Comment by cmarschner
11 days ago
My prediction is that the world will stabilize somewhere around 80% renewables and 20% nuclear. Maybe less. Prove me wrong
11 days ago
My prediction is that the world will stabilize somewhere around 80% renewables and 20% nuclear. Maybe less. Prove me wrong
I'd think more nuclear would be better for environment. Since sun does not shine around the clock and other renewables have larger negative environmental impact. Batteries for storage is not good either with today's technology.
Pure nuclear, or even as a majority production method, would be fool's errand, though. Unless someone manages to invent small enough reactors that can be started and stopped at will, to adjust a day's power demands. I doubt that can even be possible, though.
In the end it is a matter of economics. Right now there is no path towards nuclear becoming competitive again against wind, solar, battery.
Plus, storage and cleanup costs in case of failures are not even priced in and left to taxpayers.
This leaves nuclear to government actors influenced by lobbyists.
Given they don't complement each other, I predict that equilibrium to be unstable: either nuclear or renewables will grow to mostly replace the other, due to economic forces.
But they do complement each other... Nuclear provides the base generation that's online 24/7 while renewables are unstable and able to provide the peak demand.
No, nuclear wants a dispatchable generation source to provide the power. It only makes sense as a complement when the dispatchable generation is expensive to run somehow, if it's cheaper than the nuclear than you should just not bother with nuclear. The two things which complement it are gas turbine generators (cheap to build, dispatchable, expensive fuel), and storage (very expensive to build ATM, needs to buy power when there's excess, but otherwise cheap). Renewables are not this: the energy they produce is cheap but not at all dispatchable (curtailable, yes, but you can't just get more wind blowing on demand). What this means is that sometimes they fail to provide the peak and sometimes they can provide the whole peak and more, which both doesn't provide a reliable grid and eats into the economic justification for nuclear. So, you want to pair them with dispatchable generation to fill in the gaps, which sounds familiar, no? In fact the only difference is with nuclear your gaps are more periodic and there's not such a large range of the gaps.
That's why they don't complement each other: they actually want the same, different thing to complement them: something which can fill in the gaps in the power that they can economically provide. And renewables are a heck of a lot cheaper than nuclear at the moment.
No, they are not typically complementary. The optimal solutions for powering a grid tend to either be all-nuclear or all-renewable (usually the latter now), depending on cost assumptions. Optimal solutions with a mixture are uncommon.