Comment by PunchyHamster
6 days ago
> Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacity, it creates dangerous residues, it is not very modulable.
I'd imagine a lot of that would be solved if we just kept building them.
Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.
Nuclear plants are what about 5% per minute ? So you only need 30 minutes worth of capacity vs hours and hours for anything green
> Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards
The solution is to overprovision and either disconnect or cover the surplus panels.
> and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.
Power banks are useful in themselves (smoothing over demand peaks that would be hard to follow with any technology), and you can fill in with wind as well, as having multiple sources make times of reduced capacity less likely.