this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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This is a myth, most of the nuclear reactors can be throttled down, it is not instant but they can go as low as 20% in around 30 min.
The thing is it is much easier to stop a wind turbine than to throttle a nuclear reactor, and unlike fossil fuel power turbines most of the cost of the nuclear reactor is fixed cost, whether the reactor is running or not it still costs the same.
Afaik, German reactors were designed to be throttled to 60% capacity, within around a week. And doing that too often wasn't safe either. And there was no economic incentive to do so because a reactor throttled is not a reactor earning—you have to do a bunch of extra work to throttle the reactor and you're only conserving negligible amounts of fuel.
I am not deep enough in the topic to know whether that's a limitation due to all the German reactors being particularly outdated. But "30 min" and "20%" sounds more like an emergency protocol to me rather than any kind of standard procedure.
The PWRs most prevalent in Germany did control their power output by modulating the boron content of their primary loop coolant in regular (non emergency) operation. This is a slow process, but it was done deliberately, because using control rods for this purpose would lead to inefficient fuel use due to uneven fuel burn.