Nuclear power in Ireland

JayZeus wrote: »

The OP’s understanding of nuclear power plant operations seems to be informed by watching bits of pieces of the Chernobyl TV dramatisation, along with some pure fiction when it comes to suitable locations.

Bearing that in mind I think It best to let the Greens get on with their wind powered generation agenda. As a shower of lunatics they at least know what’s involved in turning bluster into energy.

OP, stock up on tinfoil for your hats, iodine tablets for your thyroid and top up your supply of AA batteries or get a wind up torch while you’re at it.

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

You realise in Ireland we deliver plenty of projects at and below budget and ahead of schedule? Also that Irish contractors and design / build engineering companies operate successfully all over Europe and around the world & that ESB itself is one of those?

Like almost every country on Earth, you’ve a few outliers that go way over budget like the NCH here.

However, don’t let that stop an only in Ireland, oh misery me!

The nuclear industry is absolutely full of massively over budget and late projects delivered by world leading consortia of contractors and that has largely been its history since the dawn of the industry.

Chernobyl is a terrible example to use as RMBK is a highly compromised design that was dual purpose, built with an aim of producing weapons grade plutonium as part of a civilian power reactor. That resulted in an extremely unusual and dangerous design that could fail in a dangerous way. The result was in effect a runaway reaction and a steam explosion and then open core fire caused by a ludicrously dangerous design concept that relies on avoiding a particular configuration to avert disaster. The design is not allowed anywhere outside Russia these days and the remaining plants have been extensively modified with systems to overcome the issue. The design didn’t even have a containment structure in the event of the main pressure vessel failing. It was coupled with a culture that slapped down any criticism or whistleblowing, so when it went wrong it went spectacularly wrong. It’s not a scenario every likely to occur outside that context.

Fukushima was a natural disaster. You might have to question the logic of placing nuclear plants on the coast in an area prone to fairly frequent (in the sense of once a century or so) devastating tsunamis, to the point that it coined the word tsunami.

However, it’s an industry that’s promised a lot in terms of cost but often hasn’t delivered - massively over budget builds and enormous legacy costs when it comes to decommissioning.

The majority of the big nuclear focused countries developed the technical expertise and supply chains on the back of enormous state intervention, in many of the bigger users: the U.K., France, the USSR & modern Russia, the USA and then China and India , closely linked to nuclear weapon technical expertise and also nuclear submarine technology.

Purely civil programmes spun up in Canada (CANDU), several European countries mostly under the EURATOM framework (so some crossover into French & British military tech) and in Japan.

However, for somewhere like Ireland it would mean buying into a technology that would be extremely expensive at the outset and with high ongoing costs for decades into the future in terms of disposing of or storing waste, which would leave us totally dependent on U.K. or French reprocessing. Then you’d have a massive political issue trying to even get it off the ground and there’s almost zero nuclear expertise locally, so you’d be building an industry from scratch and relying almost entirely on outside consultants.

We’ve also got a lack of scale that would leave a few questions although you could compare us to Finland which has several nuclear plants.

I think though, being realistic, Ireland’s energy future is in being a world leading wind power producer with strong interconnection and growing ability to store energy. We’ll likely have gas in the mix for a long time to come, but the offset in renewables will be enormous and we’ll see more wind power going into transport, space heating etc that will reduce our CO2 footprint in other areas.

Other than as imports via interconnection, I would say nuclear power is not part of our energy future.