this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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The benefit of nuclear and fusion is that they don’t need to run at max capacity, they can change their production outputs essentially on a dime to meet electricity needs.
Unlike solar and wind that need massive battery complexes, and fossil fuels that can’t stop burning once they’ve begun burning. Both of which lead to a lot of wasted energy.
~~This is kinda wrong. Nuclear energy is extremely hard to ramp up and down. Instead, it provides very stable base load power, reducing the amount of ramping energy sources required.~~
On the other hand, solar and wind provide irregular, momentary power, which needs to be stored in batteries to be able to be used over any other period of time where it is not sunny or windy. These batteries can supply electricity on demand.
By building nuclear, we can decrease the amount of solar, wind, and batteries we have to build and ramp daily. ~~However, because nuclear cannot adjust to meet the ebs and flows of energy consumption every day, we will still need renewables and batteries to make up the shortfall.~~
This is a TLDR:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexible-you-might-think#:~:text=Operational%20Flexibility,to%20meet%20certain%20grid%20demands.
This is the extremely massive manuals if you have any interest in reading them.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/11104/non-baseload-operation-in-nuclear-power-plants-load-following-and-frequency-control-modes-of-flexible-operation
That is blatantly false. Nuclear reactors have extremely malleable “Operational Flexibility”, and operators have the ability to change the amount of energy generation in as little as under an hour in order to meet the eb and flow of daily and seasonal energy requirements. This is how reactors have operated for decades at this point, as it is extremely valuable to be able to change energy generation, as why would you burn needless energy when no one is using it?
All that it requires is that a reactor can accurately forecast and plan for when such energy requirements will occur, but with any sort of central planning this can be done easily.
That is the entire point of the anti-neutrino control rods. When a reactor operator wants produce less energy, you simply lower more rods into the reactor to stifle the reaction and slow the “burn” of the nuclear fuel, and when you want more energy you remove additional rods. Further, steam can be vented back through the system and away from turbines which also reduces wear on the system when less energy is required.
Additionally, newly developments in light water reactor are extremely responsive to load capacity changes, to a degree that makes any changes in the short run essentially moot.
On the other hand, battery systems are extremely inefficient, and degrade quickly, along with requiring an absurd amount of space and material to store just a little energy, further that energy quickly dissipates if not used relatively quickly. Further, the sheer amount of rare materials that batteries requires make them not very economical for any sort of large scale usage.
We still need renewables, but their energy should be for short term consumption, not for storage.
That's super cool info, thanks! I guess my info is kinda out of date then. I know that older nuclear power plants were considered less flexible than natural gas, but newer designs should solve that problem completely. The faster we can stop burning fossil fuels, the better!