this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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The memes of the climate
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No??? Nuclear is by far the slowest to moderate. So slow, energy prices used to be significantly lower at night in Germany due to the nuclear power plants not being able to adjust to the lowered demand.
It is fairly obvious in the future energy consumption will adjust to the production, instead of vice versa like it is right now. I'm talking decades, the time to build maybe 1.5 - 2 sets of new nuclear reactors. That way you need at most hours of grid storage instead of days.
And about the scary "sun and wind is subject to variations" part - of course it is. Which is why it's best to also invest into significantly expand the European power grid to adjust. When there's a power drought somewhere it is very likely somewhere else produces more than enough energy to export. As an added benefit, this makes the grid much more resilient.
Centralized power generation is not a sensible thing to invest into in today's age anyway. Putin would merely have to send a double digit number of drones/rockets to cause blackouts. Compare that to a fully decentralized energy grid where for instance every house has solar panels and battery storage.
Also, not a single nuclear accident is preventable. Why was the Fukushima reactor not designed to handle its event? Because it's cheaper. Why did Chornobyl explode? Because it was a cheap reactor type. Three Mile Island (to be fair, that's pretty long)? Because again design failures due to cost cutting. And cost cutting refers to being able to humanly construct a nuclear reactor - if every scenario were considered no plant could be built. It's like trying to design a plane that will never ever crash - impossible.
Modern plants can change their power output 3-5% of their total capacity per minute, but they dont often do drastic adjustments like, because its more efficient to run them on the designed power output and it is something that is fully solvable with battery banks, because the output is steady. Unlike with solar and wind.
One of the Germanys stupidest decitions latelly was to shut down their nuclear plants. It made them use 7% more fossil fuels, it made them dependent on Russian natural gas and some calculations say they could have been producing 70% less of carbon emissions between 2002-2022 if kept running on nuclear.
The exact moment the pipe dream if decentralized energy grid gets any where near working condition ill change my mind. Until then nuclear is the best option.
Like i said. Im not against solar or wind. Im against coal and fossil fuels and we cant get rid of them quick enough if we are naive and wait for solar and wind to grow enough to replace those. Lets get rid of the real pollutors first and then start to replace nuclear with something else.
Dont start to fix the broken window before the fire on the roof is under control.