Nuclear is way too expensive, it essentially has lost. It will certainly will play a part for decades, but e.g. wind turbine parks are already at the same price level and have none of the disadvantages of nuclear. Plus several wind parks in a grid work just fine as base load providers, see e.g. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.475...
Nuclear is more expensive than building a combination of wind turbine parks and natural gas plant. That is a fact.
People theorize that nuclear could be more expensive than a grid that relies on over capacity wind turbine parks in combination with thermal or hydro batteries, but no country has gone that route yet. We have countries that are almost 100% nuclear and we have a bunch that are a mix between wind/solar which falls backs to fossil fuels when needed.
The cost of running a energy grid is the total cost, not individual megawatts being produced in isolation.
Ban fossil fuels and the real costs comparison between clean energy becomes apparent.
The intermittency is the one thing nuclear does better than wind. Nuclear can run 24/7 for multiple years on one fuel load on a tiny land footprint with very few raw materials. No other low-carbon source can do that.
But real world nuclear plants seldomly run for years. I just posted links in another comment, nuclears capacity factor in France (the country with a high nuclear buildout) is about 72%, while that of wind is about 50%. The nuclear plants in France routinely have to be shut down / throttled during the summer heat - just at the times of high energy demands.
In the US the nuclear capacity is over 90% across 100 plants. Just because France chooses to curtail doesn't mean they have to. Wind cannot be higher than the wind itself. The characteristic of coming on and off when you want is called being dispatchable.
In the us northwest there's a fairly regular 2-week wind outage across a 4 state area each winter.
It's unavoidable that if you get almost all of your power from some source, but demand varies, you will have a lower capacity factor for that source, unless you have utility-scale power. France does indeed have to curtail nuclear power plant output, because they get almost all their electrical power from nukes, and they don't have big enough resistors to burn up the excess electrical energy that would be produced otherwise. The US has a higher nuclear capacity factor because it gets most of its power from other sources.
> This characteristic is called being dispatchable.
While I mostly appreciate your contributions to this conversation as being informative, a dispatchable plant is one that you can turn on and off to respond to demand, not one that cannot be higher than the wind itself.
If we do get serious about intermittent renewable scale-ups without fracked gas backup we will have to build giant energy storage systems that the nukes will be able to feed into just like the solar PV and wind.
Additionally, nukes can be used for district heating, seawater desalination, hydrogen production, and lots of other non-electric things when the electricity demand is low by using steam bypass techniques.
Regarding correction: I meant to say that but thank you for pointing out that it made no sense as written. I have edited accordingly.
That's an excellent point about the fungibility of energy storage. But I don't think the lower capacity factor of nuclear plants in France is a reasonable argument against nuclear energy anyway.
The non-electric uses of nuclear thermal energy you mention are potentially interesting, but essentially they're just a slightly different form of demand response. If you're doing demand response in your desal plant, you can do it regardless of whether it's an MSF plant driven from nuclear thermal power or an RO plant driven by electric pumps. (And RO is usually considered more efficient.) I think it's more common for waste heat from power plants to be a nuisance that results in cooling towers rather than an asset that results in district heating, although I'm not entirely sure why that is.
Also there is currently no offshore wind park, as only offshore would approach the 50% capacity factor, but they won't, they will be in the 43% as estimated by renewables.ninja
Throttling nuclear power happens only a few days in the summer, once every few years, with only a few percent because it only impact a few reactor on some rivers for environmental norms, during the lowest electricity usage of the year.
There are a number of onshore wind farms that reach 50%, but a better average for onshore wind is 35%. But offshore wind can reach 60%, and so 50% is a reasonable overall average, depending on where you expect wind farms to be built in the future.
