Nuclear - future for Ireland?

carpeting fields used for food only ensures rainforests are chopped down

What is this nonsense? Do you really think someone putting, say a 100MW solar farm in Wexford means acres of rainforests are chopped down? What makes you think that.

And while you answer, you do know that 80% of what we produce in dairy and beef is exported right?
And while you mull that, you do know that we import 80% of our fresh produce

If you are so concerned about rainforests, we should rewild half of Ireland, as they were many hundreds of years ago.
Solar farms in Ireland will have zero effect on our food outputs. ZERO!

……. and still nothing on what your proposal is or a single figure on what it would cost. I can only conclude at this stage you either believe money grows on tree, or you know how laughable the costs would be if you posted them.

Stop filling the place up with irrelevant rubbish. We are discussing electricity generation and the relative costs. Not the difference in the price of bananas in Zurich and Dublin.

Another piece of information for you that I would have thought an engineer would have been aware off. Subsea AC cables links suffer from high capacity loses for distances greater than 50 km. That is why the three links to the U.K. and the Celtic Connector, if it ever gets here, transfer electricity by DC which is then converted to AC by inversion.

Same process as solar, which is AC generated here and everywhere else is via inverters.,

You throw figures around like snuff at a wake with nothing to back them up while questioning everyone else and you refuse to detail whatever plan it is you favor and it`s cost and I`m the Bullshiter…😏

All this talk about nuclear and wind turbines.I can't laugh and cry and despair at the same time.

No nuclear while Christy Moore and the green cohort is active.

Wind turbines-once the politicos decide it's beneficial(to their buds first) they will be built in back gardens.Once the construction/mtce companies smell greed, that's it.

The consumer will pay all the costs for forever

Since the public is paying for it, utility scale solar shouldn't be deployed, as in terms of the energy produced, it's more epensive than Finland's OL-3 reactor, even before considering adding grid scale storage to make the output more useful.

Even in the UAE, with a far higher capacity factor, solar with grid scale storage - Masdar solar/BESS project - is more expensive than their own nuclear was. If you were to attempt the Masdar facility equivalent in Europe, the cost would be considerably higher.

Well you know now why we have no AC interconnectors with the U.K. or France because I explained to you.

Synchronised condensers are required because of the intermittent unreliable nature of renewables. It`s disingenuous to be crying over not having AC interconnectors when we are importing a large percentage of our electricity to give a false look to our emissions by using less gas, where DC interconnectors are the only efficient means of doing that via subsea cables.

Piling on more renewables to reduce imported electricity would not reduce the need for synchronised condensers to stabilize the grid. It would increase the need for them.

Unlike you I am interested in how we get to zero emissions from electricity generation without bankrupting the country while consumers would still be paying the highest price in the world for electricity.

But then, as i said earlier, you appear to either believe that money grows on trees, or you know that whatever this plan of yours is that you keep refusing to divulge would be so outlandishly expensive it would be beyond laughable.

But you keep on rambling about nuclear as a deflection. It`s not fooling anyone at this stage.

Since the public is paying for it, utility scale solar shouldn't be deployed, as in terms of the energy produced, it's more epensive than Finland's OL-3 reactor, 

Citation needed

As above, Citation needed.

For Ireland last year, mainly due to the inefficiency of peaker plants which had to be used when wind and solar were doing little or nothing, the average efficiency here for 2025 was 42%. But I did inadvertently make a mistake and it should have been 33.7 TWh rather than 25.2 TWh as 33.7 TWh is the figure Gas Networks Ireland gives as the total amount of gas used for electricity generation here for 2025. 42% of 33.7 Twh = 14.2 TWh

Citation needed

Tonn Nua is not in the Atlantic. it is in the Celtic Sea where a very good rolling capacity factor would be the same as the U.K. average of 42%.

Quite an achievement to get not 1, but 2 facts wrong in a single sentence.

These wind companies have contracts for 20 years. They are not going to continue selling diminishing returns of generation at a 20 year old strike price while paying ever increasing maintenance reducing their profit margins when they can get a new contract for a higher strike price. It`s simply business 101. This idea that turbines out at sea in an environment that has turned anything we have ever placed in it to rust buckets will be any different is defying logic, let alone business sense.

Citation needed

Denmark due to their problem of being cut off from electricity from Norway and their inability to get a single offer for their largest ever wind offering have been looking for companies to operate beyond their contract lives and from what I have seen, those companies are not showing much interest in doing so.

I have posted verifiable data here on wind and solar when compared with nuclear. It all in this thread and I am certainly not going to waste my time re-posting it for someone who no matter how often they have been asked has not given as much as a single figure on what they favor or at what financial cost. Not to rush you - but it has been some time now - so if you could provide those as soon as possible that would be great.

No need to post again, simply link those posts for me to review.. otherwise id say you are making it up as you go along..

Solar in Ireland and Finland costs €1.05 Billion per GW. Solar in Ireland and Finland have the same capacity factor, 11%.

(1/0.11)*1.05=€9.55 B per GW

The OL-3 reactor cost €11 B and has the highest output of any in Europe, at 1.6 GW in 2023 the capacity factor was 96.3%, but lets take the cumulative average of 84.4%. So the relative annual cost per GW of capacity is 11/(0.844*1.6) = €8.15 B per GW

This cost comparison is ludicrously simplistic and favours Solar hugely, because it's comparing a base load reliable source against a very intermittent one. To make it a fair and like for like comparison, you would need to add all the extra costs needed to make an intermittent source behave like a base-load source, which means adding storage or gas costs. This is why LCOE is a steaming pile of manure when it comes to comparing costs between base-loads like nuclear and renewables. With renewables you should also add all the extra grid stability and shorter lifespan costs as well

The OL-3 cost is significantly less than solar even before adding the vast sums necessary to do a full system LCOE as per the graph I posted previously, which shows the incredible cost difference in both Germany and Texas, between basic LCOE and full system LCOE.

The Masdar solar/BESS project in the UAE has a projected cost of $6 B it's not complete so the real final cost is unknown. It's output is intended to be 1 GW and mimic a base-load source. That's $6 B per GW for a project with a likely lifespan of just 20 years. According to AI - The UAE Barakah NPP cost $5.71 B per GW.

The total cost of the Barakah nuclear power plant is $32 billion for a total capacity of 5.6 GW, which results in a cost of approximately $5.71 billion per GW.

So compared to the 60 year minimum design life of the APR-1400 reactors at Barakah, The Masdar Solar project looks more like €18 B per GW vs $5.71 B for nuclear.

The kicker with Masdar is that the UAE capacity factor for solar is 45% greater than in either Finland or Ireland, at 20%, so trying to configure solar in Ireland to match the performance of nuclear would be significantly more again.

There are reactors that are cheaper and quicker to build than OL-3, It's a near worst case example. Neither Poland nor the Czech Republic have signed up for the OL-3 or Hinkley experience, and neither should Ireland.

If solar can't even compete with OL-3, cost wise, it fares even worse against the recent builds in S Korea and the UAE. Those reactors - 7 of them - took an average of 8.5 years to build.

One of the main reasons why 120 reactors world wide are being planned is because nuclear is cheaper than wind or solar while delivering a significantly greater reduction in CO2 output.