50% capacity factor for nuclear power is an aberration: typical capacity factors are over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison, capacity factors between 20-35% for wind and solar are the norm. Nuclear's capacity factor problems are also solve-able: France identified that irregular metallurgy caused faster corrosion, and this informs future builds. Nothing can make the wind blow more consistently, or make the sun stay in the sky for longer.
In Finland wind power provides roughly 30% of the nominal power on average. The problem is that it fluctuates between 0-80%.
The National Emergency Supply Agency calculates 6% of the nominal power capacity as the guaranteed capacity of wind. Unfortunately even that is overly optimistic.
During days when temperatures hover close zero, wind farms are shut down due to the danger from ice debris. This has caused zero production days of wind power in Finland during the last month.
Our electricity prices have been 30x the normal.
List of causes includes: importing electricity from Russia has been halted, unreliability of wind power, delays in building new nuclear power, premature shutting down of certain carbon based energy production, increased exports to Estonia and Germany due to Nordstream/Russia/Ukraine, increased exports to Sweden due to maintenance of a nuclear plant there. )
Nuclear is typically under 80% availability, with the three usual examples of "cheap fast" programs being even lower. The only exceptions of note are the US whose program is horrifically expensive -- and to get >90% requires some accounting tricks like spending big money on upgrading rated power without changing the nameplate and ignoring all the failed projects that were still paid for -- and China.
The wind blows more consistently by having a higher hub height or putting it in a better place. Both are being done which is why, contrary to your claim, every year the capacity factor of new projects increases.
> France identified that irregular metallurgy caused faster corrosion, and this informs future builds
This is a great example of a factor leading to a negative learning rate just like the US experienced ever since their first large commercial plants began operating at the end of the 60s.
Probably because all of the French reactors are over 20 years old and the last operational reactor they built was in 2000.. how is France going to replace the carbon free energy they get from their aging reactors? Average life span of reactors are between 20-40 years. Intuition tells me wind and solar ain't gonna cut it.
France has been trying to start their fleet rebuild at Flamanville, but it's proving to take far far too long. 15 years of construction and it's unclear when it will be generating electricity.
Olkiluoto, using the same design, was trumpeted to be ready at the beginning of the year, but is still not online.
Intuition tells me that after 4 decades of construction productivity being stagnant, we will not have any sudden improvements in construction productivity any time soon.
Also, my intuition on wind and solar is entirely different from yours. It's already so much cheaper, faster, and easier to deploy wind onshore, wind offshore, and solar that I can't imagine nuclear being able to catch up. And storage is live today, and ready for the grid. We are scaling storage production capacity far more quickly than we could hope to scale nuclear construction capacity.
The difficulty of commencing nuclear construction at, say, 500GW per year, is absolutely staggering. But we will be very close to that for wind and solar, correcting for capacity factor, quite soon.
France has the right strategy but failed to properly maintain for years due to stingy previous administrations.
Then Macron's admin decided to push for maintenance all at once (likely because they were worried if he lost to Le Pen next cycle) but they failed to foresee the Ukraine war and loss of cheap Russian gas.
France is in trouble because due to the same misguided anti-nuclear public sentiment, they stopped building new plants. The good news is that Putin has woken people up, and the public is now decidedly pro-nuclear.
Sweden has taken down at least one reactor again for maintenance.
Using that as an argument that we need more nuclear energy seems a bit off.