<story><title>Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/developers-of-small-modular-reactors-hope-their-time-has-come/21808321</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodelshady</author><text>The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this.&lt;p&gt;Last calendar, it produced &amp;gt; 1 GW for 784 hours.&lt;p&gt;In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with &amp;gt; 100 GWh shortfall.&lt;p&gt;The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.&lt;p&gt;Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.&lt;p&gt;edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they&amp;#x27;ve been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; like the right amount. We&amp;#x27;re all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn&amp;#x27;t get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It&amp;#x27;s more rare offshore. It&amp;#x27;s very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a need for &amp;quot;base load&amp;quot;. I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it&amp;#x27;s probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We&amp;#x27;re talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They&amp;#x27;re putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they&amp;#x27;ll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe.&lt;p&gt;A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I&amp;#x27;m not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.</text></comment>
<story><title>Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/developers-of-small-modular-reactors-hope-their-time-has-come/21808321</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodelshady</author><text>The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this.&lt;p&gt;Last calendar, it produced &amp;gt; 1 GW for 784 hours.&lt;p&gt;In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with &amp;gt; 100 GWh shortfall.&lt;p&gt;The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.&lt;p&gt;Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.&lt;p&gt;edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they&amp;#x27;ve been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; like the right amount. We&amp;#x27;re all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn&amp;#x27;t get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raphaelj</author><text>Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2].&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;app.electricitymap.org&amp;#x2F;zone&amp;#x2F;GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;app.electricitymap.org&amp;#x2F;zone&amp;#x2F;GB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;URVfMDT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;URVfMDT.png&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>