kugelfish

I have mostly tried to avoid thinking much or having an opinion about nuclear power. This has been made easy by its minor and stagnating role in the global energy system. But the idea of a nuclear renaissance is now competing for attention and funding in the low carbon energy debate and is becoming harder to ignore. This post is an attempt at sorting my own thoughts on the topic in particular in anticipation of a heated political debate on he future role of nuclear power in Switzerland . Not being an expert in nuclear technology, my opinions are based on the application of general engineering principles and best practices as well as some experience in building high-availability systems. While nuclear reactors might be among the systems that are most obsessively engineered and operated for safety, nothing is ever 100% safe. Whoever promises otherwise is either lying or lacks imagination. There is a general rule in engineering -  that whatever can go wrong will eventually ...

Electricity generation from wind and sun is often criticized as somehow being unreliable. There is even an insult for this in the German political vocabulary: "Flatterstrom!" This is often put in contrast with the presumed reliability and stability of good old baseload power plants like coal or nuclear. These tend to produce largely the same amount  of electricity day in day out - as long as they don't have to be shut down for maintainance or due to adverse weather conditions .  Given that electricity demand is variable, how useful is constant production when the goal is for production to match load at all times? And how much worse would "Flatterstrom" be in comparison? Using again the thought experiment from this previous post , we consider the current hourly load over a year for Europe's two largest electricity markets, France and Germany. Then we assume two generation profiles which in total matches exactly the total yearly:  a fixed, constant production ...