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14 points

It’s becoming increasingly common around weekends in France — which gets about two-thirds of its electricity from its atomic fleet

So they occasionally have to take a nuclear plant offline on a sunny and windy day, because we still don’t have the storage for solar to be an effective baseline.

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11 points

Well if that’s actually the functioning case, they are investing their effort in the wrong place. They don’t need energy production, they need storage.

As far as your comment amount solar, we do have solutions that exist. Energy companies just need to actually get off their asses and work them into the grids.

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3 points

Yeah storage is sadly difficult and time consuming. I mean if we aren’t just using a crap ton of lith-ION.

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3 points

Sodium ion batteries are just about ready for mass production, they take up twice the amount of space as lithium but are just as effective and far cheaper

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1 point

Hydrogen gets shit on loads, but this is exactly the kind of thing it can do pretty well. When you have excess, you don’t need to have to worry about efficiency in the same way. Then it’s ready to go once needed.

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1 point
*

Nuclear Power Industry: “We need to invest $10B in nuclear plants!”
Everyone else: “Why not just spend $1B on battery storage instead?”
Nuclear Power Industry: “Nah, that’s not feasible.”

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1 point

While a certain amount of pumped hydro energy storage is feasible, we will never have enough storage to

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1 point

Who would “they” be in that case? The people who’d like cheap energy do indeed need storage. The nuclear lobbies on the other hand need to cripple their competition, so they only need their own, already present facilities and whatever means they can get to sabotage upcoming competition and secure their primary position.

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1 point

The French? Read the article or the comments I was responding to. 🫰

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8 points

The problem is turning it back on. Xenon poisoning is an issue the prevents reactors switching off and back on again.

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1 point

We need more hydroelectric water storage. Pump water uphill all day. Doesn’t need any fancy materials, just a bunch of space on a hill connected to the grid.

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