Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Fusion has always been and still remains 20 years away.

Renewables are nowhere near 55.9%. Last year Jan - Dec electricity from wind energy was 35%. A fall of 17% from the previous years 42%. (SEAI interim report March 2022). This year up until the end of November it was 34% and with the wind so far this month looks highly unlikely to go higher for the year.

The energy regulator is looking into these claims from such companies of much higher renewable claims than actual generation. It seems some of these companies are doing a bit of creative bookkeeping with Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin Certificates where after being used in one country they are then being sold on to be used in another.

I'm just reading back through the thread and the one thing I would just point out is that the UK's gas cooled reactors are a weird technology and I wouldn't really base anything on their lifecycle costs.

Because of their enormous graphite core and sheer size (for very relatively little energy output compared to modern or even old PWR), they're an absolute nightmare to clean up and dispose of. They were very much a technology where the designers didn't think about the long term lifecycle at all.

They also can't be life extended due to the graphite cores cracking and distorting. There's no way of mitigating or repairing that. Once they're gone they're gone.

There's a reason why nobody ever adopted that AGR design, other than in its country of origin where there was a captive client and it was a state driven project (the old UK power boards).

The previous generation 'Magnox' was even worse - it had problems like the fuel rods couldn't be stored in water for very long as they rapidly dissolve (basically rust). That was what drove the need for all the Sellafield reprocessing systems.

And how do you propose to do that?

as far as I can see, the only "biomass peakers" involve batteries or hydrogen generation at off peak times. Not really a peaking plant at all

Would this be the biomass taking land from food and wildlife and butchering ancient forests??

biogas cannot scale massively as it relies on large amounts of crops grown specifically for biogas. The land use is huge, especially at a time of increasing food insecurity worldwide.

Also the economics of using biogas plants as peakers isnt great either

As for hydrogen - you need excess power to generate the hydrogen (a lot of excess if its based on electrolysis), and then theres still the issues of stable storage and trying to get a "clean" burn. Much easier if its stored locally in dedicated storage surely as opposed to using the existing NG infrastructure as was suggested previously, but its a non-trivial problem.

Food isn't a problem, until you replace valuable tillage land with energy crops ..

Mescanthus growing didn't really work in Ireland , it grew alright , but it was hard to sell for bio-fuel,

In theory it's easy to harvest with existing equipment , in practice its harvested in winter ,and the ground can be very wet .

Willow is similar,

Using fertilizer,made from gas, to grow corn, to make bio-gas , to use instead of gas is , Inefficient, the overall round trip efficiency is questionable , if you can do it largely with waste products, the figures get a lot better

Not just Germany , it's done in many countries including the UK . there are commercial biodigesters here as well ,both north and south but it's more developed in the north , ( I don't think theres any commercial unit using specifically grown feedstock south of the border )

I'm not sure of the math in terms of energy efficiency for AD, but if it's using Maize as a feedstock and you include tilling- fertilizer,harvest ,transport,ensiling and , the running of the AD plant ,and then transporting of the digestate and spreading it's going to be close to energy neutral...

Waste (animal and crop ) can change the math fairly substantially , and crops other than maize ( like red clover ) can change the equation quickly ...but transport is the killer