You will need long term storage in both cases. Nuclear can’t act as a peaker because you can’t quickly ramp up or down the generation. Nuclear can only perform as baseload which, in theory, could be provided by a renewable energy mix if the install base is high enough.
I don’t disagree with your point that it isn’t a simple direct comparison but any sensible energy mix will still require storage. I find it difficult to see the economic case for nuclear if renewables can be installed in sufficient quantities, given that nuclear is roughly 4 times as expensive as solar and wind.
Nuclear can only perform as baseload
That’s only true for NPPs built decades ago. Modern designs can also do load-following power. For peaks you have renewables, of course, they complement each other. Diversity makes a healthy grid.
Niclear has high investment cost and very low production cost which incentivises runnig at max output for as long as possible. This might block out renewables from the grid if their production cost is higher and make it less profitable to build them. So its really not a Symbiosis between nuclear and regenerative
Modern designs can also do load-following power.
I think this is a maybe in terms of what the grid needs. Will be great if nuclear is built that genuinely supports system demands.
Diversity makes a healthy grid.
Couldn’t agree more.
With 100% renewables you would need almost 100% storage and potentially for multiple days, with a nuclear baseload you’d only need storage for the peaks, you could even use excess renewables to charge up the storage for these peaks.
What do you mean with 100% Storage? And why would you need it for multiple days if you have a grid that transports energy all around the continent and in future possible worldwide?
I guess we can talk about transmission then, yes if you can get enough renewable energy across a continent then in theory you can transmit it to where it is needed, however you would need a LOT of transmission capability that is not currently available. The current interconnects can handle an impressive amount of load but you’re not going to transmit enough power for all of sweeden from spain. There are some massive transmission projects underway that should help address this but they’re still not going to be enough to cover a 100% outage for most places. So a cost analysis would have to be done to determine if massive transmission projects are better than building nuclear plants. Keep in mind, these same transmission lines can transmit nuclear power as well so they should be built regardless of what energy source you use.
Not sure about the 100% point but you will certainly need long term storage which is an unsolved problem. A point I wanted to make was that with enough renewables installed you have the baseload. You would also have an excess of production at peak times that would be useful to store long term.
My personnal view is that a sensible energy mix should have some nuclear but I don’t think it is the key to solving our future energy requirements and should be minimal as it isn’t good value.
If you want 99.9999% uptime with no backup then the nuclear fleet will need months or years of storage due to the prevalence of correlated unplamned outages.
Back in reality, a good enough renewable system with >95-99% uptime has less than 10% of the storage that will be found in the accompanying country’s EV fleet. Even if you are too allergic to nuance to understand the real solution for the remainder, simply planning a renewable rollout and assuming existing fossil fuel peakers for down periods over 12 hours will take 20-100 years to release as much carbon as delaying one of the years waiting for late, over budget nuclear reactors.
Even if you are too allergic to nuance to understand the real solution
And thus you have shown that your mind is made up and no amount of evidence will sway your decisions. Good day.
