And unlike wind and solar can be used on-demand akin to coal, making it an extremely attractive option to run alongside renewables, especially year round. Solar panels are literally useless 75% of the year in at least 1/3rd of the US and we still rely on coal because of that. Sure, batteries may exist in the future that can handle solar, and maybe panels will exist in the future that will be more efficient, but we have technology now that can outpace renewables consistently and on-demand.
Which means nuclear and renewables are the worst possible companions imaginable.
Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible.
For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive.
The production cost of 'renewable' electricity (RE) is increasingly lower than that of nuclear. So when they produce, they are and will be preferred.
This will reduce the effective load factor of nuclear power and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with a strong feedback.
It gets worse because, on the technical level and despite some progress, nuclear power cannot (due to technical limitation and for safety-related reasons) adjust its production ("load following") to always exactly match demand.
This will promote the deployment of an RE system based on a continental a mix (wind, solar, etc.), smart grid, clean backup (green hydrogen), storage, etc. which will reduce the variability of its production (intermittency effect) so nuclear power will be less and less useful and more and more expensive.
I’m not sure why you seem to think nuclear and renewables are competing, but you’re just objectively wrong. Non-consistent and on-demand power generation literally go hand-in-hand. There are coal power plants that rarely turn on because they are only turned on when the grid needs to offset peaks, something that cannot be done with current renewables, even with your incredibly expensive batteries (which are mostly going into EVs anyway, and thus are a moot point.
Additionally, California is ideal for solar panels, but I assume you haven’t put even an ounce of thought into how New York or Chicago will handle it, have you?
Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
There is a very small amount of people working on low-capital industries (normally with higher operational costs), and they seem to be close to some gain here or there. But almost all of our knowledge is biased against turning things off.
> Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
that's the bit I don't quite understand - yes, in a simple economic model where you want the numbers to go brrr, it makes sense, but is there a physical limit? could a country decide to own the big facility and use the excess electricity and sell the results to commercial ventures? the government can afford to have a piece of land taken that doesn't return a profit 100% of the time?
I am uniformed on this, but those industries likely take time to scale up. A large scale desalination plant requires a significant amount of infrastructure.
No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive.
The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
Smelting cant base their production on when excess energy might be available. They need that energy now. Desalination might be a good sink but again, if water is needed now and there's no excess then what? That's why we have base load.
That basically means nuclear is the main competitor to renewables. Nuclear has extremely high Capex, so want to run as much as possible. Renewables are dependent on the weather and want to produce when the sun is out or the wind is blowing.
I believe both have their uses, but I don't buy they go together well.
Solar panels can still generate year round even when cloudy. It’s not as efficient sure but it’s not useless. That’s why you have a blend of renewables.
> It’s not as efficient sure but it’s not useless.
In the UK I've seen a system which produced 0.5kWh/day in mid-winter and 35kWh/day in summer. That kind of variation is hard to overbuild for.
> That’s why you have a blend of renewables.
Yes, we then have to build wind turbines, plenty of under-utilised transmission (because wind is in the wrong place), methane CCGT/OCGT backup (and they need to receive capacity payments to keep them in business) and perhaps eventually electrolysers to convert excess electricity to H2 (which then have to operate at low utilisation). The overall system seems quite complicated and more complex than the first step of deploying cheap solar panels so save a bit of methane.
