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Comment by fpoling | Hacker News Reader

The problem with nuclear is that their daily throttling capacity is low leading to those minimal price contracts. So it makes sense to pair nuclear with batteries as coal plants in US started to do. With that having nuclear as a base load during winter or prolonged bad weather would still make sense.

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If you have enough storage to make nuclear work, why not just use that storage for renewable energy instead?

Storage is still expensive. But if there is enough storage to cover the demand for couple hours then it can also be used to store excessive energy from nuclear making throttling down the reactor output much smoother. In few years when the storage will be cheap enough to last the whole night it will kill nuclear, but while the capacity is low why not to use it to make running nuclear more efficient.

The problem is not smoothing demand for a couple of hours, the problem is that you have excess production most of the year but need reserve capacity for two weeks without sun or wind during peak demand in winter.

In 10 years when the batteries will cover 24 hours of demand to cover few weeks without sun and wind nuclear will be too expensive as reactors requires maintenance even when they do not work. Coal will be vastly cheaper beating even natural gas as one can store coal in bulk.

But right now we do not have excessive capacity and smoothing the curve for nuclear allows to burn less coal and natural gas. Essentially right now batteries are killing peaker natural gas plants, not nuclear or coal.

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