So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
That does not sound very logical.