Electricity demand during the night is about half of what it is during the day. If you were to have nuclear baseline production that covers peak consumption, you would have to find a way to store about 100000MWh of energy that gets produced during the night and then distribute that during the following day, or you would just waste it, somewhere, somehow.
(Disclaimer: Back-of-the-envelope math, I'm assuming the scale on that graph is in MW, it's only for the UK, not the US)
Yes, it's not an impossible problem. Yes, you can even out the peaks by changing behaviour. Yes, you could perhaps figure out a way to store and release that much energy each day.
But my point still stands, replacing fossil-based electricity production with nuclear is not trivial, it's a lot more complicated than summing up the total output of all fossil-based plants and dividing it by the average output of a new nuclear plant as DanielBMarkham argues.
I'm also a big fan of nuclear. Many countries would probably benefit from having their baseline production completely covered by nuclear plants. But how to deal with peak demand of electricity without fossil-based production and in an economically viable way, that is not a solved problem yet.
One of the reasons demand is light at night is that we run our central heating systems on gas -- mostly imported from Norway or parts east, these days. Per kWh, gas heating is a lot cheaper for the consumer. But if we had a serious base load nuclear infrastructure, we could provide much cheaper off-peak electricity for domestic heating, which would smooth out the demand curve significantly.
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Dem...
Electricity demand during the night is about half of what it is during the day. If you were to have nuclear baseline production that covers peak consumption, you would have to find a way to store about 100000MWh of energy that gets produced during the night and then distribute that during the following day, or you would just waste it, somewhere, somehow.
(Disclaimer: Back-of-the-envelope math, I'm assuming the scale on that graph is in MW, it's only for the UK, not the US)
Yes, it's not an impossible problem. Yes, you can even out the peaks by changing behaviour. Yes, you could perhaps figure out a way to store and release that much energy each day.
But my point still stands, replacing fossil-based electricity production with nuclear is not trivial, it's a lot more complicated than summing up the total output of all fossil-based plants and dividing it by the average output of a new nuclear plant as DanielBMarkham argues.
I'm also a big fan of nuclear. Many countries would probably benefit from having their baseline production completely covered by nuclear plants. But how to deal with peak demand of electricity without fossil-based production and in an economically viable way, that is not a solved problem yet.