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Comment by sovnade | Hacker News Reader

And we're putting in wind and solar at record rates, but that still doesn't cover us at night or when there's no wind. Batteries or other energy storage cannot meet the demand yet. Nuclear is still the best option for continuous weather-independent power among all the low-polluting options.

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It can, according to some, here are a couple of sources:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...

https://medium.com/enrique-dans/can-we-put-the-solar-and-win...

It can't, source, gas prices in Europe now. Which we are paying. To a dictator who's overtly planning to invade the East. Because the sun isn't shining and batteries are three orders of magnitude too expensive.

Renewables get exactly as much credit for what might happen in future as Communists or NFT sellers get for how awesome their plans are. Nuclear already delivered, in some places still does, winter heat. Its detractors are responsible for gas reliance.

This is patently untrue. If you had followed some links there you would have seen that there are renewable plants today that are cheaper than fossil alternatives. The current gas crisis is, if anything, due to bad choices of electricity companies that tried to do financial games with gas prices. You can't win that game against a crooked political operator. Renewables can and do deliver winter heat too. Nuclear did and could have been something, but now it's not. We should build the best option for the future. And right now that's not nuclear for technological, political and technical reasons.

But neither can nuclear reactors that do not exist yet. Sure, there are a couple that got shut down, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to total consumption. If you want to get an alternative to gas in 15 years or so then maybe nuclear would work. But a better bet is to get people to install heatpumps and drive those with solar and wind in a few years time. Far more effective use of resources, and far quicker from start to finish.

You could also construct the argument the other way around: Demand is highest during the day and nuclear is struggling to follow the demand.

It’s also not weather-independent. When the water temperature is too hot the power stations have to be turned off.

Further it’s pretty common that when one reactor has an issue others of the same type will get turned off too to check if they have the same issue.

That's one (powerful) argument against this intermittency myth on one of the sources I link to here. The grid already is powered by intermittent sources, no power plant is on 365x24.

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