Fuel pre-conditioning guidelines
Nuke is baseload. They shouldn’t have been doing that.
US operators use nat gas mostly to keep the system balanced.
Wind is just unpredictable.
I would certainly hope that every operating mode of a nuclear power plant would be a "safe node". :=)
“Nuclear power is perfectly safe, except for the idiots who work in the industry”. A quote from my late father who worked at K-25 and Y-12 for 42 years.
” Operating in safe mode.” Sounds like Microsoft Windows. Not very reassuring considering the blue screen of death means a melt down.
Like coal fired thermal generators, it is not wise to set nuclear powered thermal generators as ‘load following’. Both work best when they are ‘base loaded’. In AB, gas fired thermal generators and sometimes hydro generators were ‘load following’. Hydro units were kept as ‘spinning reserve’ and lower levels of reserve, available instantaneously, in case a unit tripped. These German jokers need to refit their mothballed coal plants into NG plants to ‘load follow’.
Metals deteriorates more rapidly when forces increase and decrease rapidly. Just look to airworthiness of aircraft. After a certain number of take off and landings, they require in depth testing and serious maintenance. Ramping nukes rapidly up and rapidly down stresses in a similar way.
Perhaps someone in the power industry could shed light on this question:
Why not run nuclear plants at some optimal level (say 95% of capacity) and then just shunt unneeded power to a resistive load?
An even better approach would involve cycling the plant through the same power curve every day, designed to follow average power use (AC/heating, industrial use etc.).
My understanding is that fuel costs are a negligible fraction of nuclear plant costs. Why worry about adjusting output at all? The higher the fraction of grid power coming from reliable sources, the better this approach would work, of course...
There will come a time, if not in Germany then somewhere else, that the attempt to have “renewables” provide the most/major source of electricity will start to encompass a physical footprint across the land that will make earlier revolts of “not in my backyard” look tiny by comparison.
Commercial power rates are usually based on peak load, that is, you pay a higher overall rate as your peak demand increases. This highly incourages commercial costomers to manage (lower) their peak load. If you own a plant or factory you can run different equipment at different times in a scheme to lower your peak. This discourages spikes in demand and is very much in keeping with free market principles.
Likewise, we should value supply (the rate we pay the supplier) based on the reliability of the supply. Aply that very valid market principle, which goes hand and hand with that above and renewable energy as we know it is just simply folly.