this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Initially, world was very nuclear-positive. Engineers envisioned nuclear power being the holy grail of energy technology and a foundation for our future. Extreme energy density and low price-per-watt of nuclear fuel promised an energy revolution - and for a while, it actually began.
Added to expand: add to this the boost of military. The Cold War required many countries to build up nuclear arsenal, and to make weapon-grade plutonium, you need to conduct uranium cycle - one that conveniently produces a lot of energy and can be used to generate power.
Then, Idaho, Chernobyl and much later Fukushima happened, slowly turning the world against nuclear as a dangerous energy production option. Association with nuclear weapons and Cold War didn't help, either.
In the meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind, which were initially prohibitively expensive, got more traction and investment, and as a result of new developments and economies of scale, they eventually managed to become cheaper than nuclear in most areas of the world, rendering nuclear power financially inefficient and thus largely obsolete.
In terms of engineering, it takes renewables + shitload of storage in order to have equivalent power generation characteristics to nuclear.
The recent portugal/spain power outage was due to the system being insufficiently damped (insufficient storage/inertia to buffer (the loss of) a high proportion of unpredictable power generation).
Yes, storage is complicated - but it can be done. Pumped hydro and other technologies exist to make storage cheaper than it would be in batteries, and sodium-ion options become cheaper and cheaper to serve as buffers.
As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables, those were disconnected to protect the equipment later, when the voltage already dropped, along with other power stations. Moreover, they were the first to recover, and they handled some of the load during the blackout: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/04/29/did-renewable-energy-cause-spain-and-portugals-mass-blackout-experts-weigh-in
Grids are best modelled as a system, jointly operating. Insufficient damping is the cause as per the grid operator (1).
Can be solved in multiple ways such as make it a france problem (stronger interconnects to a system with more turbines), storage, improved DC-AC transformers for small (<1MW) solar plants. (*)
Pumped storage is indeed one of the best known technologies for grid stability, as it provides both storage, and turbines with inertia. Hard to build though, finding funding and appropriate locations. Then solar suddenly isn't as cheap if one takes into accou t the cost to make it a reliable source of energy.
(*) the report mentions an estimated 700MW of production auto-shutting down as grid frequency dropped. Most likely these are the inverters of small scale solar installations, which are frequency following (measure then adjust) rather than synchronizing, and simply shut off when out of bound. To quote: