Time for Ireland to introduce Nuclear..?

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.

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.

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.

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