I'm not sure why this is being downvoted, I think it is a fair point. The cost per hour of wind do not, I think, reflect all the infrastructure required for the other power plants that are required when the wind is not blowing. Yet, this is a very real cost of using wind power.
I hardly think this is surprising - countries that use the same reactors for power generation and production of materials for weapons are going to have some cross subsidies of some kind.
What I find surprising is that nobody ever comments on the fact that the UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs. Not to mention the lack of permissive action locks on the UK weapons...
Edit: I should have been clearer that I meant was discussion outside of the UK about these issues.
>same reactors for power generation and production of materials for weapons
This is mostly about the engineering capability for building submarine propulsion reactors, not weapons. Note the article never mentioned weapons. Sustaining that engineering capability through the lean years between submarine projects through power generation projects is seen by the pacifict environmentalist groups as a cross subsidy that they don't want to provide.
> warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs
Supposedly the UKs are domestic designs with more stealth and penetration aids.
> What I find surprising is that nobody ever comments on the fact that the UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs.
Huh? That's absolutely a common talking point whenever a conversation about "renewing Trident" or similar comes up.
UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs.
The thing being this was a negotiated outcome to prevent the destabilization of a system by the introduction of an independent nuclear source. France was bad enough: the Americans and Russians didn't want Britain making ICBM. (Obviously I doubt the Russians were consulted)
This is why black arrow was cancelled: the US promised Polaris if the UK ceased rocket tests in Australia.
> What I find surprising is that nobody ever comments on the fact that the UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs.
The fact that they’re US designs was one of the major discussion points of the recent renewal debate - people from across the political spectrum commented on it extensively for months.
There are no PALs in order to support a credible threat of retaliation. The UK is small enough that it’s possible that the whole country would have been destroyed by a first strike. This is how nuclear weapons ‘work’ - by credible threat.
It will be interesting to see the UK, a nuclear power, hindered in maintaining their last nuclear delivery capability by consumer environmentalist groups refusing to cross-subsidize in this manner. Interesting, in the sense used in the Chinese saying "may you live in interesting times".
That's not really what this is, though. This is about industrial policy and maintaining local industrial and technological capabilities that are, in turn, useful or necessary for defence.
There are plenty of examples of this being done all over the world, because many defence industry capabilities are pretty fungible into areas like aerospace, chip design & manufacturing, optical engineering, and so on. So an industrial policy that results in development in those areas has dual benefit.
Half the reason Silicon Valley exists is because of this sort of cross investment. It's likely Airbus wouldn't exist in its current form either without it. If it's all humming along nicely, you get good cross-feed in between too, with a lot more stable and long-term low-TRL investment on the defence side feeding into the civilian sector, and high-TRL investment producing better completed systems for the defence side.
What will be important to prove in this case is whether the UK investment in civilian nuclear power is done solely to benefit the military nuclear energy industry, or whether there is a valid and viable argument for that investment on its own. I'd be interested in seeing the research.
>solely to benefit the military nuclear energy industry
For the state's POV, maintaining a nuclear capability is a very sufficient argument on its own! The voters may disagree, but no state really lets voters pick national security mechanisms they'd like.
> bill-payers will give price support to the Hinkley Point C nuclear station at a cost of £92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with £55 for offshore wind.
Something ignored here, is that electricity generation is not fungible. Wind power is not reliable, but nuclear is. Nuclear power is really the only practical solution for the UK to eliminate fossil fuel use from electricity generation, around the clock; we don't have the geography for adequate hydro.
People keep arguing this, but it is now really too late. Nuclear power is too slow to build, has trouble with suitable sites (need to be away from populated areas but near water). If we started planning a new power station now it wouldn't be online until about 2030. The intermediate strategy of "overprovision wind and fill the remaining need with CCGT" is actually working pretty well. Hopefully people can start talking about battery storage, or some other modular deployable solution.
(Cost is another issue, but it seems the parties are happy enough to spend $100bn on a nuclear weapons system that we hope never to use)
Tend to agree. The window for nuclear is closing now. We should be doing a fuckton of R+D into energy storage solutions, and overprovisioning offshore wind.
To substitute a single 4GWe nuclear plant, one would need ~96 GWh storage, which there is no technology for, plus ~48GW wind farm, while UK has ~22GW installed total now..
And you talk of overprovisioning. Crazy.
If anything, we must invest into making nuclear cheaper.
Hi, do you have any sources for your calculations - I'm not challenging you, I'm simply interested to know more about the realities of trying to go non-carbon (especially when we're looking to electrify our transport network down the line..).
I'm afraid you'd have to research this youself, if you wish to really understand.
Current designs of PWR reactors are about 1000-1200 MWe, constant, and not really throttable. This makes them the best baseline supply one can wish for, for a comparably meager investment once the idiotic regulation premium is subtracted.
If we had bulk energy storage it would have been so much cheaper to just pump it with electricity from nukes than that from wind or solar.
Since we don't have the storage tech, the question is moot.
Curiously, with all the grids taking wind and solar power, this has not happened. It's almost as if the operators of power grids have engineers on staff who have figured out how to keep them up, and do.
The UK 's largest current nuclear plants are 1.3GW, which makes the 4GW number look unrealistic. I'm not sure where you got the worst case capacity factor numbers from either.
> invest into making nuclear cheaper
People have been talking about this since the 1950s. How much will it cost and how long will it take?
They buy their baseload from France, which at this point has one of the most vibrant nuclear industries in the world (and no surprise, fought hard to make sure ITER was on French territory).
In 2018, Germany imported 10TWh of electricity from France, while it produced 545TWh. That's not even 2% - how are you supposed to cover baseload with that?
A lot of people seem to be saying "baseload" when they mean "peak". That's the benefit of the international links - countries not having their peak consumption at the same time of day can average it out between each other.
" The French government just announced a plan to power 95 percent of the country with solar and wind energy by 2060. And by doing so, the government would spend about $44.5 billion (39 billion euros) less than it would if it maintained its current energy infrastructure.
To get there, the government would need to cancel plans to construct 15 new nuclear power plants, and instead replace its aging nuclear reactors with renewable infrastructure over the next several decades, according to a new report published Monday by the French environmental agency."
You must be pretty naive if you think an industrial giant like Germany can just import energy from another country. The answer is that Germany has 24GW of load following gas plants that sit idle 90% of the time.
Germany decided to focus on cutting nuclear instead of cutting coal.
This is not an example to follow, really.
In the current situation, getting rid of coal and fossil fuels should have higher priority than getting rid of nuclear purely for ideological reasons...
Your argument is also misleading: Of course use of nuclear power can be reduced by increasing use of renewables. But the important point is that renewables cannot replace nuclear.
Doesn't matter for the argument under discussion. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Germany did reduce coal energy by 48TWh, which was essentially offset by increased biomass capabilities and some natural gas. So focussing on nuclear, you're left with a decrease by 84TWh offset by an increase of Wind energy by 95TWh and Solar by 46 TWh.
>by increased biomass capabilities and some natural gas.
Some natural gas? Some? You think those pipelines from Russia are there to only provide 'SOME' natural gas?? Nord Stream has an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters. Nord Stream 2 will double that to 110 billion cubic meters. Those are huge, politically sensitive, projects. And those aren't the only planned natural gas pipelines.
Second, biomass really sucks as the fuel of the future. It is environmentally destructive due to the land-use requirements. It's also expensive. It may be carbon neutral (depends if you burn dedicated crops or if you burn waste). Regardless, it's crazy that people would be pushing this as a fuel of the future just so they can get nuclear power off the table.
There is only one answer to cutting C02 emissions, and that's nuclear. We've already lost 50 years because we haven't internalized that fact, and we'll continue to lose time until we do.
Did you not notice that Germany signed multi-decade/multi-billion dollar deals with Russia for their natural gas.
As Germany scaled up their solar and wind infrastructure they NECESSARILY also scaled up their use of natural gas and also supplemented high demand with imported coal and nuclear power from their neighbours. There is no such thing as a solar/wind deployment without natural gas. Natural gas providers are now one of the biggest lobby group for solar and wind.
Germany did scale up its natural gas usage - from 40TWh in 2002 to 44 TWh in 2018. That's a rounding error. In 2016, gas consumption in Germany was about industrial (38%) and domestic homes usage (31%), not electricity production (15%).
It may very well be that gas is going to play a major role in replacing coal, but that has yet to happen - while nuclear energy has already been cut back significantly.
I don't understand this "which there is no technology for" argument. There is no shortage of energy storage technologies. We have battery storage, we have hydro storage, we have thermal storage, we have hydrogen storage, we have hydraulic hydro storage. We have enough options from the MWh range to the TWh range. Some technologies have pretty crazy scalability. Hydraulic hdyro storage capacity grows faster than the radius^4 but the costs only go up by r^2.
I also don't get where you have youe numbers from. Wind power generally has a 60% capacity factor therefore replacing a 4GW nuclear plant requires 6.6GW of wind power.
Instead, diesel generator sites have sprung up eg: http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/gallery/
This proves that if grid scale energy storage was cost effective, it'd be built.
There's also the demand side of the equation, maybe storage heaters will make a come back if they're activated on live pricing rather than a night timer.
> "Plutus PowerGen’s facilities are anticipated to run for no more than 150 hours per year in 60 minute blocks of time during peak demand and may not exceed 300 hours as a result of the commitments made in the planning permission process. Despite providing valuable generating capacity, each facility is expected to be switched off for more than 97% of the time, ensuring that their annualised emissions are minimal. The Company’s facilities will conform to all UK and EU air quality standards The generators will be fired with either green fuel from HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) or gas."
A set of "backup" generators run for 3% of the year on vegetable oil is hardly a big carbon emitter. It's an expensive problem - no matter what the grid setup is, someone's got to be the generator of last resort which gets hardly ever used.
This is exactly the kind of market that a Tesla battery got deployed into in Australia.
> We should be doing a fuckton of R+D into energy storage solutions
I agree that we should research energy storage, but there's no guarantee such research would be very fruitful. I don't think it's sensible to double down on the CCGT stopgap, and put our faith in technological breakthroughs. Nuclear fission is a technology which exists now, and we should invest in before the window closes.
That said, I can't see it happening in the UK because our politics are a dumpster fire.
Storage is just an engineering problem. It doesn't need breakthroughs, just development. And every system invented can be used at the same time, somewhere. The most cost-effective ones will spread.
Underground air pressurization is low tech, and can drive existing gas turbines, with or without added methane.
Catalytic production of ammonia from water and air is advancing by leaps and bounds, mostly enabling increasingly smaller synthesis systems. Ammonia is directly useful as industrial feedstock, liquid fuel, and fertilizer, once power storage reserve is met. Again, compatible with gas turbines. (A practical use for the waste oxygen would be helpful.)
Ammonia is excellent because it is directly useful at the sites of wind turbines at remote farms, avoiding need for connection to an electric grid. It can be injected directly into the soil for fertilizer, and used to power existing machinery -- trucks, tractors. Intermittent production, there, is no handicap. Excess can be sold to neighbors.
Its insane to say nuclear window is closed. In 100 years people will for sure use nuclear and not wind and solar. It would be insane not to. The efficency fuel and land usage is so much more efficent, its an engeneering and regulatory problem right now, not a fundamental problem.
I don't think it can be sensibly argued that nuclear is more fuel efficient than wind and solar, which have no fuel as such). Although future nuclear technology (breeder reactors, seawater uranium extraction, fusion) makes fuel hugely abundant, and essentially a non-issue, comparable with renewables.
Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
Wind and solar don't have fuel, but the conversion is bad and the resources is distributed and hard to capture.
> Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
Why would they not come down? In most technology we use it does come down. Nuclear is really the exeption where normal development has not happened.
Regulatory costs are comming down right now already. The US has started a wide range of reforms to address this problem. The US is going from essentially impossible to regulate a new reactor to only very expensive. Interestingly nuclear went from both parties being against, to both parties being for and 3-4 nuclear reform bills have gone threw congress with little issue. Its suprising to say the least. Its still baby steps but at least its not continued political deadlock.
Canada is doing much better and there is actually now feasable to go threw the regulatory process again. This has lead many US and British companies to move to Canada.
This should allow now reactor types comming to market in the next 10 years and those be much smaller in scale then PWRs and thus have very much smaller capital costs, thus building them should be cheaper.
None no of that is a certainty but its also not crazy either.
> In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
Fission is 10^12 more dense then chemical energy, Fusion is about 10^15. The difference there is not all that relevant specially not as a society already ignore the 10^12 difference.
Most Fusion don't really add much, other then maybe being better at nuclear proliferation but that is not really a hugly practical problem with fission specially in the western world.
Solar and wind have to replaced fairly often, and once first generation installations must get replaced, and cheap nuclear is available, the situation might reverse itself.
That said, in certain places it will be hard to beat these but there many places where they are not optimal and there is still the intermitency question. Many GenIV nuclear plants can be perfectly perfectly load following or can be connected to utility scale heat storages.
What’s wrong with new nuclear power coming into service on 10 years? Is it because we’re 10 years away from climate disaster? Because people have been saying that since the 70s. If that’s the only obstacle to some long term thinking then I can’t see what the problem is.
There are/were several new nuclear power stations planned.
The issue is that government policy is that they should be funded by the private sector (and that the UK is no longer able to build a nuclear power station by itself).
No-one in the private sector can do that, as we've seen.
For Hinkley C, EDF could not (and the French government did not want to finance). For another power station Toshiba recently gave up and took a serious financial hit because it was just too much [0].
The only ones willing to throw money at this to build those nuclear plants are the Chinese, which EDF already called in to partly finance Hinkley C, but then everyone goes ballistic about "handing over our electricity supply to the Chinese Communist Party".
Considering that the UK developed and built the first civilian nuclear plant this is (yet another) monumental lack of strategic vision and huge waste.
I think this just goes to show how ridiculously expensive Nuclear is to build in the first place, even before the ongoing costs, waste disposal, decommissioning, etc.
The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Providing 7% of the UK's energy needs is far from nothing but it comes at a very high cost. Bringing all the costs in-house might lessen the bill in the long run (if the UK were to be building a lot) but would require a lot of investment in relearning how to build the plants.
Nuclear is not more expensive that, say, offshore wind. [0]
> The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Not so.
The deal is only to guarantee the price of electricity sold, which had to be done to remove financial uncertainty over decades in order for EDF/Chinese partner to agree to finance it.
Except the strike price used is far above the current market rate, with no real indication that it would reach that level naturally. Describing it as a generous subsidy might not be strictly accurate, but isn't far from the truth.
If the strike price used were the current market rate (or maybe a bit lower), that would seem reasonable to allow a company to have the required long term security knowing the bottom won't fall out from under them, but an implicit subsidy does not seem like a good strategy.
... or to accept that the plans were not economically viable as they stand. I'm an economist not a nuclear physicist, but the signal the market is sending is that these plans are not what is needed. Find a way to make the electricity cheaper, or accept the demand isn't there.
> I think this just goes to show how ridiculously expensive Nuclear is to build in the first place, even before the ongoing costs, waste disposal, decommissioning, etc.
All proponents of renewables bringing the topic of nuclear price fail to make the point that they are comparing apples and oranges. One is reliable, the other is not. To make a fair comparison, you have to include either
- the price of added storage, for which the latest estimates I've seen show would put the price at 5-30x the original price per kWh, including manufacturing, power losses, renewal, etc.
or
- the price of making the electricity less reliable for the industry. It's possible, and seriously considered in 100% renewables scenarios, to switch the electricity consumption for industries at specific times (e.g. the factories run at peak solar or peak wind only). And give incentives for individuals (variable kWh price) to try to pilot their consumption around the production. Problem: this might ruin the competitivity of the industry. The costs associated are much harder to estimate.
TL;DR even if it comes at a very high costs, nuclear would still be cheaper than renewables + adequate storage.
Even if you have the money and are not concerned about the time to break even, nuclear seems like a terrible investment.
Let's ignore subsidies for a moment. Also lets assume I can have the plant operational in 10 years (very optimistic unless I'm about to be ready to start construction).
Onshore wind is already much cheaper than than nuclear. The wind turbines being built when I start construction will reach their end of life, be replaced by even more profitable wind turbines that will themselves reach end of life before I will start thinking about decommissioning my nuclear plant. So I'm not just competing about the current generation that already is significantly cheaper, I'm also competing against another few decades of cost reductions for wind.
So how long until wind plus storage is cheaper than my nuclear plant? Will it be in 10 years with economies of scale from EV battery demand, or 30 years until something more ambitious like storing molten salts or molten aluminium becomes serious competition? Or am I willing to bet it takes 50 years, giving my reactor 40 years of profitable operation?
It seems like a terrible bet to make. I would need a lot of subsidies to make it look like a good idea.
> Onshore wind is already much cheaper than than nuclear.
Except that it cannot possibly produce enough to replace nuclear or meet demand.
And nuclear is not more expensive than _offshore_ wind, which will also struggle to produce enough.
As discussed in this thread, people keep ignoring that raw cost per kWh is just one of the parameters. Another key parameter is that production must be able to meet demand.
At the moment it is simply not possible to operate only on wind and solar.
This becomes is more true when you account for the boom in electricity needs that is coming because electric cars.
In the UK offshore wind seems only 10% more expensive than nuclear right now [1]. I think it's fair to assume that over the majority of the operating time of a nuclear plant that starts construction today offshore wind will be cheaper than that nuclear plant.
As a private plant operator that isn't also the grid operator I don't really care though about meeting demand. I care about a slightly different metric: can I sell my electricity at a higher price than it takes me to produce it? Of course if nobody can meet demand, prices tend towards infinity and I'm happy. Maybe that happens often enough that I can still make a profit despite all the times I make a loss when wind is too strong and electricity prices are too low. Growing demand is a good point that might help.
You can get pretty cheap nuclear plants from South Korea or even advanced pebble reactors from China. Those don't take as long to build, the west is just to proud to do this.
You can also plan to use modern reactors for the next 30, mutlibe companies, including British Company are already in the regulatory process in Canada (and they went their because British nuclear regulation were so backwards).
Both options would be cheaper then building some costum plant based on old tech.
That said, if they are willing to build modern gas plants with wind, that's actually one of the better options.
>need to be away from populated areas but near water
There should be no problems with such sites in the UK. There are a lot of sparcely populated coastal areas in the north or even in Wales.
>If we started planning a new power station now it wouldn't be online until about 2030.
What's with this desire for instant gratification? The world won't end in 2030. Even if you get a single plant running by then, it would be a great help. Not starting now is just an excuse.
As an aside, Hinkley Point C is so expensive because they really botched the financing. Nuclear cost is all about minimizing the cost of capital. What they did pretty much guaranteed the opposite.
UK has no expertise to build nuclear power plants and have to rely on companies owned by French and Chinese governments. the security aspect should also be taken into account
Nuclear power is really the only practical solution for the UK to eliminate fossil fuel use from electricity generation, around the clock; we don't have the geography for adequate hydro.
People who make this claim aren't looking at the trends. Local storage is rapidly dropping in price, pump hydro works as a large scale and cheap energy storage solution and the build costs for nuclear is huge.
"Ministers expect that, before long, wind energy will operate without support."
Not when there is a anti-cyclonic high pressure system anchored over the UK and the wind isn't blowing. No wind, no turbine rotation and no electricity.
If the wind falls below 2.5 m/s across the entirety of Britain's coast... that would be an unusual event to say the least. But in the incredibly unlikely event that happens, the UK can buy electricity from the continent (and vice versa). This already happens today with non-renewables.
If the wind stops blowing across a significant area of Northern Europe then something has gone seriously wrong with the Earth.
Good. One of the biggest tragedies of modern British history is the apparent implosion of her homegrown nuclear industry. The recent 'new' nuclear power station debacles using French and Japanese technology paid for by the French and Chinese governments are beyond embarassing.
Rolls Royce has been banging the ‘small modular fission reactor’ drum for a while now [1] — i'd love to see a discussion about the concept's merits or otherwise.
We need smart, adventurous thinking on power generation to fill the gap before fusion comes on line (fingers crossed) — the UK has one of the healthiest renewable markets in the world, I see no reason we shoudn't be pushing nuclear alongside. Just smart nuclear, not dumb monolthic last generation nuclear with little benefit for local industry.
79 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWhat I find surprising is that nobody ever comments on the fact that the UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs. Not to mention the lack of permissive action locks on the UK weapons...
Edit: I should have been clearer that I meant was discussion outside of the UK about these issues.
This is mostly about the engineering capability for building submarine propulsion reactors, not weapons. Note the article never mentioned weapons. Sustaining that engineering capability through the lean years between submarine projects through power generation projects is seen by the pacifict environmentalist groups as a cross subsidy that they don't want to provide.
> warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs
Supposedly the UKs are domestic designs with more stealth and penetration aids.
We could always do what we did the last time we forgot how to build submarines and simply ask the US how to do it?
Huh? That's absolutely a common talking point whenever a conversation about "renewing Trident" or similar comes up.
The thing being this was a negotiated outcome to prevent the destabilization of a system by the introduction of an independent nuclear source. France was bad enough: the Americans and Russians didn't want Britain making ICBM. (Obviously I doubt the Russians were consulted)
This is why black arrow was cancelled: the US promised Polaris if the UK ceased rocket tests in Australia.
The fact that they’re US designs was one of the major discussion points of the recent renewal debate - people from across the political spectrum commented on it extensively for months.
There are no PALs in order to support a credible threat of retaliation. The UK is small enough that it’s possible that the whole country would have been destroyed by a first strike. This is how nuclear weapons ‘work’ - by credible threat.
There's an official defence budget, and in a democracy voters express their opinion about the state of defence spending through the ballot box.
Real democracies don't scam their citizens with a secret defence stealth tax.
There are plenty of examples of this being done all over the world, because many defence industry capabilities are pretty fungible into areas like aerospace, chip design & manufacturing, optical engineering, and so on. So an industrial policy that results in development in those areas has dual benefit.
Half the reason Silicon Valley exists is because of this sort of cross investment. It's likely Airbus wouldn't exist in its current form either without it. If it's all humming along nicely, you get good cross-feed in between too, with a lot more stable and long-term low-TRL investment on the defence side feeding into the civilian sector, and high-TRL investment producing better completed systems for the defence side.
What will be important to prove in this case is whether the UK investment in civilian nuclear power is done solely to benefit the military nuclear energy industry, or whether there is a valid and viable argument for that investment on its own. I'd be interested in seeing the research.
For the state's POV, maintaining a nuclear capability is a very sufficient argument on its own! The voters may disagree, but no state really lets voters pick national security mechanisms they'd like.
Something ignored here, is that electricity generation is not fungible. Wind power is not reliable, but nuclear is. Nuclear power is really the only practical solution for the UK to eliminate fossil fuel use from electricity generation, around the clock; we don't have the geography for adequate hydro.
(Cost is another issue, but it seems the parties are happy enough to spend $100bn on a nuclear weapons system that we hope never to use)
And you talk of overprovisioning. Crazy.
If anything, we must invest into making nuclear cheaper.
On top of this you can massively over provision and still be cheaper than nuclear.
Specific locations can get close to that, but as a system some areas are getting lower wind speeds and generating lots of power.
Thanks for any pointers!
Current designs of PWR reactors are about 1000-1200 MWe, constant, and not really throttable. This makes them the best baseline supply one can wish for, for a comparably meager investment once the idiotic regulation premium is subtracted.
If we had bulk energy storage it would have been so much cheaper to just pump it with electricity from nukes than that from wind or solar.
Since we don't have the storage tech, the question is moot.
Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period.
That must come as an awful shock to everyone already driving their grid with increasing fractions of wind and solar.
Problem is, when the grid fails it's not like you can throttle down the load. Too late for that. It just goes out.
It's engineering, you know. Keeping politics from breaking things. Keeps getting harder to do though.
> invest into making nuclear cheaper
People have been talking about this since the 1950s. How much will it cost and how long will it take?
UK lagged behind the times, yes. Doesn't mean it shouldn't catch up skipping ye olde misdesigns.
It is just not happening.
To get there, the government would need to cancel plans to construct 15 new nuclear power plants, and instead replace its aging nuclear reactors with renewable infrastructure over the next several decades, according to a new report published Monday by the French environmental agency."
I hope it's just political bullshit.
This is not an example to follow, really.
In the current situation, getting rid of coal and fossil fuels should have higher priority than getting rid of nuclear purely for ideological reasons...
Your argument is also misleading: Of course use of nuclear power can be reduced by increasing use of renewables. But the important point is that renewables cannot replace nuclear.
Some natural gas? Some? You think those pipelines from Russia are there to only provide 'SOME' natural gas?? Nord Stream has an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters. Nord Stream 2 will double that to 110 billion cubic meters. Those are huge, politically sensitive, projects. And those aren't the only planned natural gas pipelines.
Second, biomass really sucks as the fuel of the future. It is environmentally destructive due to the land-use requirements. It's also expensive. It may be carbon neutral (depends if you burn dedicated crops or if you burn waste). Regardless, it's crazy that people would be pushing this as a fuel of the future just so they can get nuclear power off the table.
There is only one answer to cutting C02 emissions, and that's nuclear. We've already lost 50 years because we haven't internalized that fact, and we'll continue to lose time until we do.
As Germany scaled up their solar and wind infrastructure they NECESSARILY also scaled up their use of natural gas and also supplemented high demand with imported coal and nuclear power from their neighbours. There is no such thing as a solar/wind deployment without natural gas. Natural gas providers are now one of the biggest lobby group for solar and wind.
It may very well be that gas is going to play a major role in replacing coal, but that has yet to happen - while nuclear energy has already been cut back significantly.
I also don't get where you have youe numbers from. Wind power generally has a 60% capacity factor therefore replacing a 4GW nuclear plant requires 6.6GW of wind power.
> "Plutus PowerGen’s facilities are anticipated to run for no more than 150 hours per year in 60 minute blocks of time during peak demand and may not exceed 300 hours as a result of the commitments made in the planning permission process. Despite providing valuable generating capacity, each facility is expected to be switched off for more than 97% of the time, ensuring that their annualised emissions are minimal. The Company’s facilities will conform to all UK and EU air quality standards The generators will be fired with either green fuel from HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) or gas."
A set of "backup" generators run for 3% of the year on vegetable oil is hardly a big carbon emitter. It's an expensive problem - no matter what the grid setup is, someone's got to be the generator of last resort which gets hardly ever used.
This is exactly the kind of market that a Tesla battery got deployed into in Australia.
http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-mo... is an interesting read too.
I agree that we should research energy storage, but there's no guarantee such research would be very fruitful. I don't think it's sensible to double down on the CCGT stopgap, and put our faith in technological breakthroughs. Nuclear fission is a technology which exists now, and we should invest in before the window closes.
That said, I can't see it happening in the UK because our politics are a dumpster fire.
Underground air pressurization is low tech, and can drive existing gas turbines, with or without added methane.
Catalytic production of ammonia from water and air is advancing by leaps and bounds, mostly enabling increasingly smaller synthesis systems. Ammonia is directly useful as industrial feedstock, liquid fuel, and fertilizer, once power storage reserve is met. Again, compatible with gas turbines. (A practical use for the waste oxygen would be helpful.)
Ammonia is excellent because it is directly useful at the sites of wind turbines at remote farms, avoiding need for connection to an electric grid. It can be injected directly into the soil for fertilizer, and used to power existing machinery -- trucks, tractors. Intermittent production, there, is no handicap. Excess can be sold to neighbors.
Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
> Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
Why would they not come down? In most technology we use it does come down. Nuclear is really the exeption where normal development has not happened.
Regulatory costs are comming down right now already. The US has started a wide range of reforms to address this problem. The US is going from essentially impossible to regulate a new reactor to only very expensive. Interestingly nuclear went from both parties being against, to both parties being for and 3-4 nuclear reform bills have gone threw congress with little issue. Its suprising to say the least. Its still baby steps but at least its not continued political deadlock.
Canada is doing much better and there is actually now feasable to go threw the regulatory process again. This has lead many US and British companies to move to Canada.
This should allow now reactor types comming to market in the next 10 years and those be much smaller in scale then PWRs and thus have very much smaller capital costs, thus building them should be cheaper.
None no of that is a certainty but its also not crazy either.
> In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
Fission is 10^12 more dense then chemical energy, Fusion is about 10^15. The difference there is not all that relevant specially not as a society already ignore the 10^12 difference.
Most Fusion don't really add much, other then maybe being better at nuclear proliferation but that is not really a hugly practical problem with fission specially in the western world.
Solar and wind have to replaced fairly often, and once first generation installations must get replaced, and cheap nuclear is available, the situation might reverse itself.
That said, in certain places it will be hard to beat these but there many places where they are not optimal and there is still the intermitency question. Many GenIV nuclear plants can be perfectly perfectly load following or can be connected to utility scale heat storages.
The issue is that government policy is that they should be funded by the private sector (and that the UK is no longer able to build a nuclear power station by itself).
No-one in the private sector can do that, as we've seen.
For Hinkley C, EDF could not (and the French government did not want to finance). For another power station Toshiba recently gave up and took a serious financial hit because it was just too much [0].
The only ones willing to throw money at this to build those nuclear plants are the Chinese, which EDF already called in to partly finance Hinkley C, but then everyone goes ballistic about "handing over our electricity supply to the Chinese Communist Party".
Considering that the UK developed and built the first civilian nuclear plant this is (yet another) monumental lack of strategic vision and huge waste.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-...
The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Providing 7% of the UK's energy needs is far from nothing but it comes at a very high cost. Bringing all the costs in-house might lessen the bill in the long run (if the UK were to be building a lot) but would require a lot of investment in relearning how to build the plants.
> The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Not so. The deal is only to guarantee the price of electricity sold, which had to be done to remove financial uncertainty over decades in order for EDF/Chinese partner to agree to finance it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
If the strike price used were the current market rate (or maybe a bit lower), that would seem reasonable to allow a company to have the required long term security knowing the bottom won't fall out from under them, but an implicit subsidy does not seem like a good strategy.
That's just a direct consequence of the government policy of not financing the construction and operation with public money.
The alternative was to directly spend public money, which makes the complaint about this guaranteed price being a public subsidy rather moot.
All proponents of renewables bringing the topic of nuclear price fail to make the point that they are comparing apples and oranges. One is reliable, the other is not. To make a fair comparison, you have to include either
- the price of added storage, for which the latest estimates I've seen show would put the price at 5-30x the original price per kWh, including manufacturing, power losses, renewal, etc.
or
- the price of making the electricity less reliable for the industry. It's possible, and seriously considered in 100% renewables scenarios, to switch the electricity consumption for industries at specific times (e.g. the factories run at peak solar or peak wind only). And give incentives for individuals (variable kWh price) to try to pilot their consumption around the production. Problem: this might ruin the competitivity of the industry. The costs associated are much harder to estimate.
TL;DR even if it comes at a very high costs, nuclear would still be cheaper than renewables + adequate storage.
Let's ignore subsidies for a moment. Also lets assume I can have the plant operational in 10 years (very optimistic unless I'm about to be ready to start construction).
Onshore wind is already much cheaper than than nuclear. The wind turbines being built when I start construction will reach their end of life, be replaced by even more profitable wind turbines that will themselves reach end of life before I will start thinking about decommissioning my nuclear plant. So I'm not just competing about the current generation that already is significantly cheaper, I'm also competing against another few decades of cost reductions for wind.
So how long until wind plus storage is cheaper than my nuclear plant? Will it be in 10 years with economies of scale from EV battery demand, or 30 years until something more ambitious like storing molten salts or molten aluminium becomes serious competition? Or am I willing to bet it takes 50 years, giving my reactor 40 years of profitable operation?
It seems like a terrible bet to make. I would need a lot of subsidies to make it look like a good idea.
Except that it cannot possibly produce enough to replace nuclear or meet demand.
And nuclear is not more expensive than _offshore_ wind, which will also struggle to produce enough.
As discussed in this thread, people keep ignoring that raw cost per kWh is just one of the parameters. Another key parameter is that production must be able to meet demand.
At the moment it is simply not possible to operate only on wind and solar. This becomes is more true when you account for the boom in electricity needs that is coming because electric cars.
As a private plant operator that isn't also the grid operator I don't really care though about meeting demand. I care about a slightly different metric: can I sell my electricity at a higher price than it takes me to produce it? Of course if nobody can meet demand, prices tend towards infinity and I'm happy. Maybe that happens often enough that I can still make a profit despite all the times I make a loss when wind is too strong and electricity prices are too low. Growing demand is a good point that might help.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
FYI
Then the only alternative is natural gas supplemented by solar. No battery technology is forthcoming.
You can also plan to use modern reactors for the next 30, mutlibe companies, including British Company are already in the regulatory process in Canada (and they went their because British nuclear regulation were so backwards).
Both options would be cheaper then building some costum plant based on old tech.
That said, if they are willing to build modern gas plants with wind, that's actually one of the better options.
There should be no problems with such sites in the UK. There are a lot of sparcely populated coastal areas in the north or even in Wales.
>If we started planning a new power station now it wouldn't be online until about 2030.
What's with this desire for instant gratification? The world won't end in 2030. Even if you get a single plant running by then, it would be a great help. Not starting now is just an excuse.
Here's an alternative model being proposed for future UK nuclear energy projects: http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-mo...
People who make this claim aren't looking at the trends. Local storage is rapidly dropping in price, pump hydro works as a large scale and cheap energy storage solution and the build costs for nuclear is huge.
Not when there is a anti-cyclonic high pressure system anchored over the UK and the wind isn't blowing. No wind, no turbine rotation and no electricity.
If the wind stops blowing across a significant area of Northern Europe then something has gone seriously wrong with the Earth.
Rolls Royce has been banging the ‘small modular fission reactor’ drum for a while now [1] — i'd love to see a discussion about the concept's merits or otherwise.
We need smart, adventurous thinking on power generation to fill the gap before fusion comes on line (fingers crossed) — the UK has one of the healthiest renewable markets in the world, I see no reason we shoudn't be pushing nuclear alongside. Just smart nuclear, not dumb monolthic last generation nuclear with little benefit for local industry.
- ed
[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm...