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The problem with this logic is that wind doesn't die down during the night.
Lets say that you build nukes equal to base load- they produce 100% of your nighttime demand, and 40% of peak daytime demand. This works out to some 50% of your total electricity carbon free and cheap. Now, how to cover day time peak: Cheap option is just to build gas turbines and run them during the day. This isnt green, but it works, and then you decide to reduce the damage your are doing by adding some windmills. During the day, all is fine and dandy- when the wind blows, you are burning less gas. But when the wind blows during the night, windmills still produce power, and there is no market for it, so now you got to loadfollow your nukes, and if you are willing to do that, why on earth build the gas turbines and windmills in the first place? it would be overall cheaper, and less polluting, to overbuild nukes and go to a wholly atomic gird...
by Thomas on Wed Jan 13th, 2010 at 05:51:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]
In an all-nuclear grid, you don't build 100 % peak demand nuke capacity and load-follow. You build 110 % average demand and load-balance with smart grids, interruptible delivery contracts, heat baths, pumped hydro, etc.

Now, in some places, it will be cheaper to build 110 % of average demand in wind, hydro, biochar, waste incinerators, solar or some combination of all the above options.

Nuclear simply isn't always cheaper pr. MWh, even when you include the load-balancing costs of wind and solar. In some places it will be cheaper, and in some places it will not be. It would, after all, be silly to suppose that any single power source is always and everywhere cheaper than everything else.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Wed Jan 13th, 2010 at 06:00:09 PM EST
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