[cyberax]

The nuclear power plant wear-and-tear is roughly proportional to the number of hours it runs at full power. By not running the plant, you can extend its service life (probably to more than 100 years, with periodic annealing). The main limiting factor is the reactor vessel, its steel walls can only tolerate so much neutron bombardment before becoming too brittle for service.

Nuclear power plants have similar behavior to coal plants in another regard, they take approximately the same time to ramp up/down.

> You are aware that a nuclear plant tripping offline was part of the cause of ERCOT's last winter cold problem?

They just need to build more of them. Problem solved.

Anyway, nuclear power plants went from 0% to 70% generation in France within 20 years in 70-s. We don't see anything like this happening with solar, even in smaller island countries. Solar is successful only when it's backed by fossil fuels and government subsidies to keep that fossil fuel generation running.

[pfdietz]

Sure, you can save some maintenance cost by operating at low capacity factor. But this is a minor part of the cost of nuclear energy, so you don't save much. Nuclear simply isn't constituted to be useful as a dispatchable source.

The technical ability to ramp up/down is beside the point; it's the financial ability to do so that matters.

What nuclear did in France half a century ago is irrelevant. What matters is if nuclear makes sense today. It doesn't, even if it could be done.

[cyberax]

Nuclear can be made flexible, that's my point. It works best as a constant baseload, but it's mostly because the current plants were not designed for dispatchable use (except for some plants in France).

Nuclear plants do not degrade at a constant rate, regardless of their power. By idling the plant, you extend its service life, essentially amortizing the capital cost over a longer period of time. And the capital cost is the main driver in the cost of the nuclear power, as you're pointing out yourself.

[pfdietz]

You ignore the counterargument I already gave you to what you're saying there.

Nuclear can be made technically flexible. It can't be made economically flexible. The large fixed costs prevent the technical ability you are describing there from being useful. It's pyrrhic engineering, straining to achieve an outcome that's useless. Even France depends largely on the rest of Europe to deal with variations in demand rather than spooling their power plants up and down.

[cyberax]

I think I replied to your counter-argument, but I think I did not explain my argument properly.

In the case of nuclear power plants, the expenses are front-loaded in the construction (and the future major maintenance, like reactor vessel annealing). The _running_ expenses are trivial by comparison. So a nuclear power plant saves a much smaller percentage of its cost on a per-month basis when it's not running.

Honestly, I looked at nuclear energy in a lot of details. It absolutely is a viable and economic path forward, but it stymied by the lack of political will. Nuclear projects take at least 8-10 years to complete, so politicians are less interested in pushing them. And commercial companies are hesitant to invest with such long repayment periods.