No? Either you have enough nuclear to cover 100% of peak demand, in which case you just run them exclusively (at a terrible capacity factor) because nuclear is almost exclusively capex, or you don't, in which case you need gas peakers.
Nuclear is emphatically not an instant-on hot backup. Plants take time to spool up, and very importantly time to cool down. Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off, it produces energy that has to go somewhere while the intermediate fission products decay over hours-to-days.
> Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off,
Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)
> Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)
That's exactly the incorrect analysis that caused the meltdown!
That use of "and" and "both" is simply wrong. It wasn't an unforseeable collision of two events, it was a single event (an earthquake) with a predictable correlate (a tsunami). It's not like people didn't know that tsunamis follow earthquakes, and no one who does know that would make the argument you just did.
This was literally the definition of a black swan event: "an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight"
No, Japanese authorities and TEPCo knew tgat earthquakes and tsunamis could happen, and usually together. They planned for it, they simply planned insufficiently, so quite the opposite of a black swan.
The definition of a catastrophic one-in-a-lifetime event: you can't plan for it.
Fukushima had been in operation since 1971. You truly really believe that there were no earthquakes in the meantime, and the only reason for failure in 2011 is that they didn't plan for the largest earthquake and one of the worst tsunamis in Japanese history?
In this scenario you could just run the nuclear plant all the time, but just direct its electric production to heating a giant pool of water or whatever.
Then when the grid needs more power you do less of that, and instead send electricity to the grid.
Yes, but the point is that the problem is isomorphic to wind or solar: you get power when you don't want it. So nuclear isn't backstopping any particular need, it has the same drawbacks. The reason gas plants are used as peaker plants is that they can be turned on and off more or less instantly.
You're just assigning magical value to "turn it off".
That's only a big deal with fossil fuels due to the fuel cost, the fuel cost of nuclear is marginal.
Yes, I agree that it's stupid to build a (big) nuclear power plant only to use it to boil an Olympic sized swimming pool most of the time.
But that's stupid because we're over-relying on "green" energy that can't provide baseload power.
It's even more stupid with fossil fuels, now you also need an entirely different backup infrastructure, but the fossil one pollutes much more than nuclear.
The problem with your logic is, that nuclear is _only_ competitive with a 100% utilization rate/capacity factor. Only with these 90+% capacity factors do you get to competitive rates per kWh produced. Otherwise the initial CapEx is just too large, especially in a non-zero rate environment, as these plants are _already_ scoped/calculated/financed to 40 years. At 90+% capacity factor!
That amount of CapEx is basically impossible without either very high earning potential (that’s why TSMC works. Everyone will just pay their price) or government backing (because then you don’t have to care about financing and optionality costs and can just pay for it with taxes). Neither one will be possible, at least in western societies
(And yes this ignores a certain amount of externalities, like the tendency of requiring large scale evacuations in their surroundings every second decade, but we can set that aside, as it’s irrelevant for the economic argument above)
At some point society will realize comparing power pricing to the lowest cost per kwh on a given day is a silly waste of time.
What matters is what is the most realistic mix of power generation and storage for 24x7 reliability. This can of course look very different depending on the situation. Many will argue for distributed storage (e.g. home batteries) - but that just means poor people don't get reliable electric service.
I really don't find that solar is "too cheap to meter" during peak sunlight very interesting. Who cares. What I find interesting is that I can turn a dial on my nuclear power plant to whatever it is I feel like at any time, and have it operating at that capacity within an hour or three.
Since we have such a dial, if you owned both the solar and the nuclear plants you would very likely combine them in a manner that maximizes profits while maintaining continuous service. Short of clouds, regional solar and wind prediction is extremely good to the point that modern nuclear plants may as well be load following. Add in a bit of battery for those minutes (hours max) that surprise you and you're good to go on that front.
You still will need some gas peaker plants for those crazy once-in-a-decade days you don't want to overbuild nuclear capacity for, but you could drastically reduce this infrastructure from what is effectively a 1:1 ratio today.
How would they regulate fluctuations in demand? Nuclear can’t do that. You need storage, or a reasonably scalable generation medium. Nuclear as a base load is moot
You can technically use nuclear power plants as load followers in much thr same way that you can technically keep warm by setting $50 bills on fire.
Load following with a nuclear plant basically means provisioning a 2GW plant and then using, say, 0.5GW of that - throwing away the rest.
(since the vast majority of the cost is capex not fuel)
Every kilowatt hour produced by that 2GW power plant is already 5x the cost of a kilowatt hour produced by a wind farm. If you assume it is used for load following that goes from 5x-20x depending on capacity utilization.
Pumping water uphill (snowy 2, coire glas, etc) is way way WAY cheaper and the geography to do that is ridiculously common.
Electrolyzing water and storing hydrogen underground is way cheaper too, and can be stored for months cheaply.
Nuke plant -> btc mining with excess load when load is not demanded
Nuke plant -> consumers when in demand
Pretty easy equation, much more reliable and much more scalable and not subject to the whims of the elements / can be done anywhere and on any planet in the solar system.
BTC mining is the exact opposite of scalable: there's a fixed supply of BTC available to mining, so you can only pay for so many nuclear power plants with it. Even the entire bitcoin market cap is about enough for 20 nuclear power plants, optimistically (and that's ignoring the cost of the miners themselves, risk, etc, etc).
Mining fees will more than cover mining costs when the block reward becomes negligible. The use case of balancing excess power generation and load profitably is real and would significantly reduce carbon emissions if understood & properly implemented. Instead of approaching with emotions, I recommend investigating ideas with an open mind.
Beyond that, bitcoin works and is here to stay. It is the first sovereign currency free from the tyranny of small minded rulers. It will always have significant and likely increasing value over time, and its pattern of value generation (bound to physics / energy) will always exist now in one form or another.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
Quote:
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Even in nuclear-packed France (which exports electricity) fossil fuels are also burnt in order to produce electricity since nuclear's inception, for most of the load-following and peak (about 9% in 2021), and it would be much worse without hydro.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
On the other hand green hydrogen (produced by intermittent renewables at over-electric-generation time) can be stored then used at insufficient-generation time.