HN user
You are spreading FUD and fearmongering about nuclear.
We've had 60 years of nuclear and thousands of reactors. Still waiting for those terrorists I guess.
as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima
Which is also a load of bull, mostly. I wish all criminal neglect was on the same level as Fukushima, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711895
Nuclear reactors are not only slow to switch power output
This is not true
On top of that, running nuclear reactors on average significantly below maximum output drives the cost up further.
It doesn't
I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load
You'd know if you read the link I provided.
Nuclear plants in Germany had no issues scaling up and down between 400-600MW and 1200-1400MW per reactor per day.
Now, with renewables you do have this issue. Because due to their intermittent nature you're required to both overbuild them and provide enough grid-scale storage to last for hours.
It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.
For some politically-motivated definition of efficient. Additional costs to running nuclear plants in load following mode are immaterial.
The irony being those same plants failed at the time of the biggest energy crises since then.
They didn't fail.
Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier.
And the source for this is? Because reality seems to disagree with you
The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice
You're surprised that renewable energy is intermittent and you need to significantly overbuild them?
You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.
So many decisions in this space are made purely for political points, so you can see how yes, people who are building this rarely if ever talk abou this.
The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions.
Note how if you don't shut down nuclear power plants you don't need to burn coal to make up for the difference.
Nuclear has failed to scale, it's a well documented issue.
It hasn't, and it's not a "well-documented issue". What's documented is decades of FUD, fear-mongering, underinvestment etc.
If decarbonization is the goal, projects like Flamanville are already a failure
Why not look at projects like Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant instead?
will take decades and decades to make up for the construction time
Ho long will it take to overbuild renewables and all the required power storage for them?
E.g. right now, during the day, Germany's renewables are generating:
- wind: 20% of installed capacity
- solar: 34% of installed capacity
- pumped hydro storage: sucking up 8% of total power generation for recharging
Germany was over 50% coal 20 years ago, it would still be at this level if it had gone that route.
Which route? E.g. France's carbon output from electricity generation is ~56g/kWh. Germany's is ~340g/kWh. Care to guess why?
France needs to and is decarbonising.
In Europe only Sweden and Norway have lower carbon emissions from electricity generation than France.
costs they kept halfway reasonable by neglecting maintenance.
That is not how you keep costs reasonable. You're just postponing them until they become unreasonable.
I forgot to mention in the sibling comment:
in a Grid which draws like 50.
Installed wind capacity in Germany is 65GW. Seems to be much higher than what grid demands.
And yet, on April 15th it was producing only 5% of that. And solar was producing zero.
Guess where the power to cover that came from?
Even today on a reasonably windy day (at least in Hamburg where I am right now) wind production is at 20% capacity, solar at 36 capacity.
Busy burning coal for 21% of electricity even on a windy day.
No, renewables are easy to regulate and nothing about them is slow.
Renewables are among the slowest power sources to ramp up production. Which is complicated by the fact that they are intermittent.
That is, why there is a need for a huge buildup of renewables.
1. At what cost
2. What happens to generation on a quiet night?
Though no idea how realistic this is
They promise to start delivering power in 2030, and estimate the project cost at 16bn dollars or something along those lines.
We all now how well it goes with mega projects :)
but with placing the power plants at the coasts. You might have made cooling easier, but increased the demand for the grid
How is this any different from offshore wind farms or power lines from Norway to Germany?
it is way easier to build wind power there than nuclear.
Why not both?
How many plants were shut down because of water supply
0.18% of power generation
how many due to planned maintenance and underinvestment of France govt last 10 or so years
And that is the main problem.
We are talking about 3 GW less nuclear in a Grid which draws like 50.
6%
A large part of these 3 GW will be replaced even in 2023
0% of solar generation and 5% of wind generation will be replaced with what exactly?
But it is doable,
Funny how for renewables it's "certainly it's doable" and "powerlines can be built", but for nuclear "The problem of course is the proximity to power consumers"
base load" is mostly a concept important for slow, bad to regulate power plants.
You've just described renewables.
So the amount of energy which was previously part of "base load" will be reduced considerably.
There's a minimum of required electricity that you have to provide every day, and you can't escape that.
Germany has other peaks. That's why nuclear reactors before they were shutdown were routinely going between 600-800MW and 1.2-1.4 GW per reactor per day: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
This was the very definition of a black swan event.
Imagine if all dams were subjected to the same insanity after dam failures like Banqiao Dam failure
There are graphs in the report.
Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway
But much, much less coal.
The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway.
That is s great way to say: we killed our stable source of electricity because of populism, and now we're burying our head in the sand justifying our decision.
production capacity will be filled in soon.
Soon when? And the question of quiet nights remains
Doesn't this show how much Germany imports from France?
It boggles my mind that Germany can decarbonize so much and so fast
Compare it to France which didn't have to decarbonize to begin with. Because of those bad-bad-bad no-good reactors.
Fukushima was just another data point to stick to this plan.
Fukushima wasn't a data point. It was a populist FUD talking point.
Ah yes. And you have cables sending you power from that other side, right?
That's not fast enough.
That's more than fast enough. You could see it in the graphs in the document if you bothered to read it.
Note: renewables like wind and solar are orders of magnitude slower, intermittent, and actually require grid-scale storage
The problem of course is the proximity to power consumers or you have to expand the grid.
What's your opinion on UK-Morocco powerline then?
Fukushima:
- hit by earthquake at or above upper structural limit. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
"maximum ground g-forces of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 at units 2, 3, and 5 respectively. This exceeded the seismic reactor design tolerances of 0.45, 0.45, and 0.46 g for continued operation, but the seismic values were within the design tolerances at units 1, 4, and 6"
- hit by tsunami exceeding that limit
The largest tsunami wave was 13–14 m (43–46 feet) high and hit approximately 50 minutes after the initial earthquake, overwhelming the plant's ground level, which was 10 m (33 ft) above the sea level
---
This resulted in 1 (one) death directly attributable to the incident
0.18% of nuclear power generation was lost due to water levels and temperatures.
Also nothing stops you from building nuclear plants in other locations
And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.
All projects do, including wind and solar.
--- start quote ---
Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule
Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
--- end quote ---
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec...
And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants
How much do we need to overbuild wind and solar?
Yup. And had to burn coal on that night because solar generation was at 0%, and wind generation was at 5% of installed capacity.