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UK to put nuclear power at heart of net zero emissions strategy
- busymom0 5y agoArchive around the paywall: https://archive.is/ROxkb https://archive.is/ROxkb
- kmlx 5y agosee also france’s macron announcement re nuclear: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211012-macron-unveils-€30-billion-investment-plan-to-re-industralise-france https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211012-macron-unveils-€... high time for nuclear to make a comback
- Zenst 5y agoYes France has a large Nuclear infrastructure and much of that is comming close to end of life. They are actively trying to get the EU to recognise Nuclear fission to be recognised as a green energy supply. If they can't achieve that then they will risk falling foul of the EU renewable/green targets - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/70/renewable-energy https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/70/renewa... So without that, getting projects going and export of energy (of which France does more than most) all hang upon fission getting that green label approved by the EU. Equally hydrogen may well prove a very economical method of storing electricity and for Nuclear plants (both types) the ability to turn them off and on per demand is something they can't do. So the ability to store that excess in off-peak in hydrogen and then converting back on-demand into electricity does seem like a viable solution if cheaper alternatives are not available. Not sure how they cost compare with lake dam energy storage - though that storage option for on-demand production is not cheap and equally limited by topography and land along with ecological impacts. So lots of hidden costs and upfront costs for those.
- polote 5y agoMacron announced doubling down on nuclear because a poll said 51% of people were in favor of it. But don't forget this is Macron, he can say the contrary at any time, especially if a new poll say a majority of voters are against it. So don't bet too much money on it. He let Fessenheim (one nuclear plant) close one year ago. And the nuclear plants he announced are a new kind of plants that we don't know how to create yet. (And he refuses to take position to open new plants with the current technology)
- Zenst 5y agoWorth noting that they are also taking Fusion seriously and looking at a test site already for an initial reactor trial. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-58911210 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-58911210 So nuclear in 2035 may have a different default definition of thinking in which fusion supplants fission what we currently use.
- cinntaile 5y agoWe will not have fusion by 2035, probably not even by 2050.
- Zenst 5y agoI'd take that bet. https://www.livescience.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor-sparc-2025.html https://www.livescience.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor-sparc-202...
- tuatoru 5y agoYou might be using a different definition of "have". This is a post about electricity production. "Have" would mean "producing at least 1 GWe commercially by a for-profit enterprise".
- anonporridge 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY
- jmcnulty 5y agoI'll happily bet against you, but I'll let Sabine Hossenfelder explain why. https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
- janstice 5y agoTo be fair, I’m not sure that UK will be able to have fission generators running by 2035 if they kick off a project now…
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- axiosgunnar 5y agoAfter France, the next big economy that let rationality prevail over ivory tower environmental „activism“. Let‘s hope many more countries will follow suit.
- Zenst 5y agoI suspect many will be on the fence looking at how fusion goes as that's getting closer and closer each day and once that becomes a reality in your energy grid production - fission will fall out of favour like a stone. [EDIT - fixed as per comment below - thank you]
- edaemon 5y agoDid you mean to swap those? Current nuclear power plants use fission, while fusion is still in development.
- Zenst 5y agoNo I mixed them up and will edit that now - thank you.
- tsimionescu 5y agoFusion is getting slightly closer every 20 years. A fusion power plant approaching anything like a fission power plant's output is still at the very least 30 years away (EUROfusion's timeline says 2051). And that will probably be the most expensive power plant in history, even ignoring all the money poured into ITER. That gives at least 100 years before Fusion can become a major part of power generation in any significant part of the world, and this is assuming current projects achieve all their milestones on time, which historically is extremely unlikely. And this also assumes that it's even possible to reduce the cost of a ten million kelvin plasma held in place by 12 kelvin superconducting magnets, covered in a pool of liquid lithium.
- wolverine876 5y agoThe parent compliments one apparent position ("rationality") and insults another, which only inflames conversation. What are these positions? Who specifically is saying what, specifically? What is your analysis? I get that it's cool to demean certain kinds of activists, if the implicit point is about trendiness.
- wolverine876 5y agoI wonder what the politics of it is: Who benefits in politics and in business? Also, afaik renewable energy is advancing quickly. Nuclear made more sense a decade ago. Why switch to it now?
- goda90 5y agoNuclear still makes sense now. We can't just aim to have our current electricity needs be filled by renewables, we need to plan for even more electricity for vehicles and industrial processes that currently depend on fossil fuels. Not to mention the large amount of residential furnace and water heaters that also depend on fossil fuels. And if we're ever going to start really sequestering carbon, having excess energy from nuclear is going to help a ton.
- throwawayboise 5y agoCarbon sequestration makes more sense for intermittently-available renewables since it can happen when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and doesn't need massive battery storage otherwise. Nuclear makes much more sense for base load electric needs for homes and industry.
- fmajid 5y agoCarbon sequestration is inefficient if you are doing it on diffuse CO2 in the air, as opposed to a concentrated stream from an industrial process like a cement factory. Battery electric storage, or redox flow batteries, or even hydrogen are more likely to work in remote locations.
- wolverine876 5y agoBoris Johnson isn't doing it because it makes sense, but for political benefits. Who benefits? Who is making money? 10 years ago I thought nuclear was the clear answer - that we should do a moon-shot style massive project to develop a new generation of reactors and build them worldwide. I'm not against nuclear. But there's an important political dimension also, and to talk as if it's decided on technological merits is to implicitly spread the BS.
- Krasnol 5y agoHow sad for a country with so much wind potential. They should have learned from the ongoing Hinkley failure. I wonder if the French will be ready to pay for such a debacle one more time.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoWe have just had a period where wind energy plummeted leading at least in part to sky high energy prices and twelve energy companies going out of business.
- Zenst 5y agoThat has nothing at all to do with the rising energy prices which have been natural gas related - not electricity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58090533 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58090533
- tonyedgecombe 5y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-13/u-k-power-prices-hit-record-as-outages-low-winds-cut-supply https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-13/u-k-power...
- kmlx 5y agouk already has large offshore and onshore wind farms that provided 25% of last year’s consumption: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/windenergyintheuk/june2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/article... unfortunately this has dropped in 2021 due to low wind. but a lot more wind farms are planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#List_of_operational_and_proposed_offshore_wind_farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
- eynsham 5y agoWe ought to do both, and the two together likely won’t be enough to sate current demand, so more than that: electricity is about a fifth of total energy use in the UK at the moment.
- addicted 5y agoYes, because Hinkley Point C was such an unmitigated success. It will be interesting to see how the UK actually plans on executing this. The only plausible way forward would be to duplicate Hinkley Point C basically (the 2nd phase has come in much cheaper than the first as they were able to reuse design and gained knowledge), but that would mean the UK energy industry is run by the Chinese and the French. I’m not sure if Global Britain is actually prepared for that.
- zh3 5y agoAs an advocate for nuclear power, it amazed me that the UK gave EDF the go-ahead for Hinkley C given the Finnish experience (11 billion euros, about 3x the original budget and getting on for 10 years late) with the same reactor design. At least Olkiluto is sort-of producing power now. Oh, and EDF in the UK really are the pits. Why anyone pays over the odds to use them is beyond me (it may be different for industrial users, but for consumers it's hard to imagine there's a worse choice). At least they won't go bust [0] being goverment backed. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/edf-restructuring-eu-idUSL1N2KA0ZP https://www.reuters.com/article/edf-restructuring-eu-idUSL1N...
- anttisalmela 5y agoOL3 is not yet producing power, apparently turbines didn't like spending a decade waiting for use and need some maintenance. Current estimation is that reactor will be started in January 2022 and regular electricity production will start in March.
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- makomk 5y agoThe UK didn't put all their nuclear eggs in the EDF basket, it's just that the other companies offering to build new nuclear plants were even more of a disaster than EDF. At least they managed to actually complete a reactor build recently; if I remember rightly the other candidates went bankrupt.
- mdf 5y agoIt's a shame UK left EU. All help would be welcome against Germany's lobby to continue burning fossil fuels and spewing the resulting GHGs into atmosphere. If they had been still in, I'm sure UK would have stood with France, nine other EU countries, and the various expert groups' assessments for classifying nuclear power in the EU sustainable taxonomy.
- Zenst 5y agoFor better or worse the EU gets down to working out something that all members can agree and why much change can be vetoes by a single member. That all said we are hosting COP26 climate summit - though like many - the Queen sums up what we all think: - https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britains-queen-irritated-by-leaders-who-are-just-talk-climate-change-2021-10-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britains-queen-irritated-by...
- wiz21c 5y agoFrom your Queen's article : On a trip to a school in Bristol, southwest England, Johnson told baffled schoolchildren: "I promise to get world leaders to cut greenhouse gases and save the planet." He later held up a signed, leaf-shaped piece of paper on which he had written his pledge. Whatever the outcome, I'll be very happy to hear about Johnson's pledge after the COP...
- Zenst 5y agoProbably my age, but what a politician says and does, do differ. It's the actions I'll measure upon, not the promissory notes of intent.
- pasabagi 5y agoI'm pretty sure parent is being sarcastic. Boris Johnson is the guy who literally goes 'uh, I think' when asked how many children he has[0]. He's not big on commitments of any kind. [0]: for the record, it's supposed to be six, but some people say seven.
- Glench 5y ago> The Heat and Building Strategy, to be published alongside the wider net zero review, will include a new 2035 target for a ban on fitting new domestic gas boilers. Man, I'm glad this is included but the scientific reality is that we need to move much much faster than this. For reference, even if we perfectly replaced every gas furnace at the end of its functional life starting today with a non-polluting heat pump, we'd still be on track for 2 degrees of warming. We need gas bans on new houses NOW or at the VERY least create major up-front discounts for heat pumps.
- hutzlibu 5y agoWhy is a ban on gas furnaces so important, when you can burn coal in your stove and oil for heating and both are still very common (at least here in germany)? I thought gas is way better than coal or oil, because it burns cleaner?
- Factorium 5y agoThe UK strategy is to replace those gas burners with heat pumps, which you can power with nuclear energy. The problem in the UK is that many houses are very old and poorly insulated. Passivhaus basically needs to be the standard (if it isn't already).
- jamesdf 5y agoAt least in the UK, using coal or oil is very uncommon, while gas is very common. So gas is the bigger problem to resolve. We need to get rid of them all eventually.
- Glench 5y ago> We need to get rid of them all eventually. Totally agreed! But for me I'd love to strike the word "eventually" from the sentence. At this point we're in such deep shit that we have to move more quickly than "eventually" in my opinion. :) It's far better to emit NO pollutants in your home (and cars!) than to emit less, especially since polluting home infrastructure is replaced every ~15 years and pollutes for its entire lifetime.
- LatteLazy 5y agoBetween this and gas boiler bans I can only assume bojo is trying to sink green targets by setting unrealistic, intentionally unaffordable and very unpopular ones.
- RobinL 5y agoWhat set of technologies would be capable of achieving our green targets if we retained gas boilers and shunned nuclear?
- LatteLazy 5y agoAt this point I don't think the targets will be met. Replacing all those boilers will be very unpopular, it will require a huge amount more electrical capacity and infrastructure alone. It's also very unlikely any new nuclear power will be available by 2035 the first target date. Spending the same money/political capital on cutting cars or flights or renewables would get a lot more co2e reduction a lot faster...
- thedrbrian 5y agoGood. Bloody good in fact. If we can get ahead of everyone in making the Rolls Royce SMRs we could sell them to the rest of the world and maybe have some hi-tech high skill jobs in the UK. SSE however done agree and think we can get by with only renewables. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/offshore-power-will-fail-without-subsidies-bx8908gm5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/offshore-power-will-fail-... Non paywalled https://archive.is/2021.07.25-233934/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/offshore-power-will-fail-without-subsidies-bx8908gm5 https://archive.is/2021.07.25-233934/https://www.thetimes.co...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago> Under the scheme, households will be charged for the cost of the plant via an energy levy long before it begins generating electricity, which could take a decade or more from when the final investment decision is taken.
- justicezyx 5y agoSeems would be impossible were UK staying in EU?
- jodrellblank 5y agoHinkley C is up past 15 years construction time, £22Bn build cost and £50Bn electricity purchase guarantee (profit subsidised by the taxpayer in some way). Compared to how many solar panel MW you can buy on the open market at consumer prices for that money, it's terrible value for money, ignoring winter base load concerns anyway. We're going to have to have Chinese expertise come in and build them for us. "[China] has 38 nuclear power reactors in operation and 19 under construction. It has increased its number of operating reactors by more than ten times since 2000 and plans to bring five units into commercial operation this year alone." - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/how-china-has-become-the-worlds-fastest-expanding-nuclear-power-producer https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/how-china-has-become-th... [2017]
- makomk 5y agoNo matter how cheap solar power is on paper, it's not much use in keeping British homes heated over the winter - solar panels reliably produce zero power after sunset and relatively little overall due to the shorter days in winter and higher latitude. Any realistic plan for going carbon-neutral has to deal with that issue.
- epistasis 5y agoStorage will be plentiful in most homes in the future, at least those with cars. A 50kWh battery will provide several days worth of electricity, even when powering a heat pump in the winter. And if batteries are cheap enough to be in cars and idle 95%-99% of the time, they are definitely going to be cheap enough for daily usage on the grid. Already, in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage attached to the same inverters as the solar panels. Batteries are on an exponential learning curve for cost. It's not hard to see where the future will be. Additionally, a mixture of both offshore wind solar will be close enough to provide all of the UK's needs. If you go and redo David MacKay's energy scenarios for the UK from Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, and use modern costs, the all renewable scenarios look pretty great. If nuclear can chip in and reduce some storage needs during a week long wind lull, that would be great too. But at this point in time we can't depend upon new nuclear to contribute anything to our immediate needs for climate solutions. Game day is here, now, and we have to play with the team of players we have currently.
- Abimelex 5y agowell the worst of nuclear power ist not the possibility of an accident, but the radioactive waste. I guess UK doesn't care much about that since they have a history of just dumping it into the ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
- dan-robertson 5y agoThe generally proposed way to deal with the worst nuclear waste (spent fuel) is to put it back into special reactors or to use special reactor designs to convert it to material with a much lower half life (hundreds rather than 10k years) which can then be stored … somewhere … more feasibly until it becomes safe.
- jl6 5y agoThe UK has incredible wind resources, but just look at the variability of output: https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind The question is whether the UK can build nuclear faster than they can build sufficient battery capacity to smooth out all that wind power. Neither will be easy.
- 7952 5y agoThere is a lot of battery storage projects in the pipeline now, about 20GW. They are mass producable, modular, can be containerised and built very quickly. And we need to scale up battery production anyway for electric cars. If humanity had a tech tree batteries would be a major branch. It is definitely worth pursuing and is not a zero-sum games with nuclear. And the costs have been dropping already quite a bit. It even has the potential to help cover unpredictable nuclear plant downtime.
- atc 5y agoVery pleased with this. Finally some sensible energy approach