Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Poland alone has a plan to acquire 24 BWRX-300 (300MW) SMRs from GE/Hitachi.

Indeed, a plan. We have no evidence that they will go through with this. Indeed all of the "successful" nuclear projects that get farmed out here are in countries with very different planning laws to ourselves (China, UAE :pac:) or have an established nuclear industry already. We have a very restrictive planning environment and a very high wage economy, making constructing even houses at the moment extremely expensive.

Rolls Royce s offering was so enticing that the UK government dropped it's funding and looked for a more realistic offering. Its effectively dead in the water.

What is really getting old is the slave labour jibbing,and is it not rather ironic to be questioning costs for nuclear when nobody can give a price for a 2050 wind plan for here that will not even come close to providing what our requirement will be by 2050 ?

Again dodging the feckin question! Poland has not built a single commercial NPP. So their proposals aren't really worth the paper they are written on until they have a proof of concept built by Polish engineers.

South Korea has 28 reactors, with a standard repeatable design and a bespoke industry which has taken many many decades to get to the point they aare at today. The UAE of course can reform their entire planning environment around building whatever the emirates want built. We do not operate like this. Hence why our closest neighbour in the UK, is the best comparison for any NPP to be built in Ireland. If the UK could've done it cheaper, why have they not done so? If it were as easy as you suggest, go ahead and build the company to deliver it cheaply and efficiently. Clearly the two of ye have more smarts than the UK energy industry collectively have over the last 30 years.

Temperature is not an issue, otherwise 10% of the world's electricity wouldn't be coming from 440 nuclear reactors and there wouldn't be any plans to build SMRs.

Are you a cousin of that expert clown who declared bumblebees can't fly, because their simplistic mathematical model declared that it was impossible?

AI is set to blow up all existing predictions for energy demand. I saw one estimate that AI spending will amount to $250 billion this year alone. The energy demands for AI are expected to increase global electricity demand by 0.5% in just the near term. Altman was looking into getting an SMR just to run chat-GPT.

Simple enough. It`s just basic mathematics.

The predicted demand is to rise by 2493 units. The prediction for renewables by 2450 units. Renewables are not going to keep pace with demand. You not going to reduce emissions from that data with just renewables.

We have seen the same here. A few years ago renewables were supplying 42% of demand which then dropped to around 35% and has been static at that level since, and now we have a wind/hydrogen plan for 2050, that nobody is willing to give a cost for, that will not come within a country mile of Eirgrid`s prediction of what our need will be by 2050.

It's my impression that the loony hydrogen idea has been put on the back burner or shelved in favour of lots and lots of incredibly stupid interconnectors costing €2+billion a pop. If you think my nuclear to OSW comparrison made nuclear look cheap, that's nothing compared to how a nuclear to interconnector cost comparrison would turn out. Interconnectors might easily turn out more expensive than floating offshore wind, which is the current champion of insanely expensive and stupid ideas.

No one exports nuclear power. It's generally not dispatchable.

Renewables and fossil are what get exported.

Rubbish.

The claim it's renewables they export is clearly nonsense: At 4am they were exporting 16.2 GW. Solar was producing 0, wind was producing 2.4 GW and hydro 9.5, so the total of all renewables was less than they were exporting. And as for nuclear not being dispatchable; they reduced it from 39.9 Gw at midnight to 36 GW at around 13:00, a 10% decrease. And no, they didn't export hydrocarbon sourced energy either.

And here they are on 12-5-24, throttling nuclear (orange) back by 38% and then at 16:45, they turn up the nuclear wick by 68% - They went from 22.612 GW to 38.084 GW.

I have flipped the exported energy (grey) for that same day and scaled it in the vertical to match the nuclear scale and just look at that, the profiles match, meaning they export nuclear. They ramped back nuclear at about 06:30 when demand for exports started declining - and then at about 16:30 they started ramping it up again to match the demand for exports.

France essentially has a zero CO2 grid right now. Looking at the top graph (today), the only reason they were emitting any CO2 is because of that 1% gas which was barely turning over producing only around 405 MW between midnight and 06:45, which they must only keep online for grid stability reasons.

So the French do export nuclear and it's dispatchable.

Interesting article in the FT today - the cost of Hinkley C has increased to 46B - and of course has been delayed again. 46B for 3.2GW. This is significantly more than 10 times the cost of onshore wind in the UK. And even adjusting for capacity factors, means each kWh will cost about 5 times that of a kWh produced by a wind turbine. And of course it will have taken 2 decades after approval before it will produce a single watt - assuming optimistically that the current schedule is met (unlike the 4 previous).

So 10x the time to deliver and 5x the cost per unit energy produced. Of course no sane person would consider such a proposition - so Jeremy Hunt is trying to steal money from local authority pension funds to provide the capital to complete the project.

This is what happens in a country with a long history of using nuclear power, with existing storage and logistics and security facilities for handling fuel and waste, with and existing workers, engineers and knowledge and its a disaster. Only a complete moron would suggest Ireland try nuclear.

Korean Hydro and Nuclear Power have built 6 nuclear reactors recently. Two in Korea at their Shin-Hanul NPP and 4 in the UAE. They recently offered to build 6 for Poland, though Poland look to only be contracting for 2 at the moment.

The price they offered Poland is the same as the cost of the two reactors that are currently under construction in Korea, and it's a bit lower than the cost of Hinkley at €2.93 billion per GW, which is a quarter of the cost of offshore wind, adjusting for capacity factor and not factoring in grid scale storage or the considerable 26-30% O&M costs relative to initial capital cost, for OSW.

Czechia recently accepted bids from 3 suppliers to build 4 reactors in addition to the 6 they already have. For some strange reason, Hinkly doesn't seem to put them off, but then it's not putting Poland off either. Funny that. One of the bidders is KHNP and barring geopolitcal sucking up to the US and confabulation with millitary hardware acquisitions, I suspect they would likely be the front runners.

The Netherands aren't put off by Hinkley either and are currently looking to have a new NPP operational by 2035. Note they don't expect it to take 20 years or more to build, which is what Irish wind advocates claim it takes. All six of the APR-1400 reacors KHNP have recently built have taken less than a decade to build and commission, with 8 years being the average.

How do you think that unit price caps worked? Guess where the difference between production cost and sale price came from in France and the UK...

Electricity market pricing has been explained to you before: if gas is the largest component of generation in the market, then gas prices set the price for electricity from all sources. "Extortionate" pricing is due to fossil fuel volitility.. wind might cost a bit to install, but we know how much each unit is going to cost for decades; the same is true of nuclear power, but if you're trying to go from zero plants to one, as we would be, the breakeven will never arrive.

I'm not against nuclear power; I just believe that, having studied the costs, that it would never pay for itself here unless we took an enormous financial risk of building four or five large reactors in the hope that someone would pay top price for the massive surplus of electricity... which they won't once renewables take over from fossil.

In reality, we would struggle to get permission for even one reactor, and that would leave us billions in the hole for the worst benefit-to-cost possible.

Renewables are not going to get us to carbon neutral in the short to medium term even if the insane finances that some here favour, (but cannot put a figure on), was invested in them.

The proposed 37GW plan is not going to come even close to our projected requirements for 2050, and the latest great hype on floating wind turbines off the south and west coast has been exposed as just that, hype, by Eamon Ryan with his admission two weeks ago that there is no present technology capable of doing so and will not be within the next 10 to 20 years.

Using the anti nuclear lobby example on nuclear time frames that would be somewhere around 40 years.