https://web.archive.org/web/20240923081026/https://www.build...
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Additional reading if you haven't read it before, "Nothing like this will be built again" about Torness: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...?
Previously posted several times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> As the cost of Hinkley Point has increased, the backers have had to provide more funding. The souring of relations between Britain and China saw CGN stop providing any more money, leaving EDF to fund the shortfall. EDF has called upon the UK government to help out with the escalating cost but it has refused. EDF was fully nationalised in 2023, leaving the French taxpayer to pick up the tab for the cost overruns.
That paragraph might be the high point of the article.
It's about time our national infrastructure benefitted from foreign taxpayer money, considering how often it's been the other way around! Especially with the railways.
We were laughing at the stupid foreigners who don't understand maths when they bought these things from us. Humble pie is a wonderful dish.
Didn't you put yourself in that situation?
In UK elections, because it's not a 2-party system, the winner usually has less than half of the votes.
But even if they didn't, losers don't have to take it quietly.
But even if they did, governments are complex representatives, not ongoing referendums on each individual topic, so we can agree with 80% of the party we vote for and strongly disagree with the rest of their policies.
The cynical alternative is that democracy is a way to get everyone to shut up: if you voted for them it's your fault, if you voted against them you need to obey the will of the people (if you voted for a minor party you wasted your vote), if you're too young to vote then you're naïve to real issues, and if you didn't vote at all then you silenced yourself.
(Sometimes I'm the cynic).
> democracy is a way to get everyone to shut up
Democracy is a way to get people to acquiesce without violence. If you look at history, it's remarkable how common insurgencies and succession crises or breakaway warlords are.
It's like a release valve, no point in going out rioting if you can vote the bastards out in the next election.
This is also how most professional licensing works. The idea isn't that the license guarantees quality, it's that the license can be revoked when the licensee in question makes an egregious mistake.
Democracy isn't about voting people in. A monarchy or dictatorship can be voted in and stay permanently. The point is to vote people out of power.
A recent discussion[1] suggests China's ~500 CE Keju imperial exam was designed as a royal ranking system to reduce violent political fights between noble houses. But at a cost of stagnated innovation.
*representative democracy, the lowest form of democracy.
FPTP systems suffer from a very high percentage of wasted votes. If voting systems were judged like normal IT systems, FPTP would be considered defective by design.
FPTP has the redeeming property of being unstable. A fully proportional system ends up with a status quo, with people who are good at doing deals in power - this an recipe for a cesspool of corruption and indolence.
I favour the middle ground of alternative vote.
I don’t understand this comment - could you explain why?
Do other countries benefit from UK railways?
Majority (particularly by ticket sales) of uk train operators (TOCs) are foreign owned[1] and operators are "TBTF" and subsidised by the government, in 2023 this was over 4 Billion pounds, meanwhile each TOC is paying out millions in dividends to share holders[2].
1 - https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-reveals-that-75-of-uk-rail-n... 2 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-factsheet-2023...
That said the current government have introduced legislation to bring these TOCs into public ownership as franchises expire [0]. Rolling stock and freight will remain privately owned so it isn’t quite a return to the days of British Rail, but the privatisation experiment is coming to a close.
Privatization of UK rail services meant that they were given out on government tenders to "private" companies, and a few of these companies that won the tenders are owned by foreign govts. Netherlands is one I believe, maybe France too.
Some examples:
- c2c and Avanti West Coast: partially and fully owned by Trenitalia which is wholly owned by the Italian government
- London Overground, Chilltern Railways, CrossCountry, Grand Central: Owned by Deutche Bahn until June 2024 which is wholly owned by the German government
- Elizabeth line: Wholly owned by MTR transport which is wholly owned by Hong Kong government
I'm sure there are a lot more I missed. It doesn't just appy to foreign governments either. The UK government subsidized all TOCs with taxpayer money, many of which turned around and gave out dividents to shareholds (foreign government or not).
OTOH if I understand it right the French "taxpayer", i.e. govt, will be the beneficiary of the above-market price for electricity produced by the plant that the UK has guaranteed, presumably for the lifespan of the plant, which is 60 years. So I presume that will be a net gain for France, otherwise there would be no sense in continuing with the project.
> that the UK has guaranteed, presumably for the lifespan of the plant, which is 60 years
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hinkley-point-c
The Hinkley Point C CfD provides a Strike Price for the developer of £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), reducing to £89.50/MWh (2012 prices) if EDF take a FID on their proposed Sizewell C project, for a 35 year term from the date of commissioning.
I think the project has a certain momentum to it. Also failing to complete the project would rather call into question their competence for the EPR2 build-out in France.
Weren’t those agreements made way back before the giant cost overuns?
Yes. Huge mistake for France, that.
Fixed price contracts in the nuclear industry have rarely if ever worked out well for the suppliers. Contrast this with renewables which typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
Yes, it seems the only projects that have larger cost overruns than nuclear power stations is dealing with nuclear waste.
I take it you are referring to https://x.com/BentFlyvbjerg/status/1662016016493191169
Interestingly the nuclear data implies that those (45% of) projects not in the tail (defined as >= 50% cost overrun) have a mean overrun of 17.33%.
120% = 0.45 * X% + 0.55 * 204% therefore X% = (120% - 0.55 * 204%)/0.45 = 17.33%
Don't forget the Olympics, with a format designed to minimise the learnings.
Note that the point of the article was that the design is being proven, lessons are being learnt, and the skills of individuals and organisations developed, which reduces the risk of overruns etc.
Hasn't it already greatly overrun the initial promises? I mean, that's the whole reason France is crying for relief here from the UK. Anyway, claims that nuclear will show good experience effects this time, for sure, are to be treated with skepticism.
> Hasn't it already greatly overrun the initial promises? Hinkley Point C got the green light in 2016 with an estimated £18bn build cost
The most recent estimates put costs as high as £34bn at 2015 prices, £46bn in today’s money.
> that's the whole reason France is crying for relief here from the UK.
The overrun combined with COVID combined with the spike in inflation and also CNG being frozen out of the UK nuclear market/cooling of relationship with China.
> claims that nuclear will show good experience effects this time, for sure, are to be treated with skepticism.
Agreed, which is why the second unit at HPC will be interesting.
Depends on what, if any, penalties there are for discontinuing.
Absolutely. Thanks for the highlighting! Edit: It's a two-in-one good news afaiac: China withdrawing funding(/influence) and some sort of accountability applied to mega projects rather than just throwing (and eventually devaluing) more and more money at things.
I’m not sure what the win is here. I doubt the French tax payer is winning and the French government is trying for the UK to help with the bill.
And this level of risk (and realised overrun) accounts for part of the higher CfD price at the start.
I'm glad the article talks about the positive impact this will have on Sizewell C. The UK completely disregards the long term impact of skills and experience lost when debating whether we should do this kind of project.
Of course, EDF is trying to push the Sizewell C Final Investment Decision over the line, but equally a skilled workforce is being trained for these most complex of projects.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/nuclear-new-build-projects/...
It takes time to find and develop good people, so hopefully Sizewell C plus Rolls Royce SMR will gain momentum to allow their retention.
Yes, Hinkley and Sizewell may be expensive - but they're unlikely to be that much more expensive than wind/PV plus enough storage to provide reliable 24/7/365 power. In the end, I'd much rather have some diversity in the system. If the choice was 100% nuclear vs 100% wind/PV, the answer would probably be different, but for 15% of the UK's capacity to come from a reliable (but expensive) source that is uncorrelated with wind or PV downtime, that extra cost seems to be a good investment to me.
The problem is that you can't use nuclear to compensate for low wind/PV supply.
The cost of nuclear energy is dominated by the need to pay back the massive construction loan. Nobody is willing to take that risk on an open electricity market, so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand. If the price on the open market is less than the "strike price" the government will pay for the difference, and if the plant wants to supply power to the grid but the grid doesn't want it due to technical reasons the government will pay them for every kWh it could have supplied.
This in turn means nuclear power plants operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time - minus forced maintenance downtime. It can be used to supply a base load, but not to handle peak load. When there's an excess of supply, the grid is forced to turn off cheap wind/PV capacity to make space for expensive nuclear capacity.
I agree that it would indeed be nice if we could use nuclear to fill in the gaps left by a renewable grid, but the economics simply doesn't allow for it.
In an open market nuclear (and wind/solar) would still operate 100% of the time. That is because the marginal cost of one extra unit of energy is trivial. They would sell energy even if it was not enough to cover the capital costs. Because that is more revenue than turning the piywer station off.
We have strike prices so that generators can cover the capital costs. But it will also hold prices down when the wholesale cost exceeds the strike price.
I agree that Hinckley may increase peaks and excess generation. But that will be a feature of the grid anyway. We will need storage/interconnector exports either way. And it will also help a lot with the valleys in production. That is less electricity that needs to be stored or generated using gas and diesel. Adding a couple extra GW's is useful.
Nuclear plants are already being forced to shut down across Europe because no one wants their expensive energy. That is old paid off plants, not insanely expensive new builds.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...
For every passing year renewable penetration deepens and we end up with situations like this:
> On 100 out of the 144 days since 8 March, California’s electricity demand was 100% supplied by renewable energy for at least part of the day. Solar, wind and hydroelectric energy technologies fully powered the state’s grid for at least a few minutes and for as long as ten hours for 100 days.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/california-achieves-10...
That is an incredibly hostile economical environment for a nuclear power plant, and the only thing the CFD accomplishes is higher power bills for the ratepayers.
Surely the objective is reduction of CO2 emissions rather than low bills.
> so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand
Matt Levine writes about a gas contract where the gas supplier was obliged to deliver gas at a fixed price. However the contract required that the plant be completed. The spot price has been above the fixed price so the plant owners have been selling gas on the open market and the owners have not technically "completed" the plant on purpose (perhaps by not painting one last rivet).
Why hold wind to a higher standard than a nuclear plant? A nuclear plant typically has 95% uptime. Wind/PV/storage can hit 95% or 99% or 99.9% a lot cheaper than Hinkley can hit 95%.
> Wind/PV/storage can hit 95% or 99% or 99.9% a lot cheaper than Hinkley can hit 95%.
I think the geography of the UK helps with offshore wind getting good capacity factors, but the general averages aren't great, often peaking at ~40%:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I can see in real-time how wind goes up and down, while nuclear just keeps chugging along:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
And nuclear is cheaper (CA$0.101/kWh) than wind ($0.147) or solar ($0.474); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
Of course our infrastructure and/or geography may not be as well-suited for wind.
Nuclear is only 10 cents / kWh after the OEB has off-loaded all the costs for building and decommissioning to the federal and provincial governments.
> decommissioning
Bruce Power is responsible for decommissioning costs:
> Bruce Power receives a fixed price for its electricity generation that is inclusive of all its current costs and funding of future decommissioning liabilities in the Bruce Facility. As previously noted, the average price over the life of the contract was estimated by the IESO to be $77/ MWh (in 2015$).
* https://www.brucepower.com/who-we-are/delivering-transparenc...
As is OPG (Pickering, Darlington):
> From the earliest days of each project, OPG is required by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to have a Financial Guarantee in place to ensure it can cover the costs of the eventual decommissioning of its nuclear facilities.
* https://www.opg.com/power-generation/our-power/nuclear/decom...
Federally, the generation companies are also responsible for handling waste:
> The Act required Canadian electricity generating companies which produce used nuclear fuel to establish a waste management organization to provide recommendations to the Government of Canada on the long-term management of used nuclear fuel. The legislation also required the waste owners to establish segregated trust funds to finance the long-term management of the used fuel. The Act further authorized the Government of Canada to decide on the approach. The government's choice will then be implemented by the NWMO, subject to all of the necessary regulatory approvals.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Management_Organ...
Do you have references that say otherwise?
How many of their plants have already been fully decommissioned? What's going to happen when the reserved funds run out halfway through the decommissioning process? Who's going to pay for it when Bruce Power goes bankrupt? Are they going to claw back dividends decades after payout, or will the taxpayers end up with the bill?
You claimed "OEB has off-loaded all the costs for building and decommissioning". I gave references that contradict that and asked for references to support your statement.
You have not provided any, and have changed the subject. Do you retract your claim?
Or are you sticking with your claim and moving the goalposts as well?
I'm not holding wind to a higher standard - I'd rather have two pretty reliable sources whose downtime is uncorrelated.
Very good to hear about upskilling taking place but also immensely sobering numbers (i.e. 1300 apprentices is seen a big uplift) for a country the size of the UK.
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-sta...
118,770 apprenticeships achieved in the UK last year. We're not that big on practical education, with a preference for getting degrees so we can sit behind a desk moving (electronic) paper.
Tragedy is that something like 50% of people don't complete their apprenticeships
Provision seem to be very mixed - we know some teenagers who've had good ones and others who've had awful ones and these were in practical skills
Best one I know of was a degree apprenticeship for one of the big accountancy firms. Person started work at 18, had a degree in their early twenties while being paid all the way through, and no student debt at the end
I would also just say that a half of these 118,770 were over 25 Years old when they started, and only 44% of the total are for "advanced" level starts.
They are often not very high quality, sometimes it will be things like the person who puts bread in the oven at a supermarket getting a level 2 in kitchen skills and so on.
1,300 high quality apprenticeships is noticeable (which is nuts).
With 800,000 people (male and female) aged 20 (mid 2021) in a total population of 69 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kin...
I'm so never retiring.
As far as I understood it takes so long because UK has some customization requirements which impacted a lot delivery time
That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to:
1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design
All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds.
Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite that pronounced, but it's there.
2. No nuclear industry/workforce
I think the article goes into this, but a lot of the cost of HPC, Olkiluoto and Flamanville (as well as Vogtle-3/4) is simply for rebuilding nuclear expertise both in industry and in the workforce.
China also buit both EPRs and AP-1000s, and they did it quite a bit more quickly and cheaply, because they have an experienced workforce and industry at hand. They current have 20+ reactors under construction. That makes a huge difference as we know from experience. Just in Germany, the difference between one-off reactors and the Konvois that were built at the same time in series was around 2x.
However, even in China the EPR took longer than other reactors. Partly due to it being a FOAK design, but also for the third reason:
3. The EPR is too complicated
For various reasons, the EPR is far too complicated, and in the end not a good design. Which is one of the things you find out in FOAK builds (see point 1).
That's not me saying this, it's the manufacturer, EDF. They have abandoned the EPR design, all new French reactors will be the vastly simplified EPR2. I haven't been able to find out whether Sizewell C and subsequent will also be EPR2 or whether the UK will stick with its heavily modified EPR.
One example is that the EPR has quadruple independent cooling systems. This is in order to maintain triple redundancy while doing maintenance on the cooling system, so being able to do that maintenance without having to take the reactor offline. Considering the German PWRs were above 90% capacity factor with "just" triple redundancy, this seems to be gold-plating. Nice-to-have if you can pull it off, but it appears they couldn't pull it off.
Also, all those cooling systems have to be active in order to comply with German nuclear regulations. The somewhat silly reason is that German regulators both (a) had no experience with passive cooling systems and (b) had a prescriptive approach to regulation, rather than a requirements-based approach. So "you must build a cooling system like this" rather than "your cooling system must be able to do this".
It's is also obviously a bit redundant considering that Germany no longer operates nuclear power plants and isn't exactly currently in the market for an EPR.
The Westinghouse AP-1000 uses at least some passive cooling, which is not only more reliable but also simpler, smaller and cheaper and makes the total plant a lot smaller.
Once you've built one, the EPR is apparently a great reactor (the Fins are very happy with theirs), and should last a long time, but it's just a pain to build.
> Once you've built one, the EPR is apparently a great reactor
https://youtu.be/6fM2k1xEHGg?feature=shared&t=2137 with World Nuclear Association's China lead Francois Morin
Now, if you look at the price per kilowatt, for instance, Chinese yuan per kilowatt, the, the, the Ap1000 are more expensive than the EPR.
Sticking to the UK EPR. There is no point in building another FOAK for marginal benefit.
Nuclear is doomed to fail, because people's lifespans are too short. You can build a nuclear power plant, then do nothing for 50 years and have no workforce left to build new ones. This leads to nuclear power being excessively expensive and slow to construct.
If you decide to go the SMR route so that you continuously build nuclear reactors every year to sidestep this problem, then you run into the problem that the containment building needs to be airstrike proof. These high fixed costs are unrelated to the reactor technology and cannot be avoided by building a newer generation power plant.
If you decide to build the old designs, then you run into another issue: The savings obtained through building a larger scale plant, such as same number of staff, bigger diameter pipes and less material at the same fixed cost to obtain higher total power output per power plant, must be paid dearly by a cooling solution that scales with that increased power output. Placing a nuclear power plant near a river sounds intelligent, until you realize that climate change causes rivers to dry out or reduce their flow rate, shutting your nuclear power plant down, making your large scale power plant work against you. Meanwhile placing a nuclear power plant near the ocean has resulted in the Fukushima incident, so future power plants also need to be tsunami proof.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Before the failure of NuScale, I was confident that the problems with large scale nuclear power plants could be solved by SMRs, but the truth is that you simply can't operate nuclear power plants with the same lack of care you can operate a wind farm or a coal plant. If the coal/gas plant burns down or explodes, who gives a damn? Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
Well, look at it this way: what happened at Fukushima was an ageing, poorly maintained reactor built on a fault line in the Pacific Ring of Fire got hit by a record-setting earthquake AND a tsunami... and despite all of that the damage is not that massive. I mean, yes, the situation is a big mess and I wouldn't want to be in charge of handling the clean up and everything, but let's be fair: considering all of the circumstances it's impressive the damage wasn't way worse.
"Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
So there were and will be no negative health effects from the radiation, whereas 100% of the deaths and other negative effects on people were due to Radiophobia.
Try to argue for no evacuation when the nuclear power plant is literally melting down and experiencing multiple large explosions.
This feels like post-fact reasoning attempting to in a blasé paper over reality.
one of their problems was they didn't know what rad levels are to decide how to perform evacuation, because most sensors were shut down bc of tsunami. They were acting blind with no data and were assuming the worst
The local moors flood every winter. However, this was the most catastrophic flood in recent times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1607_Bristol_Channel_floods
Some nice maps in the referenced report [pdf]:
1607 Bristol Channel Floods: 400-Year Retrospective
https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/fl_1607_bristol...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c339e40f0b... page 276
Sea wall will have a crest height of 13.55m AOD.
Related to the rivers & france- it's specific to a certain plant design, newer plants usually don't have such problems. For building experience: it depends. If the building time is 4-7 years, you can afford to slowly build plants one after another until old plants need to be decommission so you'll get constant workforce
> You can build a nuclear power plant, then do nothing for 50 years
Yes, that absolutely was a major problem, and quite the opposite of what anti-nuclear advocates claim. Nuclear is not too slow to build, it is too quick to build. Relative to the Hughe lifespan of the reactors.
So you have to pace yourself and build out slowly.
If reactors last 100 years and you want a fleet of 100 reactors, that's 1 per year. You can obviously vary the pace a little up and down, but don't build all the reactors you need in 15 years like the French did and then stop.
> Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
Actually he's not. So far, > 50% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been destroyed, including one huge hydro dam. Not a single nuclear plant has been destroyed or even heavily damaged. Not sure if there was even a determined attack. One is occupied and in cold shutdown.
Nuclear plants are very, very tough. The newer containment buildings are designed to withstand a fuel-laden aircraft crashing into them. That's half a kiloton of TNT equivalent.
https://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010...
The warhead on a modern cruise missile or tactical ballistic is maybe half a ton of TNT, so 1/1000th of that. You can just keep lobbing those at the plant and it won't care.
Since they are so concentrated, they are also easy to defend against attack.
These factors probably weighed into Ukraine's decision to build 4 more nuclear power plants, two of which have been started.
> That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to:
These probably also apply to Vogtle 3 in the US; IIRC, Vogtle 4 was less expensive.
Economies of scale applies to large nuclear plants as much as it does to small widgets: the more you build the easier it becomes to build them.
yep, V4 did cost 30% cheaper than unit 3. It's interesting if the next plant will be built and if yes - how much cheaper/faster
If only the Chinese numbers were more transparent. Their CAP1000 are licensed derivatives of the AP1000, and are building several simultaneously.
thanks for additional contribution! Agree, AP-1000 is extremely cool, China already has 4 reactors with it and more are in building phase
The localised version being the CAP1000 (with a scaled up CAP1400 in the works). The main competition is the Hualong One (a.ka. HPR1000), a more conventional plant based on an imported French design (itself an evolution of a Westinghouse PWR).
What would be equivalent solar/wind installed power?
Enough wind + solar + storage to deliver
> which gives Hinkley Point C a total output of over 3.2GW.
at least 3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 50 weeks a year (allowing for some step down in output for maintainance, etc) for some 30+ (?) years.
It's a common mistake to price up renewables delivering flat nuclear shaped energy in an effort to inflate the price.
It's as silly as demanding that a nuclear plant must emulate the delivery profile of solarn and install batteries capable of shifting night time power to the day. With a similar effect on prices.
Demand is not flat. It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets which is why initial solar deployments have a high "capture rate" (i.e. they are delivering when the demand and price is high).
> It's a common mistake to price up renewables delivering flat nuclear shaped energy in an effort to inflate the price. > Demand is not flat.
The system as a whole has to deliver baseload plus variable demand. If the demand and supply do not match then there are problems. Load shifting/Demand Flexibility Service may be a promising concept, but there is only so much that will shift.
> It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets
That is not the case for the UK, the country being discussed, with peak electrical demand in winter. Electrification of heating (and not so great a need for cooling in the summer) indicates this will continue to be so.
> That is not the case for the UK, the country being discussed, with peak electrical demand in winter.
Wind also peaks in winter, while nuclear fails to rise to the occasion so maybe we should force nuclear to invest in seasonal storage so that we get a really fair comparison?
Wind also peaks in peaks, leading to gluts. Summarising something so irregular in a single number misses out essential properties. The peak/trough pattern is so good for heating without plenty of thermal storage (not something the UK’s buildings are renowned for).
> maybe we should force nuclear to invest in seasonal storage
Probably simpler to build a bit more nuclear, then use it in summer to drive DACCS (heat and electricity) or processes like raw material smelting. Better to have industry operating on fairly predictable schedules (summer on, winter off) than pre-empting them on a regular basis (as startup/shutdown could reduce useful work done/harm equipment).
Overbuilding is a good strategy, cheaper to do it with wind and solar though.
This has sometimes been referred to with the cheesy catchphrase of "SWB Superpower":
The UK’s average nuclear load factor for 1970 to 2017 was 67.4 per cent
3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 34 weeks a year.
or
3 GW 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
IAEA's PRIS database is good for reactor information.
For instance https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.... shows Sizewell B has a load factor of 83.1% which is better than the AGR fleet.
That is an excellent link thanks. Really sad reminder of how many sites were opened and how many reactors built in the 60's & 70's and how little has been done since (except for power down reactors).
It is possible for reactors to come back from shut-down. See Palisades and TMI 1.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/palisades-on-sch...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/constellation-to...
And China seems to be taking all forms of energy security seriously (intermittents as well as nuclear, combined with EVs).
Interesting, thank you for that.
Do you have a source for that and any context (eg: "not power" time being used for "experiments" related to UK military nuclear uses, etc)?
No context sorry - there are enough experimental reactors in the UK for experimentation without interruption the commercial fleet.
What would be interesting is expected vs unexpected downtime, some sort of reliability factor.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c9a5d37ed915...
No drama, good link, thank you.
It appears approx ballpark with Europe reactors and as if they're designed with a 70% of max load operating target to allow for downtime inspections and statutory fettling, etc.
To be fair the European average (depending on which average that is) is skewed by France where the reactors load-follow.
60 years
Dogger Bank Wind Farm
Thats a very good comparison-- to be fair though, 3.2GW nuclear are comparable to pretty much the whole Dogger Bank (including Sofia/South) at ~8GW (nameplate power), because offshore capacity factor is about ~40% in the UK.
Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!).
It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35billion is still competitive, cost-wise, with the offshore wind farm.
Dogger Bank will when fully built-out at a cost of some £11bn.
Lifetime cost will be much lower - near 0 staff - no anti-terrorism policing operation - no fuel. If it were onshore, cost would be significantly cheaper and would be able to scale onto the grid and generate revenue (nearly) one turbine at a time as they are installed which makes a massive difference for financing and servicing a debt.
Cost wise certainly not orders of magnitude difference, and it is competitive. The sensible non partisan thinkers out there know it isn't a choice of building one or the other, you build both.
£11Bn is just Dogger Bank A, B, C (which is only 3.6GW total nameplate power, not 8GW)-- but this is in fact where my "~£20Bn total cost" estimate came from :P
Maintenance cost for offshore wind is NOT negligible. This is possibly as high as the reactor maintenance cost already by itself. Then, for a fair comparison, you would also have to add costs for improving grid connectivity and/or local battery storage...
I'm not arguing for more nuclear power btw, just honestly suprised that the expensive reactor is somewhat competitive, still...
Definitely not negligible.
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/10/19/very-intense-r...
Ahh fair comparison!
GE's 170 full-time turbine servicing jobs for Dogger Bank phases A, B and C will be based out of the Port of Tyne. That is more staff than I would have guessed, one worker for every 1.6 turbines!
Does the $35billion also include decommissioning the nuclear reactor and storing the nuclear waste for the duration at which it is considered harmful? If not, then what amount are we talking approximately if that was accounted for as well?
Rough estimate for decomissioning the reactor could be something like £5Bn.
Decomissioning the offshore wind turbines could get into the same range though, assuming £400M per installed GW (nameplate), this would be £3.2Bn
Numbers need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
Pretty good for a rough estimate!
The best I could find was a document by the National Audit Office from 2017 (using 2016 estimates); page 18, figure 2 - The expected costs of Hinkley Point C.
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...
Back then the construction was estimated at £18.2 billion. Ongoing operation costs (including fuel, staffing, and grid charges) were priced at £29.3 billion and decommissioning (without the uplift) at £7.3 billion. Total project cost was put at £54.8 billion.
Again, it was from 2017 so things have changed.
The report states plant decommissioning is 2.7B GBP and ILW disposal is 0.3B GBP. That sort of agrees with https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792 which puts PWR at perhaps 1B USD per plant.
Handling and disposing on the used fuel is 4.4B GBP (or 73M GBP per year of running, or 2.6 GBP per MWh of electricity). Cheap!
Do you mean it's competitive due to the longer lifetime?
Is the operation cost of the reactor over such a long duration not significant?
Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
> Do you mean it's competitive due to the longer lifetime? > Is the operation cost of the reactor over such a long duration not significant?
Yes. Also because maintenance costs are probably somewhat similar-- offshore turbines are still mechanical systems in a very unpleasant environment, after all.
> Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
Yes-- the turbines give you 8GW, but only 40% of the time. Reactor gives you its ~3GW basically all the time. This difference would NOT be erased by storage-- you would need the storage on top of the windpower, but it is not trivial to tell how much storage you really need (electrical grid connectivity can also somewhat compensate, or large consumers that only turn on when energy is cheap...).
Interesting. I've been reading about the much lower costs of grid level storage and the fact that it's now getting into economies of scale. I also assume there's a lot of room for cost reduction in wind over the next decade, while I'm guessing Nuclear won't see the same level of changes. Won't this change the situation significantly over the next decade.
> I also assume there's a lot of room for cost reduction in wind over the next decade
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/giant-windf...
What are the reasons behind believing prices will reduce further?
> I'm guessing Nuclear won't see the same level of changes
Parsons says the second reactor is being built 20% more quickly than the first one.
Parsons says he expects that Sizewell will be built between 20% and 30% faster than the second Hinkley reactor.
> What are the reasons behind believing prices will reduce further?
Economies of scale and room for technological/process innovation. The fact that solar reduced so significantly and battery costs too. This article seems a bit cherry picked about a specific project and not a global trend in costs. Offshore will naturally take time to become competitive since it requires complex installation and processes, but those seem like solvable problems for an admittedly laymen as myself.
> Economies of scale and room for technological/process innovation.
This applies when going from 1 to 2 to 4 reactors.
See https://www.oecd-nea.org/mdep/events/conf-2023/presentations... page 27 for the Chinese approach to HPR1000 (Hualong One) innovation.
Plus the linked article mentioned improvements to manufacturing outside the constraints of the containment.
Nuclear needs for more specialist disciplines than turbine maintenance. The systems are more complex. And you have to deal with a wider range of hazards. All whilst having the worlds most onerous rules.
Yeah, that's one point that gets lost in the brouhaha over nuclear cost overruns:
Even the most catastrophic nuclear projects are competitive if not better than the best renewable projects.
Yeah, I know this sounds like frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboiism, but run the numbers!
I did, and once I did I started sounding like a frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboi.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Looking at the numbers for this, I don't see how it is better or even competitive at today's cost. Not taking into account the operating costs and decommissioning costs.
Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper. In 30 years it might cost much less. How can Nuclear compete?
> and decommissioning costs
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
So perhaps 1B-2B USD a plant. 2,000,000,000/(60 * 1,600 * 365 * 24 * .9) = 2.6 USD/MWh
> Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper.
Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6? Wind farm costs have exploded, and turbine manufacturers are having reliability issues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-are-issues-with...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vineyard-wind-incide...
> Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6?
Bidders have to sell the government the electricity at the strike price. They pushed up the strike price to £54.23/MWh from a previous of £37.35/MWh with a current market price of £70-£80/MWh.
Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100 (and where you could sell it for £300-£500 when the crisis occurred in 2021 / 2022).
> Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100
The beauty of the CfD scheme is that you can choose when to start using it. But once you're in you're in, you're in until the end of the 15 years.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/significant-commercial-incent....
In truth I think it will be a mug's game to build offshore wind without a CfD. See https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... for a view of what the day-ahead auction will turn into in a few years.
> How can Nuclear compete?
A factory built plant or any economies of scale.
Start a company with a mobile workforce and go country to country building 5 or more large scale reactors in parallel in each country.
Small scale reactors (again factory built) are the other alternative. They would have to be installed in a 'farm' together for security reasons.
Even 4 stick-built reactors in a row is pretty good; look at Barakah in UAE, South Korea, China and Canada (Darlington, Pickering, Bruce).
Each phase will have an installed generation capacity of 1.2GW and represents a multi-billion pound investment. Combined, they will have an installed capacity of 3.6GW and will be capable of powering up to 6 million homes annually.
Sounds about right in scale .. how many homes in the UK in total?
The obligatory "what's the capacity factor" discussion should happen here; 40% to 50% might be reasonable, with highly correlated availability.
Additionally the wind farm requires backup (CCGT or OCGT), which cost money to sit there. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6556027d046ed... (take it with a pinch of salt) gives a figure of £80/kW/year for an H class CCGT; that's £250M/year (2015 prices).
Another talking point might be the lifetime of wind farms (20 or 25 years) versus 60 years design lifetime for the EPR. Note that there are lifetime extensions to 80 years being mooted in the US and Switzerland.
The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20.
> The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... tables Table 3.2a and 3.4a show that Korean CCGT cost 838 USD/kWe and Korean PWRs were 2157 USD/kWhe (all 2018 prices).
Anyhow, gas backup fuel costs (and carbon taxes) are where the real big costs are.
The Korean nuclear numbers are unbelievable. They certainly didn't come anywhere close to that in UAE (more like $6/W, and possibly more if the concurrent military deal was being used as a slush fund to hide overruns.)
> the concurrent military deal was being used as a slush fund
Citation?
> The Korean nuclear numbers are unbelievable
See https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Contract-awarded-for... and https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Contract-for-Shin-Ha... for construction deals relating to their latest reactors in South Korea.
> Citation?
There's no hard evidence, but the presence of the side deal does raise suspicions. S. Korea's nuclear industry has been notably corrupt, with many years of prison sentences being handed out.
I believe there was a defense pact to sweeten the deal, but that seems like relationship building on top of a very competitive bid for nuclear power stations.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/03/risky-business-south-koreas-...
> Additionally the wind farm requires backup (CCGT or OCGT), which cost money to sit there.
Or batteries, but yes.
Battery manufacturing capacity is growing fast, but still — figures from recent years as reported by the IAE are [2022: 1720 GWh, 2023: 2500 GWh], but that's global and I'm not sure if demand is currently driven (no pun intended) by vehicles or by grids.
Still, if those batteries need replacement every decade, that global manufacturing supply can backup 150 GW of generation if they each need an independent 1 week backup and can't e.g. just use a broader grid to get e.g. Spanish sun for any of that.
>Or batteries, but yes.
Grid batteries make sense for those 30 second to 30 minute outages but it seems unlikely that they would be viable for those 2 week cloudy windless spells we get.
My understanding is the UK plans to fill that gap with peaker gas plants with CCS. They are being contracted for a maximum of two weeks in the year.
There's a weakness in the way the National Grid works which means we don't fully utilise the battery capacity that's available
But in California batteries supply 20% of the power in the evening https://archive.is/IruIQ
I'm not saying we shouldn't use batteries, rather that they don't solve every problem. In particular they probably won't ever be suitable for week long outages.
Currently sure, hence the numbers I gave. Theoretically possible already, but the UK isn't buying 30% of global supply for the next decade.
Forecasts suggest supply will rise to the level where this is doable… but over the next decade or so of increasing global manufacturing capacity.
Considering what happened to global and local trade in the last decade, I'm not confident beyond 5 years, and even then only somewhat confident.
> Additionally the wind farm requires backup
So does a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear capacity should be around 90% when running baseload, with < 1 unplanned trip per year. The US have been very successful at getting the capacity factor higher; it is the cheapest way of producing more from the given assets. In addition the 10% unavailability is predictable and can be planned many months in advance (and can be delayed by a few weeks or so at lower power output). So multiple plants can plan their outages to not coincide ... one backup plant will serve as backup for more than one nuclear power stations.
However offshore wind has a capacity factor of 40% to 50%, and its lack of output is correlated with other wind farms. Therefore one backup power station can only really serve one wind farm.
Not only is it capacity factor but demand correlation that weights against the intermittents.
The UK’s average nuclear load factor for 1970 to 2017 was 67.4 per cent. Furthermore, France demonstrated the correlation of nuclear downtime in the summer of 2022 when it was too summery, compounded with overrunning maintenance. At its lowest point, France’s nuclear availability sat at around 40% of maximum capacity for about a month.
All single power generators need to be backed up for downtime.
> The UK’s average nuclear load factor for 1970 to 2017 was 67.4 per cent.
Finland's load factor over the last 3 years has been above 90%, as was the USA. Germany was up at 94% until ... stuff happened.
> At its lowest point, France’s nuclear availability sat at around 40% of maximum capacity for about a month.
Would they have shut down those reactors if alternatives were unavailable? I think they would have probably continued to run them, with permission of the regulators (at the behest of the government).
> All single power generators need to be backed up for downtime.
I'm not sure I follow what this statement means. What does "single" mean, as the preceeding comment talks about correlated downtime. Should we ensure that all methane plants are backed up too?
The French nuclear power stations are often built near rivers where the water was too hot for cooling or just not enough due to drought. The UK nuclear power stations are all on the coast drawing in much cooler sea water.
France has around 20GW on the coast (21,444MW including Flamanville 3).
Also France looks to have winter-dominated electrical demand (50TWh in January 2023, 40TWh in April, 37TWh in August, 46TWh in November). See https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/monthly-e... and select France.
Indeed. Though, as I said there are others next to rivers.
The map here:
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/map-where-are-frances-n...
shows 6 reactors on the coast, and 12 inland on rivers which are susceptible to summer river water temperatures and levels.
> susceptible to summer river water temperatures and levels
Yes, when the French grid needs them the least.
> installed capacity of 3.6GW
I'm not aware what the capacity factor for wind is in the north sea, I think it's about 25% globally.
> how many homes in the UK in total?
About 25 million.
(But also: ongoing political issue is that this isn't enough and housing is too exaggerated vs. vested interests in housing being expensive).
25% would be for onshore wind. I've seen claims as high as 69% for very large offshore wind turbines.
I recall a previous exchange on hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40336108
Offshore wind is at the extreme of renewables. It may or may not make sense, but it's not needed to kill nuclear.
Triton Knoll (855MW from 90 × 9.5 MW turbines) generated 1,687,138 MWh in 2024H1, giving a capacity of 45.1% for this larger turbine.
Source :- https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generati... and doing pivots on the table.
> how many homes in the UK in total?
About 25 million it seems.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/378391/uk-england-housin...
Thing is, "capacity" is the maximum generation in ideal conditions, so for wind the actual produced amount will be much lower than this.
The Dogger Bank Wind site recognises this and bases the number of households serviced on proven reasonable wind conditions (apparently)
6 million homes powered per annum based on Typical Domestic Consumption Values (Medium Electricity Profile Class 1, 2,900kWh per household; OFGEM, January 2021), typical 55% wind load factor, and projected installed capacity of 3.6GW.Right, but doesn't that mean projected output of 55% of 3.6Gw? i.e., about 2GW
There's probably a more detailed report to be found if you go looking, and
the same qualifications apply to the nuclear reactors and turbines - it's unlikely they'll always run at peak all the time either.
The UK is a bit of a special case here. Although what you said is literally true, our wind energy has only 5% of the country's capacity, but provides nearly 30% of the consumed energy.
It will produce annually, about as much electricity as UK produces now from solar. Which is installed at a much faster clip than these two sad reactors are built, even if UK is one of the worst countries for solar in the civilised world due to expensive land and terrible weather.
What's even the point? Maybe this reactor is a live testament to the observation that "any new nuclear starting construction today will be obsolete before it's completed, due to competition from renewables"? It's been started almost 10 years ago and it seems to be already there.
That the energy is produced during night, winter and heavily overcast times...
There is storage for that, which is now finally, available, inexpensive and safe. Plus, it's long since proven that with moderate losses, renewable electricity system that combines solar, wind, and hydro, does not need any storage at all, or very moderate amounts of storage to achieve no or almost no losses.
Is there? What storage?
https://www.energy-storage.news/massive-growth-potential-con...
> The energy storage market in the UK is currently experiencing substantial growth, as evidenced by the current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh, projected to increase to 7.4GW/11.6GWh by the end of 2024.
https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design
500MW/1GWh of batteries will cost 254M USD (in California Q2 2025). Assuming a 10% revenue per year, and cycling once a day implies a storage cost of 24500000/365/1000 = 67 USD/MWh.
We only have so many lochs/valleys, realistically we will need to rely on batteries after about 20GWH or so.
"4.6GW" - that means that after 1h the 4.6GW are gone?
no, 5.9GWh, so after 1 hour at 4.6GW we could do another hour at 1.3 GW (or another 16 Mins at 4.6HW)
~76 mins at 4.6GW.
Too bad the nights a little bit more than 76 minutes.
Nobody claimed that the current battery capacity is sufficient to last a night. The interesting part is the growth curve of available storage.
Going from 76 minutes to a full British night (which can last up to 16 hours in winter!) is going to need a heck of a growth curve indeed.
Less than four doublings is not a lot. We’re at the beginning of the storage expansion. The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.
> The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.
The answer to this one is a pretty straightforward never. You have to realize that such a storage will sit duck most of the time, making it impossible to get any return on investment on it.
There are power plants today that are being paid for standing by idle, so clearly you can make money by just providing emergency backup even when it's never used.
Indeed. We can only have a small amount of solar, but wind keeps blowing at night, Nucular continues, biomas too. The gap we need to bridge most urgently is turning off gas generation. Take a look here, https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical the majority of "turning off gas" is daytime demand that needs to be covered.
> wind keeps blowing at night
But stops during anticyclones, which can last several weeks (that makes it completely unfeasible to use wind power with gas as a backup, because there's no way we can build several weeks worth of storage).
> Nucular continues
The problem is that nuclear plants cost is roughly the same no matter if they produce or not, so nuclear + solar is strictly costlier than just nuclear.
Solar in a country as cloudy and rainy as the UK, and one that is so far north it gets very long nights in winter, doesn't make make any sense whatsoever.
Most countries have the infrastructure to store several weeks worth of methane. That can be repurposed to store hydrogen.
It can theoretically be repurposed, but hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane and thus leaks in existing methane installations. Given that it is also much more dangerous when it leaks (it explodes much more easily than methane), that means reworking all the infrastructure around the storage site, which ain't free.
Also, producing hydrogen from electricity requires lots of investments in terms of conversion units, and the economics is already dubious even when they run 100% of the time, so using it just for absorbing excess production a fraction of the year really isn't economical. In addition, what are you going to do with the hydrogen? Burns too hot for existing gas turbines so you'd need new ones. Fuel cells? That's expensive too.
There's a reason why everyone is betting on batteries instead of hydrogen, the economics of hydrogen is just too difficult.
And you know what? Even if you want to go full hydrogen, Nuclear + hydrogen is also more efficient than Wind + hydrogen since the hydrogen production units are going to be used at capacity more often, because wind is intermittent.
Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big. And not everybody is betting (only) on batteries. A mix of storage technologies is most likely the cheapest solution.
> Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big.
It's cheaper than running it on wind or solar, so no.
That’s a bold claim.
When you use an energy source with a 90% capacity factor instead of 40%, you can amortize the CAPEX twice as fast, and there's a lot of CAPEX involved in the business of making green hydrogen (that's most of the cost, actually since it assumes very little OPEX due to using excess (hence free) electricity).
You ignore the cost of overbuilding nuclear vs the cost of renewables. I doubt that you can make a convincing argument that fits in the HN comment box, since it's a rather complex topic.
I agree that this is a complex topic, and you definitely don't understand it as well as you think you do.
fyi all current hydrogen plants use either a mix with 50-70% gas or 100% hydrogen but are creating huge NOx as byproduct due to high temp burning. That's just one of the many hydrogen challenges, another one is H2 handling is harder, another one is the more renewables you get, the more your H2 plants would cost since in some periods you use them extensively, in others - very little and to compensate such infra cost&maintenance the plant owners will jack up the prices or seek govt price compensation. That's why many say hydrogen plants/energy is somewhat of a pipedream
[flagged]
Batteries?
lol, look at California and how much it imports & used gas. And that's WITH a nuclear plant. Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten
I am not sure what your point is honestly. Batteries are a very viable option for storage, competing cost wise with pump storage which has been in use for decades.
> Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten
Even existing storage solutions in Germany are already sufficient for the present day electricity network and build-out is progressing rapidly. The time for a nuclear build out was 20 years ago. We missed that window, now other technologies will prevail.
How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours? The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?
> How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours?
Because they bump coal, gas and imports in peak hours.
> The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?
I suppose you did not spend a lot of time researching this. That can be easily found by mere googling.
Um... No, Germany bumps them in offpeak hours https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE?lang=en You can also check their imports.
Sorry, I'm quite bad at googling, may you show me what you found regarding this topic? I mean how much energy storage does Germany need to not use fossils and to not import from neighbor states with fossil generation?
The UK has almost 7GW of shovel-ready pumped storage hydropower projects with over 135GWh storage capacity.
> There is storage for that
There literally isn't, it doesn't exist.
https://www.energy-storage.news/massive-growth-potential-con...
> current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh
Perhaps do some research before you speak of things you have no idea about
> 5.9GWh
In other words, energy storage to match what the nuke plant will be able to put out 24/7 literally doesn't exist.
Which means it can give back 4.6GW for approximately an hour and 15 minutes. After that it is empty.
Yeah, that's why California with >10GW of installed battery is not using gas/not importing at all in off peak hours... Oh wait
I know it is hard to grasp trends when you are dead set on seeing nuclear power as the only solution, but maybe look at the curves?
California has vastly reduced the fossil gas usage due to storage. It will only continue. Are they done? No, are we seeing massive change year by year? Yes.
I do certainly see how batteries are extending the renewables supply. I also see that there's still a lot of work to do: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO
In the same sense this reactor doesn't exist?
Yes, anybody speaking as though this reactor already exists is wrong.
Well HPC exists, it's not operational yet (and won't be before several years) but it does exist.
And equivalent storage doesn't exist not as a WIP, not even as a project.
Storage can go from planned to installed in a very short time, much shorter than a nuclear power plant, so that doesn't mean much. Storage prices are declining and installs are expanding with short time constants as well.
The whole skeptical approach here smells strongly of ignoring rapid exponential change, which is pretty remarkable for a SV associated forum like HN.
> Storage can go from planned to installed in a very short time,
No it cannot, when you start building large hazardous (because of fire risk) facilities, then you face the same kind of red tape that you face with any big projects. Storage also requires adapting the electric grid to allow the energy to flow from and to the storage facilities.
Believing storage is easy is just magical thinking.
Nuclear isn't different, it's just big by default. And the French example in the 80s shows that building mass nuclear from scratch is in fact tractable in under two decades.
And yet the energy prices are so high that they drive companies to cut production. Especially in countries which banked on renewables the most (along with gas).
there are several problems here: 1 - this nuc plant in uk is a 'customized' one because uk has different laws compared to france. As result when you want something custom for the first time - it's both expensive and time consuming. 2- solar/wind can be scaled faster leading to faster decarbonization but makes the grid more unstable, just like the prices. Some tell you can use batteries for this but battery tech isn't there yet, you need absolutely huge amounts of them to cover the deficit reliably,especially for uk. Transmission&balancing costs are huge too. Right now uk's strategy is gas + more imports, usually from france. Afaik there aren't any countries globally(without big hydro resources) with a clear plan to ditch gas and reduce imports from nonfossil neighbors to cover own needs with renewables, be that California or Germany. Even green hydrogen plans are still a pipedream. It's ironical that even Norway with huge hydro resources is considering kickstarting some new nuclear plants
One of the points is that if you have a nuclear powered navy, there needs to be a career path for disembarking reactor-techs.
This is in no small part the reason why the countries with nuclear powered navies are most eager to build new nuclear power reactors.
„Sans nucléaire civil, pas de nucléaire militaire“ as the French say…
The pro nuclear types hate these observations because they’re painfully true. Battery storage is already doing a lot in the UK (4.6GW/5.9GWh) and the huge solar build out is a no brainer.
Nuclear power is a dead end technology
Output of the discussed nuclear facility is 3.6GW, which means weekly production of 604.8 GWh, or around 100x as much as currently installed storage capacity.
And going into only one type of electricity production especially with the unpredictability of renewables is never wise.
Storage is almost useless at over 24 hours of daily peak capacity stored, and fulfils most of it's purpose at as little as 2-6 hours depending on the climate and solar/wind mix.
That's Hydro (and it's a bit more than that now).
i mean you can look here https://app.electricitymaps.com/map how much batteries are doing for uk vs gas/imports...
The budget overruns are predictable. To the point where you can confidently predict that neither year nor the budget will stay as they are currently predicting. Honestly, it sounds more like wishful thinking at this point. I would say late 2030s at probably > 40 billion is realistic. They'll find a way to make it worse. Maybe they'll get lucky and only overrun only a few billion. Every year it overruns will cost billions.
The reasons listed in the article dance around the real underlying reasons and causes which relate to nuclear plants being a once in a generation kind of thing at this point. Most of the people executing these projects are on their first nuclear project. And they have to re-learn a lot of the things that make these projects complicated. There is no learning effect between projects. And in so far there is, it seems to be a negative one. And by the time they are done, there's a new generation that needs to build the next one.
The timescale doesn't help either because lots of things change and assumptions get broken. For example the relationship with China looks a lot less cozy than it did ten years ago. And that might change substantially again in the next ten. So them being a major partner in this project complicates things. In the same way, the relationship with Russia changed so relying on them for supplying the fuel rods might not be as good as an idea as it was back when Finland started planning its plant (the predecessor to this one). It's hard to predict these things on a multi decade scale. So, we're talking major changes with suppliers, project participants, and probably technology as well. And the competition.
The reason renewables are running circles around everything else is because planning cycles are short (<1-2 years), knowledge isn't lost in between projects, and consequently these projects are fairly predictable in terms of budgets and generally low risk. There's still some risk but most of that is bureaucracy. And it gets better with each project because of learning effects. Once you've done 100 wind mills, doing a 1000 more is going to be a lot easier.
Hinkley point C is about 3.4 GW of energy. Not nothing. But the UK has added a multitude in wind and solar since planning started and will add another multitude of energy by its completion (whenever that is). It's not even going to be close. Coal had a major market share when planning started (more than nuclear). The last coal plant in the UK closed last month. By the time this nuclear plant opens that will be ancient history and most of the grid in the UK will be wind, solar, batteries, imported power from abroad (cables), and a few gas plants. The good news would be getting rid of those remaining gas plants.
Indeed, we may as well finish it, certainly, but it's going to reduce appetite for future nuclear schemes enormously. Realistically I think small reactors are our last hope for net new nuclear in the UK - if we don't get them we'll end up with Wind/Solar and storage.
> I think small reactors are our last hope for net new nuclear
Sizewell C appears to be moving along; nevertheless Ed Milliband has not vocally supported the project (despite the junior minister Lord Hunt visiting the site last month and Keir Stamer visiting last year).
What is most curious is that the announcement of up to £5.5B of extra funding (taking funding up to £8B so perhaps 1/3 of final project cost) until the final investment decision was not performed by a minister; usually this level of investment would merit a great fanfare.
https://www.sizewellc.com/news-views/keir-starmer-hpc-visit-...
https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/lord/lord-hunt-of-kings...
We will seek to extend the lifetime of existing nuclear power plants while supporting the completion of new sites, such as Sizewell C.
Sizewell C joint managing directors Julia Pyke and Nigel Cann said the Devex Scheme is “significant support from the government and it further strengthens the position of this project, which is now full steam ahead”.I guess we have to wait and see.
Imported power is interesting as when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine for us, it’s the same for other countries bordering the North Sea. So if they’ve gone green we’re all looking for electricity on those days and it’s expensive. And the reverse. On the days when we have too much wind and too much electricity prices drop to zero because we can’t export it for the same reason.
There's a mix of solar, hydro, wind, and battery connected by cables. Weather effects tend to be localized. Continental calm, cloudy conditions are not that common and globally not a thing at all. Certainly not for longer periods of time. And weather and seasonal variation is reasonably predictable so that could be an opportunity to fire up some gas plants as a last resort.
On the solution side there are a few more tools that might be deployed in the UK:
- Demand shaping and price incentives. E.g. when to plugin your car or when to start charging it. Octopus is a big energy provider that is very active on this front. They are also the largest energy provider in the UK and they license their solution to others. So, the UK is ready for this. And with millions of connected users, they could shift a few GW in demand simply by fiddling with e.g. car charging schedules, boiler heating schedule, etc.
- Localized pricing. This is a topic that is a bit sensitive in the UK. But effectively prices in Scotland are high when there is demand in the South; even though they are generating lots of wind that cannot be exported south because there is no cable capacity. So you get high prices (because the gas used down south is expensive) for energy combined with overproduction. Localized pricing would stimulate using the power closer to where it is generated. And it would incentivize investing in power generation where it is needed instead of in random places on the map.
- Virtual power plants. Octopus is getting into this as well. This would add many GW of battery to their mix.
The nice thing with these three solutions is that it doesn't require a huge investment in infrastructure and improves utilization of existing infrastructure.
Finally good news from the UK!