In a recent study, researchers from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) questioned the planned development of new nuclear capacities in the energy strategies of the United States and certain European countries.
Has anyone actually built 100 hour storage at a significant scale? There’s potential for things like iron-air and green hydrogen, but they seem like uncertain emerging technologies.
Pumped hydro exists in many places (and is available pretty much everywhere). There are also demo installs for other low-discharge batteries. Also “put another battery next to the other battery” isn’t some undiscovered technology, as soon as it’s necessary LFP is ready even if you assume there’s no other option.
It doesn’t really matter though because wind/solar has demonstrably higher grid penetration capability with less storage and less overprovision than nuclear. Geographic over-concentration and unreliability is a much bigger downside than intermittency in that regard.
So for grid reliability, it would be better to build (e.g.) a distributed fleet of 100 MW reactors than a single 1 GW reactor?