[zahma]

There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Renewables are great and have proliferated spectacularly and I’m excited to see that they continue, but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources. Either we have some pretty rapid and miraculous advances in large-scale battery storage and deployment infrastructure, or we stay on fossil fuels. But when those run out, are you hedging your bets on battery storage and energy management infrastructure handling ever-growing demand? Or would you rather small-scale nuclear offset some of that.

There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.

[krasin]

> There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage.

Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah.

1. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

[riffraff]

> but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources.

It's not like turning nuclear reactors on and off is trivial, nuclear power plants are not used as peakers either so either we use batteries or we'll rely on gas for a while.

[zahma]

It's not just about peaks, it's about covering the gaps when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. We know the former happens every night, and wind is less predictable.

That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice. We're not there yet -- not by a long shot. Someone pointed to California as a leader in this field. Even if California manages to piece together something, do you think the 49 other states will follow suit? Certainly not with this federal government at the helm.

Speaking in general terms, I'm guessing these nuclear facilities probably have a capital runway of a few decades. Hopefully in that time, we'll have the storage networks and plans to offset peaks and cover intermittent lulls at the energy source.

The priority is to stop GHG emissions, and it's absolutely absurd to me that we're willing to sit on this technology from irrational fear while we poison our planet and our bodies. It should outrage people here how many die from pollution and how many more will die from climate changes. Enough is enough.

[cesarb]

> That's why I'm advocating for nuclear. It's not meant to turn on and off -- fine, but it will buy us time to invest in storage infrastructure and develop plans to move those electrons around at a moment's notice.

One of the objections against nuclear is that it takes way too long to build (for instance, the latest nuclear reactor near where I live has been on construction for decades, and is still far from being complete). Which means it can't help "buy us time".

[anovikov]

There is surprisingly little storage (or in some better cases, no storage at all) required to balance renewables and studies from 10-15 years ago confirm it, that's a favourite theme of conservatives but no longer brought up in serious circles. We already have all the production capacity (online and in committed, funded projects) for the required amount of batteries and will have many times more in only a few years - batteries will be there even before solar panels themselves will, mainly because installing them is simpler and they immediately make quick money, payback periods are shorter (and getting shorter as more solar is installed).

[pfdietz]

Also, because we're going to need storage anyway, for vehicles.

A Tesla has maybe 70 kWh of batteries. There are 283 million motor vehicles in the US. Electrify them all at that rate and it's 20 TWh of storage, about 40 hours worth of the average US grid consumption.