Hello and welcome to this episode of Naked Nuclear.
I'm Danielle Allen, and today we're talking about something
that I decided to ask the Internet.
So I came across a post that was asking why California would need
nuclear if they already have solar plus battery energy
storage systems. It got complicated.
So as you might have noticed, this season is all about
understanding how to build a nuclear power plant.
But I wanted to make this episode to answer the question,
why are we building nuclear power plants?
So I did something I've literally never done before.
I asked the Internet a simple question.
If solar panels and batteries are getting so good, why would
California ever need nuclear energy?
And within minutes, people started arguing.
Engineers, scientists, energy people.
Some were thoughtful. Some were less thoughtful.
But buried in all of that noise was a really solid question,
which was what actually keeps the lights on?
So let's get started. Let's start with what most
people think. Solar panels make electricity
during the day. Batteries store extra energy.
Problem solved, right? Not quite, because electricity
isn't like food you can store forever.
It's not like your grandma's jar of Peaches that you just put
onto the shelf and they stay there.
It's more like oxygen. You breathe in when you need it.
You breathe out when you don't, sort of.
And you need it timed appropriately.
Not earlier, not later. And that really changes the way
that we think about energy. So if the power grid isn't built
for a perfect sunny afternoon, it's understanding the worst
hour rule is if we need energy when we need energy like we need
it when we need it. The power grid cannot be built
for a perfect sunny afternoon. It has to be built for the worst
hour of the year. And that could be a hot night
when everyone's AC is blasting, a cloudy stretch where solar
drops, or when the wind just disappears.
And this is where the idea of dispatchable power comes in.
So dispatchable power is power you can turn on whenever you
need it. Whenever demand increases, you
can meet that demand. And one of the clearest points
from one of the comments was the grid needs a substantial portion
of this generation to be dispatchable.
Solar and wind are amazing, but they don't follow your schedule.
They follow the weather. So you're thinking, OK, what if
we just store the energy? And that's where batteries come
in. And batteries absolutely help.
But here's the catch. Batteries today store energy
for, you know, a few hours, days, weeks, and definitely not
entire seasons. One comment summed it up really
well. Covering a grid could require
something like 1 terawatt hour of storage, and that is a lot of
batteries, which is also a really polite way of saying
that's an enormous amount of infrastructure, not just
batteries, but mining, manufacturing, the global supply
chain at scale that we've never built before.
It's not to say that we couldn't build it, but highlighting some
of these ideas around the practicality and logistics of
just put batteries everywhere that looks like creating the
supply chains, creating the mining and manufacturing to be
able to get the materials we need to build them the last 10%.
So we're talking about batteries, we're talking about
solar. We're like, OK, this is great.
We put them together, we are solid.
But here's where things get tricky.
If we're trying to get to 70% or 80% clean energy with wind and
solar, it's very doable. But getting to 100%, that's
where everything gets really expensive.
If you go back to Season 1, I have an episode with Doctor
Simone Friedrich from the University of Groningham, and we
talked about the philosophy of economics around energy systems.
And one of the points he brought up is that last 10% becomes very
expensive to get solar plus batteries to 100% reliability
24/7 on the grid because now we're trying to cover the worst
weather, the longest nights, the highest demand spikes.
And as one person put it in the comments, that last 10% is
getting really expensive. And most public conversations
just kind of skip over that part because it makes things a little
bit uncomfortable. So now that we're uncomfortable,
we're talking about Solars plus batteries.
Let's talk about reliability versus cost.
And I think of this from an engineering perspective, but
also from a firefighting perspective.
In a major city, you don't want a fire crew or a fire truck only
available 90% of the time, and then they just clock out.
So one of the most consistent ideas from engineers in this
discussion was if you want power, you need it to be there
24/7. And that sounds obvious until
you realize most of the energy conversations focus on cost per
unit of electricity, not whether that electricity shows up when
you need it. Because to me, cheap electricity
at the wrong time is basically useless.
Hospitals don't care that power was cheap at noon if it
disappears at midnight and all of their ventilators stop
working. This is one of the conversations
that we're going to be having with Zeon Lights.
How energy is life and how the most successful countries have
access to abundant energy. It's our job now to make it
clean and reliable. One other thing that we talked
about within the comment section was this idea of capacity
factor. So we want energy that's there
24/7, and to do that we have to break down capacity factor,
which means how often something is actually producing energy.
In the United States, nuclear runs about 90% of the time.
Solar runs close to 20 to 25% of the time.
That doesn't mean solar is bad, It just means that you either
need more solar and you need something like batteries backing
it up. Because again, the grid doesn't
care about the potential, it cares about the reality.
And the reality of the situation is that across all forms of
energy generation, nuclear is the only generation form that is
in that 90% capacity range. Here in North Carolina, Duke
Energy just posted their stat that they had reached a 96%
capacity factor. That means that 96% of the times
their nuclear plants were generating electricity, which is
outstanding. Phenomenal.
Lastly, one of the comments talked about something that I
think is really difficult when you don't have a background in
energy systems, when it just feels like you get your power
from the plug in the wall and that's that.
If there's a blackout, you no longer have power.
Oh well, so sad, too bad. But we don't learn about the
very things that are keeping us alive.
And one of the points that usually comes up around grid and
grid stability is grid inertia. So imagine pushing a heavy
spinning wheel. OK, you can't imagine pitching a
heavy spinning wheel because you probably have never pushed a
heavy spinning wheel because this is not the 1700s.
However, you maybe have ridden a bike.
OK, so you're riding a bike on completely flat ground.
You're maybe like 16 years old, hanging out with your friends.
You haven't yet gotten your driver's license, and you guys
are zooming. You try to be the cool kid.
You take your feet off the pedal.
Do you stop? No.
Your bike keeps spinning. It's that inertia, the necessity
to keep moving forward, to keep that motion happening, that
keeps those wheels spinning. But really, once something is
moving, it wants to keep moving. That's inertia.
Power plants like nuclear and hydro use big spinning machines,
and those spinning machines store energy and that helps keep
the grid stable. So if something were to suddenly
change, like a power plant goes offline, that spinning energy in
that turbine gives the grid time to adjust.
Solar panels and batteries, they don't spin.
They connect through electronics, which means that
they don't naturally provide that same stabilizing effect.
However, there is new grid technology coming out to improve
that, but as we add more solar and batteries, we actually lose
some of that built in stability and we have to recreate it
artificially, which is possible but not simple and also not
free. So when we talk about energy,
we're not just talking about replacing the energy and
electricity, we're talking about replacing how the grid behaves,
reshaping the system entirely. So within the post that I
highlighted, and I'll link it below in the show notes, the
question posed is what's the point of nuclear?
So when people step back from arguing, the clearer picture
started to form. Nuclear power.
It runs day and night. It doesn't depend on whether it
produces a lot of energy in small spaces, and it helps
stabilize the grid. The key number that stood out is
that nuclear operates around 90% of the time.
When we're looking at solar plus batteries, we're looking at the
idea that it one day could operate 90% of the time, not
that it already does. That's really important.
And one comment points that out is the reality that nuclear is
already meeting the needs of our population versus the idea that
solar and battery can one day help us get there.
Because when we start to put things online, when we start to
really engineer solutions, one of the things we need to realize
is that the idea of 90% capacity factor and the reality of a 90%
capacity factor are two completely different things.
One's on paper, one's boots on the ground.
And the nice thing about nuclear is these are 90% capacity
factors with engineering that was originated in the 70s for
most plants. So if you think about what we
could do today with improved technology, that's why Duke
Energy hitting 96% capacity factor is really exciting.
It's not just about energy, it's about the idea of reliability
24/7. So to me, I like an all of the
above approach when we're thinking about energy systems,
because I've worked in natural disasters, when you need energy
and you need it fast, diesel generators get deployed, solar
comes in, We need things that are easily transportable, boots
on the ground, and it gets there fast.
But when we're looking at systems that need to be
stabilized on a mass scale, that's where nuclear comes in.
So to me, the real fight, it's not just what's the point of
nuclear, can we get it done with solar?
It's about trust, cost, and identity.
Some people don't trust nuclear because it's expensive.
Projects have gone over budget. Other people don't trust solar
only systems because they worry about reliability and what
happens in a worst case scenario.
And when people argue about energy, what they're really
asking is who do I trust to keep the lights on?
So if you're wondering why does California need nuclear at all,
it's not because solar is bad. It's because energy systems have
to work even when the conditions aren't perfect.
When the sun is shining, when the demand is high, when power
plants go offline. So before I wrap up, I want to
thank everyone who jumped into the comments on this post.
Y'all brought data, thoughtful explanations and some strong
opinions, but I think all of it helped surface a better question
and that is what naked nuclear is all about.
Stripping down today's energy topics around nuclear technology
to really understand what are the solutions and turning them
into something we can actually understand.
Thank you to Jason Corey, John McClure, Ron King, Thomas Moore,
Chris Johns, Eric Harvey, Jonathan Raymond Ross
Konenstein, Michael Burt, David Disheartens, Carl Wurtz, Thomas
Agete, Joe Ford, Ashley Forbes, Oscar Paulson, Dylan Allen, No
relation to Danielle Allen, Jesse Williams, and Thomas
Roush. Thank you so much for everyone
for commenting, for providing us some answers and clarity from
your experience and expertise and being able to make this
episode happen. If you like this episode, please
share it with a friend and until next time, stay curious.