Nuclear - future for Ireland?

I never claimed that 50MW of gas could provide backup for 14GW of wind generation capacity, did I?

I said 50MW of gas capacity is insufficient reserve for 1.5GW of nuclear and is also insufficient reserve for 1.5GW of wind generation.

Stop trolling.

When LCOE is used to cost solar, for instance, it completely ignores the elephant in the room, which is the consequence of the low capacity factor - LCOE doesn't account for capacity factor - in other words, it doesn't account for the massive costs required for backup.

It was fuc​king crystal clear what I meant, because I stated it explicitly.

Heysham 2 - poster child for nuclear unreliability:

On 1 August 2016, Heysham 2's Unit 8 broke the world record for longest continuous operation of a nuclear power reactor without a shutdown. This record-breaking run exceeds the previous record of 894 days set by Pickering Nuclear Generating Station's Unit 7 (Lake Ontario, Canada) in 1994. The reactor had generated 13.5 TWh of electricity so far during this continuous operation, taking its lifetime generation to 115.46 TWh.

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Scraping the bottom of the bucket there - nuclear is unreliable because something else fell over. Some people might rightly conclude that those other things need to be improved to match the strongest link, not consider that the strongest link should have it's worth defined by a weaker link.

You stated “LCOE doesn’t account for capacity factor”. That is untrue, so don’t be angry when people tell you so. You are misusing the term “capacity factor”. I think you mean “dependability” or “predictability”, but those aren’t “capacity factor”.

LCOE is the average cost per unit produced over the generation source’s expected lifetime: nothing more, nothing less.

LCOE = lifetime captial cost + lifetime fuel cost + lifetime operating costs / nameplate capacity x capacity factor x lifetime

It accounts for capacity factor, but not how that capacity is distributed. (Capacity factor itself does not measure that either: it’s literally just the total output over a period divided by nameplate output over the that same period). The lifetime output total doesn’t care whether you get a steady flow of power, or one enormous lump after lunch on Tuesdays: the LCOE value will be the same.

Nobody uses LCOE alone when evaluating a system. It’s only one part of the evaluation, and yes, you’re right, a proper evaluation considers dependability too - but dependability is not measured by LCOE. Even dependable systems can mislead on LCOE: Gas peaking plants have horrible LCOE figures, but they’re still commissioned because they are an essential part of a generating system.

We agree on virtually everything across many fora. It's just your RDS (Renewables Derangement Syndrome) is fairly severe, 90% of thread is renewables bashing so we haven't really got a chance to talk nuclear.

The use of Absolute Zero might be some sort of nerd humour and double meanings are common in English so it could be easily used.

The law of diminishing returns means Absolute Zero (or new phrase) is exponentially more difficult than Net Zero (if not impossible) so we should be super careful with the use of the word Net.

When you use the exact expression "LCOE doesn't account for capacity factor" - apparently we're supposed to figure out that you didn't actually mean that "LCOE doesn't account for capacity factor".

You either don't know what a capacity factor is and/or you don't know what LCOE represents. Sorry there's no way for you to weasel out of this.

Because your "in other words" is completely 100% wrong also - capacity factor has absolutely nothing to do with costs required for backup.

The way you've responded to your mistake being pointed out, says everything about your lack of integrity and character.

Perhaps they should scale back the plant size and swallow the efficiency hit in exchange for having something that can genuinely be delivered at the cost and time reliability of other generation types.

This, I believe, is actually the fundamental problem nuclear has been grappling with for the last 35 or more years.

It's the circle, that I think cannot be squared and why nuclear will likely never experience the amazing growth period that it did in the 1970s and 1980s as seen in this graph:

The fundamental issue is that nuclear reactors have been forced to get bigger and bigger in order to be able to complete in terms of cost per MWh - costs like overnight construction cost, operation costs and decommissioning costs don't scale linearly so smaller reactors are uneconomic. If you, say halve the size of a reactor then these costs DO NOT halve - they stay almost the same - so you almost double the cost per unit of electricity produced.

So bigger reactors means cheaper energy (same forces and same result with coal generation btw). But bigger reactors also means increased construction cost, construction time and project risk.

It seems we've reached some sort of limit with the likes of the EPR - the growth in project risk and cost associated with larger reactor sizes exceeds the benefits of cheaper energy production.

I honestly don't see anyway for the industry to go. They can't go smaller (because of the increased cost per MWh means they'll be blown out of the water compared to modern tech like combined-cycle gas turbines and renewables) and they can't go larger because it seems project risk and cost growth for larger reactors is already at some sort of limit as established by the EPR - around 1.5GW.

Trying to dig yourself out of a hole only ever achieves one thing. It makes the hole deeper.

Your highlighted "the nominal value of something is it current price; the real value of something however, is its relative price over time." You do skip over inconvenient facts when the do not suit, but that is one you really should have skipped for the sake of the depth of that hole.

I have pointed out to you a few times now that anyone with the slightest knowledge of economics would know what even a ten year old schoolboy would see straight away. The cfd that fits that description, (the real value of something is its relative value over time) is the one that is at a guaranteed fixed price for 35 years. Not one that is for 15 years where the cfd price has increased by 60% in just two years.

It really is very basic stuff. That you cannot understand it is a mystery, but then that is your problem, not mine.

My point was that things break , in this case it was part of the transmission system, Not the reactor ,not the turbine, not the generators, as far as I'm aware not even on the EFD site ..

But my point was it doesn't matter the generation type , it needs backing up , a couple of years ago a big interconnector between Britain and France went down in a major fire , and there was consternation a few years prior to that when a massive offshore wind farm dropped out in one go , because lightning hit the grid connection.. single point of failure ..

What`s your problem with Drax. It`s burning wood that is classified as a carbon neutral renewable source is it not ?

Except it is not is it ? It`s a scam and even green advocacy groups recognise it as such. It`s a scam that is being used to mask real emission levels and show renewable percentages greater than they really are, with the E.U. being one of the biggest offenders where 60% of the energy is from biomass. You do not appear to have a problem with the practice here. I cannot recall you doing similar rants on our use of wood burning in a generation plant in Offaly and another in Mayo that would burn 200,000 tonne annually with the wood for both being shipped here from half way around the world.

If you are looking for someone to blame for the scam of Drax, then you are looking at the wrong side of the fence. It`s a renewables scam, not a nuclear one.

For all your finger pointing at Hinkley C, the presents price for Hinkley C is €156.77 per MWh. Here it is €86 per MWh. Under the 37GW wind/hydrogen plan that becomes €172 per MWh and that is before our up-coming ORESS 2, where in the unlikely event we get a strike price similar to the latest U.K. CfD price, that becomes €200 per MWh. And that is without the hydrogen strike price on top. Even being conservative on the strike price of hydrogen, that would leave Hinkley C "The dreadful deal behind the worlds most expensive power plant" at least 50% cheaper per MWh than a 37 GW plan where we would also have to pay for whatever those offshore companies generate, even if we neither needed or wanted it, that would still not get us to anything more than 70% of the 100% carbon zero emissions required.

Funnily enough on you questioning why CfD prices do not go up during the duration of a contract if costs have risen, I haven`t seen anything to allow nuclear to do so. What I have seen though is the provision that allows wind projects to withdraw 25% of the original capacity agreed, without penalty or restriction on them re-applying for the same in a later round of auctions.

Have you a source on that 60% figure?

2023 Union bioenergy sustainability report.

That sounds like financial sense, but I doubt France would wish to keep our lights on indefinitely, (but who knows until they are asked), and might wish to see when we are going to be able to stand on our own two feet and how.

From the E.U. 2023 State of the Energy Report.

2021 in the electricity sector, 45.6 mtoe of biomass fuels and bio liquids were used to produce 14.6 mtoe of gross electricity in 2021. 15% of the total gross renewable electricity mix.

It goes on to state : Bioenergy produced from agriculture, forestry and organic waste foodstock continue to be the main main source of energy consumption in the E.U. accounting for about 59% of the renewable energy consumption in 2021. Primary solid biofuels (70.3%), representing the largest share of bioenergy, followed by by liquid biofuel (12.9%), boigas/bio-methane (10.1%) and renewable share of municipal waste (6%).