Why doesn't Ireland have a nuclear power plant?

I think one of the best arguments against nuclear power is the fact that there is so little private building of plants that are not backed by state guarantees (and we all know what they do) one of the largest (non state) defaults was nuclear power company in the US as plants always come in over budget

apoeiguq3094y wrote: »

While finland has similar sized population and economy, it uses about 4 times the energy we do (probably due to climate etc).

My guess is that they are just not using energy efficient light bulbs...like we do!!!!

Ghost Estate wrote: »

On the bright side: only 4 more years and we'll have a Mr. Fusion

It has an output of at least 1.21JW as long as we keep feeding it with rubbish. On a cold winter night we might only need 4 or 5 of them to supply the whole country.

BS

Don't really have time to look up links but had a friend (who now works at The Joint European Torus) and in his presentations about it the break even was a lot longer than ten years away (this was few years ago), maybe if some other method is used to achieve it but at present ITER isn't even built yet

Tech3 wrote: »

Wind and wave energy wont be enough to power the entire country but will provide power to several regions. One of the bigger wind farms produces 50-60MW nowhere near what we need for our base load.

Actually, according to SEI, wind alone could do most of it.

I'm guessing that the Eirgrid numbers don't include capital servicing costs, insurance, or health and safety features. The real cost of nuclear is usually a bit more expensive than wind, and can be a lot more expensive. Given wind is roughly $3000 per produced kW:

* February 2008 — For two new AP1000 reactors at its Turkey Point site Florida Power & Light calculated overnight capital cost from $2444 to $3582 per kW, which were grossed up to include cooling towers, site works, land costs, transmission costs and risk management for total costs of $3108 to $4540 per kilowatt. Adding in finance charges increased the overall figures to $5780 to $8071 per kW.

* March 2008 — For two new AP1000 reactors in Florida Progress Energy announced that if built within 18 months of each other, the cost for the first would be $5144 per kilowatt and the second $3376/kW - total $9.4 billion. Including land, plant components, cooling towers, financing costs, license application, regulatory fees, initial fuel for two units, owner's costs, insurance and taxes, escalation and contingencies the total would be about $14 billion.

* May 2008 — For two new AP1000 reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and Santee Cooper expected to pay $9.8 billion (which includes forecast inflation and owners' costs for site preparation, contingencies and project financing).

* November 2008 — For two new AP1000 reactors at its Lee site Duke Energy Carolinas raised the cost estimate to $11 billion, excluding finance and inflation, but apparently including other owners costs.

* November 2008 — For two new AP1000 reactors at its Bellefonte site TVA updated its estimates for overnight capital cost estimates ranged to $2516 to $4649/kW for a combined construction cost of $5.6 to 10.4 billion (total costs of $9.9 to $17.5 billion).

* April 2008 — Georgia Power Company reached a contract agreement for two AP1000 reactors to be built at Vogtle,[20] at an estimated final cost of $14 billion plus $3 billion for necessary transmission upgrades.[21]

Now somewhere like China can produce them a lot cheaper, or at least claim to, since they have a command economy and don't really care about paying a living wage, or health and safety or insurance or finance or any of those trivialities.

Additionally, we can locally produce and manufacture the components for wind and tidal energy production, and ultimately export them as well as energy, creating jobs and other benefits for the country, which would have a huge domestic market right from the outset. These things aren't brain surgery, and designs from 1991 are now in the public domain. Wind also scales up very well. Having a few sites speckled here and there is very inefficient, like having a gas pipe going to every home to power a turbine in every attic. The more you build the better it gets.

Nuclear is fine as long as you haven't any other options. France for example has almost no native energy sources. Thankfully we aren't in that position, nothing at all to do with being backward.

@Amhran Nua

Eirgrid figures for nuclear are based on Finland's experience which is at the expensive end of scale
and yes it includes insuraces (required by law there), decomissionining and the building of a national waste storage facility which is complete now which all have to be paid upfront there.

of course if you bother to read the document you would see that all of that is mentioned instead of pulling arguments out of your rear

And a couple of notes on Finland's experience:

In Finland, Nuclear Renaissance Runs Into Trouble

The massive power plant under construction on muddy terrain on this Finnish island was supposed to be the showpiece of a nuclear renaissance. The most powerful reactor ever built, its modular design was supposed to make it faster and cheaper to build. And it was supposed to be safer, too.

But things have not gone as planned.

After four years of construction and thousands of defects and deficiencies, the reactor’s 3 billion euro price tag, about $4.2 billion, has climbed at least 50 percent. And while the reactor was originally meant to be completed this summer, Areva, the French company building it, and the utility that ordered it, are no longer willing to make certain predictions on when it will go online.

...

But early experience suggests these new reactors will be no easier or cheaper to build than the ones of a generation ago, when cost overruns — and then accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl — ended the last nuclear construction boom.

In Flamanville, France, a clone of the Finnish reactor now under construction is also behind schedule and overbudget.

In the United States, Florida and Georgia have changed state laws to raise electricity rates so that consumers will foot some of the bill for new nuclear plants in advance, before construction even begins.

...

Areva promised electricity from the reactor could be generated more cheaply than from natural gas plants. Areva also said its model would deliver 1,600 megawatts, or about 10 percent of Finnish power needs.

In 2001, the Finnish parliament narrowly approved construction of a reactor at Olkiluoto, an island on the Baltic Sea. Construction began four years later.

Serious problems first arose over the vast concrete base slab for the foundation of the reactor building, which the country’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found too porous and prone to corrosion. Since then, the authority has blamed Areva for allowing inexperienced subcontractors to drill holes in the wrong places on a vast steel container that seals the reactor.

In December, the authority warned Anne Lauvergeon, the chief executive of Areva, that “the attitude or lack of professional knowledge of some persons” at Areva was holding up work on safety systems.

Today, the site still teems with 4,000 workmen on round-the-clock shifts. Banners from dozens of subcontractors around Europe flutter in the breeze above temporary offices and makeshift canteens. Some 10,000 people speaking at least eight different languages have worked at the site. About 30 percent of the workforce is Polish, and communication has posed significant challenges.

Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns. But Areva said it was not cutting any corners in Finland. The two sides have agreed to arbitration, where they are both claiming more than 1 billion euros in compensation. (Areva blames the Finnish authorities for impeding construction and increasing costs for work it agreed to complete at a fixed price.)

Olkiluoto 3 pilot power plant
...is a real risk now that the utility will default".[28] In August 2009 Areva announced € 550 million additional provisions for the build, taking plant costs to € 5.3 billion, and wiped out interim operating profits for the first half year of 2009.[29]

The dome of the containment structure was topped out in September 2009.[30] 90% of procurement, 80% of engineering works and 73% of civil works were completed. [31]

In June 2010 Areva announced € 400 million of further provisions, taking the cost overrun to € 2.7 billion. The timescale slipped to the end of 2012 from June 2012,[32] with operation set to start in 2013.[10]

If I was Eirgrid I'd be looking for a refund on that sales pitch masquerading as a report. It doesn't pay to take handwavy projections at face value.

Pete_Cavan wrote: »

We have installed capacity for 1746.7MW of wind energy. Peak output from wind energy was 1,196MW. So, at a cost of €7-10 million for a 5MW wind farm, we have spent ~€3bn on wind turbines that have only ever operated at 68% capacity, with the average likely to be a lot less than that.

That's why I reckoned it at three grand per kW, not the one grand install cost, estimating a 30% average efficiency, which is the norm for wind turbines.

Pete_Cavan wrote: »

We have 146 wind farms on-line and operational, in 25 counties on the island of Ireland , thats a pretty widely installed base on a small island like this.

No, it's not.

Pete_Cavan wrote: »

A solution that has produced as little as 2% of our peak demand at times is not a "good solution" if you want a dependable and cheap supply.

Only if you never build any more of them, which would be nuts. Also the interconnector plays an important role (the first of several).

Irish renewable generators will benefit from the interconnection as it will increase their available market and may make it more economically attractive to construct more large scale renewable generation.

There aren't that many OCGT generators in use in Ireland.

Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants, CCGT, are the most popular type here.

Open cycle plants are very inefficient and thus are only used as very peak load sources.

The main reasons Ireland has no nuclear power are:

1) Lack of economies of scale. We simply do not have the demand to build reasonable size plants.
2) Lack of reprocessing facilities / fuel manufacturing facilities. Effectively we would have to be 100% dependent on the UK or France for these.
3) Security concerns : Terrorism risk, which was very real in the 1970s/80s.
4) We did not have any need for plutonium production, which was a major driver behind nuclear power development in the past. The plants produced plutonium for nuclear weapons programmes in "nuclear powers" like US, USSR, UK, France, etc. This lead to huge subsidises of the nuclear power industry in the earlier days.
5) Massive public opposition.
6) Transport - we have no way of moving waste to treatment other than by ship. Most countries do it by rail in special secure flasks.

Also, remember many of the British nuclear power plants are actually quite low output even compared to regular fossil fuel sites.
The old first generation gas-cooled MAGNOX fleet in particular, most of which is now retired, had pretty tiny generation outputs by modern standards.

Wyfla in North Wales is a huge facility, but it only outputs 980MW of power to the grid, using 2 reactors - roughly the output of ESB Poolbeg and less than the combined ESB+Bord Gais capacity in Cork at Whitegate/Aghada.

If you consider that the UK's Drax Coal fired station outputs almost 4000MW, those nukes are pretty small.

Also, you have to remember with nuclear that many calculations do not include the reprocessing and disposal costs of fuel, decommissioning and very high security and intelligence costs etc etc. Bear in mind that these plants now need rapid action military air cover !!

None of that is relevant to other forms of power plant. Decommissioning of a typical non-nuclear plant is generally pretty much like demolishing any other building. Older ones would have asbestos problems, but that's about it!

It's cheap until you start adding those in.

If Ireland had a nuclear site, it would probably be a big nationalised headache, much like the facilities in the UK which are costing billions upon billions to decommission and manage.

The private operators are only running the newer, and more efficient plants i.e. the AGRs (Advanced Gas cooled Reactors) and the PWR (pressurised water reactor).

The British state remains lumbered with the fleet of old MAGNOX reactors and their decommissioning costs.

Also, at the end of these plants lives, they're effectively handed over to a decommissioning authority and the state ends up picking up the bill too.

Many of the AGRs are now coming to the end of their lives and will be retired sooner or later.

All in all, I think Ireland had a lucky escape not going the nuclear route. We were all set to build, probably a PWR at Carnsore Point in Wexford.

It went as far as evening designing the logo for the Nuclear Energy Board (NEB) (An Bord Fuinnimh Núicléigh), linked to the ESB, which was going to operate it!



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Energy_Board


Nuclear Energy Act 1971
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1971/en/act/pub/0012/index.html

jackiebaron wrote: »

Can we dump the 27 tons of high level radioactive waste that a 1000 MW reactor produces each year in your back yard?

I reckon if we did setup up such an industry we should suggest dumping it in the Thames Estuary, which is pretty much the attitude that the British, particularly the British Military nuclear people in the olden days, took to the Irish sea a few km from Dublin!

They dumped loads of stuff at sea both liquid and solid waste (in barrels).

The area around Dounreay in Scotland is also suffering from rather bad contamination due to old military and civilian nuclear experiments and production processes.

Can you imagine the uproar if that were suggested, yet, Sellafield is allowed to bubble on!

The biggest on-going pollution problem is these reprocessing facilities, not the actual power plants themselves.

There was a rather gung-ho attitude to nuclear technology in the 1940s,50s and 60s when the main aim was just to get results. It didn't really matter what you had to irradiate to get there you just got on with it as you needed to make sure the Russians didn't have more nukes than you did!

Humans can be total idiots at times.

Sure we could get CIE to operate it and it'd be absolutely fine :D

To be fair, ESB would probably have run them pretty well, but still, the technology is fundamentally rather risky if something does go wrong and also I think it is the kind of technology that you need the back up of a vast nuclear science resource to ensure that you can support it.

The UK, France, Germany, the US, etc have that, we don't. We'd be buying off-the-shelf stuff.

So, rather than being energy independent, we would be totally at the whim of a handful of foreign technology suppliers and reprocessing centers.

Also, because of the secrecy surrounding some nuclear technology, particularly 30+ years ago when this plan was being considered, you can be sure that countries outside the 'nuclear circle' do not necessarily get the latests and greatest technology. The really good stuff was always classified top secret and kept at home.

I would also have worried a bit that in the 1980s, and perhaps now, with Irish budgets being so screwed up and cash-strapped that there would not have been the ability to lash money into upgrades if the state had to fund it, so I don't know if I would particularly want old non-upgraded nuclear plants sitting around while the Government tried to find the funding to carry out whatever upgrades were optional extras.

You can see in Japan that the private industry / state idea was to squeeze as much life out of the older plants without spending any money thus maximizing their profits / minimizing costs.

If you keep an old fossil fuel site open beyond its sell by date, the worst you'll get is failure of equipment the odd steam leak. With a nuclear site that's lethal.

The other concern that I would have is that state run toxic industries in Cork harbor were run very badly in terms of pollution i.e. Irish Steel and IFI.
You could smell the ammonia from IFI on a regular basis and Irish Steel seems to have dumped horrendous waste all over the island it occupied.
The history of those two industries is in sharp contrast to the relatively pristine safety record of the pharmaceutical industry in the area.

So, I don't know if I'd have trusted the state in that era to be capable of regulatory supervision and transparency with nuclear power.

See the thing is, it is veru unlikely that the political decisions required to build nuclear power plants are going to be taken in Ireland

So we should be focusing on the alternatives like elephant grass (can provide 30% of our electricity needs for 10% of arable land) and Wind with hydro-power(already providing 6%) we should be able to get at least 50% with current renewables.
And then there is energies in the research stage like clean coal and tidal power and others.
Then there's the other side lessening electricity use by using more efficent products (either through adding taxes on inefficient products or by taking them our of the market completely).