Nuclear - future for Ireland?

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122070482#Comment_122070482

Of course it`s cheaper, (or at least it should be if renewables are as cheap as we are being lead to believe), but with the marginal pricing policy, be it 10% (or even less) or 60% gas, the price to the consummer is the same. 100% the gas price with the only financial benefit going to the renewable companies.

The only time that it would be otherwise is if 100% is provided by renewables and Germany investing €30 Billion in gas infrastructure do not share your faith in that happening anytime soon.

So really for us the question is under this marginal pricing policy how long will be goughed by these renewable companies, seeing as we have a renewables 2050 plan, (which even as it stands nobaby can give a cost for), that will not come even close to meeting our predicted requirement for 2050 ?

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122070785#Comment_122070785

Thorium development didn't stop in the 1950's. The US, Germany, India and China have all invested in it since. but still nothing to write home about.

But 100% SMR's are only competing with other future nuclear.

The Rolls Royce volume price of £1.8B for 0.47GW is £3.8Bn per GW so Hinkley C could be replaced with 7 SMR's at a cost of £12.6 but no one is taking the bait, for some strange reason.

note : £4Bn/GW is what EDF to decommission the AGR's and Sizewell per GW.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122070462#Comment_122070462

Nuclear power is far cheaper than offshore wind, even without the potential for cost and time reductions of SMRs. This 20 years to build a reactor BS is getting real old.

The S Korean Shin-Hanul units 1 and 2 took ten years to build, and that's because political interference caused a five year delay. The current government reversed the wholesale policy of complete abandonment of nuclear and re-started the project. Currently a further two reactors are under construction. S Korea will than have 30 nuclear reactors when they are complete.

We don't even know what the capacity factors of units 1&2 are because they haven't stopped producing at 100% of their design capacity since 2022! The projected cost of reactor units 3&4 is $3.2 billion per GW, reactor units 1&2 cost $2.7 billion per GW.

Barakah NPP in the UAE has four reactors, the first 3 each took 8 years from construction start to switch on, the fourth took 9, not 20 years. Those reactors cost $4.36 billion per GW.

Korean Hydro and Nuclear Power offered Poland six APR-1400 reactors at $3.18 billion per GW, which given that eight have been built to date and are in operation, it's likely that price is realistic as it's essentially the same cost as the Shin-Hanul units 3&4.

So we have 8 APR-1400 reactors in operation and another two under construction and the current cost of construction is $3.18 billion. Nuclear power in SK has a capacity factor of just over 96%.

East Anglia one offshore wind farm was commissioned in 2020 and cost $3.12 billion for 714 MW, which works out at $4.37 billion per GW. Dogger bank is the worlds largest OSW project: 3.6 GW for £9 billion works out to $3.12 billion per GW.

These two OSW farms have life spans of 30 years, capacity factors of 46.8% and O&M costs of an additional 25-30% of their original capital costs. So Dogger bank over 60 years - the design life of an APR-1400 - would actually cost 3.12*2*2.0513 per GW, or $12.8 billion per GW. Since I don't know the O&M costs of an APR-1400 I have left out the additional 1.27 multiplier which would have brought OSW up to it's real $16.26 billion per GW. The 2.0513 multiplier is to balance the capacity factor differential - 96/46.8.

$12.8 billion per GW for OSW vs $3.2 billion for nuclear - OSW is hideously expensive compared to Korean built APR-1400 nuclear power. No wonder Poland, the Czech republic and the Netherlands are all currently lining up for KHNP reactors.

The cost of OSW leaves out the energy storage system you would need to actually balance the capacity factor differential in reality and the nuclear cost is leaving out backup, but as I have suggested previously, that could be achieved with over capacity and having the output of those 'spare' reactors producing hydrogen for transport/heating and switching to being backups as required.

Consonata

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122069929#Comment_122069929

Poland alone has a plan to acquire 24 BWRX-300 (300MW) SMRs from GE/Hitachi.

Indeed, a plan. We have no evidence that they will go through with this. Indeed all of the "successful" nuclear projects that get farmed out here are in countries with very different planning laws to ourselves (China, UAE :pac:) or have an established nuclear industry already. We have a very restrictive planning environment and a very high wage economy, making constructing even houses at the moment extremely expensive.

Consonata

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071225#Comment_122071225

Nuclear power is far cheaper than offshore wind, even without the potential for cost and time reductions of SMRs. This 20 years to build a reactor BS is getting real old.

Will you listen to yourself. Whats getting old is pretending that somehow Ireland can build a nuclear reactor at the same cost and time frame as some oil barons using de-facto slave labour in Dubai.

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122070558#Comment_122070558

Rolls Royce s offering was so enticing that the UK government dropped it's funding and looked for a more realistic offering. Its effectively dead in the water.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071511#Comment_122071511

I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to listen to yourself, I'm struggling.

S Korean build cost was lower, so with your level of reasoning skills we must conclude their slaves are paid even less. Clearly Poland have told them the going rate for slaves there in order for them to assemble the bid. Remarkably, Polish slaves are paid about the same as slaves in S Korea.

Of course the ultimate irony is that cheap Chinese solar panels being installed en mass in Ireland are actually produced with Uighur slave labour.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071511#Comment_122071511

What is really getting old is the slave labour jibbing,and is it not rather ironic to be questioning costs for nuclear when nobody can give a price for a 2050 wind plan for here that will not even come close to providing what our requirement will be by 2050 ?

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122070558#Comment_122070558

Temperature is an issue. NPP's have a Carnot efficiency of ~28% which hasn't really changed much since the first generation. You can't change the laws of physics by engineering or materials science (neutrons)

Fossil fuel plants have gone from coal plants with similar efficiencies to CCGT plants which emit a quarter of the CO2 for the same power because they produce half the CO2 emissions for the same amount of heat but twice the electricity from it.

Globally gas has displaced more coal than nuclear has.

Incandescent bulbs used to account for 14% of global electricity usage whereas nuclear supplies only 10% and falling of global electricity. In the grand scheme of things energy efficient lights contribute more than nuclear does.

Unlike most of the other SMR companies RR have decades of experience in making reactors. And no one's shown any interest in buying them.

It's not that Japan turned off it's reactors. It's that they didn't turn them on again.

13 years later they have only turned on a fraction of them. It gets parroted that average build time is 7 years so can't take that long to re-certify something that wasn't affected by the earthquake. So why hasn't Japan turned them on ? If the answer is politics then please explain how a nuclear program would get survive reunification here.

It's taking about 3 years for the increases in renewables to match total nuclear output.

Consonata

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071638#Comment_122071638

Again dodging the feckin question! Poland has not built a single commercial NPP. So their proposals aren't really worth the paper they are written on until they have a proof of concept built by Polish engineers.

South Korea has 28 reactors, with a standard repeatable design and a bespoke industry which has taken many many decades to get to the point they aare at today. The UAE of course can reform their entire planning environment around building whatever the emirates want built. We do not operate like this. Hence why our closest neighbour in the UK, is the best comparison for any NPP to be built in Ireland. If the UK could've done it cheaper, why have they not done so? If it were as easy as you suggest, go ahead and build the company to deliver it cheaply and efficiently. Clearly the two of ye have more smarts than the UK energy industry collectively have over the last 30 years.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071771#Comment_122071771

Perhaps I`m missing something in that IEA data, but do they not show that demand is to increase over those 3 years by 2493 and renewables by 2450 ?

If that is correct then renewables will not even keep pace with demand. Admittedly not by much, but it`s not going to reduce emissions. In fact apply your own analogy of renewables being the electricity France exports, in this case it would be nuclear that would achieve any reductions.

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cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071771#Comment_122071771

Temperature is not an issue, otherwise 10% of the world's electricity wouldn't be coming from 440 nuclear reactors and there wouldn't be any plans to build SMRs.

Are you a cousin of that expert clown who declared bumblebees can't fly, because their simplistic mathematical model declared that it was impossible?

Shoog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122073101#Comment_122073101

There are no commercially viable SMRs and the companies who propose them are all slowly going bankrupt. Its a grift

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071999#Comment_122071999

AI is set to blow up all existing predictions for energy demand. I saw one estimate that AI spending will amount to $250 billion this year alone. The energy demands for AI are expected to increase global electricity demand by 0.5% in just the near term. Altman was looking into getting an SMR just to run chat-GPT.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/nuclear-power-oklo-sam-altman-ai-energy-rcna139094

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071999#Comment_122071999

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying there.

Anyway the 43TWh difference is more than covered by any rounding of the predicted 10,799 TWh from renewables next year.

BTW the image came from https://www.carbonbrief.org/renewables-will-be-worlds-top-electricity-source-within-three-years-iea-data-reveals/

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122073461#Comment_122073461

Simple enough. It`s just basic mathematics.

The predicted demand is to rise by 2493 units. The prediction for renewables by 2450 units. Renewables are not going to keep pace with demand. You not going to reduce emissions from that data with just renewables.

We have seen the same here. A few years ago renewables were supplying 42% of demand which then dropped to around 35% and has been static at that level since, and now we have a wind/hydrogen plan for 2050, that nobody is willing to give a cost for, that will not come within a country mile of Eirgrid`s prediction of what our need will be by 2050.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122073130#Comment_122073130

It`s not difficult to see why. If renewable are not even keeping pace with demand, and they are going to add even more demand, other than fossil fuels they have no other option.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122073977#Comment_122073977

It's my impression that the loony hydrogen idea has been put on the back burner or shelved in favour of lots and lots of incredibly stupid interconnectors costing €2+billion a pop. If you think my nuclear to OSW comparrison made nuclear look cheap, that's nothing compared to how a nuclear to interconnector cost comparrison would turn out. Interconnectors might easily turn out more expensive than floating offshore wind, which is the current champion of insanely expensive and stupid ideas.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122074017#Comment_122074017

Not surprised of the loony hydrogen idea is gone. As soon as the Eirgrid predictions came out for 2050 demand it was dead in the water. It just goes to show how clueless those pushing this wind based energy are. Even basic mathematics is a mystery to them on design and cost.

The hydrogen plan was supposed to compensate for the long sustained period of little to no wind European wide which we have seen at the height of our demand and Europe`s so how is that hole now to be filled ?

For all the anti nuclear rhetoric on this thread I cannot see anything other than fossil fuels or nuclear through interconnectors. Rather than being so gung-ho to shut down nuclear if they really have any interest in reducing submission then they should be hoping more nuclear is added. Even though it doesn`t say much for our energy security, but it would at least keep the lights on. But then again, not a cheep, similar to the 37GW`s, as to what it would cost.