9 ms·

> 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. Someth

by gnode 7y ago

> 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.

pjc50 7y ago
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)
- dabeeeenster 7y ago
  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.
  - lstodd 7y ago
    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.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Wind is variable but it never has zero output days. Further in many cases you can select peak output periods based on specific sites local conditions. On top of this you can massively over provision and still be cheaper than nuclear.
      - lstodd 7y ago
        It has zero output days. If only because storms can blow off the blades if you don't feather them.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Certain places have zero days. But not the same day as all the neighbors.
        Retric 7y ago
        England does not get 24 hour wind speeds of 55mph (a common wind turbine cut out speed). Specific locations can get close to that, but as a system some areas are getting lower wind speeds and generating lots of power.
    - detritus 7y ago
      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..). Thanks for any pointers!
      - lstodd 7y ago
        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. Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        > 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.
        lstodd 7y ago
        And it does come as such.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Very gradually, evidently.
        lstodd 7y ago
        A comfy, nice, slowly creeping death of a grid might be preferrable to some. Problem is, when the grid fails it's not like you can throttle down the load. Too late for that. It just goes out.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      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?
      - lstodd 7y ago
        4GWe is a stock design for a PWR nuclear power station, 4 reactors of 1GWe each, sharing the infrastructure. UK lagged behind the times, yes. Doesn't mean it shouldn't catch up skipping ye olde misdesigns.
    - cygx 7y ago
      Given these numbers, how was it possible for Germany to cut nuclear energy production from 156TWh in 2002 to 72TWh in 2018? (source: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...)
      - XorNot 7y ago
        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).
        cygx 7y ago
        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?
        pjc50 7y ago
        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.
        lstodd 7y ago
        Can't send power over thousands of kilometers without losing half of it, sorry. Not to mention oceans. It is just not happening.
        macspoofing 7y ago
        That's the problem with solar and wind. During peak times you get very good generation capacity and nothing or too little off-peak.
        ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        " 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."
    - imtringued 7y ago
      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.
  - jonatron 7y ago
    Instead, diesel generator sites have sprung up eg: http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/gallery/ 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.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      That's an interesting read. http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ > "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-model/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-mo... is an interesting read too.
  - gnode 7y ago
    > 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.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      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.
  - nickik 7y ago
    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.
    - gnode 7y ago
      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.
      - nickik 7y ago
        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.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    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.
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  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. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-uk-nuclear-power-plant-project-nu-gen-cumbria https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-...
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    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.
    - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
      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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
- douglasfshearer 7y ago
  CCGT - Combined Cycle Gas Turbine FYI
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >but it is now really too late. Then the only alternative is natural gas supplemented by solar. No battery technology is forthcoming.
- nickik 7y ago
  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.
- Grue3 7y ago
  >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.
- daniel-cussen 7y ago
  I remember Leo Szilard complaining the first nuclear power plant took 18 months and later they took 12 years, as if that was an improvement.
jabl 7y ago
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. Here's an alternative model being proposed for future UK nuclear energy projects: http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-model/ http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-mo...
ptah 7y ago
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
nl 7y ago
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.

by gnode 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

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)

dabeeeenster 7y ago
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.
- lstodd 7y ago
  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.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Wind is variable but it never has zero output days. Further in many cases you can select peak output periods based on specific sites local conditions. On top of this you can massively over provision and still be cheaper than nuclear.
    - lstodd 7y ago
      It has zero output days. If only because storms can blow off the blades if you don't feather them.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        Certain places have zero days. But not the same day as all the neighbors.
      - Retric 7y ago
        England does not get 24 hour wind speeds of 55mph (a common wind turbine cut out speed). Specific locations can get close to that, but as a system some areas are getting lower wind speeds and generating lots of power.
  - detritus 7y ago
    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..). Thanks for any pointers!
    - lstodd 7y ago
      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. Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period.
      - ncmncm 7y ago
        > 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.
        lstodd 7y ago
        And it does come as such.
        ncmncm 7y ago
        Very gradually, evidently.
        lstodd 7y ago
        A comfy, nice, slowly creeping death of a grid might be preferrable to some. Problem is, when the grid fails it's not like you can throttle down the load. Too late for that. It just goes out.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    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?
    - lstodd 7y ago
      4GWe is a stock design for a PWR nuclear power station, 4 reactors of 1GWe each, sharing the infrastructure. UK lagged behind the times, yes. Doesn't mean it shouldn't catch up skipping ye olde misdesigns.
  - cygx 7y ago
    Given these numbers, how was it possible for Germany to cut nuclear energy production from 156TWh in 2002 to 72TWh in 2018? (source: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...)
    - XorNot 7y ago
      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).
      - cygx 7y ago
        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?
        pjc50 7y ago
        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.
        lstodd 7y ago
        Can't send power over thousands of kilometers without losing half of it, sorry. Not to mention oceans. It is just not happening.
        macspoofing 7y ago
        That's the problem with solar and wind. During peak times you get very good generation capacity and nothing or too little off-peak.
      - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
        " 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."
  - imtringued 7y ago
    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.
- jonatron 7y ago
  Instead, diesel generator sites have sprung up eg: http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/gallery/ 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.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    That's an interesting read. http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ > "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-model/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-mo... is an interesting read too.
- gnode 7y ago
  > 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.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    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.
- nickik 7y ago
  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.
  - gnode 7y ago
    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.
    - nickik 7y ago
      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.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  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.
NotPaidToPost 7y ago
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. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-uk-nuclear-power-plant-project-nu-gen-cumbria https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-...
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  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.
  - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
    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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
douglasfshearer 7y ago
CCGT - Combined Cycle Gas Turbine FYI
macspoofing 7y ago
>but it is now really too late. Then the only alternative is natural gas supplemented by solar. No battery technology is forthcoming.
nickik 7y ago
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.
Grue3 7y ago
>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.
daniel-cussen 7y ago
I remember Leo Szilard complaining the first nuclear power plant took 18 months and later they took 12 years, as if that was an improvement.

jabl 7y ago

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. Here's an alternative model being proposed for future UK nuclear energy projects: http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-model/ http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-mo...

ptah 7y ago

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

nl 7y ago

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.