to find someone who likes both nuclear power and EVs despite them being so well suited.