[cyberax]

> By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that couldn't be scheduled).

That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The inspections then found potential problems, so other reactors did additional maintenance and checks.

They could have been deferred further if needed, but politicians were not willing to make the call.

> Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans.

Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including solar and wind.

> As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.

Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9 years (they're built in parallel).

[formerly_proven]

Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity. Some are technically capable but load-following seems to be quite taxing on the equipment due to pressure and temperature cycling.

However it is very suitable for base load generation, there's a reason why oil and coal companies lost their marbles in the 50s and astroturfed anti-nuclear into existence.

I'm not sure if that's their most-effective campaign ever or if it's a tie with BP's popularization of the carbon footprint, which atomizes responsibility for climate change and has successfully delayed systematic action for decades. And even managed to get greens and climate change activists to do their work for them. Just like with nuclear. It's actually, genuinely incredible.

[cyberax]

> Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity.

That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for that. France does this, for example.

You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant level and just dump excess power into their cooling system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.

Most nuclear power plants do not do this because they don't need to do it.

[pydry]

>This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.

Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high.

If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about 2x$168 = $336.

(LCOE listed here is $168: https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-surge-is-circuit...)

For reference, Bhadla solar park sells a MWh for roughly $30, so even if you charged $300 to store and retrieve it you could still provide cheaper electricity than a load following nuclear power plant running at 50% of nameplate.

[cyberax]

I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/

For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost.

As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.

[pfdietz]

Many of the entries in that table (LTO) are for 20 year life extensiom of existing plants, not new plants.

[cyberax]

And so what? Modern nuclear reactors are licensed for 60 years and are expected to last 80-100 years with maintenance (reactor vessel annealing, mainly).

This is exactly a point in favor of nuclear.

[locallost]

It's been proven to work and the only able to displace fossil fuels, yet it's existed for 70 years and not even reduced the amount of fossil fuels used in electricity production. Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Displacing? I see increasing use of fossil fuels to backup up renewables.

[locallost]

Check numbers for Germany, Denmark, Scotland, Portugal etc.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Yep, coal goes up.

[locallost]

Maybe you're reading the data upside down. Take care.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Still goes up. Does not matter how much you are trying to gaslight me

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...