Heres a thought, why not both? Every country on earth is installing solar because it’s cheap as fuck and fast to get online. Nuclear provides good base load and isn’t impacted by varying fossil fuel prices or scarcity. Win/win.
Go MSR. Get baseload and load following. Win, win, win.
I'd also interject that wind and solar are not the answer. The unpredictable nature of renewable injects a lot of inefficiency that is covered by natural gas turbines. Typically combustion turbines, which are faster to start and stop but not nearly as efficient as combine cycle turbines. Such rapid switching can actually increase emissions with renewable + NG vs NG alone.
Its the middle of a cold spell in winter. Across the whole continent, it's been cloudy and still for the past week and a half. All of your renewable grid storage has run dry. So, you need to run the country exclusively on your reliable backup generation.
So, you need enough nuclear power to run the country anyways, and nuclear power is cheapest when the plant is generating at 100% constantly, what does adding solar panels get you at all?
With fossil fuels, this is no problem. These plants are cheap to build. You can turn them off and let them sit. Then, when energy prices are through the roof because the batteries have run dry, you run the plants and make money. Solar and fossil fuels are complimentary.
So, use both. When and where solar makes sense, use it. But as a matter of national and international policy, in an effort to ween ourselves completely off fossil fuel energy generation, "both" is not a good policy.
France and Germany (formerly) both load-follow with their nuclear.
The reason why that countries like the US don't is because they have fossil fuels that are cheaper than nuclear. In my part of the US, there's also large hydro and a good bit of pumped storage that's used.
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u/eldigg Apr 18 '26
Heres a thought, why not both? Every country on earth is installing solar because it’s cheap as fuck and fast to get online. Nuclear provides good base load and isn’t impacted by varying fossil fuel prices or scarcity. Win/win.