[rickydroll]

> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.

Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.

Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.

[phil21]

Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.

In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.

Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.

This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.

Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.

Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.

Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.

tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.

[dalyons]

Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.

What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built

[awesome_dude]

> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.

Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.

[zdragnar]

For one thing, nuclear power plants produce much less waste than most people imagine.

Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it.

In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.

[awesome_dude]

I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.

Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.

You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.

Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically