Why is nuclear+short term storage not an option
Because cold winter days exist. Yes you can only build nuclear capacities for the average day and then short-term storage to match the demand pattern. But you would need to do so for the day(s) of the year with the highest energy demand, some cold winter work day. What do you do with those capacities the remaining year as throttling nuclear down is not really saving much costs (most lie in construction and deconstruction)?
How much renewable production, and bess, does one need to achieve 90% grid uptime? Or 99% grid uptime?
About 115% to 130%. Depending on diversification of renewable sources and locations. The remains are losses in storage and transport obviously.
But shouldn’t you actual question be: How much storage is needed?
For a quick summary of those questions you can look here for example…
Fossil fuel lobbyists know very well that their business model is running into a dead end. So now their goal is to extend it as long as possible.
Today’s fossil fuel propaganda isn’t “Climate change from CO₂ isn’t real” anymore. It’s “We can totally fix this with carbon capturing later”, “Renewables are actually bad for the environment” and “Better don’t build renewables now as a much better solution will be available soon™ <insert SMRs or any other fairy tale how new reactor will totally be cheap and not producing waste here>”. Yet it’s not happening. Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and produces toxic waste we actually don’t know how to handle safely for the amounts of time it stays toxic.
Nuclear basically only has a very limited amount of fake arguments constantly used in variations of the same chain:
“Nuclear is perfectly safe!”
“That’s not the problem. The problems are the massive costs and the waste.”
“But we can recycle most of the waste. Also renewables produce so much waste, too.”
“But you actually don’t do it because it’s very expensive and makes nuclear power even less economicallly viable. Also how is recycling wind-turbine blades and solar-panels unrealistic but recycling nuclear waste is not?”
“But nuclear would be economically viable and so much cheaper if it wasn’t so over-regulated. And lithium mining is so toxic to the environment.”
“It’s only perfectly safe because it’s highly regulated. And we don’t actually need lithium for grid storage where energy optimised density is not the biggest concern.”
“<Inserts insults about you being brain-washed to fear nuclear power here>, also nuclear will totally become much cheaper with SMRs any day now…”
In the end it’s always the same story. Nuclear might be safe but it is insanely expensive and produces radioactive waste. No, the fact that you can theoretically recycle the waste doesn’t matter, because you don’t do it. No, it will not become cheap magically soon. And no it is not expensive because it’s highly regulated because without those regulations we can start at the top again and talk about how safe it is.
There are only two reasons to pretend otherwise: you work in nuclear power and need to sell your product or you work in fossil fuels and need to keep the discussion up so people keep talking instead of actually working to get rid of them. And the nuclear industry and lobby is actually not that massive compared to the fossil fuel one. So it’s very clear where the vast majority of nuclear fan boys get their talking points. Have you ever thought about the fact why pro-nuclear is so massively over-represented on social media? 😉
PS: Nice, I only need to scroll ~ one page up and down to find all those fake arguments repeated here. How surprising /s
Another important note about France: They are the second country alongside Germany heavily pushing for an upscaled green hydrogen market in the EU. Because -just like renewables- nuclear production doesn’t match the demand pattern at all. Thus it’s completely uneconomical without long-term storage.
The fact that we seem to constantly discuss nuclear vs. renewables is proof that it’s mostly lobbying bullshit. Because in reality they don’t compete. It’s either renewables+short-term storage+long-term-term storage or renewables+nuclear+long-term storage. Those are the only two viable models.
Yes, it’s called reality. I know it’s an ugly thing that just doesn’t go away no matter how hard you want it to.
Yeah let me imagine a supervolcano explosion of that scale to effect global weather patterns. What do you think will happen to your reactors? No, they are not indestructable just because they can handle an earthquake of normally expected proportion.
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building houising the batteries weighs 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
PS: And the materials can also be recycled. Funnily there’s always the pro-nuclear argument coming up then you can recycle waste to create new fuel rod (although it’s never actually done), yet with battery tech the exact same argument is then ignored.
“85% of used fuel rods can be recycled” is like “We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means”.
In theory it’s correct. In reality it’s bullshit that will never happen because it’s completely uneconomical and it’s just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
That all those products are produced by the same company is the biggest joke.
And there is even more: the company also produced a European “3 Musketiers” bar (yes, written like this) that again was something different and called Marathon on the US (both discontinued).
It’s not just the packaging but the bar itself that is completely different.
The US Milky Way would be the equivalent to your Mars bar and the 3 Musketeers is very close to what you know as Milky Way.
Not that I […] want to minimize the experience.
But isn’t that something that happens at pretty much all companies
Pick one…
130% production on average, with excess being stored, minus losses in conversions, transport and storage = 100% demand covered all the time.
Or the longer version: For a stable grid I need to cover 100% of the demand in next to real-time. This can be achieved with enough long- and short-term storage, plus some overproduction to account for storage losses. The 115% to 130% production (compared to actual demand) are based on studies for Germany and vary by scenario, with the higher number for the worst case (people strongly resisting all changes to better balance consumption and south Germany keeping up there resistence to diversify by only building solar while blocking wind power).
The question now is: How much storage do I need? And that answer is varying by much greater amount based on scenario (for example between 50 and 120 GW capacity needed as electrolysis for long term-storage or battery storage between 50GWh and 200GWh).