Time for Ireland to introduce Nuclear..?

Modern safe small nuclear reactors exist. Hundreds have been in use since the 1950's. There's a huge market for them, or rather there would be in they weren't still seriously expensive even after 70 years of optimising them. Lots of snake-oil merchants selling computer generated images and unicorns. Rolls Royce who are actually in the reactor business want £32Bn contacts for 7.04GW total reactors delivered sometime around 2040. Too little, too late to have any impact. Over the timescale of nuclear power solar, wind, batteries and other storage prices are in freefall.

Our problem is that we weren't able to import from the UK. Probably because EDF have 27 reactors down out of 56 in France because of corrosion which is a common complaint of that sort of nuclear reactor. They also have another 5 or so running at reduced load because rivers are too warm. Last year they were exporting up to 15GW ( three Ireland's worth ) now they are importing an Ireland or two depending on how much wind and solar they have. The UK have to keep them happy because the UK is a nett importer of an Ireland's worth of power from them.

We knew renewables were intermittent, that's why we have backup and interconnectors. It's unreliable nuclear that's let us down.

UK has 6 reactors out of 11 at nominal full load after recent issues at multiple plants. But the long delayed Hinkley C gets some new water intakes.

Thorium and molten salt etc aren't new. They dust down the plans every generation and go looking for investors to hoodwink. Shills are useful.

No hard questions are ever answered. Neutron economy with thorium ? , doubling time for thorium ? nevermind that no one has built a reliable over-unity breeder even though we've been trying since 1944 on an industrial scale and most of that time with huge "I can't tell you what that 14,000 tons of silver is for" type budgets.

The cold war and the oil shock of 1973 meant that every possible nuclear technology has been tried, repeatedly by the best most motivated people. The technoloies involved are either proven to be too expensive or unworkable to use. Anything new is totally unproven and best case scenario will be in development hell for ages.

Hundreds of small modular reactor have been used safely since the 1950's by Western navies in submarines and aircraft carriers. They have never been commercially viable. Unlike lots of startups with no real experience Rolls Royce are a company that have been making reactors for submarines forever, their SMR's plans actually have some basis in reality. £32Bn in orders and they'll deliver 7GW by 2040 (excluding the almost mandatory delays and cost-overruns of nuclear)

Nuclear provides only 10% of gobal electricity. I can't see how you can ramp up to provide energy for transport and heating as well as decarbonising the cement, steel and fertilizer industries and replace the end of life reactors too. Most of the stuff accumulated for weapons during the cold war has been burnt up so there's no cheap uranium source anymore. Uranium deposits can be picked up by low flying aircraft with gamma ray detectors. Or just use lots of fossil fuel to process granite which kinda defeats the whole carbon thing.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.