alt Hacker NewsNuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered.
"distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be.
Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
> because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation
It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system.
Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that.
I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity.
> they massively reduce resilience.
I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage.
Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuse...
But just to be clear - I think there needs to be a mix - and part of that mix is grid capability improvements.