[tfourb]

Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark, which also has excellent links to reliable hydropower from Norway and Sweden? Especially when your greatest external security threat is Russia which has openly threatened targeting nuclear reactors of a country they are trying to invade?

Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.

Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.

[KaiserPro]

> Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark

Strategic mix.

I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)

[actionfromafar]

Nuclear is a strategic drone target first and foremost. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.

[00N8]

Not really - for either system, the transformer substations are the part that's vulnerable to drones. Any munition capable of breaching the outer containment structure of a nuclear power plant (let alone impacting the core, dozens to hundreds of meters further inside) is closer to a bunker buster than a drone.

What I'd really like to see though is heavy subsidies for synthetic e-fuel plants running a carbon negative process during off peak hours. That would work with both solar & nuclear.

[actionfromafar]

Ok, nuclear is a strategic missile target. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.

[adrian_b]

Nuclear could be more distributed too.

The obstacles for small nuclear reactors have not been technical, but the fear that they may be more easily misused.

There are good arguments against nuclear, but not being more distributed is not one of them.

[actionfromafar]

No I am not against that. I'm just against any medium-to-large to large nuclear reactor built in within striking distance of a credible foe. Which is to say, at this point in time, all of them.

But if we start producing Fallout style reactors everywhere, sure, why not.

[tfourb]

> Strategic mix

Nuclear doesn't vibe well with a grid that is supposed to be dominated by renewable electricity generation. You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.

So if nuclear is supposed to have a "strategic" effect on your electricity mix, you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand. But static demand is poison for a renewable generation. You actually want demand to be highly dynamic via grid-tied batteries and dynamic loads (i.e. electric car charging, scheduled appliances and heating, cost-dependent production) so that it can be tailored to supply and keep the grid stable.

> I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable.

I doubt that this is a requirement for Denmark. There is tremendous hydro capacity in northern Scandinavia and the country is tied into the EU and UK grid.

[KaiserPro]

> You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.

you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.

But to your point, pan continental links are not that practical for making up ~30% of a country's peak demand.

> you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand.

If you look at the grid on aggregate, there is always a static demand. If you look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ you'll see the variance in use is 30% over 24 hours.

For denmark (and the UK) wind is a great source of power, but its not always there, even at grid level. Currently the UK uses gas to bridge that demand. The UK is rolling out batteries, and thats going to help with price in the peaks. (currently most of them are used to stabilise rather than "peaking") But _currently_ battery capacity is only really measured in hours. Ideally we'll be measuring capacity in weeks. The hard part there is pricing reserve capacity, especially as it leaks.

Now, where nuclear comes in, is allowing the grid to arbitrage night time production from nuclear, into peak demand or, when wind is short. (in addition to bridging/stabilising) This gives a country more options to

We will see something like this bridging capacity in spain in the next few years. They have a much less well developed battery grid, but have more sun so the generation is a bit more predictable day to day. The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory its something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)

[tfourb]

> The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory it's something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)

The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.

> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.

Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.

At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.

But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.

The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.

Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.

Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.

[KaiserPro]

> Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.

which is why batteries are really great. We have couple of batteries that are 180 and 300gwh, which can turn on frighteningly quick. The iberian market is really young at the moment for batteries, they have a way to go before batteries make a dent in prices (which is great for us)

The spanish grid has about 16% nuclear: https://www.ree.es/en/datos/todate Now spain's grid usually has a whole bunch of solar sites in curtailment, which means they can turn on power fairly quickly. Which is where batteries come in, as the curtailment could be flowing into batteries, and that sweet sweet energy sold at a stonking profit in the evening.

But!

Denmark isn't the spanish grid. They have less predictability, so need bigger storage to account for the variability of wind.

[bryanrasmussen]

>Why would you

I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because

>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors

since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.

[inglor_cz]

I am a bit surprised that a engineer-heavy forum does not think about scaling of batteries.

If everyone in the developed world starts to build batteries massively - in the extent necessary to bridge multiple days of bad weather for millions of people, because that is what happens quite often in northern half of Europe in winter - there will be new strategic dependencies, at least during the buildup phase, and then in a smaller extent for maintenance and modernization. Instead of oil, lithium and other resources not present or not mined in Europe will become worth fighting over and blackmailing over.

When we are already undergoing such a massive transformation, I would like to have a bit more strategic independence, instead of trading Arab/Iranian/Russia pressure for Chinese/Bolivian/Congolese pressure.

Ultimately, we must hope for fusion and/or geothermal to become practical. These are nigh impossible to be subjected to geopolitical constraints.

[tfourb]

There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development.

And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.

For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!

[inglor_cz]

These need to be available in enormous quantities, though.

Are they? Who produces them? Please tell me that it is not China and that they don't come with a firmware that may or may not have remotely exploitable rootkits.

The road from a lab discovery through a working prototype to mass-deployable tech usually takes decades, especially in devices which pack a tremendous amount of energy.

[tfourb]

The manufacturing of all modern battery chemistries is dominated by Chinese companies because the Chinese government has strategically invested in production capacity and expertise for more than two decades.

But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.

These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.

[adrian_b]

Indeed, at least 2 Chinese companies (CATL and BYD) already have in mass production sodium-ion batteries, including a 50 MWh model for stationary storage.

Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is a historical accident, because using lithium makes sense only in mobile applications where weight is essential.

For new installations, sustainable alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries, should be preferred.

In the past there have been many companies in various countries, including Australia, UK and USA, which have claimed that they are able to make very high capacity flow batteries for stationary storage, based on various chemistries, e.g. vanadium-vanadium or bromine-sulfur. A few such batteries have been installed at various customers.

I do not know what went wrong with flow batteries. They have bad weight, similar to the lead-acid batteries, but that is irrelevant for stationary batteries. Otherwise they should be the best batteries for stationary applications, because they have 3 essential advantages over other batteries. Their energy and their power are not coupled as in normal batteries, but they can be scaled independently, i.e. for a given power (which is determined by electrode area) in a flow battery the stored energy can be made arbitrarily large, because it is determined by the volume of a couple of tanks where liquid electrolytes are stored. The second advantage is that the auto-discharge when the battery is not used can be almost null, because the 2 electrolytes can be stored in separate tanks, preventing any reaction between them. The third advantage is that the solid electrodes do not take part in the chemical reaction, so they are not damaged by a charge/discharge cycle, so they can have a very long life.

Despite the advantages, none of the many kinds of flow batteries that have been proposed has been a commercial success and it appears that the companies producing them have lied about the problems that might plague them.

I have not seen any published information about which were their problems, but I assume that a likely cause was the separator membrane that stays between the 2 liquid electrolytes, which must selectively allow the passage of certain ions and not of others. Such membranes are expensive and they might have a short lifetime, requiring frequent maintenance. Another possible problem could be caused by secondary reactions leading to solid precipitates from the liquid electrolytes, another possible cause for expensive maintenance.

Regarding the battery firmware, it does not really matter if the batteries are made in China. The history of the last 3 decades has demonstrated that no firmware can be trusted, regardless whether it comes from a company located in USA, in UK, in China or in any other country, so any firmware must be treated with suspicion.

China actually makes a great number of electronic products that are much more trustworthy than almost anything that comes from USA or other western countries, because those products, like it was the norm several decades ago, but no longer today, are accompanied by full hardware documentation, including schematics and PCB layout, which makes it much easier to verify that a malicious firmware would not be able to do damage.

If the European Union or any other countries would be concerned by the security risk posed by malicious firmware, the solution is simple and it does not consist in banning the products of some arbitrarily chosen countries, but in mandating that any product with an embedded computer, regardless of its origin, must provide complete documentation, i.e. schematics and the source program for the firmware, and it should allow the replacement of the firmware. This would be nothing new, as this is how computers, including the IBM PC, were sold in the old times, before the vendors succeeded step by step to incline the balance of power in their favor and in the detriment of their customers.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium

Not being mass produced. Betting on multiple horses makes sense. It's perhaps the singular lesson from the present problem.

[dncornholio]

Wind + Battery doesn't exist. Wind and solar renewables are dependent on natural gas plants at this moment. This is why nuclear is still a consideration, it's more "green" then most "green" energy.

[tfourb]

Wind and solar are not "dependent" on natural gas plants. You can observe this quite well by simply building a wind or solar plant, connect a battery and a load. It works and it works well.

Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet. When renewable generation is not sufficient, the difference is made up with generation from fossil-fueled thermal plants. But the existence of thermal power plants shouldn't be confused with any form of technical reliance on them. 100% renewable grids are inherently possible. If only, because you can simply enlarge grids geographically to the point that wind and solar production averages out. In combination with planned overcapacity (you can simply "switch off" wind and solar if you don't need generation), you strictly speaking don't even need batteries. It's just much more economical.

[modo_mario]

>Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet.

When will it make sense for many countries? Because the difference between peak production and a winter dip for germany in let's say Berlin is enormous.

[tfourb]

First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.

The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.

I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).

It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …

[toraway]

By that definition, nuclear is also “dependent on natural gas” because it’s a baseload power source that can’t dynamically follow demand.

[mrmlz]

As a Swede i'd like to cut the cord to Denmark/Germany. That would greatly reduce our electricity costs in south/mid Sweden.

Let them enjoy their "cheap" wind and battery solution.

[tfourb]

You export more to Norway + Finnland than to Denmark + Germany: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

And my guess would be that it would be much more expensive for you to build out (and hold in reserve) enough generation capacity to satisfy your theoretical peak demand than it costs to have interconnected grids and a large efficient market, even if you are a net exporter.

[mrmlz]

You are aware of our different price-markets in sweden right? SE4 is priced at the export prices for Danish wind and German goal - which sucks for Swedes in SE4 (and to some extent SE3). SE4 can eat their own dogfood since they cut the Nuclear Power and are now burning oil instead (Karlshamnsverket).

[coldtea]

>Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh

Because the related lobby pays well and a huge power station project (which runs well into the tens of billions) has much larger space for bribes

[crimsoneer]

Alternatively, because nuclear power still works at night.

[coldtea]

If only we had some way to store energy

[mrmlz]

At scale.

[tfourb]

You mean like 27 Gwh of yearly installed capacity kind of scale? https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...

[Jensson]

Nice, that gets us enough battery to survive winters in 10 000 years.