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UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales
- Archelaos 1y ago[flagged]
- Angostura 1y agoYou’re talking about the unhindered release of CO2 into the atmosphere, I assume
- roenxi 1y agoIf a generation is ~20 years then 50,000 generations is around a million years. We're talking several times longer than recorded history. In fact, I was curious and looked it up - Homo Sapiens is estimated to be around 300,000 years old [0]. We should be so lucky if there are humans around in 50,000 generations. Just by nature of the amount of stuff that happens, if they have any conception of what the UK was or any idea what happened there then there has been some sort of transcendental enlightenment where there are no longer limits on how many memories a human can retain. In short, I think you are exaggerating the downsides of maybe a potential 10x cost blowout on the budget of a government project and a trivial amount of waste disposal. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution
- Tabular-Iceberg 1y agoPaying for a few security guards to sit next to the dry casks and point out that you'd better not crack them open and snort the contents for 50,000 generations will be peanuts compared to all the other expenses associated with keeping a society going for 50,000 generations.
- mikaeluman 1y agoGreat news. Lets hope this is just the start. The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoThe question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.
- helltone 1y agoIn the UK, probably nuclear.
- rcxdude 1y agoNuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
- cenamus 1y agoYeah, the UK is probably one of the best places for offshore wind, and they're building gigantic fields. And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
- dukeyukey 1y agoWith the big * of solar being fairly predictable, and wind not. You can be bereft of wind for weeks.
- londons_explore 1y agoNuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane. I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
- longor1996 1y agoWasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?
- toyg 1y agoIf by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...
- Angostura 1y agoAnd Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
- longor1996 1y agoOh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
- lysace 1y agoSee also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown. https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-german-nuclear-exit/ https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-germany-russia-gas-ukraine-war-energy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
- eucyclos 1y agoI think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
- Philip-J-Fry 1y agoProducing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold? Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
- thyristan 1y agoThe reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
- magicalhippo 1y agoThe underpant gnome version of nuclear power? Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant Step 2: ??? Step 3: Power!
- pfdietz 1y agoOne has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
- thyristan 1y agoIt might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details. The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium. So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
- perihelions 1y ago> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015" Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
- speedbird 1y agoWylfa was Magnavox, not AGR. AGR was the next generation that never went full commercial. Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.
- Oras 1y agoHopefully not another HS2
- jorisboris 1y agoI believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
- testing22321 1y agoAbundant yes, but new nuclear is by far the most expensive way to generate power, and it gets worse everyday as solar and storage prices plummet
- triceratops 1y ago50 or 100 years from now we may run out of solar and wind resources to tap. We may consume a couple order of magnitudes more energy than now. Materials science may have unforeseen advances that make nuclear development safer and cheaper. Nuclear will find its place in the sun - so to speak - at that time. But not now I think. The numbers don't work.
- testing22321 1y agoHow will we run out of solar resources to tap?
- jorisboris 1y agoAssuming energy consumption per capita continues to rise
- testing22321 1y agoOk, how will we run out of solar?
- osn9363739 1y agoSaying we will run out of space is a wild take. I'm interested. Anything to back that up?
- irthomasthomas 1y agoAnglesey is beautiful[0]. My ancestors came from there and I used to holiday there as a child. Today it is somewhat blighted by those ugly and noisy turbines[1]. I am in favor of this if it reduces the number of onshore turbines on the island. 0 https://www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Llanddwyn-Island-Anglesey-2000x985.jpg https://www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk/wp-content/upl... 1 https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/article21841043.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200/0_AFR_DPW161117BeltexRowlands_29.jpg https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/article21841043.ece/ALTERN...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 1y agoHopefully we can go back to just having the big beautiful high voltage power lines again.
- testdelacc1 1y agoThis live dashboard puts this number in perspective - https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards. Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them. The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix. I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
- jacobgorm 1y ago“like IKEA” sounds misleading at best.
- testdelacc1 1y agoMisleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
- blitzar 1y ago> Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them A more realistic target, one that would make this all more viable, would be 50MW and make 200 of them.
- rsynnott 1y agoThat was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
- jl6 1y agoThis is a rare moment of sanity in energy policy. It’s not about wind vs nuclear. We (the whole world) need everything we’ve got. SMRs have the potential to move nuclear out of its mainframe era. Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
- fundatus 1y agoThat's not what we're seeing with nuclear power though. At least so far. Counterintuitively it seems to get more expensive the more you build of the same design: [1] > Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
- jl6 1y agoMass production has never been tried before for nuclear so those 50 years don’t tell us much about the possibilities for the next 50 years. They built multiple mainframes of the same design too, but the scale remained tiny and so the costs remained high.
- crote 1y agoSome designs have several dozen reactors. If that's not enough to trigger cost savings, why would you expect it for a low-hundreds number of reactors?
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoWe desperately need regional pricing. If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity. And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
- chickenbig 1y ago> If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium used to be close to Wylfa.
- JohnCClarke 1y agoI suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones. Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines. The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
- mr_toad 1y ago> Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines. Those are called torpedoes.
- Retric 1y agoIt’s way cheaper to build a drone that doesn’t need to travel quickly or carry huge amount high explosives.
- greedo 1y agoHow is a slow, lightly armed drone going to damage a nuclear submarine that can both outrun and outdive it?
- Retric 1y agoThe drone’s goal is to locate it, you’d then send something else to destroy it if you’re in an actual war. America uses surface buoy’s to similar effect, going underwater would allow drones to be harder to detect. https://idstch.com/military/navy/navy-researching-new-buoy-technologies-naval-antisubmarine-warfare/ https://idstch.com/military/navy/navy-researching-new-buoy-t... Of note you don’t necessarily need to be able to track a sub everywhere, an invisible underwater “fence” may be good enough.
- speedylight 1y agoSo Rolls Royce makes cars, engines for planes, and nuclear reactors?
- qayxc 1y agoThe car company is a different entity owned by BMW.
- ksec 1y ago>estimated date of completion (2035) Ignoring cost, I sometimes wonder why we cant build this in 1 - 2 year. And if the first one takes 5 years, why the second one isn't 5 times faster. It frustrates me that nothing in UK is done with any urgency. And I bet that the Estimate date will be off as well.
- jacobp100 1y agoThe reactors will also be cast in the UK by Sheffield Forgemasters