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.
trust me, I have thought about it. I was enthusiastic about bitcoin early on, but I have become more and more pessimistic about it becoming a net good as time goes on. Especially this idea of it being useful for promoting green energy, especially a useful supply of green energy for the grid, just doesn't hold up much to scrutiny, especially at scale.
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.
You are repeating a myth.
Load following is used in France: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
It mostly isn't used in the US due to regulations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716
The reason load following is not generally used is because because the economics of nuclear (large fixed costs) favour base load.