[ajross]

That's simply not true, because wind output never goes to zero across the whole grid. Even assuming the pessimal case[1], wind needs to drop below 5.5% (1/18th) of its average capacity before nuclear even reaches break-even!

What fraction of the time is whole-grid-amortized wind capacity running at 5% of average? Has that ever even happened? I don't have numbers, but I'm willing to bet that this has never actually happened.

What you've done is try to counter my overwhelming quantitative argument with a qualitative hedge ("but storage"). Please, (please!) look up the numbers here.

Nuclear is a borderline scandal. If it was some other federal subsidy of an industry you disliked, you'd almost certainly call it fraud.

[1] i.e. no use of gas peaker plants, legacy nuclear, solar, pumped hydro, batteries, etc... Literally trying to run the whole grid on wind and wind alone.

[infamia]

How do you explain the grid meltdowns in recent years in areas that have tilted their output towards renewables? California and Europe have had some pretty epic grid destabilizations recently, and all the analysis I've looked at points squarely at the unreliability of renewables. Base load matters, we have seen this time and again. Stitching together a bazaar of unreliable renewables with overlapping failure modes and claiming it is just as good as traditional base load providers has been proven false thus far. Either it can't be done with our current tech, or we don't know how to do it (and we should not try until we are confident we can make it work well).

[ajross]

I'm not sure I see the evidence you're invoking? "Grid meltdowns" are quite rare, actually, and on the whole electrical infrastructure has been getting more reliable over time, not less.

And in any case the two biggest "meltdown" events in recent history in the USA were in... Texas, and had to do with weather effects on fossil fuel generators.

[infamia]

California has had rolling outages for years and in 2020 they had a blackout that impacted hundreds of thousands of residents during a heatwave. The failure occurred a bit after dusk when solar stopped producing and other states didn't have as much power to send to California to make up he difference. All the information is in the link below. California's energy policy looks a lot like Germany's which is to heavily weight your grid towards renewables, call yourself green, and then prey your neighbors produce enough energy to keep your grid stable. All the information is in the link below. The governor of California enacted a state of emergency concerning power shortages and narrowly averted another grid failure last month, so I wouldn't say that their reliability is anywhere close to acceptable.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2020-10-...

[pfdietz]

Also weather effects on a nuclear plant there.