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The government granted the licence to build Hinkley Point C in 2012. Construction started in 2017. It's expected to start producing power in 2027. https://en

The government granted the licence to build Hinkley Point C in 2012. Construction started in 2017. It's expected to start producing power in 2027. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

nine_k 4y ago
So, both sides are right. Nuclear is too slow, but renewables are not fast enough / sufficient either. Another thing is that politicians tend to plan that things will continue to go about as well as they are going at the moment, and the only major crisis ahead is the one being discussed at the moment. Nobody has the nerve to think that e.g. France will have trouble with several nuclear reactors at once, and a major war erupts in Europe at the same time. Ah, and a global pandemic right before that. Who in their right mind would vote for an energy budget based on such paranoid view of a possible future?
- Retric 4y ago
  Hardly, the UK completely replaced coal and reduced it’s dependence on natural gas with renewables from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile that wasn’t enough time to bring any new nuclear online in the current environment. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electricity-production-by-sourceUK1985-2020.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electric... Looks like renewables where simply the better, cheaper, and faster option. Which is shocking considering how little hydro and solar they have.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Plenty of wind though! Wind farms in the sea are a great idea; UK has a lot of sea at every side.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Well sure. When you effectively ban nuclear through regulatory hurdles, why is it a surprise that you don’t builds any and why is that a conclusion you can draw about the efficacy of nuclear itself? Somehow China is building out quite a bit of nuclear capacity while the west is sitting around dithering.
- epistasis 4y ago
  I wouldn't put nuclear and renewables as opposed sides. The only reasonable future will be built for a minimum of 80%-90% of primary energy generated from renewbles, and it may be that 10%-20% of nuclear is cheaper than to do it all by renewables. I don't understand why you say renewables will be too slow. I've only done napkin math, but simple projection of continued growth of existing production capacity through, say, 2035, completely replaces all current electrical generation, as well as other energy uses. And when you account for the much much higher efficient of electrification, meaning that we get 2-3x as much work out of the same amount of energy compared to all the waste with fossil fuels, we can fulfill the developing world's needs for growth too. But this is just my napkin math from taking production trends from top Google hits, it's not a sophisticated analysis. I would be interested to see one that is realistic, meaning that it doesn't assume that solar deployments plateau tomorrow.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Renewables and nuclear are of course not opposing each other; they are opposing fossil fuels. According to the article, the UK now has less electrical generation than it would like / planned to have. Partly because the nuclear power plants failed to go online at the planned time. Partly because the amount of renewable generation that has been built in the meantime is not sufficient ether, because renewables need to be seriously overpeovisioned, due to their varying output. Hence "both were too slow". Were they not, there'd be no energy deficit, I suppose.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      They are opposing each other because of the combination of two factors: * Peak energy demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production [1]. * Nuclear power is as cheap to run at 100% capacity as it is to run at 50% or 25% capacity. If you build enough nuclear power to fulfill the peak demand when renewables aren't producing, then you've already built enough nuclear to power the grid all day. And since nuclear is just as cheap to run at 100% capacity there's no point in provisioning renewables. Renewables work well when paired with a dispatchable energy source like gas or hydroelectricity. The former emits carbon and the latter is geographically dependent. In areas without hydroelectric potential, nuclear is the only existing option for full decarbonization. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
- godelski 4y ago
  A big problem with projects like these (nuclear and even renewable, but to a bit lesser of a degree) is that these projects outlast leadership. It then becomes easy to support something and it never get done. You make a big speech, but a few gears into motion, but more pressing stuff takes priority because a voter's attention is less than an election cycle. Truth is that if they work hard, get everything in motion you have 1 of 2 outcomes: 1) the next person gets all the praise because it is finished under their leadership or 2) the project goes into major delay as the next leadership doesn't prioritize it (often because it was the previous party's platform). Honestly I think we could get a lot more done if people were able to disentangle when policies were achieved from when they were implemented. Governments are fantastic for long term investments, but politics works on shorter timeframes than many corporations. Though I think changing the cultural mentality to provide that selective pressure is an unrealistic pipedream. That said, it does also really show the constraints that we operate under and why existential issues like climate change are extremely difficult to solve.
  - orhmeh09 4y ago
    How could this be achieved? I have one model in mind that might enable this type of long-term planning, but it would take quite a bit of work to make the US like China.
    - tene 4y ago
      Policy Prediction Markets.
    - godelski 4y ago
      The reason China can do it is because they are an autocracy. Voters don't matter and their elections aren't as meaningful, meaning they can have projects longer than an election cycle. If you want to get the West on a path this way, you have to get the people to have a change in how they evaluate their leaders. But first, you need to have the people trust in the leaders, which they don't right now for good reason. It is a tough nut to crack. I'm not saying this in approval of authoritarianism btw. I think the results of that are worse, but it does have advantages (which is why it is attractive to some).
belorn 4y ago
In 2012 we had in EU access to exceedingly cheap natural gas from Russia and electricity prices where around 2 cent per kw/h, and was getting cheaper each year. No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h, especially since prices were predicted to reach 1 cent per kw/h, and there is little incentives from government speed up the regulative process. Building capacity was mostly a cost center, and nuclear power represented a significant political risk. In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.
- roenxi 4y ago
  I do agree with your post, but I really have to bite my tongue to not get snarky. Part of the process here has to be recognising that this outcome was the obvious base-case future right from the start. Indeed, from as early as the 1980s when the politicians started really cracking down on building new nuclear plants. This is an entirely policy-driven problem. If I could see it, anyone who cared to look could - the free market would have been building nuclear plants in 2012 if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?". People winning or not winning elections shouldn't be a factor in whether people freeze to death in winter or have to start burning wood fires because we're regressing to the early 1900s. People should be able to sort out their own energy needs in a free market.
  - pydry 4y ago
    >if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?" I'd be happy with this if there wasnt a liability cap on all nuclear plants at ~0.1% the cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima. The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however. That's why the cap exists after all - the government was desperate to get the private sector to build these things. Arguing to chip away at safety standards in an industry that already has full liability protection against its own mistakes...doesnt make a lot of sense to me. Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
goatlover 4y ago
How is China able to build nuclear power plants relatively quickly? Are you saying the British are incapable of doing this in less than a decade? I bet the military could do it faster.
- pas 4y ago
  the military couldn't by itself. they use suppliers nowadays for everything, but they might. China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them. estimated delay is strictly less than a year. of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient. .... the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all. and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive" and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    > of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen Chernobyl is an older design than plants we builds today. if I recall correctly Chinese plants include a lot of passive safety features especially in the wake of Fukushima (gen III / gen III+). Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered. If I recall correctly they used a mildly updated design than Chernobyl. It’ll be interesting to start seeing gen IV reactors coming online since they have an identical safety profile to fusion. If anything goes wrong the reaction stops rather than the runaway reactions common to traditional reactor designs that are basically fission bombs hooked up to a steam engine.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Approval of Hincley was taking place amidst massive drama, cancellations, revisiting, and really bad finance deal. Thats only one that got approved. It will not even be enough to replace reactors that are going offline in this timeframe.
Reason077 4y ago
4 of the 5 currently operating UK nuclear power stations are scheduled to close by around the time Hinkley Point C starts operating. Only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028. Hinkley C will add 3200 MW, but around 9000 MW of nuclear capacity will have been retired between 2012 and 2028.

nine_k 4y ago

So, both sides are right. Nuclear is too slow, but renewables are not fast enough / sufficient either. Another thing is that politicians tend to plan that things will continue to go about as well as they are going at the moment, and the only major crisis ahead is the one being discussed at the moment. Nobody has the nerve to think that e.g. France will have trouble with several nuclear reactors at once, and a major war erupts in Europe at the same time. Ah, and a global pandemic right before that. Who in their right mind would vote for an energy budget based on such paranoid view of a possible future?

Retric 4y ago
Hardly, the UK completely replaced coal and reduced it’s dependence on natural gas with renewables from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile that wasn’t enough time to bring any new nuclear online in the current environment. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electricity-production-by-sourceUK1985-2020.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Electric... Looks like renewables where simply the better, cheaper, and faster option. Which is shocking considering how little hydro and solar they have.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Plenty of wind though! Wind farms in the sea are a great idea; UK has a lot of sea at every side.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Well sure. When you effectively ban nuclear through regulatory hurdles, why is it a surprise that you don’t builds any and why is that a conclusion you can draw about the efficacy of nuclear itself? Somehow China is building out quite a bit of nuclear capacity while the west is sitting around dithering.
epistasis 4y ago
I wouldn't put nuclear and renewables as opposed sides. The only reasonable future will be built for a minimum of 80%-90% of primary energy generated from renewbles, and it may be that 10%-20% of nuclear is cheaper than to do it all by renewables. I don't understand why you say renewables will be too slow. I've only done napkin math, but simple projection of continued growth of existing production capacity through, say, 2035, completely replaces all current electrical generation, as well as other energy uses. And when you account for the much much higher efficient of electrification, meaning that we get 2-3x as much work out of the same amount of energy compared to all the waste with fossil fuels, we can fulfill the developing world's needs for growth too. But this is just my napkin math from taking production trends from top Google hits, it's not a sophisticated analysis. I would be interested to see one that is realistic, meaning that it doesn't assume that solar deployments plateau tomorrow.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Renewables and nuclear are of course not opposing each other; they are opposing fossil fuels. According to the article, the UK now has less electrical generation than it would like / planned to have. Partly because the nuclear power plants failed to go online at the planned time. Partly because the amount of renewable generation that has been built in the meantime is not sufficient ether, because renewables need to be seriously overpeovisioned, due to their varying output. Hence "both were too slow". Were they not, there'd be no energy deficit, I suppose.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    They are opposing each other because of the combination of two factors: * Peak energy demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production [1]. * Nuclear power is as cheap to run at 100% capacity as it is to run at 50% or 25% capacity. If you build enough nuclear power to fulfill the peak demand when renewables aren't producing, then you've already built enough nuclear to power the grid all day. And since nuclear is just as cheap to run at 100% capacity there's no point in provisioning renewables. Renewables work well when paired with a dispatchable energy source like gas or hydroelectricity. The former emits carbon and the latter is geographically dependent. In areas without hydroelectric potential, nuclear is the only existing option for full decarbonization. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
godelski 4y ago
A big problem with projects like these (nuclear and even renewable, but to a bit lesser of a degree) is that these projects outlast leadership. It then becomes easy to support something and it never get done. You make a big speech, but a few gears into motion, but more pressing stuff takes priority because a voter's attention is less than an election cycle. Truth is that if they work hard, get everything in motion you have 1 of 2 outcomes: 1) the next person gets all the praise because it is finished under their leadership or 2) the project goes into major delay as the next leadership doesn't prioritize it (often because it was the previous party's platform). Honestly I think we could get a lot more done if people were able to disentangle when policies were achieved from when they were implemented. Governments are fantastic for long term investments, but politics works on shorter timeframes than many corporations. Though I think changing the cultural mentality to provide that selective pressure is an unrealistic pipedream. That said, it does also really show the constraints that we operate under and why existential issues like climate change are extremely difficult to solve.
- orhmeh09 4y ago
  How could this be achieved? I have one model in mind that might enable this type of long-term planning, but it would take quite a bit of work to make the US like China.
  - tene 4y ago
    Policy Prediction Markets.
  - godelski 4y ago
    The reason China can do it is because they are an autocracy. Voters don't matter and their elections aren't as meaningful, meaning they can have projects longer than an election cycle. If you want to get the West on a path this way, you have to get the people to have a change in how they evaluate their leaders. But first, you need to have the people trust in the leaders, which they don't right now for good reason. It is a tough nut to crack. I'm not saying this in approval of authoritarianism btw. I think the results of that are worse, but it does have advantages (which is why it is attractive to some).

belorn 4y ago

In 2012 we had in EU access to exceedingly cheap natural gas from Russia and electricity prices where around 2 cent per kw/h, and was getting cheaper each year. No one was in a rush to build nuclear power that costed around 3-4 cent per kw/h, especially since prices were predicted to reach 1 cent per kw/h, and there is little incentives from government speed up the regulative process. Building capacity was mostly a cost center, and nuclear power represented a significant political risk. In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.

roenxi 4y ago
I do agree with your post, but I really have to bite my tongue to not get snarky. Part of the process here has to be recognising that this outcome was the obvious base-case future right from the start. Indeed, from as early as the 1980s when the politicians started really cracking down on building new nuclear plants. This is an entirely policy-driven problem. If I could see it, anyone who cared to look could - the free market would have been building nuclear plants in 2012 if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?". People winning or not winning elections shouldn't be a factor in whether people freeze to death in winter or have to start burning wood fires because we're regressing to the early 1900s. People should be able to sort out their own energy needs in a free market.
- pydry 4y ago
  >if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?" I'd be happy with this if there wasnt a liability cap on all nuclear plants at ~0.1% the cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima. The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however. That's why the cap exists after all - the government was desperate to get the private sector to build these things. Arguing to chip away at safety standards in an industry that already has full liability protection against its own mistakes...doesnt make a lot of sense to me. Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.

goatlover 4y ago

How is China able to build nuclear power plants relatively quickly? Are you saying the British are incapable of doing this in less than a decade? I bet the military could do it faster.

pas 4y ago
the military couldn't by itself. they use suppliers nowadays for everything, but they might. China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them. estimated delay is strictly less than a year. of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient. .... the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all. and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive" and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  > of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen Chernobyl is an older design than plants we builds today. if I recall correctly Chinese plants include a lot of passive safety features especially in the wake of Fukushima (gen III / gen III+). Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered. If I recall correctly they used a mildly updated design than Chernobyl. It’ll be interesting to start seeing gen IV reactors coming online since they have an identical safety profile to fusion. If anything goes wrong the reaction stops rather than the runaway reactions common to traditional reactor designs that are basically fission bombs hooked up to a steam engine.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

Approval of Hincley was taking place amidst massive drama, cancellations, revisiting, and really bad finance deal. Thats only one that got approved. It will not even be enough to replace reactors that are going offline in this timeframe.

Reason077 4y ago

4 of the 5 currently operating UK nuclear power stations are scheduled to close by around the time Hinkley Point C starts operating. Only Sizewell B is scheduled to operate beyond 2028. Hinkley C will add 3200 MW, but around 9000 MW of nuclear capacity will have been retired between 2012 and 2028.