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Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled

Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin or error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.

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agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.

If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.

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CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.

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- CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Geothermal is really expensive in most parts of the world. It costs a lot of money to drill deep enough and to have enough capacity.
  
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  - barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Plasma deep drilling is starting to hit the market which should make geothermal available pretty much everywhere. The sad thing about geothermal is that it’s not even used in areas where you do have heat near the surface, the reason is that geology is quite unpredictable and every borehole is a crap-shoot between hitting the jackpot and having to pay damages out of your arse because people’s houses collapse. Deep drilling has none of those issues.
    
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oyo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.

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- Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Hydro is definitely the least flexible. Those gate move slow.
  
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  - oyo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Hydro is often turned on and off as pumped storage. Nuclear never is
    
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barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Running frequency regulation of batteries is a silly idea, that’s more capacitor range. Also, flywheels, which is how fossil fuels do it anyway.

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