It is easy enough to do safe nuclear, or cheap nuclear. The trick is to do safe, cheap nuclear. Chernobyl was the consequence of the operators doing what the designers of the RBMK explicitly told operators NOT to do. The control system was printing warning messages; those DON'Ts were literally written into the software. Yet the clown in charge pressed on, and the operators did not have the authority to say no to him. There was no safety culture in the USSR. Obedience cultures have caused fatalities in many other situations; I recall an airliner crash that was caused by the captain flying directly into very adverse weather, and because of the authority of the captain all the co-pilot could say was something like "the weather radar looks interesting today". The captain ignored the hint and they both died, along with everyone else on board. RBMKs would have been operated safely in the USA. The US nuclear industry and aircraft industries both have strong safety cultures.

Reducing REs to mostly Wind/Solar is a definition created by USA's fossil fuel energy firms to block importation of clean Hydro energy. Also to block a proliferation of small hydro operators and handing incentives to existing ones not to decommission. Gee, why would fossil interests want THAT? Avoid competition for their gas turbines burning cheap shale gas, maybe? Same as their push to get rid of nuclear? Don't thing that SAEP should repeat that falsehood. What falsehood? The definitions in RPSs are the definitions. But you're edging awfully close to the truth about just WHO is providing the money and the agenda for "Greens", AlzHarvey.

Hydro is the number one among all REs with about 20% of the world e-energy production. Argue with the people who define what "renewable" means in "renewable portfolio standards". They say hydro doesn't qualify. The water used is NOT consumed like in CPPs, NGPPs and NPPs. It is therefore very renewable. None of those things consume water either. They may return warmer water to the environment, or they may evaporate some and it falls as rain a short time later. The water remains water. Dams, OTOH, are great big solar collectors and large sources of evaporation. They also kill off runs of migratory fish and warm the water substantially, changing ecosystems radically.

3 days since last comment in this thread, and here you come in with something apropos of nothing AGAIN. Made your quota for the week, AlzHarvey? Or is it that you just can't remember what you've already posted?

A proper mix of many REs and future peer-to-peer energy trading will certainly help to better manage the man-made duck-belly load curve. "Proper mix of many REs" is a laugh. What are you going to use in Montreal in the winter? Tidal? Nope. Geothermal? Nope. Solar? Don't be ridiculous... oops, too late. You have hydro and whatever wind Nature deigns to provide. The duck-belly curve was CREATED by "REs". They ARE the problem. Secondly, energy users can, in the near future, better manage the energy they use, to further reduce the amplitude of the duck-belly load curve, to make it easier to mange. Can't do it without storage. LAES is the only realistic option for that. And "to mange"? Yup, mange is about what it is. It's a disease.

Hydro is still one of the major RE (at 20+%) Hydro is excluded from "renewable portfolio standards". It can't scale and the land for new reservoirs is either protected or unaffordable anyway. I have to admit that Solar and Wind are growing much faster Solar plus wind have still not exceeded hydro in the USA. The sum of all "renewables" is still behind nuclear. Nuclear is producing only about 20% of US electric power. Electric power includes almost no transportation energy, very little heating energy, and just a fraction of industrial energy. Trying to close down nuclear in favor of "renewables" is ecocidal.

PHEVs can get rid of lots of brake use, and the associated brake-wear emissions. Once again they're close to or at the sweet spot.

AlzHarvey, "renewables" are defined as wind and solar. There is NO SUCH THING as "24/7 REs".

A great deal of this is due to coal combustion. The Chinese would literally be better off had they built RBMK reactors instead of coal-fired plants. Even if they did something as stupid as at Chernobyl and blew one up, they would have far less total harm to the public.

Let's not forget that 50% left out (today) means 50% can use it now. Let's also not forget that amenities like block-heater plugs used to be ubiquitous in Canada, and with tricks like blockchain charging can be rolled out in apartments and even on-street parking without having to negotiate billing between the property owner and the driver.

More Greenie boilerplate, eh AlzHarvey? You bear an uncanny resemblance to Talk to Transformer. I'll give everyone a hint (which you won't get): peer-to-peer energy trading is not going to fix the duck-belly load curve nor will it keep EVs charged when it's cloudy. Blockchain is a way of cutting transaction costs so e.g. businesses can install EV chargers and not have to do a bunch of accounting to pay for the juice.

I was hoping for advances in CNT synthesis that would make them cost-competitive with metallic conductors, but this is good too.

More Green propaganda from AlzHarvey, 3 days after the previous comment and completely unresponsive to anything in the post or discussion. Have you made your quota to get your check this week, AlzHarvey?

Aiming for large numbers of BEVs while ignoring the rest of the fleet is a deliberate attempt to keep fossil fuel demand high. The best way to go after oil demand/carbon emissions is to make every vehicle at least a MHEV as soon as possible, and work on making most new vehicle sales either HEV or PHEV.

Multiplying clean e-energy production by 3X will not be required until our population grows by 3X + or more or close to 30,000,000. That could take another 2 or 3 centuries. You're in luck, it needn't take more than a few years. Justin Trudeau wants to invite the whole Turd World to live in Canada! At least half of the 32 million Venezuelans would like to get out of their Bolivarian disaster area, and that would do it right there. Then there are 200 million Nigerians, 86+ million Congolese and 15 million Somalis you can have for the asking. Of course, many thousands large electrified green houses may be required to feed that many people, but it could be done with low cost clean electricity and very high efficiency heat pumps. So, just what are the material and energy requirements for so many greenhouses? Would, say, the plastic skins require petroleum? Do you have that much, especially for the on-going replacements? What becomes of the vegetation on the land repurposed for greenhouses, and the wildlife that used to live there? Congolese are already heading for Portland Maine in substantial numbers, and Lewiston is full of Somalis. We can arrange to send them onward to Montreal if you like. Just don't expect us to take them back if they turn out to be not to your liking.

Here's something for those who take Green propaganda at face value: At the same time, the report warns that energy storage has limitations in a system with much greater variability due to renewable generation. The answer to the problem of intermittency in renewable energy will not be energy storage. “The current state of battery storage technology does not have the ability to match the duration of such events without significant (and very expensive) over-build of those resources,” the report states in an executive summary. Now watch AlzHarvey ignore this just like all the rest.

50 GW nameplate, given seasonal flows and reservoir limits, probably means 20 GW average. You're talking 67.5 GW of power between interconnects with an average demand of probably 500 GW. What part of "can't do the heavy lifting" didn't you understand?

What part of "unreliables can't do the job" and "hypedrogen is a solution in search of a problem" don't you understand, AlzHarvey?

Pro-nuclear (at all cost) SAEP Oh, there are alternatives to fission power. Space solar power satellites would do it. Hydrogen fusion, if we can get it to work. But Greenies hate SSPS as much or more than nuclear, and commercial fusion has been 20 years away for the last 60 years. soon take note of the arrival of the growing H2 economy Your "H2 economy" is an excuse to keep fossil fuel viable. If I'm for anything "at any cost", it is decarbonization (which requires defossilization).

California will soon have 100+ H2 ultra quick refill (3 minutes) stations equivalent to a mix 1500 semi-quick and quick charge e-stations. The difference being that the PHEV can charge almost anywhere, overnight; the HFC car MUST refuel at a station. No H2 station within range, your HFC car can't drive there. Yes, California needs another 100+ ultra quick refill H2 stations to match the 3065 semi & quick charge e-stations. Fast chargers are only required to support BEVs on long trips, which is a small fraction of all driving; they aren't required for PHEVs at all. 22,000 total and 3065 quick-charge stations can support 1+ million vehicles, because to a BEV or PHEV, any NEMA outlet is a charging station.

22,620 non-residential EV charging units in California. Number of H2 stations in the whole state? 40.

Called it. One detail I've never seen addressed is higher-power charging. The previous piece does not mention the electric motor power, but in general inverters for EVs must also operate in regeneration mode to charge the battery. It should be possible to use the inverters to charge from sources like 480 V 3φ power, which would greatly increase the charging speed and make brief "opportunity charging" stops replace a lot more fuel consumption.

You got it all wrong. I'm not against NPPs but against the very high price 20 to 25 cents/kWh of the clean e-energy produced by the new NPP units. Then you should be against the over-regulation and political risks which turned nuclear from "cheaper than coal" to "too risky to finance". Here's VP of Insight at the UK's National Nuclear Laboratory: When Hitachi suspended work on its Wylfa Newydd project, it cited the size of the financial burden as one of the main factors, while the high cost of Hinkley Point has, in part, been explained by the fact that EDF could only borrow capital funding at high interest rates. That’s because this project is deemed ‘risky’, and well over half the cost was attributed to raising the money over the lifetime of the project. Reduce the cost of financing and you can cut the cost of nuclear power in half right there. Find a way to reduce total Nuke energy cost (including disaster insurance and long term used fuel safe storage) by 7X or to 3 cents/kWh and I'll will gladly promote it and buy their shares? Here we are, in a discussion thread about a technology which its proponents claim can provide ~10 hours of storage at 75% efficiency for what looks like fairly cheap (though I'm doubtful), and you're STILL not getting it. You can easily need 2 WEEKS of electric power storage if your source is wind. Multiply the cost of the heat and cryogenic storage elements by 33. Also reduce the efficiency to account for heat leakage both in and out. What's the new cost/kWh? What you don't get is that nuclear gets rid of ALL the problems of "renewables".Nuclear uses only tiny amounts of material.Nuclear uses only tiny plots of land.Nuclear generates 24/7, independent of the weather.Nuclear makes almost no demands on the biosphere.Nuclear does not require particular geography.Nuclear has next to zero emissions besides heat. In the UK, people pay world prices for natural gas. Last I saw these were running about USD15/mmBTU (about USD0.05/kWh thermal). A NuScale unit operating as a heat-and-power cogenerator would generate perhaps 40 MW(e) and 150 MW(th), with the low-temperature heat displacing about USD7700/hr (USD184000/day, USD2.2 million over 120 days of heating season) of imported gas... with no emissions. $2.2 million/year in heat sales finances about $300 million in capital over 30 years at 7% interest. That's about $5000/kW(e) (summer mode). That pretty much pays for the plant right there. Now try doing what a NuScale does using your "REs". It cannot be done.

More Greenie propaganda from AlzHarvey. How much more to make your weekly quota?

ORLY? France's grid has been as much as 80% nuclear since the build-out. Show me a serious industrial grid anywhere that has been 80% wind plus solar over even one year... and no, countries connected to hydro-heavy neighbors don't count.