Nuclear works when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Renewables provide cheap energy at the margin (e.g. negative energy prices in Germany at peak hours) but cannot be counted on all the time.
Renewables provide cheap energy at the margin (e.g. negative energy prices in Germany at peak hours) but cannot be counted on all the time.
This kind of thinking is exactly what's wrong with armchair modeling of renewables.
Even if you're somewhere where the wind could give you 90% of your energy, you'll still need a reliable, baseline power source if you don't want everything to randomly shut down the other 10% of the time.
Wind + solar aren't as cheap as the LCOE makes it seem because you always have to pay for another source of power as baseline. If you added similar subsidies to natural gas it would be by far the cheapest energy source
For example using Norwegian hydro together with German, British and Danish wind.
Germany <-> Norway (2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink
UK <-> Norway (2021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link
Denmark <-> Norway (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagerrak_(power_transmission_...
* The best option is storing it as potential energy for water, i.e. using a pump and a dam. That's 90% efficient, except, we can't exactly build dams everywhere.
* Power to gas to power has a dreadful 10% efficiency ratio, and it also requires energy to make. So, you use a ton of energy to store very little energy.
* Conversion to hydrogen has the same problems. Best we can do 25%. What do you do when you only have a tiny bit of excess energy? The process takes a constant amount of energy in, so you need a constant power source. Nuclear reactors, ideally.
Storing nuclear waste isn't hard. France is building a storage place that will handle all our nuclear waste produced until 2080, safely for hundreds of years. The project cost 25 billion euros, and that includes looking for potential places, running tests, and everything else involved in new things. Future projets would be much cheaper. Considering the country is subsidizing renewables to the tune of 70 billion, it costs us one third of the price for a solution of literally a lifetime. That's also taking into account that, ultimately, very little of the nuclear waste is truly oh-shit-oh-shit dangerous. With a simple phone call, you can most likely go visit a low activity waste storage location, which is 90% of the waste we produce, and you can just go dance on storage tanks. Radioactivity is basically nil.
Additionally, waste is only waste because we can't use it. Look at projects like Superphénix and breeder reactors, and suddenly you've got all this stored "waste" able to produce much more energy.
I doubt that it comes out cheaper than building pumped storage or hydrogen facilities. Even if that means building more renewables to account for inefficiencies involved
The challenge for countries like the UK is saving solar generation from summer to use for heating in the winter: The capital costs are much higher, because instead of storing one day's solar output, you need to store a few hundred days' output.
Of course, nuclear is super-expensive (or at least, it is the way my country tries to build it). I don't know what the answer is.