Nuclear power in Ireland

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472113#Comment_118472113

I think most of Ireland's potential hydro sites are already used up unless you want to do something drastic altogether like flooding the entire blackwater valley and the towns therein

RainInSummer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472113#Comment_118472113

Hydro is one of the most environmentally destructive ways to produce power.

I'll take nuclear waste over windfarms in my area.

We wouldn't need to source nuclear fuel outside Ireland. Could be mined locally. Unfortunately that was banned by the same donkeys that sold diesel as a green alternative for automotive use.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472113#Comment_118472113

What you really need for hydro is steep mountain valleys, more than rain. We don't have them, but Switzerland and Norway do and so of course they have used those.

I wouldn't mind a nuclear waste facility next door. Given the security measures and such, it would still probably be several hundred metres away. The waste thing is bizarre. The radioactive waste comes from mining radioactive stuff that is already out their naturally. Apart from some radon issues, most people don't have mind melt-downs over this, but they completely loose it if you suggest returning nuclear waste to whence it came - but far less accessible. The level of safety assurance demanded by some for disposing of nuclear waste, far exceeds what exists in the natural world.

Scientists found the remains of a natural nuclear reactor at Okla in Gabon: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/zhao1/

I believe some nuclear waste was dumped into the sea in the past, and that's basically the last to be heard of that, despite it seeming crazy. I'm not condoning that idiocy in the slightest, but the consequences don't seem to match the doomsday alleagtions by some that sealing nuclear waste kilometres deep in salt beds that have been stable for 200+ million isn't safe enough. Humanity is about 3 millions years in the making. It might sound crazy, but I don't care about the possibility some humans might be exposed to nuclear waste, hundreds of millions of years in the future. If they are so primitive they can't deal with it, no loss.

We are not going to last that long. With virologists apparently tinkering with viruses to deliberately make them more infectious to humans so they can have bragging rights and a paper to write, together with labs that even in the US with their standards, leak like sieves - I think my son said there were 50 leaks a year from top level US labs per year, or something like that - our days are possibly numbered. Did you know Omicron was also made in a lab, just like Covid?

The impact of nuclear waste in millions of years time shouldn't be of concern, with virologists tinkering.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472113#Comment_118472113

We have very few hydro sites in this country - and not nearly as much rain as you might think. Also if you try and create reservoirs through damming and flooding it is disastrous to the environment - totally wipes out ecosystems across a large area.

Places with real mountains can do hydro, scotland, norway etc. Irish "mountains" are pathetic by comparison, and our rivers are on the small and short side.

You need much bigger river catchments than anything we can provide in Ireland, save for the Shannon, Liffey and maybe the Corrib - most others lack either the flow or the gradient to be worth damming.

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472599#Comment_118472599

Hydro is far less environmentally destructive than nuclear. Actually quite a lot less.

Even if uranium would be mined here it would have to be sent somewhere else to make fuel out of it since we do not have facilities to make end product from ore over here.

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118473705#Comment_118473705

I maybe expressed myself incorrectly. I meant hydro more in form of a tidal power plant. We are surrounded by pretty predictable energy source.

Akrasia

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/07/the-latest-energy-storage-gizmo-is-an-ocean-battery-with-a-bladder/

Use Offshore wind to pump seawater into an underwater 'bladder' when there is excess wind generated

When there is no wind or high demand, flip the valve and use the water pressure to generate power

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118471834#Comment_118471834

The UK is interconnected to our grid so kinda relevant.

They have been doing nuclear power since the 1950's and have a much bigger economy so they'd be in a better position to roll out a new power station.

In 2011 they agreed to order 6 power plants to replace the existing ones which now due to retire. Only one is under construction, already delayed years and not scheduled to come online before 2026 with a probably delay of another 15 months and come back next year to see what the new delay is.

Nuclear companies from the UK , France, the US and Japan have gone bankrupt or been nationalised in the meantime and it's got to the stage where the UK, French and Chinese governments have had to underwrite the project and companies involved.

The cost original cost of £18Bn has ratcheted up and even then it's dwarfed by the £80bn extra lifetime cost of the electricity.

On the other hand France , who we will be interconnected to soon, using those better and cheaper designs has multiple reactors off line in the middle of winter. Has paid a fortune retro fitting them to the latest safety standards (relying on the other onsite reactor is not nearly enough redundancy) and at times has had 50% of reactors offline.

Different designs, different companies, different reactor generations, same result.

RainInSummer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118474730#Comment_118474730

Ah fair enough.

Yeah harnessing that would be ideal. Be a tough ask though. Hopefully one for the future.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118474730#Comment_118474730

Tidal does not work - its been found to be completely uneconomical, so much so that all(?) commercial tidal energy projects have been wound up.

Also tidal only works on very select locations - large inlets with narrow openings. You cant just stick something on an exposed coast and rely on the tide to give you energy.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118474730#Comment_118474730

Lots of tidal lagoon projects proposed for Wales. Flood defence is claimed as a benefit.

https://www.rhyljournal.co.uk/news/18742301.tidal-lagoon-replace-wylfa/

https://www.rhyljournal.co.uk/news/18552989.590million-tidal-lagoon-plan-unveiled-north-wales-will-create-300-jobs-power-82-000-homes/

Two different projects on different scales for North Wales , how many wind turbines could you stick on the border of a 6.7 kilometre long lagoon ? It would also offer a larger area for floating solar panels.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118475005#Comment_118475005

Not all, there's the ones in Rance, France and Sihwa Lake, Korea.

Tides are too low to extract power most places worldwide. It's weird seeing how non-existent they are in parts of Italy.

In the UK the problem has been getting approval even for the offshore lagoons. Barrages are harder to get approved because of environmental impact. The west coast of the UK doesn't have the same sort of Atlantic storms ours does.

Coast off Northern Ireland has decent tidal races so it's only a matter of time there. Not huge power but every few hundred MW adds up.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118472591#Comment_118472591

Let's try that maths again.

22 Turlough Hills is 6.4GW or 2 Hinkley C's worth of output and a Turlough Hill stores power for 6 hours full load.

Doing that would mean lots of synchronous generation and use as synchronous compensators so grid could adsorb lots of renewables and interconnerctors.

Doing that would completely eliminate any market for nuclear because there's no need for baseload anymore since 6 hours is plenty of time for dispatchable generators except for nuclear which takes much longer than 6 hours to ramp up if it's been down for a day or more.

You'd still need dispatchables for backup, but not at peak time every single day and all day in winter which nuclear needs.

Let's try that maths again.

Two Hinkley C's would cost €55.2Bn up front vs (€22m in Jan 1972 -> €263.21m in Nov 2021) so those 22 pumped storage stations would cost €5.8Bn which is only 70% of the cost increase (so far) per Hinkley C. And that's using late 1960's technology which may have been improved on.

If you throw the square/cube law at water storage (using a hanging valley to the sea like Spirit Of Ireland) then the costs per cubic meter of pumped storage drop further. Nuclear is so expensive that building multiple high walled basins like a tidal lagoon setup start to look very attractive. (water could flow between basins or sea)

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118466782#Comment_118466782

But that's not what the chart says.

What is the "solar roofing industry" anyway? If you are doing some repairs on a roof unrelated to the panels that happen to be on it and die, are you counted among this statistic?

RainInSummer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118474683#Comment_118474683

I don't believe it is. Could I ask you to back that up?

Hotblack Desiato

The mighty Shannon produces at best 86MW which is fúck all really and that's by far the best hydro source in Ireland.

patnor1011

https://www.power-technology.com/features/featuretidal-giants-the-worlds-five-biggest-tidal-power-plants-4211218/

There are few under construction in the world and two I think right next door in the UK. I do not know but for me nuclear do not look safe no matter how you look at it. Not to mention that despite some perspective potential uranium ore deposits we still do not have any facility or experience to enrich ore to make fuel for it. Yes we can build some, train people but that is another expense on top of building, maintaining and decommissioning plant.

Decommissioning nuclear plant if not done properly is a recipe for disaster. It is a long and costly process and it seems as a sort of "sure lets others down the line to think about it" scenario.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/decommissioning-nuclear-facilities.aspx

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118477698#Comment_118477698

What chart? My post didn't contain one and there isn't one on the page linked to.

The solar roofing industry is one where companies supply solar energy systems which include installing solar panels on roofs, and would include maintenance of such systems, like all The Tesla ones that caught fire.

If you want a chart, here's one:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy/

(And before the inevitable person comes charging in claiming the our world in data figures are more recent, their source appears to be a paper from 2015.)

A caveat would be that it's very doubtful the true extent of solar panel installation related deaths is known or captured. The sources seem to be mostly US based and are estimates from deaths of roofers vs estimates of the percentage of roofing work that is related to solar panel installation. The world wide stats would likely be far higher some claim due to laxer safety standards than in the US.

Solar panel installations also are causing a lot of house fires. If any of those result in deaths they wouldn't be counted as solar panel industry related deaths.

There are no cumulative stats of worldwide solar panel related deaths, but it's certain that any real figures would very likely be higher than those being compared to other power generation technologies.

In Oz they were finding 21-26% of installations to be dangerous and faulty, mostly in terms of electrics, when inspected.

There have been complete building losses from fires related to solar panel installations - 10 at least in Germany alone.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118478251#Comment_118478251

The negative environmental and aesthetic impact of the whole Ardnacrusha mess is prodigious. Killaloe is a nice enough place, but before the hydro, it was far nicer, as there used to be lovely rapids where the bridge is. There also used to be a small village nearby, downstream, which is now at the bottom of the holding lake formed by the hideously ugly concrete dam. The Bridge at Killaloe could be visually apealing, but it's not, because the ESB attached an incredibly ugly edifice of steel pipes and walkways as an eel sieve to save some of them being chopped by the turbines downstream. Everything to do with the ghastly Ardnacrusha mess should be expunged from the landscape and the original aesthetics, geography and environment restored.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118463446#Comment_118463446

"Nuclear fission energy is the only source of zero carbon, safe and reliable baseload power."

First off nuclear isn't reliable. Today only 6 of the UK's 13 reactors were on Nominal full load. Two others that should have been on line were retired early. France also has reactors offline which so far will mean 10% less nuclear electricity in 2022. The replacement reactors are years late and the new design has teething problems so years to go.

Germany retired half it's reactors a fortnight ago. And already the remaining ones have dropped a third of output. Belgium will be shutting down reactors in the next two years. You simply can't rely on a fleet of nuclear power plants being available in the foreseeable future.

Multiple plants have been taken offline worldwide because they hadn't been prepared for historical levels of flooding or icing or drought. The problem is that you can't do nuclear on the cheap.

Hydro, Biomasss, and Geothermal all provide dispatchable zero carbon power as opposed to nuclear which can't be dispatched . Our grid can handle up to 75% of non-synchronous generation so minimum baseload only represents 25% of demand and Turlough Hill has been eating into that since 1974 both load balancing and as a synchronous condenser.

Besides for grid stability you must have at least 5 high inertia devices on load at all times spread around the grid so minimum baseload is already well covered. The new Static Compensator / synchronous compensator down at the Shannon end of the 400KV grid will reduce the need for thermal generators to provide this.

So there isn't enough guaranteed demand for the output of a typical 1.2-16GW reactor, besides the costs of providing spinning reserve 24/7/365 for such a white elephant would be enormous.

The challenges facing nuclear are many. Politics is one that cannot be avoided even if you could make nuclear reliable.

For a start there's a history of delays and cost overruns and failing to deliver on the promises especially "this time it will be different". If you exclude plants being built by Russian or Chinese companies then ALL of the other projects are running late.

Despite promises there is no new step change technology. Today's reactors are only 15% more fuel efficient (on paper) than the previous generation built 30 years ago. Over the same time the costs of solar have fallen 7% a year.

BTW all the talk of low volumes of radioactive material are smokescreens. Highly radioactive material is indeed produced in low volumes. It will decay relatively quickly so long term storage isn't a huge issue. But when you start reprocessing the volumes of nasty waste skyrocket, and to use more than 0.5% of the fuel you have to reprocess. If you don't reprocess then uranium reserves will run out if nuclear power is expanded significantly.

The real problem is the intermediate stuff with half lives of thousands of years.. Much larger volumes and enormous costs to keep safe. If Neaderthals had been using reactors to keep warm during the ice age we'd be dealing with their mess today. If an ice age returns glaciers can rip through mountains. There's depleted uranium and huge volumes of contaminated processing equipment and structures and areas to clean too. As for low level waste there's a reason why the Irish Sea became the most radioactive in the world.

cnocbui

Can't stop lying.

"Unit performance. Even as the nuclear power fleet ages, operational NPPs continue to demonstrate high levels of overall reliability and performance. The load factor, also referred to as the capacity factor, is the actual energy output of a reactor unit divided by the energy output that would be produced if it operated at its rated power output (reference unit power) for the entire year. A high load or capacity factor indicates good operational performance. In 2020, the global median capacity factor was 84.6%, in line with the load factor in recent years.

Another indicator measuring the performance of nuclear reactors is the energy availability factor (EAF), which refers to the ratio of energy that the available capacity could have produced during a specific time period, compared to the energy that the reference unit power (RUP) could have produced. In 2020, the weighted average EAF was 76%, where half of nuclear reactors also operated with an EAF above 87%."

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/nuclear-power-proves-its-vital-role-as-an-adaptable-reliable-supplier-of-electricity-during-covid-19

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118480878#Comment_118480878

We get it , capacity factor of operation power stations is 76%. Equivalent to 1 reactor being offline for every 3 online. Even so the issue is how often multiple fail to provide nominal load at the same time. You can't treat nuclear power stations as being random as external factors can affect multiple units at the same time.

Unplanned outages due to external reasons, such as significant decreases in electricity demand, increased to 15 average days in 2020, Do all operators use the EDF trick of continuing to call an outage planned when it extends past the advertised return date ?

See note at bottom : Nuclear power operating statistics do not include outage data from French reactor units as information for these units was not available by the time of publication. Hint : it's freely available here lots of plants offline or at reduced loads.

Capt'n Midnight

Capacity factor of operation nuclear power stations is 76%...

There's a supermarket nearby that's open from 8am to midnight and they always have milk. Capacity factor 75%, totally predictable in advance so you can work around that.

There's petrol stations open 24/7 but a quarter of the time they've run out of milk. Capacity factor is also 75% and if it was truly random then you could be reasonably sure of getting milk at the next garage, it's hassle but you could put up with it.

If there's a run on milk or if there's a problem with distribution such that multiple petrol stations in an area run out at the same time the capacity factor is still 75% but now there's nowhere to get milk overnight.

Nuclear falls into the third category more often than it's supporters would like you to believe. It's simply not reliable enough to justify it's premium pricing.

I keep a litre of milk in the freezer so I don't have the hassle and expense of needing to go to garages to get milk.

Yellow_Fern

Antis like to claim that the world is running out of uranium due to limited proved reserves, but what they never mention is reserves are a function of demand and prospecting. We only have 20-50 years of copper yet we aren't being persuaded to cut use. It's a similar story with many metals. The reality is though metals are non renewable, we have never run out of a non renewable resource. The only resources that we wiped out are renewables ones.

Btw middle of the night and winter and we are still only 16% renewable at the moment.

RainInSummer

Re: uranium running out, I'd not heard that one put forward as an arguement before.

In any rate we've enough uranium to last till the sun decides to swallow us.

Sea water extraction will eventually get to a place where it's competitive with ISR/OP, most likely this decade. And if even only 10% of the 4.5bn tonnes are recoverable from the sea that'll be enough to keep the lights on in a safe, reliable and carbon free way for long enough that our great great^10x6 grandchildren won't need to worry about it.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/116574493#Comment_116574493

10% of the time that the wind does not blow? Wind has an average capacity factor of 30% on the island. In 2021, it was just 20%. I would think it doesn't blow far more than 10%.

RainInSummer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/116574493#Comment_116574493

They've been running them in aircraft carriers and subs for 60 or 70 years.

As for the point about gas plants being cheap, that is true, but the price of gas can fluctuate by several hundred percent and we're already seeing fuel switching in Europe back to oil (and oil ain't cheap at the moment either). I'm not sure cheap should be the goal though, reducing emissions should be.

As for the 10% wind thing, that's just hot air.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118483413#Comment_118483413

And the capacity factor of wind turbines is?

Relying solely on wind/solar and storage of same is just a stupid strategy - there's no effective redundancy (other than burning fossil fuels, mostly gas), and we can be totally screwed by prolonged calm spells.

Using nuclear as baseload, but with wind/solar for peaking (and storage of course) puts the grid in a far more stable and resilient position. Can still export excess, can still store excess, but would be infinitely better positioned to deal with prolonged calm/cloudy spells, and not reliant on LNG importation.

Small scale reactors in this country are as feasible (if not more) than plans to reuse our gas infrastructure for hydrogen production, storage and transport.

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118456003#Comment_118456003

Nuclear isn't evil, it's just too expensive as an energy source.

If it made any financial sense it would be ideal.

1874

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118469116#Comment_118469116

You are unaware of anyone dying from the effects of radiation or hearing about it??

You talk about converting waste products to cylindrical slugs like it is nothing, finding a geologically suitable place to put them, DRILL DOWN a few KM's like it is nothing, drop the waste in, and backfill 1.5 KMs of concrete like it's filling in a trench being dug to put down utility or services a few metres under the ground.

Everything to do with Nuclear is wasteful/costs/energy intensive/creates CO2 before a single Watt of useable power is created, thats not to mention sequestering the waste byproducts in a safe and sustainable way which is an ongoing cost FOREVER.

I thought you were for Nuclear power, what you say are not arguments for it, aside from it being makey upey pie in the sky, no one just gets to decide we just drill holes and drop the waste down there and cover it with cement, dropping the waste so far into not very deep water bodies isn't the answer up to now.

The cost of the whole life of Nuclear energy is not viable, we in this county dont have the experience and there are a host of other factors which rule out Nuclear being safe, cost effective, sustainable.

It has been mentioned a few times, we could pay for everyone to have solar and battery storage before we got any power derived from Nuclear.

As for CO2, we could affect that by having very cheap projects of planting trees, EU wide/globally, changing farming practices, changing how much meat we consume (not as easy to do as saying it, but better than the alternatives).

Nuclear waste is the problem that keeps giving, talking about future technologies is a waste also, until they are available.

A vast amount of energy is wasted through poor designs of habitable spaces, improve that alone and we save a fortune on expended energy.