Nuclear power in Ireland

realistically ireland could never afford nuclear, the costs are insane as we all know.

we could get a lot more for the buck with all of the other alternatives available.

The aim is zero CO2. How are you going to achieve it with renewables and what's the suatained average final cost? You must have the numbers to have the confidence of claiming getting a lot more bang for the buck.

Some of the stuff I've read on this thread has been amusing but I feel the need to bring in a much needed reality check and some facts.

Firstly, the "point" about nuclear being unreliable is nonsense. I've been monitoring the live data on and off from Electricity Map and in the large nuclear market of France, most of their nuclear capacity is available at all times. The data on capacity factors for various power types are clear and irrefutable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

Nuclear plants also avoid the problem of region-wide drop offs in output as they do not depend on the weather. It is common for wind speeds to be similar across a wide region and solar panels are also tied to the time of day, so again, will all produce or drop off production at the same time across a very large region. The idea that a power type can all fail simultaneously is much more true of "renewables" than nuclear.

This bizarre idea that nuclear "doesn't make sense economically" is coming from people who support weather-dependent renewables which are the ultimate creature of government. Without renewables mandates, subsidies for renewables, use/wastage of enormous amounts of raw materials, a willful blindness to the extreme destruction cause to nature by these supposedly "green" technologies, a tolerance from extreme unreliability of output, and a tolerance for mind blowingly high electricity costs like they have in Germany and Denmark, without a tolerance of for all of this, "renewables" would not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing

Not to mention the fact that these renewables for all the cost, environmental destruction and unreliability they case, aren't actually all that useful in reducing emissions. Right now, at this moment in 2022, Germany is producing more than 500g of CO2 per kw/h of electricity. This is despite the fact that they have been following a policy prescription laid down in 1980 called the Energiewende.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende

Though the Energiewende was first promulgated as a policy in what was the West Germany, I don't think Leonid Brezhnev or his successor Yuri Andropov who was leading the Soviet Union was pushing Erich Honecker of the former DDR (a.k.a East Germany, the German Democratic Republic) to follow suit. Because that's how long this bolloxology has been failing for. 40+ years of failure. It was nonsense when first promulgated nearly half a century ago, it's nonsense today and it will likely continue to be half a century from now.

Meanwhile we actually do know how to reduce emissions because the French did it starting in and around the 1970s. They virtually eliminated all CO2 from their electricity grid, by accident, (nobody cared about climate change back then) and simultaneously allowed a large scale increase in the use of electricity by French people and businesses from the mid to late 20th century, all at reasonable prices.

As to costs, we know, absolutely and without any doubt that with good reactor choice, sound public policy and sensible regulation, nuclear power plants can be delivered on time and to a sensible budget. The commissioning of two reactors at Sizewell B from 1985-1995, a pair of PWRs in the United Kingdom shows us this. France likely had similar experiences as they were able to electrify their entire county and didn't go bankrupt in the process.

As to this idea that Ireland is too small a market to justify a nuclear programme, there are 5 million people in the Republic and another 2+ million in the North, plus the associated workplaces, industries etc. Plus there is a growing demand for data centres, and soon electric cars. Oh and we're also just a little over the water from a very large market in the United Kingdom, well within the range of electrical interconnectors.

Would you stop.

I knew lads that worked in uranium mines in Canada in the 50s and somehow in an era when cigarette smoking was advertised as a way for women to have an easy birth those lads had more sense than to talk like that.

There's a few things that should stay in the ground. Oil and gas are two of them.

Uranium is one of the most heavily regulated metals on earth. You don't get to take the piss mining it.

Quick edit: These days.... You don't get to take the piss these days.

Calling BS on your cherry picking. The UK are on a roll of stupidity - Brexit and Hinkley point being stand out examples. The UAE have not had a Hinkley point nonsense with their Nuclear program. They go the Koreans in.

There are more nuclear power plants than Hinkley point - have fun scrolling: https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/world-nuclear-power-plants-in-operation

Both the IPCC and IEA see more nuclear capacity as inevitable and vital. Nuclear power has been in the doldrums and that has not been beneficial for the industry, so costs in some regions have risen, such as Europe, while costs have been steady in regions that haven't been victims of nuclear negativism and panic attacks, such as Asia. Costs will improve as plant building activity increases.

I am certain that Germany will come to it's senses and restart it's reactors at some point. It will only take one large German conglomerate to announce their energy operating costs are too high and they are relocating to Asia or somewhere, with significant job losses, for the German populace to wake up. The current threat to Ukraine is a very difficult wale up call in Germany at the moment. Whatever possessed them to think Nordstream 2 was a good idea? Making yourselves, and by association Europe, Putin's puppets - now how do you calculate the cost of that? Makes nuclear look cheap to me.

It's risible to go on about nuclear being expensive and wind 'cheap', when the price paid for wind electrons is determined by the most expensive source at any given time. Wind costs whatever gas costs, and at the moment, that is more expensive than nuclear. The only financial winners are the turbine operators who have secured stupid pricing structures.