💾 Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz › thread › 24947621 captured on 2020-10-31 at 01:03:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
________________________________________________________________________________
The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091
https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...
Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels.
Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions.
If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively wind farm to charge them, and have enough capacity to carry through any weather, then cheaper is better. If someone can more cheaply drill into the earth core and use thermal heat (an other promising technology) then great!
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. It is costly, and by the look from the private companies involved a bit financially risky, but continuing burning fossil fuels is bad enough that all alternatives should be used until the last fossil fueled power plant get demolished.
> Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels.
Maybe it won’t be a lot once built, but fuel extraction and processing are energy intensive. Also, 10 years of construction and the vast quantity of steel and concrete are going to burn one hell of a lot of fossil fuel.
It would be interesting to compare the lifetime fossil fuel usage of all power generators, including construction and disposal (and waste storage).
Nuclear and offshore wind are equivalent (median: 12 gCO2eq/kWh)
Source: IPCC, 2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Fair comparison here is overall energy invested for energy obtained. For nuclear, as it is much denser energy-wise then anything else, you need to do the least amount of digging per MW capacity / let alone overall produced MWh. Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options. For example for solar it is about 6, versus 75 for nuclear. [1]
Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear fuel is. [2]
[1]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-to...
[2]
Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.
The UK grid is on track to eventually becoming fossil free, although there will likely be a long 'tail' period where natural gas backup plants still operate during periods of unusually high demand and/or restricted supply.
2020 will very likely be the first year that renewables overtake fossil fuels in total electricity generated.
Here's a satisfying video of UK coal-fired power plants being demolished:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-52985841
If only countries could work together to institute a global carbon tax. Pollute too much - pay the tax. Don't pollute - great and, if you are poor/developing, here is help (funded by polluters) to stay that way while still being able to develop.
It’s amazing they could all come together to make sure people couldn’t pirate movies and music and video games. But save the planet? Nah.
We don't need anywhere near global consensus, a small group of nations can start. The idea is called a "climate club", and it won William Nordhaus a Nobel Prize.
https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
The problem is the largest CO2 polluting country is unwilling to join any such agreements. This is true now and it was true 30 years ago.
Put taxes on imports from big polluters. That will make them tow the line. Frankly it should have been the approach from the start to avoid need for cooperation.
So levy punitive tariffs against it, and anyone else who does not sign onto a carbon tax.
I don’t think the Europe Union really wants a trade war with the US. Basically, Germany is the weak spot in this. They are an export driven economy and a US embargo on Germany would be devastating.
> One of the reasons that the electricity that Hinkley will one day produce is so expensive (ÂŁ92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with gas and wind at about ÂŁ40) is that the constructors were required to shoulder the risk of any cost overruns themselves. EDF estimates that the cost of electricity produced at Sizewell will be somewhere between ÂŁ40 and ÂŁ60.
So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be _at best_ as expensive as wind energy _already_ is.
Of course nuclear power plants can still generate electricity on a windless day, but if they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Perhaps the (estimated) ÂŁ20 billion could be spent on energy storage projects like Vehicle-to-Grid distribution or hydrogen generation, which should be even more competitive 10 years from now when this power plant is supposed to start operating.
Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy due to failed nuclear construction in the U.S.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos...
Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva
It's always astonishing how hydro and nuclear are so much better handled by SoEs like EDF or HydroQuebec that manage to turn a profit too, while private companies can never do it well.
EDF _is_ the "private company" which is building Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C.
For Hinkley, EDF have assumed the construction risk in return for an exceptionally high, guaranteed "strike price" for the electricity it produces.
But for Sizewell, it sounds like a different finance arrangement will be in place, likely where the UK government/public assumes more of the risk in return for a cheaper per-MWh price.
Private company mostly owned by the French Government.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/inves...
The main advantage that EDF has that allows it to work well isn't that effective out of France. They still do good work, but they act much more like a private company than an SoE, which is why it's so much more successful in France.
Well, EDF have not been so successful with their most recent project in France, Flamanville 3.
Construction started in 2007, with estimated completion in 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion.
As of 2020, the plant is still not complete and the cost has spiralled to €19.1 billion. It is now tentatively planned to go online at the end of 2022.
Comparatively to other nuclear companies and in aggregate, EDF has the best safety record, the cheapest energy when subsidies are taken out, and is solidly profitable. That one or two constructions went overbudget does not matter if the result is still head and shoulders ahead of the fray.
> The others are already over budget and behind schedule
The reason why is important though. Is it because of:
1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?
2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?
It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.
My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.
There may well be other contributing factors than the quite narrow two you offer.
Reading some of Jeremy Leggett's analysis of nuclear in the region, notably Flamanville and Hinkley, is highly enlightening.
From inability to plan or produce sufficiently high quality components, and then challenges getting them into place without damaging them, low quality work being undertaken in the construction process [1], government hiding details of contractual arrangements, a consistent (and predicted) drop in the price of power before and through the lives of these projects, industry players being painted into a corner where they must [try to] grow their business despite the above [2], combined with a surfeit of hubris all round.
[1]
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/10/edf-warns-o...
[2]
https://jeremyleggett.net/2016/06/03/the-nuclear-white-eleph...
Construction projects are inherently unpredictable, because it's building something large, bespoke, and in constantly varying conditions. Nuclear plants are very complex, so that obviously raises the level of unpredictability.
Every manufactured object has an insanely long and convoluted dependency chain, where each link is subject to disappearance due to factors completely out of your control. Especially objects that require special or unusual parts.
Then there's actually building the thing, which can go wrong for a million reasons before you've even reached the grand and rolling lands of human error.
> Construction projects are inherently unpredictable
And yet, renewable projects typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
Article says:
"However, the BBC understands that the fact Sizewell C is a carbon copy of Hinkley - which has seen work on a second reactor there completed 30% more quickly than the first - is thought to have substantially mitigated that risk."
It sounds like it should be pretty easy to budget for this plant. Plans are allowed to include a 20% "we don't know what this is going to be spent on but something will come up" for surprises.
It's a job stimulus package, creating 10000 jobs and advertising this(whether or not it eventuates) is the reason for giving this project the green light.
I think you're right. Though for 2mil quid a job, we could have done better just picking people and sending them cheques imho...
It's a 10 year project. 2 mil becomes 200k per year. Still a lot, but then it's not really a purely job project. If you send 10000 people 200k per year you will end up with the same hole in your pockets of 20 billion after 10 years, but with a nuclear power plant less. And 10000 people with zero work experience.
Chances are that 10 years from now you're still going to be money in the hole with no nuclear power plant. Both scenarios have no plant after 10 years.
Sizewell C will be a "carbon copy" of Hinkley Point C, with construction equipment and personnel moving over to Sizewell as Hinkley is finished.
This should significantly reduce construction risk, as you have an experienced team who already understand how to build the thing.
At this point probably only the Chinese, Korean and Russian that can build Nuclear Power Plant properly.
Good news for the climate and the environment!
Better news if they had put the money into renewables and storage.
Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables.
If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight.
That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents of renewables.
If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells.
Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.
Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment.
It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.
Land costs are not a big issue, especially when looking at the world as a whole. In much of the US, for example, the cost of putting solar equipment on some land is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the land itself. If a country is land constrained, then in an era of cheap solar they'll lose heavy industry to other countries with more land.
If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour.
It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent.
Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
It IS an either-or situation. Nuclear is terrible for backing up renewables. We don't need a diversified portfolio, we need a sufficiently reliable portfolio at minimum cost. This will likely involve no new nuclear plants; they're too expensive.
What should we replace consistent reliable baseline energy with?
Renewables + storage (both short and long term). At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper. Building expensive baseload now is a recipe for stranded assets not far down the road.
> At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper.
As you imply here, it is not cheaper now, and plan something on hopes that it will be seems not very prudent.
Past performance is not indicative of future one.
We don't know what technical and engineering problems will surface when building battery packs orders of magnitude bigger than current biggest ones.
Can you explain a little more about the storage part of this? I see renewables and storage mentioned every time this topic comes up. It seems like we've got the solar panels and wind turbines figured out, but I'm skeptical on the storage part. I tried doing some research myself, but everything I find reads like a press release from a company that is attempting some kind of storage. As far as I can tell, there is no actual large-scale storage operating anywhere, other than pumped hydro, which we've known about for a long time, and can't be scaled unless we start building mountains.
I mentioned I'm skeptical, but I'm genuinely asking, because I've never seen anyone ask about it.
There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
You could put all the nuclear waste the US has _ever_ produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high.
Roughly 83,000 metric tons.
Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment.
Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
> The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
Concrete and a train is the usual method.
Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a _lot_ of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume!
Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol.
With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel.
Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
> Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy.
Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge.
The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will.
The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech.
This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
Burn it and distribute it in the atmosphere like coal plants do, and it won't be that big of a deal.
Can you do better than that? Sure. Leaving it sitting onsite until there's enough will to do reprocessing is probably better.
Do you actually have evidence of this? Because I have evidence to the contrary.
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example).
We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own.
Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
The Catholic Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire and among the oldest institutions - competitors are China, Ethiopia, etc
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term.
There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is _VERY_ much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
_Its not the will of the voting public._
To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
So it is true.
In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
Here’s an article discussing the costs more: “The Hinkley Point C case: is nuclear energy expensive?”
https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-cas...
I am not all negative to nuclear power but large nuclear reactors is not the way. They are always over budget and delayed. Put the money in next generation nuclear power like small molten salt reactors, batteries and renewables.
How long and how much will take to build a next generation nuclear power plant like with a small molten salt reactor ? Will it be like, twice cheaper and twice faster to build ? If so, why is it not happening ?
Inertia of the industry combined with risk aversion. Nuclear regulation is not really setup for small modular reactors and nuclear power still has a bad name.
The nuclear fanboys still push the big reactors. I think renewable fans like me favor next gen rectors because we are okay with not building reactors right away. We can build renewables until they are developed. Nuclear fans OTOH hate renewables and just want to build whatever is possible right now.
So we are in a situation where nuclear fans are not pushing it and most renewable fans think all nuclear power is like the current shitty big reactors.
I see, so we can quickly build cheap & safe small molten salt reactors but we actually don't build because of risk aversion and industry inertia so that's really a shame (I thought the tech just wasn't ready yet).
Another problem is nuclear fanboys: why exactly do they hate renewables so much ?
Astounds me how so many people can be pro nuclear in opposition to fossil fuels - the instant impact is obviously much better, but the risk if something goes wrong is so catastrophically higher that the increased risk with each plant seems a huge gamble.
Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?
You sound like somebody who has never seen any statistics on nuclear death rates and waste volume because in both cases it is the best of the current options.