Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors. Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
> Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all
It is given we're talking about perceptions. I see no evidence Germany's Greens are suddently rational when it comes to modern reactor designs, of which MSRs are one.
> And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.
Most of Germany's Nuclear Power Plant could have run for many additional decades. Especially the Konvoi-PWRs from the 80's
To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really dumb.
By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.
Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is done into looking into alternative designs.
Germany has a 500 GW interconnection queue for storage.
It will be interesting to see how long the ”baseload” talking point lasts.
The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.
Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your power comes from such sources.
Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them when there is excess and give power back when there isn't making them effectively dispatachable power.
Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all. And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.