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Nuclear power does not play well with renewables. It's a steady baseload source, but solar and wind are highly variable and need something that can switch on or off to fill in the gaps. You can't turn on and off a nuclear plant throughout the day. So even though (ignoring disposal challenges), nuclear is a clean source of energy, it probably has no place in a highly VRE dominated future.


You can do load following fine with nuclear, that's how they run a lot of it in France and to an extent in Germany.

http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2011/load-following-npp....


do you know where one can find typical frequency or impulse response plots? both for total input control to energy network or partial (control -> heat, heat -> turbine etc) responses would be interesting, for real/typical systems


You're approaching it from the wrong angle.

Solar and wind don't need on-demand electricity to cover the gaps, they need better storage solutions.

Then, you have nuclear as the base for large metros / regions, and local wind/solar with good storage solutions for peak demand.




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