The lobbying effort in the mid 2000s for a "nuclear renaissance" was absolutely a tour de force. It passed laws in US states that put all construction economic risk (the biggest risk of nuclear) onto rate payers rather than the utilities that start nuclear construction projects. These sorts of shady laws sneak through state legislatures all the time, but these ones in particular were the only reason that utilities in Georgia and South Carolina embarked on construction projects. Of course, these have been massive economic and management failures, as nuclear too often is. All the US/UK efforts are echoes from that lobbying push.

And in the mid 2000s, nuclear seemed to be a much better idea. Solar and wind were more expensive, not far less expensive, than estimated nuclear costs. It seemed like nuclear was going to be an absolutely essential part of a carbon neutral or negative society.

Fifteen years later, we have had an energy technology revolution, and we are still in the middle of it. Personally, I don't see a future for nuclear, and for that matter I see only niche applications for thermally generated electricity. Other technology will undercut the steam turbine driven electricity that has been the basis of grids for a century. We might have some chemical storage in hydrogen, methanol, methane, or longer carbon chains that comes from atmospherically extracted CO2 for use in extreme scenarios, but it also seems likely that long-duration battery storage (e.g. vanadium flow batteries) will get cheap enough to replace even that.

> It's the only reason I can think of for paying inflation linked £92.50 per MwH for 35 years for Hinkley point c when the UK can build wind or solar for £35-40 now and probably less in future years.

Really? Intermittency seems like a very good reason.

Yes. I've not seen figures that put the cost of handling it above 30%. 160% > 30%.

It's not like nuclear is dispatchable either, whereas wind turbines can be.

> I've not seen figures that put the cost of handling it above 30%

Really? Is that battery storage? Hydroelectricity?

I haven't seen a storage plan, let alone a cheap one, that hasn't assumed some future technology like hydrogen, synthetic gas, or molten salt will essentially be a cheat code to provide nearly-free storage.

A combination of overproduction, demand shifting and storage. Storage being the most expensive way to handle it. There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.

For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".

The price of even those has plummeted though and even they are being rolled out (e.g. in Hawaii, next to solar farms). That's still a lot cheaper than hinkley point C.

However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.

So, investing in capacity on the presumption that dealing with the intermittency costs of solar and wind will be an enormous 160% of production costs is flat out insane without subsidies.

Hence why it's fairly clear that the UK wanted hinkley point c for other reasons - i.e. to keep nuclear capacity and know how local so that the nuclear arsenal can be maintained.

Your response fits the same pattern: allude to the existence of storage solutions, but neglect to actually specify what those solutions are.

> There's a few papers on managing the mix of this but theyre not widely read or reported on.

Again, great of you to cite these papers.

> For a long time the carbon lobby pretended that lithium ion batteries were the only thing that could be used to manage renewable intermittency. This was precisely because they wanted to charactize it being technology that was impossibly far fetched. In reality it's the most expensive of many options and the best last resort but as a result most people think it's just "the solution".

Okay then: if not lithium ion batteries, what is the storage solution? Pumped hydro is geographically limited. That leaves approaches still in testing, like thermal storage or hydrogen storage.

> However, if you're Germany and you've got a calm and overcast day the most cost effective approach is to tell heavy non time sensitive industrial users like aluminum smelters to ramp down production today and ramp it up extra high tomorrow when it's very sunny and windy. The cost of doing this is comparatively very low for many users like smelters and we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this space.

So we have to tell people not to use energy. Because we have no effective way of addressing intermittency.

You're assuming that industries can just "ramp up extra high" when there's excess energy. Not all industries work like that. If a factory uses 100 MW at peak capacity it can't just produce 3x as much product if you feed it 300 MW. The reality is that few industries can be flexible like this.

What about things like street lights? Or sewage and water distribution? Hospitals, data centers, and essential services? There's plenty of things that cannot shift load like this.

Yup, a lot of the conversation around energy and electricity feels like we're not at all talking about the same things. A book worth reading on the subject: https://www.withouthotair.com/

The book mostly focuses on raw generation figures. I see little to no writing on how to handle the intermittency of renewable sources.

Also, the 1,000 year figure for fissile fuel does not consider reprocessing which reclaims over 80% of fuel used.

Worth bearing in mind that it was published in 2009 & the author died in 2016.

A lot has changed since then - the costs he specifies, for instance, might as well be from the previous century.

Energy use has also decreased.

That author is long dead, and his assumptions are increasingly out of date.