I’ve read “The Base-Load Fallacy” a few times. It gives general answers that would be difficult to evaluate quantitatively from the article, alone, so it is difficult for a reader to determine whether the author’s claims are reasonable or mere wishful thinking. I am skeptical that bioenergy will ever provide more than a small percentage of electric power generation, for several reasons, including the amount of extra energy required to produce, harvest and process the biomass compared to the amount of energy it provides. Coal has much greater energy content per unit mass than biomass does. Hot rock geothermal power looks great, where one can get to it economically. In many locations, the installation would not be economically feasible, even if technically possible. Solar thermal electricity could provide cold regions with heat, but most of the people in my country are moving to warmer regions, where cooling is a bigger concern. Water storage systems for electrical power aren’t practical in my region of residence, due to the general lack of water and relatively flat elevation. Thermochemical storage is experimental and not yet practical. Wind power in my region of residence (an area of millions of square kilometers) is generally available only during off-peak times. Although it might be possible technically to produce a stable base load from wind power by increasing the geographic distribution, this also increases the area of electric demand, and demand usually increases at a greater rate than supply over the region the expansion would require to achieve base load stability. Wind power has the capacity in my region to provide 5 times the energy we require, but it would be mostly at 5 a.m.

Yet the question of the necessity of nuclear plants to provide base-load power remains unanswered. It is generally admitted that base-load power can only be provided by nuclear or coal-fired power stations. They are characterized by high capital costs, low operating costs and the technical impossibility for them to handle chaotic fluctuations of energy demand. Even though technological advance has made next-generation nuclear power plants more flexible to the energy demand, it would be an economic aberration not to use them to full capacity all the time.

Besides, one cannot leave aside the possibility that renewable energy could also provide base-load power. In an article called The Base-Load Fallacy, Mark Diesendorf gives several examples of renewable electricity sources that can generate base-load power: bioenergy, based on the combustion of crop residues (not very different from coal), hot rock geothermal power, solar thermal electricity combined with electricity storage systems (in water or through a thermochemical process)… Even wind power can be base-load if a large number of wind turbines are separated by several hundred kilometers and subject to different winds.

Wind power would benefit from pumped storage, whereby water is raised when the wind blows to provide power when it does not, in the same way as it compensates for the inability of nuclear power to turn down at night.

The worsening uranium supply situation will in any case cause the nuclear “renaissance” to stall, so all things considered the flexibility of output from its decreasing contribution is a minor issue.