Comment by V__

Comment by V__ 11 hours ago

8 replies

I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.

A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.

StopDisinfo910 11 hours ago

The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.

Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.

  • V__ 11 hours ago

    This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.

mulmen 11 hours ago

By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.

  • V__ 11 hours ago

    I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?

    • mpweiher 10 hours ago

      The Spainout was caused by having too little rotating mass in the grid that stabilizes the frequency.

      There was a trigger in some of the PV systems, but that wasn't the underlying cause.

    • StopDisinfo910 9 hours ago

      Yes, interconnectedness is critical if you want reliability.

      Spain has far too little transnational capacities. That was a significant contributing factor in the grid outage.

    • mulmen 10 hours ago

      If you want to change the topic of this conversation to distribution resiliency instead of production resiliency then sure.

      • V__ 10 hours ago

        I had both of these as a single concept in my head, thus the confusion.