[thomasmg]

If you remove environmental regulations, then (pumped) hydro, wind, and photovoltaics would also be much cheaper, and much faster to build. For windmills, it's birds and whatnot, for photovoltaics (specially large-scale in the mounts) it's wildlife and other environmental impact.

[realusername]

Yes, but those are still different from weather failures. When there's no sun and no wind, you can do whatever you want with regulations, you can't bring it back. Weather failure is something unique to renewables on top of everything else.

[natmaka]

All modern electric grids are interconnected at continental level because it is by far the best approach on nearly all accounts (optimization, robustness, resilience...). Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

At continental level "no sun and no wind" is extremely rare and doesn't last.

The nature of nuclear power doesn't make it 100% available (no equipment is), therefore a classic way of presenting the challenge, such as "nuclear power is perfectly controllable and it's necessary" (two lies), is a distortion.

The major intellectual fraud consists of considering the characteristics of a type of energy source (renewable, nuclear, etc.) when all that matters is the adequacy of the electricity system, i.e., to begin with, its ability to meet demand.

In terms of the imperfection of sources and equipment, which prohibits us from always expecting them to be ready to produce, the solution is known, applies to all types of sources and equipment, and is already in place: a production fleet containing a number of units that sufficiently reduces the effect of their individual variability (whatever the cause).

The French nuclear fleet is thus made up of a sufficiently large number of reactors (57 in 2025) to make it unlikely that they will all be shut down simultaneously, and for their combined flexibility to increase its "controllability."

This smooths out the impact of imponderables because it is possible to approximate the probability of failure of each reactor (its reliability) and because they are not identical, so the discovery of a defect does not necessarily imply the shutdown of the entire fleet.

A renewable mix at continental level will be way better on nearly all accounts (cheaper, less dangerous, no dependency on any fuel, no durably very dangerous 'hot waste', no weapon proliferation...).