In the short term, one would burn natural gas in turbines. The marginal cost of displacing this by using nuclear instead would lead to an enormous cost per unit of CO2 avoided, so high that most other uses of fossil fuels would be eliminated first (like, all use in ground vehicles).
In the long term, either non-fossil fuels burned in turbines (e-fuels like hydrogen or biofuels), or bulk thermal storage of renewable electricity. These both have lousy round trip efficiency (maybe 40%), but that's still cheaper than using batteries, because the capex per unit of storage capacity is far lower, and the cost of the RTE is low when there are so few charge-discharge cycles (as happens with seasonal storage); cost of seasonal storage is dominated by capex, which is why using high-capex batteries for it is such a bad idea.
Personally, I consider bulk thermal storage of cheap DC-coupled PV the most promising approach, as being pursued by Standard Thermal. They claim to be able to deliver 365/24/7 heat at 600 C for $3-5/GJ, which is competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.
I would prefer to reduce emissions using technology that exists today, I know it works, and I have seen it operate at national grid scale, not speculative future tech.
You do highlight something there: the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. If not, the 40 (or 60, or 80) year investment horizons needed to partially shore up the bad economics of nuclear become utterly absurd.
(The criticism that renewables don't last as long as nuclear suddenly looks like praise when viewed in this light; renewables don't need those very long time horizons to pay out.)
But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed even in a nuclear-powered world, because of existing hydrogen demand that is currently satisfied by steam reforming of fossil fuels (mostly natural gas). So lots of hydrogen will be made; it doesn't require new technology to make some more.
I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser, since burner reactors are far too fuel-inefficient to last very long on existing estimated uranium resources. The current estimate of uranium resources at 3x current price would provide the world's current rate of primary energy demand for just 5 years, if burner reactors were used.
> the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance.
1. No, it doesn't
2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
> But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
> Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed
Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales. All known methods are either extremely complex and volatile, or require large amounts of energy to release hydrogen back, or cannot store much hydrogen to begin with: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S025405842...
> I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser
something something assuming no rapid advances or something
It does, for the reason I gave. You didn't give a reason why not.
> 2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
Incredibly, you seem unaware of just how rapidly the cost of solar and wind and batteries have dropped.
If we project the demonstrated experience curve of PV forward another five doublings or so, PV energy will be delivered at under $0.01/kWh. This is basically impossible for nuclear to compete with.
> 3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve. If anything, it has shown a negative experience curve.
But in any case, even if nuclear were capable of rapid advance, this would still argue against assuming 40 (or 60, or 80) year lifetimes for nuclear power plants when calculating their economics. The power plants would be obsolete and uncompetitive long before that time span ended.
One cannot have it both ways: both assuming rapid advance, and assuming long economic life.
> Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top. This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't. Listen to the market when it's sending you such a strong signal.
> Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales.
Yes we do. We store it just like we store natural gas, in underground caverns. This is demonstrated technology, and would be very cheap (capex < $1 per kWh of storage capacity). There's a well-advanced project to do this in Utah, for example. The salt formation there could store enough hydrogen to power the entire US grid for something like a day.
> something something assuming no rapid advances or something
I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear. I'm willing to consider nuclear advances, I just note that nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
> nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
Kind of circular reasoning / begging the question here, since in North America we essentially stopped building nuclear over 35 years ago.[1] We stopped because people were scared of nuclear, and thus a ton of regulatory roadblocks were increased, making it uneconomic. Note that the changes in regulations post-1986 were not new regulations to improve the safety of plants, rather, they were increased environmental review burdens, state-level moratoria and voter approval requirements -- populist measures designed to do exactly what they did do: kill nuclear.[2]
So, we've chosen to not build any reactors anymore, which means comparatively little advancement is happening (since who would invest in that when no one is soliciting bids for a new plant), and then we're saying "See, nuclear isn't advancing, so we shouldn't invest in it."
[2] The 1990s saw much lower growth of electricity demand, too, so few new plants were needed during that decade, and by the time more capacity was needed, cheap shale gas drove the rest of the nails in the nuclear coffin. Of course, anti-nuclear activists who are also anti-carbon-emissions activists shouldn't count that as a win.
> We stopped because people were scared of nuclear,
This is the usual line nuclear advocates use, but it doesn't fit the facts. Nuclear stopped because it became clear it wasn't competitive with alternatives. There were large cost overruns, increased risk from demand growth slacking, and large new sources of power becoming available from PURPA and natural gas.
As the famous Forbes cover story said:
“The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent.”
You didn't give reasons. You presented this as an undeniable fact. And the whole reason is "but advances".
E.g. you literally listed green hydrogen as a viable storage solution even if we literally don't know how to store it reliably at required scales. Oh, wait. Your answer to that is "we just store it in underground caverns" lol. Even though it's very, very different to storing natural gas. For example, it takes 16 times as much energy to compress hydrogen as methane. Or that hydrogen embrittlement is a thing (I'm pretty sure you didn't know about this and think that we just pump hydrogen or, indeed, natural gas into empty caverns underground).
And so on and so forth.
> Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve.
Could it be almost 40 years of fear mongering and no advances in nuclear? Whereas France with its nuclear reactors has been busy keeping Germany afloat after it shut down its plants. And whereas China is went from 9 constructions in 2000 to 36 in 2025, 42 new ones proposed, and over 140 on the roadmap, 6-7 years construction time per reactor.
> One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top.
Ah yes. So on top, that once there's winter all "on top" countries end up importing energy from countries with stable power generation in form of nuclear and hydro.
> This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't.
Nuclear isn't installed due to 40 years of nuclear fear-mongering and anti-nuclear policies. China has no issues installing both nuclear and renewables.
Many countries are now reverting their stance on nuclear precisely because diversifying energy sources is a good thing, and we literally don't have more stable sources of electricity than nuclear. We're literally discussing this under a post about Canada finally admitting that nuclear is a good thing actually why don't we build more of it. Following most of Europe, for example. And Asia has never been shy of nuclear energy, with China busily building reactors all over Asia and Middle East.
> I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear.
Note how you again invent requirements for no advances, assume this is a fact, and pretend that it is I who requires this. Imagine if you ever had an argument in good faith.
No, it's ok if you schedule maintenance during summer. And with more AC adoption you'll partially reduce this heavy swing. Nuclear at 60%cf is still economical. The problem arises if your plant takes 20y and 20bn to build
