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Nearly a fifth of it's time out of action?

How about 91.9% uptime in 2015, which by far leads the way among generation sources: https://www.power-eng.com/arti...

You are full of shit. Go lie somewhere else, or make up lies that are far harder to immediately disprove with 2 seconds of looking on Google. Literally the first link of my search.

Maybe you are wrong and the people funding them know better. Do you think people like to lose money?

In the U.S. you are arguing over the properties of the empty set, everything is vacuously true! This is amusing, here for example we have a web page devoted to new coal plant construction in North America and there is nothing listed. Investors do not like to lose money and as a result there are no coal plants being build! The money has spoken.

Virtually all planned coal plant construction is in China or India, where they are more strongly influence by government policy than profit-and-loss.

By the same token, not wanting to lose money, there are currently only two nuclear power units under construction in the U.S. (the Vogtle 3 and 4 units) , both massively over budget (planned cost $1 billion each, actual cost $9 billion each). Seven other plant projects that started at about the same time have bailed out. That the two Vogtle units are still being completed is due to the sunk cost fallacy and the political effect of having multiple minority owners (the decision to cancel and eat the cost is too difficult for too many, and so it continues. Getting any more nuclear power plants built in the U.S. requires finding a way to make them profitable. No hippies are holding them back.

Nukes are useful, necessary even for a number of reasons. First and foremost nukes deliver power and lots of it all the time, which heavy industry absolutely requires;

Bullshit.

"Advanced grid management technology" is a nice way of saying shutting off the customer's power. Very few heavy industries can put up with that. Very few people will put up with that.

And also bullshit.

The dilemma of cooling nuclear power plants is an artificial one. "Ecologically sensitive" is code for animals are more important than people. A choice between rolling backouts and a lower standard of living versus insignificant ecological damage is not going to be good for the ecology.

Why not apply a Pigovian tax to encourage a market friendly solution which prevents ecological damage? Because they have no interest in such a thing; they just want nuclear power gone at any cost. Isn't it odd that a Pigovian tax is not used on fossil fuels? I wonder why that is.

batteries are not yet capacious or cheap enough to store power in sufficient quantity to make up for the patchiness of renewables.

Bullshit.

Others disagree and it is difficult to get trustworthy numbers.

Electro-chemical storage has always been very expensive but with high power density making it suitable for load balancing once the power electronics became economical but not so good for bulk storage and this is *with* the advantages of flow batteries in bulk applications. Maybe the economy of scale available to lithium batteries in traction applications will change this.

Secondly, the world still has a lot of high-level nuclear waste that really needs destroying in fast-neutron reactors;

They are expensive and dangerous. It would make more sense to just drop the waste into a subduction (The word "subduction" is not in the Moz dictionary... WTF) zone and wave goodbye to it.

I agree but it would be wasteful. High level radioactive waste has almost all of the original nuclear energy in it and it is not that difficult or expensive to store compared to dumping it into subduction zone.

Because that is your Nuclear Ideology, it is your ism, your belief system that wants to make us believe the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing when it is hot.

That's not what I claimed and you know it. I stated that wind and solar have reduced output in a heatwave, just as nuclear power has reduced output in a heat wave. I suspect you know this otherwise you would have provided a citation on that. I did some searching and found that PV panels can see a 10% to 35% reduction in output in high heat. If you don't believe me then I'd like to see what you believe a more accurate number would be.

Solar Thermal is an immediate, viable, long term, economical and technologically underdeveloped base-load replacement for nuclear power.

Yes, I've seen that. The claim is that the sun can heat a molten salt, used to heat air in open or closed cycle gas turbines, do so without the use of water as a heat sink, and therefore perfect for use in hot arid climates. This allows for long term storage of energy (long term = hours or days, not months), load follow capability, as well as waste heat suitable for desalination and other industrial processes. I do not dispute this. Want to know why I don't dispute this? Because this exact same technology is what is planned for in future molten salt nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Go ahead, bring on the molten salt solar thermal power. That will prove the technology for use in nuclear reactors. You think energy storage only helps wind and solar? It helps nuclear power just as much, if not more. Here's where nuclear beats out solar on the molten salt storage, it doesn't take multiple square miles to achieve 1 gigawatt of power. It might take the area of a medium sized airport, but that's mostly to provide an ample security buffer around a vital civil asset, no different than that around a water reservoir, hydroelectric dam, or... well, an airport.

Domestic Solar is the perfect peaking solution to replace nuclear power. Wind is a new type of power generation mechanism with a vastly more dynamic upgrade cycle than anything we've see so far, it has massive promise to replace nuclear power.

I'll believe it when I see it. Since nuclear power provides 20% of the electricity consumed in the USA, and you claim that wind and solar are going to replace it, do I really need to provide a citation for you on the current viability of nuclear power? It seems you've admitted to that already.

Maybe it's more of your rhetoric. As you said of nuclear "they still produce power" the only difference is solar and wind don't explode and cause mass evacuations like a nuclear plant does when they overheat, they just make less power.

Wind and solar kill more people than nuclear. Citation:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...

If you want to reduce nuclear accident deaths further then stop evacuating people needlessly. Citation:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w...

Unlike Nuclear power, wind and solar plants are upgradeable.

Then explain this list of articles on nuclear power plants getting upgrades:
https://www.power-eng.com/nucl...

Unlike Nuclear, coal and everything else developed in the 19th and 20th century that produce heat, solar and wind is a 21st century solution that reduces the heat load

Because we could never, ever take a coal power plant offline in Indiana and replace it with cleaner production, right?

http://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/nipsco-will-close-bailly-power-plant-may/article_da6b70a1-4f30-5df5-9302-897fbaf8a818.html/
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2016/04/duke-energy-shuts-down-indiana-coal-plant.html/

Try to take a longer view. Fossil fuel is lock-in, electricity is flexible. If you wanted, you could even throw up a small turbine or some solar panels.

Passenger transport accounts for over 20% of our CO2 output.

Let's do some math, shall we?

Transportation is about 30% of our CO2 output, but only about 1/3rd of that is passenger cars. The rest of that is aircraft, ships at sea, and so forth that cannot run on batteries. Replacing an ICE passenger car with an electric car cuts the CO2 output to 1/4 of what it was, because the electricity we use now comes largely from coal and natural gas. So, by replacing every passenger car with an EV we take maybe 10% of the total CO2 output and turn that into 2%. I am not impressed.

I say that electric vehicles solve only half the problem because replacing passenger vehicles would mean very little improvement. It's not nothing but it's small. Nuclear power, on the other hand, takes the larger slice of the pie (about 30%) that is electrical production and take that to zero. Does it all have to be nuclear? No. Have some wind and hydro in there, quite likely some natural gas too. I don't believe we'll get rid of natural gas any time soon because it's just so cheap, very convenient, very clean (compared to coal at least), easy to store and transport, and perhaps more.

Use nuclear power for industrial processes and we reduce CO2 output further. Nuclear power would be great for fertilizer production, desalination of water, perhaps even providing heat for things like making cement.

Can't we use wind and solar for this? Not totally. Wind and solar are very unreliable, we'd need a back-up for those.

http://www.power-eng.com/artic...

The NBER report quoted one grid manager in Germany as saying that 8 MW of back-up capacity are required for any 10 MW of wind capacity added to the system.

If we use natural gas for this then we run the risk of not reducing our CO2. Running a turbine means getting 30% efficiency in turning that natural gas into electricity. Burning that in a combined cycle plant, a plant that cannot be used to backup wind, gets 60% efficiency. If we see the wind blow half the time and have to run the turbines half the time then we saved nothing in fuel costs and CO2 output. We'd be better off just burning the natural gas in the combined cycle plant.

Fourth generation nuclear power plants may offer the ability to load follow. Using nuclear to backup wind gains nothing because nuclear is as zero carbon as wind. The fuel costs in running nuclear is next to nothing, other operating costs dominate. If for every 10 MW of wind it takes 8 MW of nuclear for backup then wind would have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear to compete. Similar math applies for solar. This does not apply to natural gas so it can compete with nuclear with near parity prices.

Electric vehicles are not "charged from coal". Coal is baseload and is running regardless of what is happening in the country. If the USA switches to electric cars it will put more strain on generation requiring the construction of new power plants. These are not powered by coal.

Coal still dominates, being roughly 1/3rd of our electricity production. Calling electric vehicles coal powered is not inaccurate. New generation is dominated by natural gas. With wind and solar, as history tells us, would need large investments in inefficient natural gas to remain viable. Future developments in battery or nuclear fission technology may change this but for now we have three choices to make:
- Nuclear power
- Fossil fuels
- The lights going out

I'd like to see people choose nuclear power.

GM is not in the business of solving all of our energy problems, so I cannot lay this all at their feet. With that said I would like to see some recognition by GM and others in the EV business to recognize the need to have nuclear power to take us the rest of the way on reducing CO2 output.

^You are talking off of assumptions, not experience. You could have checked just a little first, the link below an example of digital products that have been being installed in US nuclear plants for over that last 20 years. These systems don't need to be installed in containment where radiation levels are high, relay based controls are already installed in low rad environments.

http://www.westinghousenuclear...

Here is one on the Oconee Reactor Protection digital system, other plants are in the process of planning protection system digital upgrades;

http://www.power-eng.com/artic...

In addition, many US plants have installed digital control rod drive control systems. Once again, those controls are not located inside containment. You can walk right up to them, as most all controls, while the plant is running full power.

Here's a good article on the subject:

The most likely candidate for a coal-to-gas conversion are 50-plus year old units, less than 300 megawatts in capacity and generally early generation sub-critical utility boilers - the least efficient, most-costly to operate and with the lowest overall capacity factor in the coal fleet. The majority of these older, inefficient units are located in the eastern United States. Typically, these plants have limited or no air quality control systems already in place, and the cost of adding an AQCS to comply with regulations is prohibitively high. Most plants west of the Mississippi River built in the 1960s or later aren't as attractive as candidates for fuel switching since they are often larger, more efficient and tend to burn Powder River Basin coal, a cost effective fuel with a more favorable emission profile than the bituminous burned by many eastern plants.

And here's a list of conversion projects being tracked by environmentalists.

One item to note on the natural gas: a lot of the newly installed natural gas capacity is in the form of combined cycle units, which are operated more like base load units rather than peakers. These are the units that are putting a lot of coal units out of business (and some nuclear units if they can't manage to get a bailout).

Yes, before wind turbines the grid was totally safe:
 
... the Electrical Safety Foundation International reports that an average of 133 workers die each year due to contact with power lines. In addition, most authoritative sources on electrical incidents report that approximately 400 general industry workers, including power plant workers, die each year from electrical shocks. When combined, these figures represent one or two deaths daily due to electrical incidents.

Gas and renewables are the future. Coal is dying. There have been a rash of nuclear plants that are asking for bailouts or shutting down.

On the battery front there is very good news as well:

The Southwest commercial story is particularly interesting: Our original analysis did not indicate that solar-plus-battery systems would be cost effective in the Southwest for several decades. However, as illustrated above, the Tesla announcement enables cost-effective deployment of systems for commercial customers throughout the Southwest in the near term.

Bottom line: Thanks to Tesla’s announcement, in the Northeast and Southwest, an additional 60 million annual customer megawatt-hours cost-effectively can defect from the grid to solar-plus-battery systems more or less immediately, resulting in an additional $12.5 billion in annual utility revenue erosion.

Another factor to consider, which was not included in this comparison, is what might happen should solar prices drop faster than expected. Current prices and updated forecasts are coming in lower than what we modeled as well, meaning the economics could further accelerate.

Gas turbine peaker plants have ramp rates on the order of 20MW to 50MW per minute. See an example below. Also, on the intermittency of wind and solar being a problem, you can't ignore the grid and assume a single plant in isolation. With the grid power can be generated elsewhere and transmitted to where it's needed. This is not new, and is part of how the power systems are able to handle adding renewable capacity. Adding battery backup is another way to load level, and is probably required to increase renewable use beyond something like 20% of the generated power.

For example:
"Single-shaft gas turbine designs can accept greater step loads, varying from 50 percent to 100 percent depending on the model, rating and site conditions. In the case of a 50MW single-shaft gas turbine, it is possible to load the unit from zero to full load in two steps within 30 seconds."
http://www.power-eng.com/artic...