NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled::NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

  • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.

    • Pipoca@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.

      If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.

      Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn’t come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.

    • Uranium 🟩@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.

      • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        You can do the same with excess power from renewables though. My point was that you need something to fill in the gaps when renewable output is low, whether that be from batteries, pumped storage, peaker plants, etc.

        Nuclear doesn’t fit in here, there are no nuclear peaker plants.