> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
The answer is you don't scale nuclear up or down, it's a silly waste of time and effort to even think about it. The fuel costs are effectively a rounding error, so running at 100% 24x7 is the only way to ever think about how nuclear should operate.
If you are going to curtail, you curtail other sources including solar and wind.
Nuclear fits quite well for the baseload you need. It's more expensive, but if you are going to need X capacity 24x7 and build nuclear, you simply build enough to provide just that plus perhaps a few extra for redundancy when another one goes offline. Then use gas peakers for the "oh shit" days difference between what nuclear is providing and solar was expected to but could not.
I don't understand the fascination folks have about nuclear not being able to following the grid. They don't need to, since they only ever remotely make sense when operated 24x7 at 100%. If you always have 1TW of grid usage every night during your lowest usage period - build that much nuclear as your starting point and figure out the rest from there. Nuclear's share of the total mix should be a straight line on a graph outside of plant shutdowns for maintenance.
That’s not the way the energy market works though. The cheapest sources (like daytime solar) will knock your expensive nuclear off the grid. Or force it to sell at significantly below operating cost, which is suicidal in the long term, since nukes need a guaranteed high price nearly 100% of the time to pencil out (pay back the capex).
Your argument only works in entirely state controlled systems, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers. Which is why nukes don’t get built.
- billions (if not trillions) of subsidies were poured into wind and solar over decades to make them viable while nuclear energy was addled with additional taxes, reactor closures, and very few new reactor licenses
- decades of fear-mongering led to loss of expertise in building new nuclear power plants (and instead South-East Asia has been picking up speed in building new reactors) [1]
In 2015 nuclear was significantly cheaper than most other types of energy across most markets: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/REPORT_Economics_R... (Figure 12, in some markets including the then-emerging renewables). And yet renewables were enjoying unprecedented amounts of subsidies and money poured into them while nuclear... Oh we know what was happening to nuclear, just look at Germany.
Renewables: 80-80 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Fossil fuels: 60-140 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Nuclear: good luck finding the thin orange line in the graph. (1% of subsidies)
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As shown on Figure 4 , solar energy received by far the largest share of subsidies, both historically and in 2023 (EUR 21 bn), followed by biomass (EUR 9 bn) and wind power (EUR 7 bn). Hydropower received marginal financial support (~EUR 1 bn), while subsidies targeting multiple renewable technologies (such as tax reductions on green technology or public aid for investment projects) jumped to EUR 23 bn by 2023.
Subsidies for nuclear energy dropped from EUR 7.9 bn in 2021 to 3.7 bn in 2022 and 4.1 bn in 2023. Of the 14 MS providing nuclear subsidies, France (EUR 2.9 bn) accounted for the biggest share, followed by Germany (EUR 0.8 bn) , Spain and Belgium (EUR 0.1 bn each).
Also corruption. I lived in an area that for some years was trying to build a new nuclear power plant.
It was fraud from the top down and the manufacturer went bankrupt. I paid more for power in SC than I ever did when I lived in “summer all year” Florida. But I guess I got a token check in the mail some years later.
Plant got completely abandoned and I got to help subsidize this failure.
Oh yes. That too. It's one problem after another in quite a few countries: ignore/neglect, make processes, regulations and subsidies opaque, all of this leads to huge construction times and corruption, declare nuclear non-viable.
China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005
And still china’s share of energy provided by nuclear is declining y/y, and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Because their renewables buildout is >10x nuclear.
Even china, a nuclear construction scale/cost/time success story, can’t make them compete with renewables.
Share of the total grid is meaningless comparing solar to nuclear. It’s the wrong metric to optimize for - the metric that actually matters and is the expensive one is reliability.
What matters is “share of the grid when solar literally cannot provide the power at any price”.
In a well designed and functional grid share of nuclear power should be close to 100% of the latter and the lowest percentage of the former you can get away with.
It’s better to think of nuclear as energy storage with a really really long lasting battery that costs the same to run it 24/7 or 1 hour a month.
Ideally it would be replacing close to all baseload/reliable power on the grid outside of hydro - with hydro being your peakers instead of natural gas for topologies amenable to it. The power share graph should look like nuclear at close to 100% at night less wind and battery storage that backs wind unreliability - and that graph remaining flat throughout the peak daytime hours with other energy sources kicking in such as solar, hydro, duck curve sized battery arrays, etc.
No one pays you for that reliability though. In free energy markets they pay you for what you supply, at the clearing price at that moment.
Solar is so cheap it will push nukes off the grid during the day, you don’t get credit just because it’s more reliable. People will just build more and more solar till the nukes share in the day is zero. And at night people are incentivized to build more wind and batteries, because you can still undercut the expensive nuke power and push it off. When the wind doesn’t blow at night there’s gas and hydro peakers. And more and more batteries. There’s increasingly no room left for nukes that have to be sold at 100% for 100% of the time to still be the most expensive form of energy.
The only way nukes have a role at scale today is if you have state intervention in the market to force the grid to buy your nuke power at close to 100% at the baseline share you described, because you have a nation-state goal of reliability that you prioritize higher than cost. Essentially subsidizing the nukes. And I’m sympathetic to that goal, but that’s not mostly not what western markets do, and not what they will do. Making power deliberately more expensive is unpopular, and not neoliberal marketism
You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?
Quote:
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The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.
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> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Gas turbines can. Hydro can. Battery storage can.