Should Ireland go Nuclear?

Are boards paying people to start all these **** threads

Nuculear fission is way to expensive to implement and too complex for us plus the obvious risks of half assing it like everything else we do

Then there is the issue of the waste

Take about 20 years to bring online and the cost would be off the charts

Why bother? We are too small an electricity market to be able to build and maintain a nuclear plant and the people won't stand for it. We have interconnectors with the UK and EU and have been buying their nuclear electricity without the hassle for years.

Why bother? Because we need to move away from fossil fuels and move to either 100% renewables with storage or have a nuclear backup to our renewables.

No coal/oil/gas.

Datacentres make the problems more difficult, but even without them the problem of generating base load still exists and can't always be taken care of by renewables.

Wave energy and ultra deep geothermal may be able to make up some of the need, those would be an easier sell for suer

Green hydrogen isn't very efficient - there may be some change in that but it's not likely to be massive - and storage of large amounts of hydrogen long term could be problematic ..

Nuclear is expensive- and takes decades - ,and not at all flexible - there's promise of new tech but that's decades further out again -

Batteries of all types are short term storage - even with huge investment you're thinking hours - not days - but chemical batteries are getting cheaper and more available at shorter lead in times .. it looks like pumped hydro is going ahead at the silvermines which is great -

Wind is where we're at really - smoothed out with batteries - we're moving to electricity for more things from heating to transport - onshore is still by far the cheapest - offshore allows for huge scale ..

But the wind isn't available 24/7/365 , so we're still going to need fossil fuel back up - all of the existing generators and a good few more beside - hopefully they'll be used very little so should have really long life .

All of this is going to cost - a lot ... So say goodbye to cheap energy.. it was nice ( but wasteful ) while it lasted

I am not sure if I am remembering correctly, it's been awhile since I came across it but we would need a large wind turbine every 15 square km to cover the energy requirements of Ireland. Some might correct me if I am off. That will increase at around 3 percent every year with demand and doesn't include a requirement for storage for low wind. This is just at the current electric demand. If we switch from using oil,gas and solid fuel as a source of heating in homes this increases. At a guess at least 3 fold so about one every 5 km.

Build a small reactor in the whest somewhere and be done with it. Or in the healy-raes back garden.

At what level of "waste " or duplication of infrastructure does the whole thing become cost prohibitive ? You build a wind turbine to harvest "free" energy - so there's an extra grid cost but that's still ok - then you need many wind turbines so that you have enough power on low wind days -next it's banks of batteries - then you build an expensive hydrogen plant to use "spare" wind - now a storage plant ( and compressor) for a very volatile gas - now you need either a fuel cell or an engine to make more electricity ..

But at what point is the whole thing too expensive - ( in terms of energy and cost ) considering everything else we do, eat and use also has its own energy component..

Yes. Nuclear by the back door - interconnectors. Guaranteed price for constant load or even investment to own a portion of a nuclear plant in UK or France.

Reducing demand with solar and batteries should be done now. A Boardsie was off grid for two months this summer with a 6kW array and an 8kWh battery. Winter could see batteries charged over night and discharge between 4 - 7pm.

The other thing I never really see us talk about when we talk about nuclear power in Ireland is who would provide security for the facility. UK nuclear power plans are protected by a combination of a specialised police force, UK intelligence services, army and RAF units. We don't have a lot of that capability. For example, there is no military grade aircraft radar in Ireland, and we don't have any intercept jets either. There will be costs associated with improving our security capabilities that would also need to be factored in.

I am all for it. Even anti-nuke greenies love the idea of huge, fat, expensive interconnectors to France so Ireland can get greater access to a reliable supply of electricity mostly generated by nuclear fission.

Ireland's anti nuke stance is plain hypocrisy if you see interconnectors as a solution to not building your own and propping up intermittent renewables when they aren't producing anything.

This decades to build meme is simply wrong. While true in some cases, the average build time for some periods this century has been as low as 4.75 years. Given our planning system, an offshore wind farm requiring landing a cable onshore and pylons to connect to the grid probably takes longer.

"Since 2011, EirGrid has been working with its French equivalent Réseau de Transport d’Electricité (RTE) to find the best way to develop the interconnector to benefit electricity customers and markets in Ireland, France and the EU. We are working together to deliver the Celtic Interconnector, which, if built, is due to be completed in 2026."

Remind me again how long a nuclear power station takes?

I think the idea of small modular reactors (SMR) makes sense. Seems the French do too as Macron just announced they would be pursuing that business.

Were I running things, I'd pass legislation allowing the bypassing of the ABP and AT nimby planning mechanisms - this is supposed to be an emergency, after all - and use that as the basis to offer Rolls Royce a deal of a fixed price contract for the £2.2 B they say their proposal for a 470 MW SMR would cost; in return for no government interference in the process beyond monitoring that agreed contractual obligations of quality and safety are being adhered to. And if it does take till 2030 - so what? Isn't that when Ireland has committed to banning the sale of ICE engined cars? Actually, we might need to build two.

I think RR would agree to a fixed price for the first customer to order one and would sound them out on that and take advantage of it if it panned out.

As I mentioned in another thread, I believe the waste 'problem' is entirely political and is not 'real' from a technical perspective. Australia developed a process called Synroc, that can turn all levels of waste into a glass/ceramic. This renders it stable, such that water can't leach from it, for geological scale time periods. This waste could be stored several km underground in salt deposits that have been stable for around 250m years. I believe there are even 400m year old salt deposits and there is a 220m year old one under Antrim. A piece of Synroc the size of a can of soup could hold all the nuclear waste resulting from generating a lifetimes worth of electricity for a person.

I have been reading about the problem posed by nuclear waste for 40 years. It's a problem that always seems to be a problem, but never is enough of a problem that anything is done about, even though the means are there, so it isn't really a problem.

If climate change is as severe a problem as claimed, then business as usual shouldn't be a thing. WW2 was a real emergency and showed what can be achieved in short time frames when you don't let business as usual bureaucracy and such, get in the way of the necessary being done.

No.

My vote is based on raw fear.

Some people object to the visual and aural impact of wind turbines. You do the same for nuclear waste - ignore them and just do it.

I don't know what the density of vitrified nuclear waste is, but a 27 ton block of marble looks like this:

If the densities are at all comparable, I don't see a problem finding somehere to park the equivalent of a thousands of those.