It seems to me like this is a little inconsistent in how it treats the storage needs of nuclear and wind/solar. If you have a good energy storage solution, then 12-hour adjustment times are fine, and variable supply is also fine. The question is something like: how much storage do you need, as a fraction of load, and how efficient can that storage be, and how much does it cost?
[For example, my favorite storage solution when I looked into this years ago was phase change materials; dump the thermal output of the reactor into a large reservoir of salt at its melting point, which moves more of it from solid to liquid; run steam thru other pipes to drain energy from the reservoir, turning some of the salt from liquid to solid, and then push turbines using the steam to generate electricity. The moment-to-moment electric output of the plant is now determined entirely by how quickly you pump steam, which is easy to adjust, you have plenty of warning if you need to stop the reaction and so stop dumping heat in, and the reservoir is held at a consistent temperature, which reduces wear on components. Apparently this is what TerraPower is using for its prototype plant, and so it’s still one of the better ideas out there.]
I could buy that actually solar needs less batteries (or the equivalent) than nuclear does, but it feels to me like that’s the modeling that needs to happen here, and my queuing theory intuition is that that probably isn’t the case. Nuclear’s storage situation for the typical case is bad, since it needs to store ~8hr of night-time production for the day-time peak, whereas I think the typical case for solar is more like ~2hr of storage because the consumption peak and production peak are only off by ~2hr, but if you’re shooting for something like three nines of uptime, the “worst thousandth” situation for solar seems like it requires way more storage than the “worst thousandth” situation for nuclear. There’s still maybe gains here if there’s storage mechanisms that are cheap only if you use them infrequently and slowly, but I’d currently bet against solar having better storage prospects. [That said, the overall cost for solar could still be lower, even if it pays slightly more for storage, if it pays less for generation.]
It seems to me like this is a little inconsistent in how it treats the storage needs of nuclear and wind/solar. If you have a good energy storage solution, then 12-hour adjustment times are fine, and variable supply is also fine. The question is something like: how much storage do you need, as a fraction of load, and how efficient can that storage be, and how much does it cost?
[For example, my favorite storage solution when I looked into this years ago was phase change materials; dump the thermal output of the reactor into a large reservoir of salt at its melting point, which moves more of it from solid to liquid; run steam thru other pipes to drain energy from the reservoir, turning some of the salt from liquid to solid, and then push turbines using the steam to generate electricity. The moment-to-moment electric output of the plant is now determined entirely by how quickly you pump steam, which is easy to adjust, you have plenty of warning if you need to stop the reaction and so stop dumping heat in, and the reservoir is held at a consistent temperature, which reduces wear on components. Apparently this is what TerraPower is using for its prototype plant, and so it’s still one of the better ideas out there.]
I could buy that actually solar needs less batteries (or the equivalent) than nuclear does, but it feels to me like that’s the modeling that needs to happen here, and my queuing theory intuition is that that probably isn’t the case. Nuclear’s storage situation for the typical case is bad, since it needs to store ~8hr of night-time production for the day-time peak, whereas I think the typical case for solar is more like ~2hr of storage because the consumption peak and production peak are only off by ~2hr, but if you’re shooting for something like three nines of uptime, the “worst thousandth” situation for solar seems like it requires way more storage than the “worst thousandth” situation for nuclear. There’s still maybe gains here if there’s storage mechanisms that are cheap only if you use them infrequently and slowly, but I’d currently bet against solar having better storage prospects. [That said, the overall cost for solar could still be lower, even if it pays slightly more for storage, if it pays less for generation.]