Nuclear - future for Ireland?

As for that UK solar nonsense:

Here's France. 63% from nuclear and just 3% from wind, and that's not due to low installed capacity, it due to low wind at the moment, often it's a bigger contributor. And boy does it highlite the problem with solar, where you need power 24/7/365, not just a tiny minuscule fraction of that. Imagine asking the engineers responsible for running a grid whether thay prefer that massive area of orange or that pathetic little sliver of brownish.

Nuclear was managing 70% a few days ago there.

That giant slab of orange has been chugging away doing that heavy lifting for 30+ years. In 2009 it managed to produce 78.5% of all electricity generated.

The number of anti nuclear energy lemmings on here is mind boggling. No nuclear please, we'd rather continue to pay, through our nose, out our ears and nether regions for 'cheap' renewables as envisioned by minister for PayMore, Eamon Ryan.

A free LNG terminal? No, we'll get the stupid tax payers to fork up for a high maintainance floating alternative with yet another levy on their power bills, the idiot's didn't make a squeek about the one subsidising all those 'cheap' renewables they are being bled dry with.

Average timescales hide some pretty nasty cases, and please don't tell me what I do or do not want.

I'm not against nuclear energy in principle, I just don't see it as a useful or cost effective solution for Ireland. We have limited export capacity* for surplus power, which would be far better used to sell wind energy, a resource that we can realise cheaply, incrementally and at predictable cost. Nuclear works okay in big grids, but the price of entry is enormous, so it really only works for nations that have a nuclear infrastructure already.

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* the grids of continental European countries are synchronised, so they can export to their neighbours using the standard AC transmission network; the island of Ireland is not synchronised with the European grid, and never will be, so we need to use much more expensuve DC interconnects to get energy in our out.

Statista give no explanation of their methodology and are sloppy at the best of times - but we all know that the average Irish person is NOT paying nearly 50 cent per kWh.

Eurostat are professional provide the following:

with the average Irish kWh costing about 25c which is clearly more reasonable.

Perhaps Statista were with Airtricity, those gouging zero co2 wind turbine electricity people, like me. Speaking of Irish people claiming to know what an electricity bill looks likes:

That's my bill for 10 July 2023, which works out at €0.48c per unit, rounded. On that day (oanda.com), the €<>US$ exchange rate was 1.09671. Multiply by 0.48 and you get US$0.5264208

So Statista were absolutely bang on the money in terms of what consumers actually pay, not the BS unit price before the Revenue gougers have added their share of misery, and that's with that particular bill having the PSO levy -25.46 so including the subsidy, otherwise it would have been even higher.

And you can keep your insults to yourself.

If you decommission a fossil fuel fired power station and replace it with a NPP, then any grid related costs would likely be minimal, which is exactly what Poland is planning to do. Renewables on the other hand have way higher cost implications for grids because they are so geographically spread. Our 2050 goals could likely be met with just 2-3 NPPs, vs hundreds of new wind and solar farms and 30 GW of offshore wind.

The two are not comparable. While there is some commonality where the grid needs to upgraded just to handle the general doubling of power generation and consumption forecast, NPPs would not require anything like the grid investment of renewables.

Yes, wind and solar are ways to reduce gas consumption, but the goal is essentially no gas consumption. That's the bit nuclear can do and which renewables can't without a hydrogen economy which no country has demeonstrated at scale.

Nuclear reactors are expensive, but the greatest lie told about renewables is that they are cheaper. The world's latest and largest wind farm is being built offshore of the UK at Doggerbank. £9 billion for 3.6 GW of capacity. But renewables 'capacity' is just not the same thing as capacity of a nuclear reactor, it's a theoretical that most of the time won't be achievable, whereas it's the exact opposite with a Korean built NPP, where the capacity is deliverable most of the time. Given all the OSW stats from the UK it's fair to state that Doggerbank will have a capacity factor of around 47%. OSW farms also hide the truth of their cost with all being to build it, and the energy is free, but the operation and maintainance costs are an additional 30% of the construction cost over it's maybe 30 year lifespan, so it's more like £12 billion of capital expenditure for a mostly illusory capacity of just 3.6 GW

The Polish NPP plans seem a bit rubbery at the moment, but it would seem to involve at least 2 APR-1400 reactors in one small NPP, which cost £2,811 per KW to build, so £7.87 billion for 2.8 GW.

Disregarding the 30% maintaince cost of Doggerbank, it's costong £2,500 per KW to build something with 47% capacity factor, vs £2,811 for Korean nuclear with a 96% capacity factor.

OSW is about double the capital cost of Korean built nuclear on a per unit of energy basis, ignoring the 30% extra for O&M, and this is completely ignoring how much it would cost to burn gas for 4% of the time with nuclear vs 53% of the time with OSW.

Nobody knows or can even estimate, the cost of replacing that 57% gas burn with hydrogen.

And we have plans to build 30 GW of OSW, it's utter financial madness.

I have said it before, the costs of the OSW and Hydrogen plan are so high that you could duplicate your NPP capacity in gas turbines for backup and gold plate every component and that would still be cheaper

The predictions on wind energy price here a year ago were that the entry price for offshore would decrease due to economy of scale when some were pointing out that all the indicators were that the opposite would be the case.

One year on offshore entry prices have increased by a very unincremental rate of at least 40%, and providers are refusing to honour contracts and are pulling out of proposed ventures worldwide. As to this cost being predictable, nobody from the Minister down has even the vaguest idea what the cost will be of a plan that from Eirgrid`s predictions will require 70 GW of offshore energy, (50% for consumption, 50% for hydrogen production with the offshore providers paid for all they provide even if we do not need or use it), with the consummer being on the hook for the lot. In fact if anyone was to even give a prediction here, let alone verifiable figures, they will be threadbanned.

Just a btw. 2020 wind provided 42% of our electricity needs. 2021 it fell to 34% and has sat at that percentage since. This, all eggs in one basket of wind energy is unviable economically and is going nowhere.

Why don't more countries do what the Finns are doing in Olkiluoto?

They seem to be well organised and have given proper consideration to disposal at the time of rollout.

Havent the french got something like that in the works ? Somewhere in centre of france ..

I think the volume of storage required for nuclear waste is many orders of magnitude smaller that what would be required to store any meaningful amount of gas - as stated above, the physical space used by the waste generated to produce nuclear power for a person over their lifetime would fit in something like a soup can.

At any rate, if the events of 2022+ have not made the point clear, reliance on natural gas is a major strategic weakness for Europe. Despite this, our waste of space government, especially the Greens, don't want to build gas storage facilities, LNG terminals etc. So that's out of the question.

You certainly seem fixated with eliminating NG. I've no problem if we rely on 10% or 20% natural gas for electricity generation for the foreseeable future.

Staying under the critical 1.5 degree rise by 2035 does not require electricity generation to be 100% carbon-free at all or anything close to it. There are two separate processes happening: one is to reduce fossil fuel/carbon emitting electricity generation and the other is to electrify the rest of the primary energy market - particular the big 3 in terms of carbon emissions: transport, industrial and domestic heating/cooking.

As these emitters switch to electricity, every few per-cent less fossil-fuels consumed for electricity generation, is multiplied as immediately and without effort or cost translates into an emissions reduction from transport, industrial and domestic. Even without that - because internal combustion engines and gas cookers and the like are so inefficient compared to gas turbines, just electrifying them all and powering them with electricity generated purely by NG would cut global emissions by around 50%.

We only need about a 60% reduction to prevent going over the critical 1.5 degrees of warming by 2035. This is eminently feasible with current growth rates in renewable electricity and the rate at which other sources of carbon emissions are electrifying.

What won't be sufficient is to do nothing while we wait 12 years to build a nuclear reactor or two to come on-line (which is being optimistic given what we've seen of every single nuclear project started in Europe or the US in the last 2 decades being a disaster). In fact for nuclear to provide 80% of the current electricity demand in Europe would require constructing over 550 reactors in Europe by 2035. It's just never going to happen.

But I know that's why you argue for nuclear - as you know it's infeasible, uneconomic and never going to deliver at this kind of scale - but you don't care given you believe that anthropogenic global warming is a global conspiracy.

11 billion isnt how much OL-3 cost , its how much the finns paid ,EDF and the french tax payer picked up the rest of the tab , theyre currently reckoning in the uk that it'd be 10 to 12 million sterling per reactor for new build ,if the gov assumes a lot of the risk , at todays money , commodity prices, and interest rates,

That may still be a great deal ,but you"d probably have to add a decade of planning and legal disputes onto a 15 year design and build time ,