[tenthirtyam]

IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

[SoftTalker]

It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.

[ViewTrick1002]

The problem is the economics. They’re just horrifyingly expensive to build. The equivalent to each new large scale reactor in GWe requires tens of billions in subsidies.

The next problem comes from incentives. Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?

Why should their neighbors not buy surplus renewables and instead pay out of their nose for expensive nuclear powered electricity?

EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.

And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.

[panick21_]

The French have used their nuclear system for 20+ years as a giving tree.

The forced EDF to sell nuclear at very cheap prices to fossil fuel companies and then buy it back at much higher price.

The French forced EDF to give subsides to solar even when that actually hurts their economics.

The French randomly in the 2010s decided to replace nuclear in a short time-frame (completely 100% unrealistic) but it sounds good to politicians. And they decided to delay all maintenance and didn't do any of the upgrades many other nations did.

Once of the secrets of French nuclear is, that their grandfather were so good in providing them these nuclear plants, the french absolutely suck at running them. Other countries like the US and ironically Germany managed to run their reactors at higher factors.

The problem is the solar is cheap when its being produced and makes the economics of base lose worse, without actually solving base load. Solar has been cross subsidized this way for a long time. And has been more explicitly subsidized. But its a private good, it helps only private people, it is negative on a system level.

Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.

> Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?

If somebody privately wants to build solar/storage that's fine, but they should get no support. Also prices should be adjust to actually reflect peak demand. Historically the way the system operated is with much simpler pricing models because it was understood that everybody shares in this infrastructure. In such a situation, the majority of people wouldn't build solar and batteries.

But really, the question we should ask, what the best thing to run a modern economy on and the German solution of 'lets build a massive electricity pipeline to solar farms in Greece' isn't a great model.

All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.

[ViewTrick1002]

People disliking renewables always say this.

Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.

It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.

The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.

> Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.

Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.

The French made a good choice half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2026 are renewables and storage.

Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor coming online at the earliest in 2038.

It’s just complete insanity at this point.

> All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.

The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs €20B. That’s equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large scale reactor. Then you have the market price of electricity on top of that.

Are you starting to realize the conundrum?

[panick21_]

France has treated its nuclear fleet like literally shit. They have literally delayed maintenance because the government believed that they were just about to replace all nuclear with renewables. In addition to that, France has so much nuclear that they have become incredibly lax in operating their nuclear, they take ages to do basic shit most other countries do in just a few days. All of this is literally just related to the French government of the last 10-20 years not giving a shit about nuclear.

The reality is that in most western countries even 50+ year old nuclear plants often have an 80% uptime and usually are down at times when the capacity is not needed. If a government properly cares for their reactors, up-times of 90-95% are very possible.

Switzerland has a capacity factor of 90% with some of the oldest reactors in the world.

> The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.

The fact is that is overall much less available and much less flexible on when you do the generation and when you want more or less energy.

> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.

Nuclear is to slow is something renewable fans have been arguing since the 1970s.

The fact about cost is that on a system level its cheaper and France has been able to have cheaper energy then Germany for the last 50+ years.

Once you don't just look at generation but total cost, including all the cost of building out the grid, the cost is much higher. And if you ever want to be 100% renewable you better have weeks of battery at least, and that is a thing people barley calculate. Gas peakers plants will remain the solution for a very long time and when gas prices go up, it will cause an energy crisis.

In addition you will need to replace the wind energy far sooner.

In addition, with nuclear, a huge part of the cost is going to salaries of local highly educated people and technicians. You capture much more of the value in your own economy for the next 60+ years.

> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.

> Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor coming online at the earliest in 2038.

The West has so totally and completely fucked the industry and did every possible thing wrong for the last 30 years. And now we are paying for it. This is what 30+ years of renewable orthodox has brought us, high energy prices and a complete collapse of the nuclear industry. France has dropped all its advanced reactor as well now we are building EPRs again. Its beyond sad.

What we could build are APR1400 units like in the UAE. If you do a proper build, yes it takes 10 year for the first to finish but after you start a new years 3 years later, and then another every year and then 2 each after that and later 3 each year. In 20 you can build pretty much as much capacity as you need and your learning curve is going to be amazing, likely you will finish a new build in less then 5 years at much lower cost. The problem is if you only look at 'when will the first reactor finish' instead of 'how fast can we build 20 reactors'.

Capital-recovery component for APR1400 alone works out to about 3.2–4.3 US¢/kWh at 5–7% financing, but this is for only 4 reactors built in with no background. But we should finance this with government bonds directly, so really capital alone is only 2 USc/kWh and less as build cost go down the learning curve. The fuel cost is also only 3-4 USc/kWh (hopefully we again have reliable European fuel and reduce the price further, another thing destroyed by the last 30 years). And operation and maintenance around 10USc/kWh isn't crazy for a proper fleet with centralized staff training and local industry.

As with everything in nuclear, one nation building 1 plant is going to be expensive and makes the numbers look worse then they are. And remember this was build in a country with no experience and no train workforce and only 4 reactors built, not the 10s of reactors people should build. A country like Poland could easily do a 20 year flash build program, and that would be much faster for them then Poland.

> The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs €20B. That’s equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large scale reactor. Then you have the market price of electricity on top of that.

> Are you starting to realize the conundrum?

Try looking up total grid upgrade cost if you want to achieve 100% renewables. We are literally talking the same amount of money as all the generation combined. I heard interviews with people responsible for even only part of Germany where they admitted they will have to go to private markets to fund 100+ billion $ in investments. And these investors will want their money back. Total grid cost will be higher then to total cost of renewable installs. And of course wind turbines need to be rebuilt.

But I guess Germany is making it easier on itself by losing so much industry that they have fewer problems in the future for renewables to solve. Germany by the way since 2018 is spending 50 billion $ per year on direct energy subsidies. Yes that is partly heating but France because of its cheap electricity has far more heating converted to electric. So it is related to electricity policy.

What I want is rock solid energy that is reliable and served from a simple centralized grid, nuclear + 1-2h battery peak shaving with lithium or sodium batteries. Anything longer then that isn't great. Not some scheme where we somehow hope that the combination of Greek solar and Danish wind produce enough, and then trying produce hydrogen in Canada and ship it to Germany, or whatever other nonsense people want to come up with.

The current proto-market system has all the wrong intensives built in and we were much better of in a system where there was simply one centralized utility that made rational engineering choices about how to get cheap energy to everybody.

Not to mention that having a well functioning nuclear industry has lots of other advantages that 'buy solar panels from China' doesn't bring.

[cauch]

Demand following for nuclear is possible (after all, if you produce 10X but the demand suddenly drops to 7X, what you can always do is to "dump" 3X worth of steam instead of injecting it in the turbine), but because the cost of nuclear is mainly upfront, it is not cost efficient at all.

If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit of energy.

You are right about storage as a way to help with demand following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this case, you have the choice between building an expensive nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable generation.

I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it looks like before we look into the practical details.

[panick21_]

No, nuclear storage needs to be optimized for 1-2h peaks, if you build a renewable system you need, much, much more. And you have much more localized peaks and valleys depending on weather and such.

So basically, you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid.

For renewable you need a much more complex grid with much more battery.

[cauch]

Why do you say "optimized for 1-2h peaks"? The typical electricity demand has a trough during the night for few hours, then a first peak in the morning, than a second less-deep trough in the middle of the day (sometimes with a bump around lunchtime), than a second bigger peak in the afternoon for 3-4 hours. And of course this varies with season, day of week, regions, ...

Not sure why you are saying that renewable you need "much more battery": the overlap of generation means that you already have a "baseline" of generation even with renewables (sure, I know about dunkelflaute, but they are as frequent as unexpected shutdown of nuclear site), and therefore in both case, the game is mainly to "move the peaks around" which requires about the same capacity.

Not sure why you are saying the renewable led to a much more complex grid either. Sure, with a naive simplified grid, nuclear works well. But in practice, the modern grid is complex, and adding more nuclear does not really reduce the complexity.

Also, nuclear or not, having EV or heat-pump will be needed for decarbonisation, and therefore the demand becomes even more complex. With EV and heat-pump, local solar+battery is also a smarter choice. So it means that some storage will need to be built on the consumer site directly, even with nuclear.

I'm not saying that in some situation at the end of the computation, nuclear is not the best option, but it is not at all as simple as having a clear winner. Also, the reality is that you need to work with the uncertainties, so it is not like one solution has a score of 75 and the other has a score of 70, so the first is the obvious choice, it is more like one solution has a score of 75 +- 15 and the other 70 +- 5 (or even asymmetric errors), so you cannot directly conclude the first solution is the best. I think the conversation would be way more healthy if we could just avoid over-simplify into a pro-nuclear vs. pro-renewable partisan battle.

(also not sure about "you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid", why is this not true for renewable too? Just compute the average production of the site, and put storage that will charge when the site produces more than the average and discharge when the site produces less, and you get the same situation as the nuclear site (they may still have period of no generation, the same way nuclear sites have unexpected shutdown). Especially that with a renewable site, the cost is lower so the site owner can invest more in storage and manage it themselves: storage is part of the black box, the grid does not need to know, stay the same and no complexity is added)

[SoftTalker]

Renewable (solar for example) needs enough battery to cover the 12-18 hours a day where the sun isn't shining or is at too low an angle to effectively capture by solar panels. This is far more than covering a few hours of load peak. Solar might actually be a decent peaking power source, as it tends to peak at the same time as demand. But it's not a good base load source; it needs far too much battery buffer.

[cauch]

My point is that to follow the demand, you need ~12 hours of capacity: the trough is during the night around 1-4 am, the peak is mainly in the afternoon around 5pm. So if you have a battery for nuclear, you will charge it during the night and discharge it ~12 hours later.

Not sure about your 12-18 hours, it looks like you want to use the energy during the night, while it is the trough and does not require energy.

[panick21_]

First of all its not that slow, and when you know when you need it, at what point in the day, so you can ramp up in anticipation.

Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants could be far better. Some designs are very much load following.

[pfdietz]

The problem isn't technical dispatchability, it's economic dispatchability. A nuclear plant operated at 5-10% capacity factor would be ludicrously uneconomical, even to just operate.

[zozbot234]

It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the output.