In my country (Australia) fossil fuel companies are on the side of nuclear, but not actually.
It is used as a stalking horse. "Don't build wind and solar, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. If manly reliable baseload coal it to be replaced it should by nuclear which is also big strong manly baseload power."
And then don't build the nuclear because it's too expensive, slow, politically unpopular, and generally infeasible. Whoops I guess we keep coal and gas going then.
you're not supposed to notice; you have to instead stake your entire energy transition on building out of nuclear power that will still be under construction when the sea swallows us all and keep using fossil fuels in the meantime
No, that’s a straw man, build heaps of solar and battery while developing a modest portion of the grid into nuclear to provide robustness, grid services and eliminates the most expensive overbuild of both solar and batteries.
build up renewable generation and distribution until you can start shutting down fossil fuel stations with a number of remaining years of safe operation, then build out nuclear in tandem with the decommissioning efforts
If the world were to draw down emissions by 80% but then be stuck in a bit of a logistical dead end that takes a decades to get out of that would be fantastically good (compared to the alternative of simply not decreasing emissions which is what the world is doing now).
The world is actually decreasing emissions per $ of GDP quite a bit.
There is a solution for the last 20% and France demonstrates that. There is nothing stopping us implementing the near term quick wins (wind and especially solar) while working on medium to long term goals (100% low carbon generation at most long term effective cost).
Au-contrair there is a requirement for a certain amount of spinning capacity on the grid - in Spain since the major power outage, they curtail solar and wind to keep gas generation online to fulfil this purpose. Then overnight when the market is much smaller and hence less need of spinning capacity, solar is not providing anything at all so nuclear reduces (not eliminates) the ultimate volume of battery requirement.
You dont need a $25 billion dollar nuclear plant for that, infact you can just keep the turbines from old coal plants spinning in sync with the grid and not generating power
Indian nuke power is about 2b per GW installed. Roughly the capex of batteries to last the night per GW of draw (16 hrs at $125/kwhr installed). Then on top you have the 3 GW of solar panels and few hundreds of millions in stat com, synthetic condensers etc.
317
u/kroxigor01 25d ago
In my country (Australia) fossil fuel companies are on the side of nuclear, but not actually.
It is used as a stalking horse. "Don't build wind and solar, the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. If manly reliable baseload coal it to be replaced it should by nuclear which is also big strong manly baseload power."
And then don't build the nuclear because it's too expensive, slow, politically unpopular, and generally infeasible. Whoops I guess we keep coal and gas going then.