federalreverse

Feel free to tone it down a little.

Your discussion of reservoirs/pumped hydro seems a bit one-sided too. Environmental concerns around e.g. sawing off hilltops to build a reservoir (happened in Czechia) or of destroying aquatic eco systems by sucking up/shreddering fish along with river water or drying up river beds are pretty real. Not to mention that reservoirs are already massively affected by climate change, as could be seen particularly well in China in recent years.

And yet, China is still building out solar, wind, and coal faster.

That's despite nuclear having a lot of advantages in China:

• high level of centralization (even SMRs produce 0.5TW)
• high level of governmental involvement in economy (which means huge investments can be a lot easier)
• low level of governmental transparency (which means you don't have to deal with NGOs or Nimbys)
• rapidly increasing demand for electricity (which creates an incentive to build as much supply as possible)
• first-class universities (for independent R&D)
• large land mass (which is useful both for mining and disposal)
• lax environmental policy (same)

For every country that is moving to a solar/wind-dominated future, "base load" definitely is outdated. "Base load" was always artificially propped up economically through night-time power tariffs, and propped up practically through night shifts in factories (thus continually running processes) and things like night storage heaters.

You certainly don't need base load to keep the grid stable, you just need to be able to quickly match production and consumption.

You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem

That is a challenge, because it means you need a flat consumption curve as well -- which in reality you don't see often. I.e. you either need to waste or cheaply export energy, especially at night and over the weekend to make sure your grid doesn't crash.

and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.

The point is that augmenting solar/wind with (plain) nuclear doesn't work well.

But the variability of solar/wind are a challenge as well, especially given the at times negative energy prices. Fossil, biomass, battery, pumped hydro, and H2-based power production have a huge advantage there.

Sure, if you'd wanted to put a lot of money into 30+-year-old nuclear reactors, the power companies could have added storage. However, this is not the only issue of nuclear either and the societal consensus at one point was to phase the reactors out.

(Fwiw, the TerraPower reactors are supposed to store heat — except of course none have been built so far.)

No, because specific power levels need to be available at specific moments. The flat production curve of nuclear does not pair well with varying production from solar/wind. Gas sucks for climate-change reasons but at least you can regulate it up/down in a matter of half hours to react to variability of your other production. While we still had nuclear, wind parks needed to shut down more often.

In the longer run, batteries will shift solar peaks over the day and H2 will likely be used to replace methane.

Commemorated in today's XKCD.

Except, the plant is sized to burn around 8x the amount of household waste produced in the city and regionally, there already are enough waste-burning plants for the current amount of household waste, making this a bet on a foreseeable race to the bottom.

The massive limiting factor for wind/solar/storage is still capex. Biomass is often labeled sustainable, thus often profits from subsidies, and has low capex. It has high opex and allows for high levels of centralization — which is exactly the kind of business power companies know.

Fwiw, our local utility (mid-sized German town) is currently investing in "green" wood-burning and waste-burning facilities for district heating. It's obvious that none if this is sustainable even as a business because there's simply not enough wood waste in the 200-odd km radius they want to use. There's also not enough household waste in the region for the waste facility. They do it anyway, partly because they're incredibly scared of heat pump economics.

As if. The biomass/corn ethanol/HVO/"zero waste" (because we burn it)/... grift(s) will continue for at least another decade.

Thank you for your submission! However, since this is mostly a news community, it does not fit with the theme here. I have removed it.

Maybe you want to live in an illiberal society as well? Because you seem to be advocating that kind of life for others.