Time for Ireland to introduce Nuclear..?

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119458563#Comment_119458563

Then Irish foreign policy and EU voting behaviour will be for the French president to decide.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479036#Comment_119479036

French president can't magically restore the missing 40GW of nuclear power that isn't there right now.

The French put their eggs in one basket and they are reaping the rewards. They've spent billions nationalising EDF already, on top of the cost of importing electricity, and there'll be a good few repair bills too.

EU policy is to roll out interconnectors. That's why they are subsidising them for Malta and Cyprus and ourselves.

unkel

Portugal has the lowest cost of electricity production per unit (mostly solar PV), France has the highest cost (mostly nuclear). Ireland is somewhere in the middle and can bring down the unit cost considerably by installing more wind.

Nuclear is simply put not economical.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119478661#Comment_119478661

Wind is not cheap, hence why our power bills have been going up. The government incentivises wind farm developers by contracting to purchase the energy at very high costs, making it very profitable for the wind farm operators. In another thread, someone said that the agreed strike price for Irish onshore wind generated energy is higher than the exorbitant strike price the Uk government agreed for Hinkley point nuclear PP.

That's just onshore wind, which is cheap to construct. Offshore wind is considerably more expensive. It's actually very hard to find out what offshore wind farms do cost to build, but from what I have found, it appears that offshore wind easily costs more than nuclear power when you account for it's low capacity factor.

It puzzles me why accountant and engineering bodies haven't called out governments over the false claims of renewables being cheap, when they are actually very expensive when you factor in their low capacity factor.

Leaving aside the artificial and unnecessary planning issues which can be removed via appropriate legislation; If Ireland started building a 6 GW nuclear power plant a year from now, using a Korean design and contractor, the entire grid could be essentially zero CO2 and emissions free in 11 years - 2034 instead of 2050, which is unachievable as it's based on false assumptions - allowing for delays. The two most recent Korean built nuclear power plants, both in Korea and the UAE, have taken about 10 years to construct, including delays. Without delays, they would take 5 years, and some NPPs have taken only 3. About 85% of NPPs built globally took 10 years or less to construct. If SMRs live up to their designers expectations, the construction time would be far less than for an offshore wind farm. RR believe an SMR production line would deliver one every 6 months. The problem then would more likely be the length of the queue of orders.

Ireland is hardly overpopulated, ranked 146th out of 248 territories by density.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479125#Comment_119479125

Your anti nuclear ranting is based on only two themes: France and the Uk. They are always your go-to for examples, never the US or South Korea. The French reactors you are criticising for needing maintainance have been churning out massive amounts of zero CO2 electricity for 30 years, but all you can do is rant at how they are currently in need of a service. I seem to recall some of Ireland's gas turbines have recently been out of action for cosnsiderable times for unscheduled maintainance because the wheels fell off and the crashed. Never a peep from you about that fiasco.

After 30 years, arguably underinvested French nuclear is needing some investment. That's what you tend to get when you don't pay the piper.

You obviously would prefer that the French nuclear industry had never existed and that for the last 30 years, they had been powering the whole of France using coal fired power plants, like everyone else.

I can't begin to understand the mental processes that drive what passes for thinking in the minds of people who supposedly are concerned by anthropogenic CO2 and yet are vehemently opposed to zero CO2 nuclear. Here you are wishing nuclear didn't exist and that the atmosphere be filled with way more CO2 than it has been. Nuclear energy has produce far more zero CO2 energy than renewables. The only energy source that has generated more zero CO2 energy is hydro.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479136#Comment_119479136

Source?

Yellow_Fern

Great news. Germany sees some sense. Woohoo https://www.forexlive.com/news/germany-to-extend-the-life-of-its-last-three-nuclear-plants-report-20220816/

Yellow_Fern

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119478661#Comment_119478661

This is true but the power demands of Brazilians in Dublin or Ukrainians families in Carlow, is dwarfed by data centres. A single data centre can use more power than 130,000 people. Even if you built a million turbines, there they still needs huge amounts of expensive and environmentally harmful storage to be net zero.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119481569#Comment_119481569

Families require peaking plant because they have variable demand and nuclear can't do variable output.

Data centres have more stable demand and use more baseload which means they subsidise grid upgrades.

They are actually one of the few use cases for nuclear when it's not offline. But data centres have backup batteries and some are looking to sell spare capacity back into the grid and can do demand shedding and a good few go out of their way to use green electricity. Another big problem is data centres like cheap electricity which nuclear cannot do.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119481543#Comment_119481543

Magenta line is electricity consumption. The non-steady line at the bottom is German nuclear output this year. Nuclear is simply not as dependable as claimed. It's reliable until it isn't and has a much bigger knock on effect than smaller generators.

Also like in Italy nuclear was voted out by a public referendum. There's no technical fix for that. Even if nuclear was good, cheap and fast.

Sure looks like Biomass (green) is a more dependable source of power doesn't it ?

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479151#Comment_119479151

Source ?

That 11 year build is in an autocratic desert state with more or less indentured labour and as you say there are massive delays (standard with nuclear). The $18.6Bn deal that cost $30Bn and there's $20Bn deal to run it so it's $50Bn not counting other deals. But that $50Bn is turnover? , nope, Kepco said the deal will bring it about $49.4 billion in profits over 60 years. Over here things like human rights would mean we wouldn't get it that cheap.

You may be confusing it with the Doosan $3.9Bn deal to supply a reactor which sounds cheaper all right. But you still need the whole nuclear island and other works and all that lovely profit.

It took the UK 6 years to negotiate the price for Hinkley C. And then it went up another £3Bn this year. Besides 2034 is TOO LATE.

SMR's taking less time than offshore wind - source ? Hint : many GW of offshore wind will be delivered this year and next year and the year after that and ... non-military SMR's not so much.

RR won't lift a finger until they get orders for 16 at £2Bn each. Then they'll start serious R&D and who knows what problems they'll find? Even then the bait and switch price is half that of Hinkley-C and the UK government isn't biting despite loosing all but one of the existing nuclear power plants by 2030, and coal is on the way out too.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479176#Comment_119479176

Suck it up. Nuclear isn't dependable.

South Korea had that fake parts scandal that took out a huge chunk of their power. Not the first time you've been told that either.

USA , look at corrosion history there, French reactors have been and will be down for months, because newsflash - everything about nuclear is fricking expensive and takes bleedin' ages. Look at all the US plants closed by cheap fracking gas. Look at their efforts to build a new plant and how much it's costing billpayers. Look at their history of thorium in power plants from the 1960's, it's all been done before.

Japan got lucky with the Tsunami. One power plant only just survived because one engineer stood up to the beancounters and got a proper seawall. Another one lost local cooling power and several backups and was very close to melt down. Other reactors that weren't directly affected were taken offline for an extended time. Nuclear isn't dependable. Japan spent $20bn on a breeder program, it produced electricity for the grid. For ONE hour.

France has been investing in new nuclear for 20 years. But still haven't delivered a single plant even though they have thrown four times as much money at it as originally billed. By rights they should have 4 working reactors by now paying for the construction of a series of them, in practice EDF are virtually bankrupt. France had one of the better attempts at a breeder. Better, but still not much use.

Germany took a different path and should be carbon free by 2035, that's sooner than nuclear could arrive.

The Swiss tried putting a nuclear rector in a cave. There's now a sealed cave in Switzerland.

Nuclear has a massive CO2 overhead. Hinkley C being 10 years late means one Drax worth of baseload fossil fuel for a decade. That's about 100 million tonnes of coal wasted. I can't see how it could possibly be carbon neutral until 2040. Tens of billions of pounds could have been invested in renewables, public transport (local, not HS2) and insulation, but let's feed the money pit.

Finland has ben missing half it's nuclear power for over a decade.

Also jellyfish.

Yellow_Fern

@Capt'n midnight,

Would you be interested in taking a bet about Germany being carbon free by 2035?

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479151#Comment_119479151

Population densities are not barometers of overpopulation.

population vs resources on the other hand.

.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119482398#Comment_119482398

Nuclear is the most dependable energy souce used to generate electricity.

" Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy Source and It's Not Even Close

March 24, 2021" https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close

The rest of your tripe is on par with your initial massive lie.

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119479151#Comment_119479151

Wind is not cheap, hence why our power bills have been going up. The government incentivises wind farm developers by contracting to purchase the energy at very high costs, making it very profitable for the wind farm operators. In another thread, someone said that the agreed strike price for Irish onshore wind generated energy is higher than the exorbitant strike price the Uk government agreed for Hinkley point nuclear PP.

Wind energy is actually cheap, it's the price of the backup fuel of gas that is sending everything skywards. With working alternatives just not there at present it's likely to stay that way for quite some time. Additionally our offshore capacity is still in the planning stage and most of that will not come online for 5-8 years.

KildareP

"Nuclear is not dependable and is exhorbitantly expensive" - so this thread outlines as reasons we shouldn't even consider it.

Instead, we should bank our energy security on offshore wind, where it has been largely not done at scale to date, no-one knows what the real world capacity factor will actually be, thus no-one knows how much nameplate capacity we'll need to provision and thus how much it's going to cost nor how long it will last in the highly corrosive environment of the ocean.

The closest we have to go on is onshore wind, where the capacity factor at times is nothing short of abysmal, we've all had to pay special tarriffs (PSO) on our bills to subsidise it and we're still held entirely at the mercy of fossil fuel availability and price for the extended periods where the wind doesn't blow.

But no, it is nuclear that shouldn't be considered because it's undependable and expensive.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119483829#Comment_119483829

Over 60% of French nuclear has been offline for months.

UK currently has 5 out 9 reactors at nominal full load.

New builds in UK, US, France and Finland are at least a decade late.

You can't ignore that sort of stuff if you need to keep the lights on.

When nuclear goes down it places massive strain on the rest of the grid so it gets massive subsidies for infrastructure and spinning reserve.

Watts Bar unit 2 started construction on 23 January 1973 and after many delays including a transformer fire it started commercial operation on October 19th 2016. It then went offline from March 23, 2017 until August 1, 2017. On December 12, 2018 there was a small earthquake with it's epicentre 3km from the plant. There's 15 US nuclear plants located in the New Madrid Seismic zone.

France, Japan, Italy, Germany and Korea lost huge chunks of nuclear with little warning.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119483630#Comment_119483630

Of course not you've moved the goal post. Carbon free is not the same as carbon neutral. Germany's Biomass (green) produces more power and is more reliable than nuclear (grey)

Also Germany has moved the goal post too. They are going for 80% carbon neutral by 2030 and aren't stopping there.

Achieving this target requires an annual increase of 22 GW of solar capacity, according to the European Solar Energy Industry Association’s plan, 88 GW will be installed by 2024, 128 GW two years later, 172 GW by 2028, and the 2040 target of PV installations Capacity 400GW.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119486564#Comment_119486564

"France, Japan, Italy, Germany and Korea lost huge chunks of nuclear with little warning."

I lost my bedroom lights last night, without warning, when I flipped the switch to turn them off.

These two engineers burnt to death when this wind turbine caught fire and killed them.

From this we can clearly conclude that all wind turbines will catch fire killing people.

Once again, you are characterixing all of the nuclear industry by cherry picking incidents.

"Over 60% of French nuclear has been offline for months." And before that, over 60% of French nuclear was online for the past 30+ years.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119483871#Comment_119483871

Offhore wind costs more than nuclear, particularly if your aim is to contrive a system that is the central plank in a zero CO2 grid. Of course you could build a nuclear power plant in 10 years, for less than half the cost, and get a 92%+ zero grid CO2 17 years earlier than the 2050 target, which won't be met with current hopium relying on stuff that doesn't exist, and have plenty of capacity for EV's, heat pumps and data centres.

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119488463#Comment_119488463

For production or upfront costs? I don't think anything matches nuclear on the initial outlay and the construction phase.

Brief_Lives

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119488463#Comment_119488463

36 months for small modular reactors.

https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/cost-competitive

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119490698#Comment_119490698

shorter nuclear construction period of less than 36-months from the first safety concrete

That's assuming they already have a factory churning them out, then it would be 3 years if all the heavens align.

There's no factory. All they have is a design that only exists in a computer. If it worked as promised there'd be a long queue and uranium prices would shoot up. Also 35 times as much waste as normal reactors.

We need solutions for 2030. Nuclear isn't one.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119490125#Comment_119490125

Large Hydro or pumped storage is in the same order of magnitude as nuclear. But lasts longer and costs less to run. Ardnacrusha start to finish took 4 years and 20% of government budget. It was the world's biggest hydro project when it started generating in 1929.

Hinkley-C increased in price by another £3Bn this year. Interest costs are a bitch on something that's 10 years overdue.

The government don't pay for offshore wind construction just the power so you have to look at how much the government are on the hook for nuclear. And the hidden subsidies for spinning reserve and insurance.

Hinkley was at £106.12£/MWh in December but it's indexed linked so ratchets up and will continue to ratchet up until generation starts and then for another 35 years. (that's the discounted price if a second power station is ordered before startup otherwise add another £4 or thereabouts )

Offshore wind fell from £155/MWh in 2014/15 to £39.65/MWh in 2019. New software algorithms will allow rotating of turbines so as to not intefere with each other and promise another 5% of energy from existing wind farms.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119490125#Comment_119490125

Project cost. It's hard enough finding even a project cost for offshore wind farms, let alone a breakdown.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119490698#Comment_119490698

18 conventional reactors have been built in 3 years. 85% of reactors have been built in 10 yers or less.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119491552#Comment_119491552

How many reactors have been completed (fully operational) in the Americas, and Western Europe in the last 18 years ? (hint see graph at bottom)

More importantly for our 2030 target how many have been started and competed within the last 7.5 years ?

Almost half the reactors under construction are behind schedule. 26/56. Almost all of the ones on schedule are being built by the Russians and Chinese. There's two in India but they've six behind schedule.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=iso;status=C;delayed=DEL

Here's the number of new reactor builds outside of Asia (mostly China now) and Eastern Europe (mostly Russia).

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119491536#Comment_119491536

Nuclear costs governments billions directly and in financing and indirectly in subsidies so the project cost is very important. And the electricity costs a bloody fortune on top of all that. And you have to pay for backup power during construction delays.

Scotland got paid £700m in the last capacity auction so offshore wind has a negative capital cost from the governments point of view, it costs less than free. So project cost isn't important. The electricity will cost a faction of nuclear, which will be subsidised £66 more per MWh than wind.

When the wholesale price will be £50/MWh wind will only get £39.65/MWh but nuclear will get the full £50 AND be subsidised to the tune of £56/MWh to get a total of £106.12/MWh.

Are you are seriously suggesting that a windfarm with 20 years to pay back construction costs is more expensive than nuclear which has 3 times as long to payback costs and all the while is getting 2.5 times the income per MWh ? There's about a magnitude of difference in the total income.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119491802#Comment_119491802

You are ignoring or forgetting the capacity factor difference, just for a start. When the capacity factor is half, you have to double the cost when comparing. If you have even the slightest interest in matching nuclear's low CO2 numbers, ie. not using gas the other 53% of the time, you not only need to slightly more than double the installed capacity of OSW, you also need to add the cost of the whole grid, 12 days reserve energy storage solution, which the tech for doesnt really exist yet. That alone will cost as much, or more likely more, than the cost of the NPP, alone.

And as if that weren't bad enogh, you then have to factor in the 20 year lifespan of turbines vs the 60 year lifespan of a modern NPP.