[AnotherGoodName]

Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery...

We did have many many problems previously. The state of South Australia went out for a couple of weeks at one point in similar cascading failures. This doesn’t happen anymore. In fact the price of electricity is falling and the grid is more stable now https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...

This price drop is inline with the lowered usage of gas turbine peaker plants (isn’t that helpful right now? No need for blockaded gas for electricity).

A lot of people say it can’t be done. That you can’t have free power during the day (power is free on certain plans during daylight due to solar power inputs dropping wholesale prices to negative) and that you can’t build enough storage (still not there but the dent in gas turbine usage is clear).

It’s one of these cases where you’ve been lied to. Australia elected a government that listened to reports battery+solar is great for grid reliability and nuclear was always going to be more expensive.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright

That makes no sense. Those are projections and for battery only. Europe today has around 100GW energy storage, Australia has around 6GW.

[AnotherGoodName]

For the discussion of replacing gas peaker plants pumped hydro isn’t as useful as grid connected battery storage which is the focus of the above discussion.

[postexitus]

You need grid connected storage where you have (unpredictable) renewables. That doesn't negate the benefits of Nuclear baseload power. In an ideal mix, you need both, and also Gas for emergencies. One is not better than the other, they have different roles in a balanced grid.

[gpm]

Nuclear has the same issue as (unpredictable) renewables, it is incapable of cost efficiently following the demand curve. As a result, just like renewables, it requires a form of dispatch-able power to complement it (gas, batteries, etc). Solar and nuclear fill the exact same role in a balanced grid - cheap non-dispatchable power.

Or at least nuclear would if it was cheap, but since its costs haven't fallen the same way that the costs of other energy did... well new nuclear buildout really doesn't have a good role at all right now, it's just throwing away money.

Solar and nuclear complement eachother fine - because their shortfalls (darkness for solar, high demand for nuclear) are mostly uncorrelated... a mix of non-dispatcahble power with uncorrelated shortfalls helps minimize the amount of dispatchable power you need... but batteries have made it cheap enough to transform non-dispatchable power to dispatchable power that nuclears high costs really aren't justifiable.

[laurencerowe]

A case can be made that nuclear could potentially be cheaper than renewables plus batteries in Northern Europe when targeting 100% zero carbon electricity. (It seems unarguable that renewables can get to 80% zero carbon electricity more cheaply).

But they're not really complementary in that one can't fill in for the gaps in the other. So the case for new nuclear gets more and more uneconomic the more cheap renewables we deploy.

[adrianN]

Nuclear has a hard time existing in a net with dominant renewables during most of the year. Down-regulating nuclear absolutely kills its profitability. What you want is power plants with low capex that can be profitable with just a few hundred hours at full capacity per year. For example you can burn hydrogen.

[drtgh]

Plus, related (storage), you do not want to put hydroelectric in water reservoirs targeted to population consumption, as you could find out one summer that the reservoirs are empty, the result of such water being used with the intention of generate electricity, or even used as inertial stabilizer for renewables.

This is the moment were at the news you read "There's a drought because it isn't raining" and similar excuses, when in reality your five years of water's reservoirs become reduced to half -or one third- due they focused the electricity production over the population real water demand.

I mean, hydroelectric needs at least two level’s reservoirs, one to generate electricity (or even exclusive two level's reservoirs with water pumps for this), and the next one, absolutely untouchable by the electric companies, targeted as water storage for the population/agriculture, the classic more than five years reservoir, for real.

[Qwertious]

Renewables are very predictable, they're just intermittent.

[preisschild]

> Australia elected a government that listened to reports battery+solar is great for grid reliability and nuclear was always going to be more expensive

The report you mean (csiro) was wildly biased though. They based their nuclear power cost estimate on a nuclear reactor that was never deployed anywhere (Nuscale) instead of "normal" nuclear power plants that have been deployed for decades.

[laurencerowe]

The CSIRO report appears to have cost estimates for "normal" nuclear power plants too.

    Large scale nuclear $155-$252/MWh.
    Solar PV and wind with storage $100-150/MWh.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-...

[ViewTrick1002]

The NuScale cost was what the project itself announced. And they hadn’t even started building yet. The latest reports also include large scale nuclear power.

I find it funny when people get outraged because all CSIRO does is use real world construction costs easily proving how unfathomably expensive new built nuclear power is.

[AnotherGoodName]

And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the Australian governments research body, separated from the current political party. They aren’t some private company or political group. I don’t think you could have a more neutral and unbiased viewpoint.

[ViewTrick1002]

Exactly. And they have well established methodology publishing a consultation draft asking for review. Then following that review publish a final version half a year later.

Followed by updating the methods for the next iteration to cover any gaps discovered, like only including SMR and not large scale nuclear.

[mastax]

Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of those programs.