The market has spoken. We need a shitload of reliable electricity and can't rely on the sun or wind.
Individual participants making different bets is how the market decides what’s effective and what’s wasteful. But you can’t assume any subgroup is speaking for the total market, because they could be about to lose big. Nuclear could make a huge comeback in the coming decades, but until that happens we can only talk about the market in terms of what the market is actually doing.
China is already trying to use coal as a peaking generation something it’s terrible at. That’s something nuclear is even worse at and what’s ultimately limiting their nuclear ambitions. They slowed down the pass of nuclear construction despite nuclear only making up ~5% of their electricity supply it’s simply an issue with nuclear not regulations.
Which then shifted overall electricity planning.
Japan and Germany panicked. China did something else.
If you are aiming for a fleet of 200 reactors, you should be completing 2 per year.
~5% of total supply after 2+ decades of nuclear construction is almost perfunctory.
It's because nuclear power plants are so durable, they last almost forever, but at least 80-100 years for modern plants.
If you build out too quickly, you end up in the same situation the French found themselves in after the Messmer-plan predictions turned out to vastly overestimate demand: they were done after 15 years.
With effectively no nuclear power plants to build for 45-85 years, their industry withered and they have had to re-learn building them. Not helped by the fact that there was a legal cap on the total amount of nuclear production.
However, don't discount renewables. Paired with energy storage -- which isn't only chemical batteries! --, intermittent generation can be extremely useful across vasts parts of North America.
Add energy (speed) when available, use it to power things when not.
Hydro is described as peaking power because it can be ramped up and down 100%-0%-100% multiple times in a single day. Very useful for tracking changing demand and intermittent energy from solar/wind.
Coal/Nuclear has issues doing the same due to thermal stress and heat loss when not in use. The energy used to get things back to working temperatures requires fuel which isn’t generating power, you also have ware issues from thermal cycling. Alternatively, you could keep things at operating temperatures but that’s again spending fuel without generating electricity.
On top of this Nuclear runs into if you try and ramp down very low very quickly, wait a few hours a then try and ramp back up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison To be clear 100%-30%-100% can be fine 100% to 0% to 100% isn’t.
“Firm power” is more about the type of relationship between energy generation and consumers than the actual technology being used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firm_service
Baseload is load, so demand side.
Firm power is generation, so supply side.
Since intermittent renewables cannot do baseload, and get asymptotically more expensive trying, fans of intermittent renewables are trying to paint baseload as an obsolete concept by making intermittency primary.
That is silly. Baseload is real and a major component of demand. Intermittent renewables can be a good addition, as their supply curves can actually match the variable part of the demand fairly closely (thought obviously not perfectly).
It is not true that Hydro can be ramped arbitrarily. For example, just last year Finland had a huge problem with their plentiful hydro plants overloading the grid. Fortunately they also have significant nuclear that they were able to ramp down to compensate.
With ~60% baseload, there is no need to ramp nuclear plants down to 0 rapidly. That's only necessary if you screw up your grid by having too much intermittent renewables and giving them priority. Don't do that.
Alas, overloading their grid with renewables is exactly what some countries are doing, Germany for example. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. One is that due to even the average capacity factors being so low, you have to dramatically over provision in order to even achieve fully supply on average. However, that massive overprovisioning means that when weather is favorable, those massively over provisioned massively cannibalize each other (and other producers, if those still exist).
The more you overprovision, the worse this gets.
Reasonably ramping nuclear up or down is no problem. France for example has been using nuclear reactors almost exclusively for some time. Lower capacity factors for the nuclear plants than you'd really want, but otherwise not a problem. Their investment in renewables (aim seems to be around 30-40%) will likely increase the capacity factors of their nuclear plants. Good for them!
You can find that definition used regularly in older books dating well before renewables where a thing.
01 April 1967: “This paper states some of the basic principles concerning daily and annual load factor on power systems, and the use of load duration curves in coordinating the type and operating pattern of generating plant. Operating procedure is explained, and the types of plant in use or under construction in New Zealand are described. Overseas plant is divided into the categories of base load, medium load factor, and peaking, with an outline of the desirable characteristics in each case.”
Also, time of day pricing shifts users to periods of low demand so it doesn’t represent the minimum need, just the observed demand under specific pricing schemes. If daytime rates fall well below nighttime rates continually the actual usage at 3AM would fall dramatically.
'nuff said.
There’s an even older saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and prove it.”
The article even goes on to use both, while making clear which definition the author is trying to promote: “Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.[3][5][6]”
In the wider context grid operators don’t actually care about the specific absolute lowest demand number. They need to operate 24/7 for years so whatever the minimum number happens to be for a single second just doesn’t matter much compared to blackouts and other extreme situations. Bottom 5th percentile matters from an economic standpoint, but very temporary extremes only matter in terms of resiliency.
You've consistently mixed up "baseload" and "baseload generation" (not usually called that), irrespective of spaces.
There is baseload. That's demand.
"The base load[2] (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
There is generation capacity that caters to that demand, for example "baseload generation" or better dispatchable generation. That is supply.
> There’s an even older saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and prove it.”
True, true...
You understand the difference between supply and demand?
"This demand can be met by unvarying power plants[3] or dispatchable generation,[4]"
Dispatchable generation can also service variable demand, but it is difficult to impossible for non-dispatchable generation to service baseload.
You’re incorrect in several ways here. Utilities care about the supply they need to generate not total customer demand because of inefficiency in the transmission network. People like yourself got confused when reading about existing terms and have been using them incorrectly ever since.
Anyway you’ve been spouting so much nonsense I’m only going to respond to a fraction of it.
The minimum power demand is the easiest to reach with intermittent sources via even minimal storage being by definition the lowest relevant number. It’s also the least valuable electricity to supply which is why nobody actually does this. You use energy from batteries when the price of that energy is highest. That’s a function of energy markets not inherent limitations on the technology. It’s easy to move most use at 3AM to other times of the day because most of the consumption is due to cheap prices. Charging EV’s late at night happens specifically because there’s anything particular going on at 3AM and otherwise generation would be idle.
And baseload is only the easiest to supply when you have firm generating capacity. When you don't, you can't.
Bye.
They can know how much energy they are generating and they can look at the grid frequency/stability. Which is why they speak in terms of supply. Demand is always a lower and only indirectly relevant number.
> have firm generation capacity
Batteries charged from redundant but still cheap solar are more dependable than individual nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants have historically have been offline roughly 10% of a given power plants total lifespan making it surprisingly difficult to consistently supply baseload with nuclear alone. Total availability of French nuclear power in 2022 for example was abysmal. Batteries can easily make up for short term instability, but nobody is paying for enough batteries to supply 1+GW 24/7 for 2 months because some nuclear power plant will eventually need maintenance.
How cheap will wind, solar and batteries be then?
There is no universe where starting in on a new nuke today makes financial sense. They just take too long, cost to much to build and run.
China are currently building 27 reactors [1], and the average time is still 7 years for completion.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
Important point: even the most disastrous nuclear projects are better than "succesful" intermittent renewables.
Nuclear power plants are big and take a while to build. They also reliably deliver truly stupendous amounts of electricity over an amazing amount of time.
Totally worth it.
Nuclear: an expensive way to generate cheap electricity.
Intermittent renewables: a cheap way to generate expensive electricity.
And they had some major f-ups. For example, they used a new licensing process, which is all-up-front. This is great, because it means you can get a single design approved and then just built that design over and over, instead of all these one-offs that then are all FOAK.
Except.
Their design wasn't actually done (correctly) when it was approved. So what got approved was safe (that's what the NRC checks). But it wasn't actually buildable, which is not the NRC's problem. So they had to go back to the NRC again and again to make changes, but within a process that wasn't meant to work that way. So sometimes it was cheaper just to tear down what they had built.
COVID also didn't help.
But now the Vogtles are built, and as you said the second AP-1000 was already 30% cheaper than the first. The next ones should be significantly better, not only for the usual FOAK stuff, but they have now built two of these, so they have plans that are actually buildable.
Poland selected it, so did Ukraine.
Economists have the term market failure for configurations in which groups of individuals making decisions predictably produces bad outcomes [1].
The last decades seem to imply that there is a broader social failure when high-frequency, echo chambered, outrage-based discussion results in suboptimal debate. This is true from our political media to social media to the quality of private policy debate in America.
Nuclear power seems to exemplify that problem. If a public utility discusses nuclear power, every neighbour in the zip code will come out complaining about radiation. Even if their town is built on radioactive coal ash. Even if they live next to a missile silo, or near a port where our nuclear-powered fleet makes call. Private parties, on the other hand, can cut through the bullshit, which we usually see as bad, but plays a spoiler effect that maybe keeps the system from getting gridlocked.