The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.
I don't think killing solar and wind projects is what the greens do. The problems with solar and wind are entirely due to the laws of physics. They get large advantages in the energy markets in most places. They have been very effective in preventing nuclear though which ironically does so much real world damage to their cause that all the rest of what they do is a drop in the bucket.
Sorry, I was talking about the fake environmentalists being funded by the fossil fuel industry. And the fossil fuel industry is still successfully killing solar and wind projects in the US.
Storage would mean just to reroute the energy to storage, otherwise you need to lower the power plant‘s output what doesn’t happen fast in nuclear power plants
> This tells me you’ve never looked at a demand curve. In for example California the demand swings from 18 GW to 50 GW over the day
Have you been looking at "net demand" curves? Total demand variation is not too large over the day. The wind/solar production enormously increases the magnitude of remaining demand difference over the day.
Nobody is talking about batteries to deal with demand swings between seasons though. Capacity has to accommodate whether it's nuclear or fossil or battery or renewable. The issue is day to day variation. And it does not matter how much wind/solar capacity you have, you can't supply demand without storage. That is untrue of other generation types.
Other generation might use batteries to take the edge of peaks, but that would only be done if it made total cost cheaper. That's not the case for renewables. If there were no other generation then they would have to use storage, so it's always going to make them more expensive.
Nuclear power is one of the most flexible sources of power, especially PWR's with ALFC or even more so - BWR's
You can actually see how France is flexing in the summer on RTE website
France's nuclear operators have been claiming this for years. But recently started claiming that wind and solar are bad because they force nuclear to flex which is too expensive.
> Electricite de France SA said growing solar and wind generation was increasing equipment wear and maintenance costs at its nuclear reactors, which are forced to reduce output when power demand is insufficient.
"France's nuclear operators have been claiming this for years. But recently started claiming that wind and solar are bad because they force nuclear to flex which is too expensive." - one doesnt disprove the other.
French nuclear is extremely flexible https://www.services-rte.com/en/view-data-published-by-rte/g... but it doesn't mean it's free. Solar and wind without proper bess to support them are creating problems for other generators, acting as grid parasites without offering proper firm generation
France seems to work. They have plenty of nuclear power that is flexible. And you can have other forms of consumption flexibility; otherwise wind and solar are really in trouble.
France is part of the EU power grid and flexibility comes from that not from nuclear power plants.
And the government had to rise the subsidies for nuclear energy to prevent higher rises of the energy prices. The costs for the consumers still raised.
And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer because the rivers were too hot to be used for cooling. Won‘t be the last time. And that will be a big problem when people turn on their AC in a heat wave but the power plants can’t power up because they don’t have enough cool water.
And that was before drone wars were a thing.
People react nervously when unknown drones fly around airports and power plants.
And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that.
Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that.
"And their power plants were in trouble in the last hot summer" - blatant lie. Cooling was fine, it's env protection law to avoid damaging the fauna(read - to not boil fish). Yet, it affects about 0.02% of annual generation and valid almost exclusively to NPP without cooling towers. Yet in those exact periods EDF was net exporting about 14GW to neighbors, again, data is public. French nukes can handle ppl's AC's just well, probably EDF even hopes for that to modulate their npp less and get more $
"And didn’t we learn from the internet that centralization is a bad thing? Nuclear power plants are exactly that." France has a combination of centralized and decentralized power - npp's are distributed around the country but each can generate a lot of power. Even more distribution and you start paying a ton for transmission lines and maintenance. That's the reason Germany started subsidizing them from this year, with about 6bn/y. Full decentralization is not a feature and you still can't achieve it since transmission system is centralized, prime example being recent cascade blackout in Spain.
"Imagine a grid where every consumer is also a producer who can satisfy their energy needs at least partially for themselves even without the grid. Try to blackout that." - that'll mean having to need a fully parallel grid for firming. Besides, a lot of home solar are grid followers - if there's a blackout, it'll shut down too unless you have a special invertor+bess which many dont have (yet)
"And that was before drone wars were a thing." - a drone would do nothing to a NPP. Even an airplane impact can be tolerated depending how new is the NPP.
1- not being able to cool reactors physically, which is false
2- being a major deal, when it affects only 0.2% of generation per year, during a period when EDF is net exporting about 14GW to the neighbors
3- being an unfixable issue, which is again false. The problem exista for reactors without cooling towers. EDF can fix it by building them. But there's no financial incentive here. Where would EDF sell extra power when export is already maximized in that same timeframe and market prices in summer are low?
France uses their own and their neighbors fossil capacity to manage nuclear inflexibility.
When a cold spell hits France exports turn to imports.
Now EDF is crying about renewables lowering nuclear earning potential and increasing maintenance costs.
The problem is that they are up against economic incentives. Why should a company or person with solar and storage buy grid based nuclear power? They don’t.
Why should they not sell their excess to their neighbors? They do.
French nuclear is more flexible than coal by design and as flexible as many older gas plants with ALFC system. They can reach up to 0.5%/second modulation (proved by Philipsburg) if the situation requires but it's rarely the case if you have a fleet. It's still not as fast as BWR's that can reach 1%/second but german coal is the slowest load follower and still meets min requirements imposed by the grid.
"When a cold spell hits France exports turn to imports." - was true in the past, a bit, but afaik this and last winter France was net exporting a ton. And with FLA3 reaching full capacity this year it'll be even less of a problem. It's not like they have a problem now, they are the largest net exporter on the continent and it's unlikely to change soon.
"Now EDF is crying about renewables lowering nuclear earning potential and increasing maintenance costs." - yes, because ren generation is acting like a parasitic source without proper BESS deployments - they eat into firm power profits without providing firm power benefits.
"Why should a company or person with solar and storage buy grid based nuclear power? They don’t." - because in many places of the world solar+bess are not sufficient. It's also the reason why Microsoft signed a contract for TMI way above market prices instead of building a fully offgrid ren solution
EDF is selling power to neighbors and makes money from it. It also is modulating it's npp a lot, which will maybe change when AC's will be more widely deployed and EV's will expand. It also is trying to schedule most maintenance works in summer, during lowest demand periods
Which are paragraph after paragraph agreeing that nuclear power is inflexible, can’t meet a true grid load on its own without flexibility and that renewables craters the earning potential of both existing and new built reactors.
As EDF will be able to sell fewer and fewer hours at a profit we will likely see them crying for handouts to even maintain the existing plants. Let alone new builds requiring 18-24 cent/kWh average prices to cover the costs.
Who is agreeing that nuclear is inflexible? RTE real generation data is a direct proof it's false.
EDF needs no handouts for maintenance of their reactors. But I'm eager to see their profits evolution in 2026 H1 after arenh got ditched.
There will be some govt loans for EPR2, but the amount is rather tiny if we compare to say German EEG fund.
These topics are political and I seriously doubt these types of solutions are what the politicians are looking for. In fact, they are the exact opposite of what they are looking for because it takes away the excuses they are using and would lay bare what they are actually trying to do. BTW, I'm not suicidal and I bet you aren't either.
Homomorphic encryption and similar techniques in this paper are just getting going. They are impressive technologies. However, they often take 100x the compute of "regular" systems with encrypted networking. This is probably the main blocker for these types of technologies. Until and unless insurance companies mandate these technologies because they are tired of paying out for their customers getting hacked, they probably won't be deployed. Probably for the best. Most devs can barely make code without advanced math and encrypted data work, let alone these types of advanced platforms.
1) Compared to the US, Brits live very socially isolated lives. You are just used to it.
2) There was a (small) government taskforce in the UK to prevent/arrest men for approaching women on the street. It backfired badly as you might expect. It was politically unpopular, yet it got enough coverage to change people's behavior but not in the way the politicians expected. Specially, amounts of SA didn't change but the number of dates did.
3) Someone is upset at this change in behavior and is trying to revert it.
4) This is someone from the leopards eating faces party complaining about having their face eaten by a leopard.
Sure, when the expected monetary value was 0. Then they started claiming that investing $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that's $1T) into a 4 year old startup was a good idea. Change the valuation, change the goal. Then the goal was be better than a human employees (or at least more efficient or even just improves efficiency) because without that the value of the LLM is far lower than what it is being sold as. All the research so far says that LLMs fall far short of that goal. And if this was someone else's money, fine. But this is basically everyone's retirement savings. Again, higher valuation, higher goal. Finally, when you start losing people's retirement savings, criminal penalties start getting attached to things.
Hospitals always take long time, both are non-profit and had to raise ton of money. They are both large multi-building complexes. And I think the UCI one is a trauma center (even more complexity) to deal with the fact that the previous (UCI) trauma center no longer meets earthquake standards.
A lot of people on this site do or used to live in CA. It is especially galling to have people who have never lived there tell those that have what it is like there. Especially people who have tried to build or run a business in CA.
I agree but I fail to see how bad water infrastructure that allows poop to get into the water supply in Mexico has anything to do with this topic. Nobody is arguing that you should be able to spew cancer causing chemicals into the air. It is possible to do all these industrial processes responsibly. It just costs more to do it. So either you can allow businesses to do these things with reasonable amounts of regulation locally or you can prevent those businesses (what CA does) and import these products made somewhere where they won't follow your regulations. And since pollution notoriously doesn't honor borders, perhaps its best not to use simplistic scarecrow arguments and instead have a nuanced understanding of the topic. But don't let me stop your partisan hackery, I'm sure you enjoy it.
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