[bryanlarsen]

If you need something to supply power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you need it to supply peak power needs, not base power needs. And if nuclear can supply peak power needs, then you might as well just have a grid that is 100% nuclear.

If nuclear can't supply peak power needs, then you need batteries or something else to do that. And if you're using batteries, it's a lot cheaper to charge them with solar than with nuclear.

[Saline9515]

France has been doing this for a long time and balances the unreliable loads of the solar and wind productions from Spain and Germany using pilotable nuclear production. https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix

[preisschild]

You are not thinking about the big picture.

If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper than running Solar/Wind when the weather is perfect and backup/storage when not, then why should we scale solar/wind up that much to begin with?

[bryanlarsen]

> If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper

It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive. Running nuclear intermittently is more than 20x as expensive.

[Saline9515]

Sorry, that's not true. France, which has the most stringent and costly regulations, produces nuclear electricity at around 70€/MWh[0] on average. And this production is intermittent, pilotable, and more importantly, at a very large scale, for a small carbon and spacial footprint, which isn't possible to do with batteries at the moment.

[0]https://www.vie-publique.fr/en-bref/291910-energie-un-nouvel...

[throw0101c]

> It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive.

Not according to the Ontario Energy Board, which sets wholesale rates; see Table 2:

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...

[bryanlarsen]

10s of billions of dollars of costs have been uploaded from the electricity wholesalers to taxpayers in Ontario. Excluding those makes Ontario numbers misleading.

[throw0101c]

Talk to Mike Harris about privatizing stuff in Ontario: there's no reason why Ontario Hydro could not have been kept 100% in public hands and the debt serviced 'internally' instead of being assigned to OEFC.

At the end of the day it's still electrical rate payers paying the bill. (Just like ratepayers are paying for the failed experiment of McGuinty's Energy Green Act: what's the cost of that?)

As it stands all current nuclear refurbishments are being done with commercial rates, as is dealing with nuclear waste (per the NFWA).

[olyjohn]

Compare battery costs from 1990 to today. Don't you think that if we actually did some investment in nuclear, that we could bring the cost of that down significantly as well?

[bryanlarsen]

France didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 1980's. China didn't experience cost reduction in their flurry in the 2010's. So if there is some sort of volume effect available, it'd need to be a number significantly greater than a few dozen. And nobody is proposing building in that sort of quantity.