NRC Certifies First U.S. Small Modular Reactor Design
There is a lot of discussion here about renewables. I recommend a recent paper published in <i>Nature Communications</i> titled &quot;Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power worldwide&quot;[1]. It considers mixes of Solar and Wind, with or without excess capacity, and storage facilities zero, 3, or 12 hours. The paper&#x27;s model (it looks like the code is available on GitHub) makes optimist assumptions (e.g. no transmission losses within a single country and feasibility of 12hrs of storage for the whole country). Nevertheless, the results are interesting.<p>Figure 3 (see[1]) indicates how much power outage must be tolerated across the entire country for different mixes renewable capacity and storage depending on the country:<p>US -- Generation 1.5 times the capacity needed, 12 hours of storage, wind and solar have a power supply gap of 15% when the goal is to tolerate 10 hours of power outage.<p>Germany -- Generation 3 times the capacity needed, 12 hours of storage, wind and solar have a power supply gap of 60% when the goal is to tolerate 10 hours of power outage.<p>The larger the power supply gap, the more additional dispatchable power that must be provided.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-021-26355-z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-021-26355-z</a>