And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
Ah yes, everyone is brainwashed. Sure. We see today how non brainwashed is Germany that not only is a bad polluter but plans gas expansion to firm renewables.
Nuclear requires far less overcapacity and transmission. You can cycle maintenance schedules and if country's demand is smaller, you build smaller units like Candu to make this rotation.
Nuclear generates the same power when demand is minimum as when its maximum.
Take Germany for example. It requires a peak of 45GW of power and a trough of 30GW.
That means that you need 45GW running 24/7, with 10% overcapacity for maintenence, so 50GW running 247,
Nuclear's lack of dispatchability means it needs to generate 50GW to produce 35GW-days, meaning the cost per MWh is more like $150 per MWh rather than $30MWh for solar.
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
