Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
In the power grid of today (and even more so in the future), that’s fairly slow. On good days wind and solar already produce more than 100% in several countries, so it needs to be able to drop to 0%. Worse however is that nuclear is already expensive, and shutting it down means it’s just a hunk of a building costing money. It’s why private investors have largely shunned nuclear in the modern days: it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough. And that picture seems to be getting worse and worse every year.
The costs are just externalized and safety is, comparitively, neglected.
Sure, but the power companies don’t pay for that so to them it’s cheap, which was the point.
it’s not econonically viable anymore, or even if it is it’s just not profitable enough.
That’s just an issue with capitalism, not with nuclear energy itself. Placing solar panels everywhere may be easier and cheaper short-term, but it’s far from optimal. Ideally we’d like to have a bit of both.
You’d have similar problems doing this under communism tbf. It’s expensive under any economic system. Solar at least has the advantage that any Joe Shmoe can put it on their roof and produce their own power, not being dependent on big energy corpos.
China seems to be proving this false. They are building the molten salt reactors that we designed in the '60s and never tested. Two major bonuses of molten salt reactors are that they are physicsly impossible to melt down, and they don’t really create nuclear waste. In fact China will probably start selling us nuclear waste disposal contracts since those reactors can use our waste as fuel.
They do create some waste, but the half-life of said waste is like 6 week/months, so it is safe after a few years.
China is investing more in solar. But China is also very power-hungry, so any energy they produce will get sold to the market, so their market looks significantly different. Their economy is different and so is their power usage.
True, that advantage of solar is very beneficial and I think it’s great because of it. Independence is worth a lot.
Though the point about nuclear doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, it’d be just as expensive regardless of the economic system in place. The problem here is, capitalist economies often focus on short-term profits instead of investing into long-term infrastructure. Which can be seen in thorium reactors research.
At this point, it’s practically confirmed that thorium power plants will meet our expectations. China already has one operational (though it’s a relatively small one) and several under construction. No western country invested any significant resources into this research, because it didn’t align with quick and easy gains that capitalists love. This is the problem.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Not really. Reciprocating gas engines are specifically designed for balancing loads with renewables and have maneuvering capabilities in the 25-100% range with the state of the art at ~25%/minute slope.
Startup time is 15min-1hr for gas, 30min-2hr for nuclear.
You’re correct that gas is better on all these metrics, but it’s far more comparable than you’re making it out to be.
Also needs to be mentioned that these are very oversimplified metrics and things look better for nuclear the deeper in the weeds you go imo.
That’s not how any kind of turbine works.
The same could be said of solar. ‘It’s a very expensive capitol investment and as soon as the sun goes down it’s just a stupidly expensive roof costing money’.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 18 hours ago
Solar is significantly cheaper. Like it’s not even funny how much cheaper it is. This means that other than the sun going down, they’re always going to be producing because it’s by far the cheapest power available. And because they easily earn back what they cost, it’s perfectly fine if they don’t operate at 100% efficiency.
For nuclear to remain economically viable in these market conditions it has to be similarly profitable, and it just isn’t.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
The point wasn’t to denigrate solar, but to demonstrate the fallacious beliefs you’re operating under.
Yes, the plant owner will want to maximize the profit of their investments and get as quick a return as possible.
If gas/coal was held to the same exact safety, environmental and waste disposal standards as nuclear, and they should, then those would also need to be run at max throttle to justify the initial expense and have significantly shorter lifespans. It’s a “plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit” type issue.
Nothing you have said is an argument against a solar in the day + nuclear at night type of setup. It would certainly be a huge improvement over building out more CO2 based generators.