Comment on Demolition of the cooling towers of the Grundremmingen nuclear power plant, Bavaria / Germany
turdas@suppo.fi 2 weeks agoIn comparison, nuclear has quite constant generation, but demand varies more strongly compared to it. This is why in reality it needs coal in addition, to adjust for deman
In theory, one could adjust a nuclear power plant by switching it on and off once in the morning and once in the evening, and sometimes in winter. But that “filling up of the mix” with nuclear would just not be economical - nuclear is already by far the most expensive energy source and one can better spend the money by installing battery storage and improving the grid.
“Modern” (newer than the 90s) nuclear plants can do much more granular load following than that, and it’s what they already do in France and Germany: oecd-nea.org/…/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf (see figure 2 for an example from Germany). Or it’s what they would be doing in Germany if they hadn’t been shut down, heh.
HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
There are two problems with that.
One is that nuclear plants are, among other stuff, massive heat engines. Because all the steel, tubes and whatever expands when it is heated up, switching it on and off stresses the material. This can be improved on by design but such design has extra costs and has its limits.
The second is that when you turn down your plant to half the output, you spend essentially the same money to get half the result. Which means you have just doubled the cost per kilowatt hour. And this with the background that nuclear is not any more cost-competitive to begin with.
In the result, a fleet of wind power plants plus battery or hydro storage is cheaper than such a nuclear plant.
turdas@suppo.fi 2 weeks ago
Yeah, and this is something that has been improved on for modern reactor designs precisely so that they can operate in load-following mode. There’s essentially no impact on operational lifespan (typically 60 years for modern reactors), because the impact has already been factored into the operational lifespan.
This is mostly an opportunity cost thing. The actual running costs, e.g. the fuel, make up a negligible part of the €/MWh of nuclear. Most of the cost comes from the construction of the plant, which should be publicly subsidized the same as other clean energy is. Lack of subsidies and other public support is one of the main reasons nuclear is relatively expensive, though it is still the cheapest ecological method for meeting base load that we have.
The thing about battery storage is that it doesn’t exist yet and may never exist in an economical way. Hydro power and storage, on the other hand, is absolutely devastating for ecosystems, clean though it may be in terms of carbon emissions. It would be preferable if hydro dams did not exist. Now of course you could build a hydro storage system in a completely artificial pair of reservoirs, but that will be incredibly expensive compared to natural reservoirs (read: flooded valleys) so I am skeptical that it would be feasible at scale.