[ftth_finland]

> When French nuclear plants get shut down for months at a time for maintenance what happens?

You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.

> The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity.

It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage. Where are you going to put all that pumped storage? Where are you going to get all the batteries you need? Not that many batteries are produced compared to the world’s energy needs.

The jury is still out on syngas. So far it’s expensive and inefficient. But it’s still early days.

> the fact its a horrible peaker

Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.

> So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.

This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel and don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.

[ViewTrick1002]

> Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.

Because you have no choice. There simply are not takers for your expensive energy when competing against zero marginal cost renewables.

In Australia there are grids which sometimes are met to 107% with rooftop solar alone. [1] All utility scale renewables are curtailed, let alone expensive thermal plants.

In these grids what was previously "base load" plants running at full tilt 24/7 are forced to become peakers or shut down. [2]

[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/rooftop-solar-meets-107-5-pct-of...

[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

[pydry]

>You reconsider your life choices and hire the Finnish to run your nuclear power plants instead.

The French made Finnish plant or the Moscow made Finnish plant?

It would be a cool party trick if Finland tried building its own nuclear power plants instead of just suing the French for cost overruns.

>It’s not even just the economics that rule out batteries and pumped storage

The economics dont rule them out - not unless you treat the environment as disposable.

They're much more cost effective when paired with solar and wind than nuclear power, they just dont get the subsidies.

>Where are you going to put all that pumped storage?

You might be confusing it with river dams for which the geography is actually scarce. There was actually a paper that identified a truly enormous number of potential sites globally for pumped storage. Google can easily find it for you if you have an ounce of curiosity about this.

>Where are you going to get all the batteries you need?

Make them? Did you think theyd fall out of the sky?

>The jury is still out on syngas

Syngas only makes economic sense once natural gas is banned/made cost prohibitive and solar+wind are regularly overproducing what can be otherwise stored or used.

It'd still be cheaper to only use syngas made with solar and wind than to use nuclear energy just coz nuclear energy is that absurdly, fantastically, stupidly expensive.

>Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful.

You wouldnt it's even more economically hemmoraging than using it for baseload but some people think it's a substitute for natural gas because technically it can peak.

Nuclear almost always pairs itself with natgas for peaking just like solar and wind currently do during dark, windless days.

>This seems to be a wonderful idea, as long as you assume nobody lives above the 60th parallel

A) Not many do live up there and B) there is NO shortage of available wind and hydro power options up there.

So I guess you admit it is a wonderful idea.

Of all of your critiques this is the oddest.

>don’t mind on relying on CO2 producing power sources.

Did you read the link I posted at the top? It was written before you responded to me but it was meant for you.

The straw man I referred to in that post was the one you just made.

[rstuart4133]

> Why on earth would you run a nuclear power plant as a peaker? That’s inefficient and wasteful. You run a nuclear power plant at full tilt, all the time. Then you divy up any excess demand to other sources of power.

When solar is producing, it's at a faction of the cost of nuclear. So when you say "you run it a full tilt", who is going to voluntarily pay the nuclear price for power when it costs far more?

You see that play out in countries with lots of solar now. Where I live the wholesale price goes negative most days [0]. I think driver behind this is coal makes it's money overnight, but can't ramp down quickly. Consequently when the sun comes up they have to dump power onto the grid while ramping down, forcing the other suppliers (solar, wind) off. The coal generators end up paying for the privilege of doing that. It's even worse than it seems because by the time that dumped power arrives at the consumers, it's had transmission and other changes added to it - which means the consumer is still paying something for it. Therefore any consumer that has solar doesn't take it, which reduces the market still further. That mechanism has sent a number of coal generators into early retirement here.

Nuclears ramping is worse than coals, so if the invisible market forces are left to operate freely, if the are going to have to pay someone for the privilege of running full tilt as you suggest. That can only work if governments artificially subsidise the price, or force consumers to pay more.

It is getting worse for coal here as batteries get cheaper. Coal makes most of it's money between 4PM and 9PM - which is both peak consumption and there is no solar. So they charge like a wounded bull. But batteries have halved in price over the last 5 years or so, and 5kWh battery will get you through that high price period. Because the price is so high, the battery prices have just crossed the line - it's now break even to install a small battery. In a couple of years, it will become a "no brainer". And with that coal will lose it's major market.

I have no idea what the end game is. May the price coal charges for 9PM .. 8AM goes through the roof - but that will just make a 20kWh battery cost effective. So then what? Does coal shut down completely? How does that work for industries that need a lot of power overnight? I don't know - maybe it becomes cost effective to build pumped storage at that point. I know for me personally coal shutting down won't not matter. We have a 25kWh battery (and once V2G becomes a thing we will have a gob smacking 150kWh of storage for the house), we have over provisioned solar that means even on dim days we make enough power to get by is we are careful.

I have no idea what happens for everyone else - but I'm pretty sure whatever it is, it won't be nuclear. It's too expensive, and too inflexible. So inflexible the nation with most pumped storage per unit generation was ... Japan. Because it used mostly nuclear, can't even ramp well enough to cope with the day / night transition.

[0] Download a month from here to see negative prices in the RRP column: https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...

[jenadine]

> When solar is producing, it's at a faction of the cost of nuclear. So when you say "you run it a full tilt", who is going to voluntarily pay the nuclear price for power when it costs far more?

Nuclear have high fixed cost, but very small marginal cost. So once you have a nuclear power plant, the more you produce, the cheaper it is.

[pydry]

It doesn't matter if the running costs are minimal if the capex is sky high, the site clean up costs are sky high, the insurance costs are sky high and the lifetime is fixed.

The total cost is what matters and the total cost is absurdly expensive.

If you used a nuclear plant during its entire lifetime as a peaker at, say, an average of 50% of max capacity, the average kilowatt hour would be TEN times the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced directly from solar panels or a wind turbine, ~7-8x the cost of the average kilowatt hour generated from gas and probably about 4-5x the cost of the average kilowatt hour sourced from solar/wind via battery/pumped storage and over 2x the cost of the average kilowatt hour from solar/wind via syngas.

[jenadine]

The fixed cost might be sky high, but the marginal cost are not. And so it doesn't matter if it also produce when electricity is cheap. (To a certain limit)

And if you compare the total cost, you also need to compare to the total revenue. Nuclear can produce a lot of power at the time where power is the most expensive when there is no sun and no wind.

[pydry]

"Revenue" is electricity.

I did count and compare those things. That was my entire point. Even on the darkest most windless night it cant match the cost of solar and wind and storage.

Those ongoing costs are not so low anyway. France spent an absolute fortune on maintenance.

[ViewTrick1002]

They still have fuel and wear and tear costs.

In Sweden they generally start to shut down if the price is below ~€10-15/MWh for a longer period of time.