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Title: Danes Are Finally Going Nuclear. They Have To, Because of All Their
Renewables

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/19/...

"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear
power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted
a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and
Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only
ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001.
Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the
expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is
different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the
one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily
dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with
the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-
fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to
stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a
diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.] The
Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its
power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal
inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that
maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and
nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features
that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue
that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so
far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that
are difficult to resolve. Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-
scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other
than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon
electricity grid. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the
news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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