21 ms·

New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

186 points by Reedx 6y ago

steeve 6y ago
Good news for the climate and the environment!
- Afforess 6y ago
  There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Do you actually have evidence of this? Because I have evidence to the contrary. https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
    - Afforess 6y ago
      Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
      - wow_why 6y ago
        The Catholic Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire and among the oldest institutions - competitors are China, Ethiopia, etc
      - ByteJockey 6y ago
        Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example). We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own. Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy. You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high. Roughly 83,000 metric tons. Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment. Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
    - Afforess 6y ago
      Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
      - atty 6y ago
        Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
      - com2kid 6y ago
        > The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste. Concrete and a train is the usual method. Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume! Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol. With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel. Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
  - orangecat 6y ago
    Its not the will of the voting public. To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
    - Afforess 6y ago
      So it is true.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    > Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge. The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will. The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
    - Arubis 6y ago
      At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech. This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
      - jodrellblank 6y ago
        America and the UK haven't done well at deferring to actual trained experts with COVID-19 tactics. I have no idea what you might say the public's broad-strokes and goals for COVID19 were. It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
  - Lazare 6y ago
    > There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
  - Camas 6y ago
    In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
    - joijoiwejrr 6y ago
      > The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section. I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power. (I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
  - toast0 6y ago
    Burn it and distribute it in the atmosphere like coal plants do, and it won't be that big of a deal. Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    Yet coal power plants pump radioactive, climate changing, material into the air we breathe by the chimney full, and gas vehicles do it by the cylinder full at the rate of ~1 litre/second outside homes and schools, and nobody gives a shit about "disposing of that safely in the medium or long term". You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    Read about burner mode of breeder reactors, they allow to "burn" spent nuclear fuel and make the resulting waste much safer in the long-term, i.e. not only volume of waste will be 100 times smaller, but also the "burnt" fuel will be relatively safe radiologically speaking after just several hundreds years, instead of tens of thousands of years for waste from existing reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
    - jnxx 6y ago
      Breeders are not established technology, and they have their own risks; they are much harder to control and cool.
  - pezezin 6y ago
    I literally live in front of a nuclear reprocessing facility (as in a can see it from my window), and I want more nuclear energy. Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Better news if they had put the money into renewables and storage.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
      - godelski 6y ago
        I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.
        manfredo 6y ago
        Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour. It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent. Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
LatteLazy 6y ago
The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraws-uk-nuclear-power-plant/48828/ https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-to-run-29m-over-budget https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...
- rbg246 6y ago
  It's a job stimulus package, creating 10000 jobs and advertising this(whether or not it eventuates) is the reason for giving this project the green light.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I think you're right. Though for 2mil quid a job, we could have done better just picking people and sending them cheques imho...
    - credit_guy 6y ago
      It's a 10 year project. 2 mil becomes 200k per year. Still a lot, but then it's not really a purely job project. If you send 10000 people 200k per year you will end up with the same hole in your pockets of 20 billion after 10 years, but with a nuclear power plant less. And 10000 people with zero work experience.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        Chances are that 10 years from now you're still going to be money in the hole with no nuclear power plant. Both scenarios have no plant after 10 years.
        Reason077 6y ago
breakfastduck 6y ago
Astounds me how so many people can be pro nuclear in opposition to fossil fuels - the instant impact is obviously much better, but the risk if something goes wrong is so catastrophically higher that the increased risk with each plant seems a huge gamble. Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?
- dexterdog 6y ago
  You sound like somebody who has never seen any statistics on nuclear death rates and waste volume because in both cases it is the best of the current options.
- joijoiwejrr 6y ago
  Fossil fuels are already going catastrophically wrong: their continued use is the greatest threat to life on this planet in the history of humanity. Compared with the certainty of carbon-induced climate catastrophe, I'll take the risk of nuclear any day.
- desas 6y ago
  In the UK it's pretty well known that it all goes to Sellafield.
erentz 6y ago
Here’s an article discussing the costs more: “The Hinkley Point C case: is nuclear energy expensive?” https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-case-is-nuclear-energy-expensive-f89b1aa05c27 https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-cas...
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  Great read, thanks do much for the link! It's really refreshing to see the actual math. Main takeaway: nuclear can be cheap if financed properly, but incredibly expensive otherwise. Also, nuclear plants eventually become highly valuable cash cows, once the huge initial investment is recouped.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Importance of mass-production can not be underestimated. ERP has only 2 working reactors and 3 in construction. Meanwhile Russia produces VVER reactors in an almost conveyor-like fashion (see list in [0]), iterating on design and streamlining construction process, which results in more than twice smaller CAPEX per GW and less delays. Such mass production allows to lower cost of R&D per built reactor and in general to "spread" cost of supporting country's nuclear expertise, which is then used for development of new technologies such as breeders and non-RTG space reactors (though sadly the latter does not see much development lately). When energy cost of nuclear vs renewables is compared it's very common not only to forget about cost of storage and of additional generation capacity (including natural gas peak plants) required for renewables, but also to bring cost of nuclear based on the projects like ERP, not on the Russian/Chinese/Korean projects, which arguably have much more sensible and viable in long-term energy policy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Power_plants
  - 7952 6y ago
    Arguably the reason for the success of renewables in the UK is that the government gave big subsidy opportunities early on, and then made cost reduction a condition of future subsidy. And there is a strong grid operator that can do strategic planning. This worked for wind, solar, and maybe battery storage now. And this regulated/grid based approach is what deals with issues like intermittency. People may forget these things in a discussion on the web, but the grid and regulators do not. And actually Hinckley and Sizewell do fit within this model. They have been given very high strike prices and hopefully will be able to deliver a more cost effective pipeline of projects later on. But this approach is more difficult with large, monolithic projects.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
I am not all negative to nuclear power but large nuclear reactors is not the way. They are always over budget and delayed. Put the money in next generation nuclear power like small molten salt reactors, batteries and renewables.
- 1337shadow 6y ago
  How long and how much will take to build a next generation nuclear power plant like with a small molten salt reactor ? Will it be like, twice cheaper and twice faster to build ? If so, why is it not happening ?
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Inertia of the industry combined with risk aversion. Nuclear regulation is not really setup for small modular reactors and nuclear power still has a bad name. The nuclear fanboys still push the big reactors. I think renewable fans like me favor next gen rectors because we are okay with not building reactors right away. We can build renewables until they are developed. Nuclear fans OTOH hate renewables and just want to build whatever is possible right now. So we are in a situation where nuclear fans are not pushing it and most renewable fans think all nuclear power is like the current shitty big reactors.
    - 1337shadow 6y ago
      I see, so we can quickly build cheap & safe small molten salt reactors but we actually don't build because of risk aversion and industry inertia so that's really a shame (I thought the tech just wasn't ready yet). Another problem is nuclear fanboys: why exactly do they hate renewables so much ?
      - radu_floricica 6y ago
        I'm a nuclear fanboy, and I don't hate renewables. Nor do I know anybody who does. We just want nuclear to be allowed. After that, of course it's a matter of results. But currently the narrative is that "we don't want nuclear, because we have renewables"
NextHendrix 6y ago
One thing to follow in terms of nuclear power in the UK is the work being done in small modular reactors (SMR). These are much smaller PWR reactors that are intended to be considerably cheaper and faster to build than the massive reactors at places like Hinkley Point, Sizewell etc, as well as being far less onerous to decommission. The designs will be such that components can be mass produced in an assembly-line like fashion and transported to the sites. Development is going forward under the UK SMR Consortium (Rolls Royce, NAMRC, NNL and a few others) and there is quite a lot of buzz in the UK's civil nuclear industry at the moment. Some further reading for the interested: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-technologies/advanced-nuclear-technologies https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-... https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm... https://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/smr/ https://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/smr/
- skitout 6y ago
  SMR is interesting and have advantages... but it is not ready yet, and there are uncertainty about the cost. Wind and solar are getting so cheap that I have doubt SMR can compete on price... Possibly it could compete at the margin when the cost of storage (electrical and thermal) and demand-response are too expensive. About the current cost of the different type of energy: https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o... (please note that capacity factor would be different according to the country, for example renewable energy would be more expensive in France than is this document)
  - radu_floricica 6y ago
    Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decades.
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
So a few notes on this in no particular order: 1) LCOE notwithstanding is new nuclear good value / likely to be a low regrets investment? 2) Why have previous EPRs been delayed and over budget? 3) Why is HPC so expensive? 4) Is there evidence that HPC, the predecessor is likely to be on-time / on-budget? 5) Therefore is this likely to be a good decision? The first one depends on whole-system modelling of energy systems cost. LCOE is fine for understanding the cost of a single point asset or of a low penetration technology, it doesn't incorporate balancing costs. The way you model this is you build a model that: -Includes heat as well since the electrification of heat adds a substantial load of non temporally diversified, difficult to defer load. Basically when its cold, everyone wants to run their heat pumps and they will run them for weeks at a time) -Includes transport (including V2G) -Includes demand side response -Includes storage (not including storage and DSR is not realistic and substantially escalates system costs) -Operates at the long time resolution where investment decisions are made and at the short time resolution (stochastic unit commitment to dispatch available resources in an optimal way) -Includes system stability constraints -Includes transmission and distribution costs -Generates physically plausible load/generation combinations, in other words if you're in Los Angeles you don't need to simulate what happens if it's blazingly hot on a February evening after a day where the sun hasn't shone because that doesn't happen. You then impose a carbon constraint on your model and let it come up with an optimum generation mix and associated system cost for that constraint. If you want to know the system value of a particular technology, you manually increase or decrease it from the optimum level and determine the change in system cost (excluding the marginal cost of the manually changed technology). This gives you a set of marginal system values which you can compare with your LCOE to determine a curve for each technology, conditioned on all the other technologies and their costs in the system. Some highlights from this research: (For reference, on an electricity only basis (IOW heat not included) France is 90g/kWh, UK is 220 down from 400 a few years ago, Germany is 400, Poland is 600, Denmark and Sweden are 50 or so. -For shallow decarbonisation, down to about 100g/kWh, you don't need nuclear or CCS. Optimum systems are Wind/Solar/Battery/DSR/gas. -Down to 50g/kWh you just run your gas less frequently and need more battery technology. (Or if you have massive hydro you can down to this level with fewer batteries). The cost of batteries has a big impact on total system costs and there are plausible battery cost forecasts where this system is less expensive than most current power systems even without accounting for the costs to the climate. -For deep decarbonisation, going down from 50 to 0, the system cost without nuclear or CCS goes up very rapidly. That's because above this point you're keeping your existing gas capacity around, just using it less. That requires a tariff mechanism to pay for capacity as well as energy but that's easily solved and in many places exist already. Below this point, even running your gas for a few weeks during winter peaks blows your budget. You therefore need to either: --Build a lot more batteries, except now they're not being diurnally cycled but used for longer term storage which makes them way more expensive per kWh --Overbuild renewables so that even when there is very little power produced from them it gets you through an overcast and windless period. This leaves you dumping excess power the rest of the year. There are groups who argue that if we did this, our economy would adapt to find a use for the excess power, which I'm sympathetic to. You need about 4x current peak in nameplate renewables capacity and a lot of batteries to do it in a heat-not-included scenario. This overbuild scenario is the one the models select and the cost is high because the model assumes excess power is wasted. --Build nuclear or CCS, not necessarily a lot, but some. This is a little-goes-a-long-way type deal. The system value of Hinckley Point C comes out as being between £80 and £150 / MWh, depending on when you assume the rest of the UK's AGRs will come offline. Remember that these are curves rather than points so its not a matter of this justifying infinite more nuclear at that point but determining the system difference between having a small amount of nuclear and none. On that basis, the agreed strike price of £93 / MWh is high and difficult to justify on purely commercial basis but remember that long-term government decision making should be based on keeping pathways open and minimising regret. I think it was just about justifiable but I accept that with different assumptions about technology cost curves it might be suboptimal. This report is a good read and was generated using my favourite model (my second favourite is the MIT GenX model but last time I checked that one doesn't do system operational constraints like reserve and frequency stability): https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_baseload_capacity_in_low-carbon_gb_electricity_system_2018.pdf https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_...
feralimal 6y ago
We needed more steam!

186 points by Reedx 6y ago

steeve 6y ago

Good news for the climate and the environment!

Afforess 6y ago
There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
- godelski 6y ago
  Do you actually have evidence of this? Because I have evidence to the contrary. https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
  - Afforess 6y ago
    Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
    - wow_why 6y ago
      The Catholic Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire and among the oldest institutions - competitors are China, Ethiopia, etc
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example). We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own. Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy. You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high. Roughly 83,000 metric tons. Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment. Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
  - Afforess 6y ago
    Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
    - atty 6y ago
      Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
    - com2kid 6y ago
      > The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste. Concrete and a train is the usual method. Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume! Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol. With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel. Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
- orangecat 6y ago
  Its not the will of the voting public. To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
  - Afforess 6y ago
    So it is true.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge. The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will. The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
  - Arubis 6y ago
    At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech. This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      America and the UK haven't done well at deferring to actual trained experts with COVID-19 tactics. I have no idea what you might say the public's broad-strokes and goals for COVID19 were. It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
- Lazare 6y ago
  > There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
- Camas 6y ago
  In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
  - joijoiwejrr 6y ago
    > The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section. I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power. (I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
- toast0 6y ago
  Burn it and distribute it in the atmosphere like coal plants do, and it won't be that big of a deal. Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Yet coal power plants pump radioactive, climate changing, material into the air we breathe by the chimney full, and gas vehicles do it by the cylinder full at the rate of ~1 litre/second outside homes and schools, and nobody gives a shit about "disposing of that safely in the medium or long term". You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Read about burner mode of breeder reactors, they allow to "burn" spent nuclear fuel and make the resulting waste much safer in the long-term, i.e. not only volume of waste will be 100 times smaller, but also the "burnt" fuel will be relatively safe radiologically speaking after just several hundreds years, instead of tens of thousands of years for waste from existing reactors). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...
  - jnxx 6y ago
    Breeders are not established technology, and they have their own risks; they are much harder to control and cool.
- pezezin 6y ago
  I literally live in front of a nuclear reprocessing facility (as in a can see it from my window), and I want more nuclear energy. Also, there are some reactor designs that can burn the waste we currently have, so we could get more energy and less waste.
pfdietz 6y ago
Better news if they had put the money into renewables and storage.
- godelski 6y ago
  Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
    - godelski 6y ago
      I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.
      - manfredo 6y ago
        Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour. It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent. Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.

LatteLazy 6y ago

The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraws-uk-nuclear-power-plant/48828/ https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-to-run-29m-over-budget https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...

rbg246 6y ago
It's a job stimulus package, creating 10000 jobs and advertising this(whether or not it eventuates) is the reason for giving this project the green light.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I think you're right. Though for 2mil quid a job, we could have done better just picking people and sending them cheques imho...
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    It's a 10 year project. 2 mil becomes 200k per year. Still a lot, but then it's not really a purely job project. If you send 10000 people 200k per year you will end up with the same hole in your pockets of 20 billion after 10 years, but with a nuclear power plant less. And 10000 people with zero work experience.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Chances are that 10 years from now you're still going to be money in the hole with no nuclear power plant. Both scenarios have no plant after 10 years.
      - Reason077 6y ago

breakfastduck 6y ago

Astounds me how so many people can be pro nuclear in opposition to fossil fuels - the instant impact is obviously much better, but the risk if something goes wrong is so catastrophically higher that the increased risk with each plant seems a huge gamble. Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?

dexterdog 6y ago
You sound like somebody who has never seen any statistics on nuclear death rates and waste volume because in both cases it is the best of the current options.
joijoiwejrr 6y ago
Fossil fuels are already going catastrophically wrong: their continued use is the greatest threat to life on this planet in the history of humanity. Compared with the certainty of carbon-induced climate catastrophe, I'll take the risk of nuclear any day.
desas 6y ago
In the UK it's pretty well known that it all goes to Sellafield.

erentz 6y ago

Here’s an article discussing the costs more: “The Hinkley Point C case: is nuclear energy expensive?” https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-case-is-nuclear-energy-expensive-f89b1aa05c27 https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-cas...

gautamcgoel 6y ago
Great read, thanks do much for the link! It's really refreshing to see the actual math. Main takeaway: nuclear can be cheap if financed properly, but incredibly expensive otherwise. Also, nuclear plants eventually become highly valuable cash cows, once the huge initial investment is recouped.
fuoqi 6y ago
Importance of mass-production can not be underestimated. ERP has only 2 working reactors and 3 in construction. Meanwhile Russia produces VVER reactors in an almost conveyor-like fashion (see list in [0]), iterating on design and streamlining construction process, which results in more than twice smaller CAPEX per GW and less delays. Such mass production allows to lower cost of R&D per built reactor and in general to "spread" cost of supporting country's nuclear expertise, which is then used for development of new technologies such as breeders and non-RTG space reactors (though sadly the latter does not see much development lately). When energy cost of nuclear vs renewables is compared it's very common not only to forget about cost of storage and of additional generation capacity (including natural gas peak plants) required for renewables, but also to bring cost of nuclear based on the projects like ERP, not on the Russian/Chinese/Korean projects, which arguably have much more sensible and viable in long-term energy policy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Power_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Power_plants
- 7952 6y ago
  Arguably the reason for the success of renewables in the UK is that the government gave big subsidy opportunities early on, and then made cost reduction a condition of future subsidy. And there is a strong grid operator that can do strategic planning. This worked for wind, solar, and maybe battery storage now. And this regulated/grid based approach is what deals with issues like intermittency. People may forget these things in a discussion on the web, but the grid and regulators do not. And actually Hinckley and Sizewell do fit within this model. They have been given very high strike prices and hopefully will be able to deliver a more cost effective pipeline of projects later on. But this approach is more difficult with large, monolithic projects.

socialdemocrat 6y ago

I am not all negative to nuclear power but large nuclear reactors is not the way. They are always over budget and delayed. Put the money in next generation nuclear power like small molten salt reactors, batteries and renewables.

1337shadow 6y ago
How long and how much will take to build a next generation nuclear power plant like with a small molten salt reactor ? Will it be like, twice cheaper and twice faster to build ? If so, why is it not happening ?
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Inertia of the industry combined with risk aversion. Nuclear regulation is not really setup for small modular reactors and nuclear power still has a bad name. The nuclear fanboys still push the big reactors. I think renewable fans like me favor next gen rectors because we are okay with not building reactors right away. We can build renewables until they are developed. Nuclear fans OTOH hate renewables and just want to build whatever is possible right now. So we are in a situation where nuclear fans are not pushing it and most renewable fans think all nuclear power is like the current shitty big reactors.
  - 1337shadow 6y ago
    I see, so we can quickly build cheap & safe small molten salt reactors but we actually don't build because of risk aversion and industry inertia so that's really a shame (I thought the tech just wasn't ready yet). Another problem is nuclear fanboys: why exactly do they hate renewables so much ?
    - radu_floricica 6y ago
      I'm a nuclear fanboy, and I don't hate renewables. Nor do I know anybody who does. We just want nuclear to be allowed. After that, of course it's a matter of results. But currently the narrative is that "we don't want nuclear, because we have renewables"

NextHendrix 6y ago

One thing to follow in terms of nuclear power in the UK is the work being done in small modular reactors (SMR). These are much smaller PWR reactors that are intended to be considerably cheaper and faster to build than the massive reactors at places like Hinkley Point, Sizewell etc, as well as being far less onerous to decommission. The designs will be such that components can be mass produced in an assembly-line like fashion and transported to the sites. Development is going forward under the UK SMR Consortium (Rolls Royce, NAMRC, NNL and a few others) and there is quite a lot of buzz in the UK's civil nuclear industry at the moment. Some further reading for the interested: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-technologies/advanced-nuclear-technologies https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-... https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/small-modular-reactors.aspx https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm... https://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/smr/ https://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/smr/

skitout 6y ago
SMR is interesting and have advantages... but it is not ready yet, and there are uncertainty about the cost. Wind and solar are getting so cheap that I have doubt SMR can compete on price... Possibly it could compete at the margin when the cost of storage (electrical and thermal) and demand-response are too expensive. About the current cost of the different type of energy: https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-130-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o... (please note that capacity factor would be different according to the country, for example renewable energy would be more expensive in France than is this document)
- radu_floricica 6y ago
  Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decades.

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

So a few notes on this in no particular order: 1) LCOE notwithstanding is new nuclear good value / likely to be a low regrets investment? 2) Why have previous EPRs been delayed and over budget? 3) Why is HPC so expensive? 4) Is there evidence that HPC, the predecessor is likely to be on-time / on-budget? 5) Therefore is this likely to be a good decision? The first one depends on whole-system modelling of energy systems cost. LCOE is fine for understanding the cost of a single point asset or of a low penetration technology, it doesn't incorporate balancing costs. The way you model this is you build a model that: -Includes heat as well since the electrification of heat adds a substantial load of non temporally diversified, difficult to defer load. Basically when its cold, everyone wants to run their heat pumps and they will run them for weeks at a time) -Includes transport (including V2G) -Includes demand side response -Includes storage (not including storage and DSR is not realistic and substantially escalates system costs) -Operates at the long time resolution where investment decisions are made and at the short time resolution (stochastic unit commitment to dispatch available resources in an optimal way) -Includes system stability constraints -Includes transmission and distribution costs -Generates physically plausible load/generation combinations, in other words if you're in Los Angeles you don't need to simulate what happens if it's blazingly hot on a February evening after a day where the sun hasn't shone because that doesn't happen. You then impose a carbon constraint on your model and let it come up with an optimum generation mix and associated system cost for that constraint. If you want to know the system value of a particular technology, you manually increase or decrease it from the optimum level and determine the change in system cost (excluding the marginal cost of the manually changed technology). This gives you a set of marginal system values which you can compare with your LCOE to determine a curve for each technology, conditioned on all the other technologies and their costs in the system. Some highlights from this research: (For reference, on an electricity only basis (IOW heat not included) France is 90g/kWh, UK is 220 down from 400 a few years ago, Germany is 400, Poland is 600, Denmark and Sweden are 50 or so. -For shallow decarbonisation, down to about 100g/kWh, you don't need nuclear or CCS. Optimum systems are Wind/Solar/Battery/DSR/gas. -Down to 50g/kWh you just run your gas less frequently and need more battery technology. (Or if you have massive hydro you can down to this level with fewer batteries). The cost of batteries has a big impact on total system costs and there are plausible battery cost forecasts where this system is less expensive than most current power systems even without accounting for the costs to the climate. -For deep decarbonisation, going down from 50 to 0, the system cost without nuclear or CCS goes up very rapidly. That's because above this point you're keeping your existing gas capacity around, just using it less. That requires a tariff mechanism to pay for capacity as well as energy but that's easily solved and in many places exist already. Below this point, even running your gas for a few weeks during winter peaks blows your budget. You therefore need to either: --Build a lot more batteries, except now they're not being diurnally cycled but used for longer term storage which makes them way more expensive per kWh --Overbuild renewables so that even when there is very little power produced from them it gets you through an overcast and windless period. This leaves you dumping excess power the rest of the year. There are groups who argue that if we did this, our economy would adapt to find a use for the excess power, which I'm sympathetic to. You need about 4x current peak in nameplate renewables capacity and a lot of batteries to do it in a heat-not-included scenario. This overbuild scenario is the one the models select and the cost is high because the model assumes excess power is wasted. --Build nuclear or CCS, not necessarily a lot, but some. This is a little-goes-a-long-way type deal. The system value of Hinckley Point C comes out as being between £80 and £150 / MWh, depending on when you assume the rest of the UK's AGRs will come offline. Remember that these are curves rather than points so its not a matter of this justifying infinite more nuclear at that point but determining the system difference between having a small amount of nuclear and none. On that basis, the agreed strike price of £93 / MWh is high and difficult to justify on purely commercial basis but remember that long-term government decision making should be based on keeping pathways open and minimising regret. I think it was just about justifiable but I accept that with different assumptions about technology cost curves it might be suboptimal. This report is a good read and was generated using my favourite model (my second favourite is the MIT GenX model but last time I checked that one doesn't do system operational constraints like reserve and frequency stability): https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_baseload_capacity_in_low-carbon_gb_electricity_system_2018.pdf https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_...

feralimal 6y ago

We needed more steam!