Comment by swiftcoder
13 hours ago
Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.
This is just wrong. Nuclear is perfectly fine for nighttime because nighttime is highly predictable and doesn't fluctuate very much.
My state (NSW, Australia) for example uses no less then 6 GW at all times of day. Variable load is on top of that during the day.
If we had 6GW of nuclear plants, our grid would be almost completely green and they'd run at 100% utilization.
Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.
You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.
Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Not what I was responding to. Saying nuclear plants can't ramp for predictable night time demand is wrong.
Nuclear plants can't do instant demand response, but they can absolutely respond over windows of several hours.
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