this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Renewables are also intermittent and strongly tied to geography. Geography is especially limiting in much of Europe which isn't particularly sunny, and where much of the low hanging fruit for wind, geothermal, and hydro has already been tapped.
And even if you were able to keep building it, you will soon run into the storage problem which is still potentially more costly, especially when trying to provide baseline power for the whole year, where it's buildout may have to be many times more expensive to save power for months than a baseline solution like nuclear which can provide steady power all the time.
So, some mix of baseline solutions like nuclear and intermittent solutions like renewables will be needed to completely phase out coal, oil, and gas which provide our baseline power today.
I will tell you a secret: Nuclear power doesn't work without storage either. That's just something they will not tell you as that's their biggest pro-nuclear/anti-renewable argument.
Nuclear is expensive and running the amount necessary in winter is only viable because you have an overproduction most of the year to export. But when everyone runs either on nuclear, nuclear and renewables or renewables and storage, there is no demand most of year (as everyone is overproducing) and also nobody to import from in a few especially cold weeks in winter (so you need even more nuclear power you won't need most of the year). That's completely unaffordable unless you put in storage in place to cover some of your winter demand and export time-independent when there is demand in other countries (which is why French models for 2050+ plan with huge capacities of hydrogen production - not the most efficient way of storage, but good for export).
Actually weeks. Wind and solar are quite complementary. So you only need to cover the rare circumstance of cloudy and windless... which doesn't happen more than may 3 weeks a year, barely more than a few days in a row (in a lot of countries even less if you geographically diversify).
Nuclear energy is backed by big business and a lot of money. It’s a big cash cow and there is a lot of money and effort spent to manufacture public support for it, and they use troll farms to push their agenda, no doubt. Am I the only one that finds it a little suspicious that it’s always the same few talking points whenever the topic is mentioned? Whenever there’s a discussion about investing in renewable energy, there are always nuke bros popping up, bombarding the thread, derailing the discussion.
but this isn't a discussion about renewables, the topic is Slovenia's new nuclear plant which they're building to end coal consumption for power generation.
in fact, what you describe is exactly what is happening here to nuclear