The Nuclear Debate

SeanW

Because that is, of course, the only option open to us.

Well, George Monbiot wants the U.K. to cut CO2 emissions 90% by 2020 - all without recourse to either nuclear power or biofuels - and there's not much chance of doing that while maintaining any standard of living.

I don’t want to turn this thread into a discussion on nuclear power, but you show me the strong, unequivocal evidence that nuclear power is an anti-climate change tool and maybe I’ll support it. Until then, I shall remain ambivalent.

Fact: Weather based renewables such as wind, some solar, cannot be relied upon to provide reliable electricity supply. That's self evident when you look at Eirgrid's data for Wind Generation. Thusly (save for the possibility of a Europe-wide renewables grid, or a Spirit of Ireland style storage scheme, or both), the choice the world must make can be described as nuclear vs. fossil fuels.

Fact:

Nuclear energy already makes a substantial environmental contribution to generating electricity. Today nuclear power plants operating in over thirty countries produce 15% of the world’s electricity, avoiding the emission of over two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year

http://www.world-nuclear.org/climatechange/nuclear_meetingthe_climatechange_challenge.html

Fact:
The IPCC recommends that all governments seriously consider using nuclear energy. Reprinted from the WNA.

All governments should give serious consideration to the potential of nuclear power for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

IPCC, 4th Assessment Report, Mitigation of Climate Change (2007)

Fact:

• France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
• France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html

Opinion: Clearly this 75% operates as a direct replacement for fossil fuels like coal and gas that would be used instead: furthermore it's neighbors benefit from cheap, clean energy.
If one primarily believes that our planet is gravely and spectacularly threatened by human greenhouse gas emissions, and desires realistic solutions to counteract this threat, then the above facts provide not only good news, but an example to follow.

Yet for whatever reason, Greenpeace and every national Green Party on Earth continues to tell one half-truth and lie after another about nuclear energy. All I know is that if I were running a Big Coal mining or power plant company, and were as morally insolvent as they were, I'd be writing out cheques to Greenpeace etc. as fast as my shareholders would allow on a very simple rationale "you guys are doing more to hamper my competition (the nuclear industry) than I could hope to accomplish in a million years *thumbs up* keep up the good work!"

probe

SeanW wrote: »

Fact: Weather based renewables such as wind, some solar, cannot be relied upon to provide reliable electricity supply. That's self evident when you look at Eirgrid's data for Wind Generation. Thusly (save for the possibility of a Europe-wide renewables grid, or a Spirit of Ireland style storage scheme, or both), the choice the world must make can be described as nuclear vs. fossil fuels.

Neither nuclear nor fossil have a long shelf life and both are heavy polluters, leading to illness and increased mortality rates.

Renewable energy is all about networks. Wind, wave, and solar energy are driven by barometric pressure over an area of about 1,000 km (eg a high pressure zone). Build a grid that covers an area greater than 1,000 km and you have renewable energy redundancy. While it will take some time (in terms of solar technology efficiency to ramp up) to make Ireland a viable location for PV energy, Ireland has 30 to 40 GW of wind/wave/tidal to throw into the European energy pot, if it gears up. Ireland only needs about 8 GW – assuming every car is electric and space heating moves from being largely carbon based to electric, like Norway.

The IPCC recommends that all governments seriously consider using nuclear energy. Reprinted from the WNA.

Please stop rubbing salt into the discredited IPCC’s wounds! :-)

France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
• France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.

When the summer gets hot, France has to shut down most of its nuclear power plants and import power from neighbouring countries. France’s legacy of cheap 2c/kWh electricity (production cost) has prevented renewable energy taking off in the country. The only renewable energy in France to speak of is the old, pre-nuclear hydro system which produces about 10% of the nation’s requirements. France is a big trader of electricity – importer and exporter – almost as big as Germany which is a much larger economy. However tiny Switzerland is almost as big an exporter of electricity as France… and a far bigger exporter than France on a per capita basis.

Pete M.

Whichever way you look at it, it has to be considered as part of an integrated solution when it comes to moving away from oil & gas.

probe

Pete M. wrote: »

Whichever way you look at it, it has to be considered as part of an integrated solution when it comes to moving away from oil & gas.

One has to consider all the options, but given the small size of the country, the massive amounts of renewable energy within the geographic limits, the need for redundancy - ie you need more than one nuclear plant for backup if it becomes a material part of the infrastructure (because they always have to be taken offline for maintenance and do breakdown often with zero notice to allow one to get something else running) - IRL is better off exporting green energy and importing nuclear produced electricity when it has to.

Much has been written about the intermittency of wind generated electricity. For several months eirgrid has been publishing met eireann's forecasted wind in terms of kWh of wind energy production for about 6 days in advance. Over the past few months the forecast energy production in kWh has been more than 90% accurate. This gives one plenty of time to start up alternatives - be they imported power or standby plant. Wave energy is equally predictable. Tidal is very much more predictable.

In summary I'm saying that nuclear is best outsourced to other countries (doing so will help pay for the HVDC connectors to export IRL's surplus green energy) - and nuclear won't be around forever.

http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/windgeneration/

Macha

probe wrote: »

One has to consider all the options, but given the small size of the country, the massive amounts of renewable energy within the geographic limits, the need for redundancy - ie you need more than one nuclear plant for backup if it becomes a material part of the infrastructure (because they always have to be taken offline for maintenance and do breakdown often with zero notice to allow one to get something else running) - IRL is better off exporting green energy and importing nuclear produced electricity when it has to.

This was pointed out in the EirGrid (Poyry) report released last week:

Commercially available nuclear stations are large for the size of the electricity system on the island of Ireland and we have assumed that a high system cost is required to integrate nuclear generation. More detailed technical feasibility studies and a full project risk assessment will be needed to develop this option. Nuclear feasibility could be re-examined in a different light at a future date if smaller nuclear generators become commercially available.

http://www.eirgrid.com/media/Low%20Carbon%20Generation%20Options%20for%20the%20All%20Island%20Market%20(2).pdf

Pete M.

I totally agree that it's better off that someone else do it.
Aside from the enormous capital cost, shur let the Brits deal with the security, public resistance, waste management and other costs.
Guess I'm just saying that we can't be too resistant to the idea of nuclear energy, when we would be reliant on it even if we were net exporters, given our potential for renewables.

steamengine

Reading around some recent opinions expressed by various engineering institutions and engineers in general, would point towards a consensus view by engineers, that for the future, nuclear power would be the logical option for providing us with adequate base load capability. However it appears that 'clean coal' is also being considered as another alternative, although I understand that this involves capture and storage of CO2.

Looking at my last ESB bill, I notice that renewables account for 11% 'Average for Ireland' of electricity generated and obviously this will be increased in years to come. I take it this percentage applies, in the main to wind generation.

As mentioned in several posts above, possibly it would make sense to import nuclear generated electricity and in turn export excess renewable generated electricity when eventually we reach the required generation capacities.

As regards the acceptance of nuclear power in principle, if for example at this point in time, we had to import electricity from the UK - would it not have a 'nuclear' content ? It would appear that 'needs must' will eventually decide the issue!

Capt'n Midnight

How many nukes would we build here ?

and what would we do when IT is offline for maintenance or whatever ?



On the financial side.

How stable is the price / supply of uranium ?

How predictable are the costs of decommissioning ?

What are the chances the project would get cancelled for political reasons during it's lifetime as happened in other countries ?


Where would we put it ?
and who would finance the costs involved in the delays due to legal challenges and protests ?


And since this is Ireland , who would pay for the tribunal in 30 years time when the truth leaks out ?



There is question of a debate about having nuclear power stations here. Just ain't going to happen, if it did I would suspect brown envelopes were used.

SeanW

I'll bite:

> How many nukes would we build here?
Enough to replace any oil fired plants that still exist. Enough to replace either all (or most of) our gas or coal fired power plants, depending on whether energy security or environmental protection was the aim
(i.e. if we want energy security, we build nuclear plants to replace the gas plants, if we want a cleaner environment and improved human health, we build n-power plants to displace coal. Bye Bye Moneypoint).

> and what would we do when IT is offline for maintenance or whatever ?
You would NEVER build a single large nuclear installation, such as a European Pressurised Water Reactor. For our market, that would be too big, too unstable and require a silly margin of redundancy, relatively speaking.

Instead, you could build a number of small reactors nationwide in a distributed, such as Toshiba 4S "nuclear batteries" in 10MW and 50MW increments - using multi-reactor arrays if necessary near the big energy drains such as large industries and main cities. The grid would be designed so that each county/city would provide its own nuclear energy at the best of times, and draw from the rest of the decentralised grid of the other regional plants when one towns reactor had to go down for any reason, staffing, maintenance or whatever. Ideally, some maintenance could be timed to coincide with forecasts of high wind.

> How stable is the price / supply of uranium ?
Reasonably so. Years ago, the Uranium price market was depressed by a recession in the nuclear industry, as well as two simultaneous dumps of nuclear material onto the market by the governments of Russia and the U.S. There have, in the last few years been some upward corrections in the Uranium price that I consider normal.

Uranium only accounts for about 5% of the cost of running a nuclear power plant. The rest goes on things like staffing (i.e. local, high paying jobs).

I should also point out that most reactors wastefully use fuel on a "once through" basis despite spent fuel being theoretically reusable. France, and to a lesser extent the U.K. are the only countries that make any serious effort at fuel recycling.

> How predictable are the costs of decommissioning ?
Again, reasonably so. Where nuclear power is done right, such as France and the United States, plant decomissionsings are basically a non-story because it's been paid for in advance, in the U.S. the builder puts up a decomissioning bond at build time, in France, a decomissioning levy is applied to all nuclear energy sales.

The U.K. has not been a good model in this case, inefficient 1st and 2nd generation plants run by a government body with no commercial mandate, means there's been no provision for decomissioning and it's going to hit their finances hard, i.e. the decomissioning of MAGNOX and AGR plant.

> Where would we put it ?
See above

> and who would finance the costs involved in the delays due to
> legal challenges and protests ?
> And since this is Ireland , who would pay for the tribunal in 30
> years time when the truth leaks out ?
> There is question of a debate about having nuclear power stations here.
> Just ain't going to happen, if it did I would suspect brown envelopes
> were used.

All true. Doesn't mean we shouldn't support nuclear energy as policy though.