Should Ireland go Nuclear?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118136063#Comment_118136063

The more this anti-nuclear nonsense drags on, the more I am convinced that the anti's don't really care about reducing CO2 emissions.

🙄

Kermit.de.frog

Should Ireland embrace nuclear power? - yes.

Will we? No, because there is an irrational fear about it among some sections of society.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118136063#Comment_118136063

Who said batteries ? I prefer the plan to use old gas fields for green hydrogen. Grid scale storage using existing infrastructure. Demand shedding using something like Climote is even cheaper. And insulation reduceds the demand forever.

Back in 2017 the UAE targetted an energy mix of 44% renewables, 38% gas, 12% clean coal, and 6% nuclear , just 6% !

The UAE is a rich, desert country where some foreign workers face appalling conditions, so it would take much longer to build such power plant here. And much longer to pay back the sunk costs.

See also solar-powered green hydrogen plant at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai. where they also have thermal storage.

Or you could use hot sand to store energy.

At 1,100 degrees c you should get decent Carnot efficiency and economies of scale.

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118136183#Comment_118136183

So my statement WAS true , but is now uncertain - and they're not saying anything till after an election cycle - in a country that largely approves of nuclear ...

French electricity depends on nuclear - and that whole system has been massively subsidized by the french state -the cheap electricity prices are a result of this -

Frances nuclear industry doesn't have a great history of coming in on time and on budget , especially in recent decades -

But if they succeed in making cost effective small modular reactors then brilliant .. it's gonna be a while before we know are they gonna be reliable -

And even then those small nukes are going to need to be matched to energy storage systems to handle peaking -

cgcsb

Costs way too much at present. Affordable smaller reactors with minimal waste have been promised for a long time but still nothing commercially available.

If it becomes affordable to buy smaller reactors then it should definitely be used but at the minute it's impractical for Ireland. It's impractical for the UK also but they're pressing ahead none the less.

Sam Russell

Not to worry too much - fusion reactors are only a decade or two away - as they have been for the last 50 years, but are actually further away than ever. Affordable fission reactors are also only a decade away - as they have been for the last fifty years. However, the promises are getting louder, and less believable.

Nuclear energy was going to be so cheap it would not be metered, which turned out not only to be not true, but the opposite was true - it was so expensive, it had to be subsidised greatly, and by more as each generation passes.

How much of the civilian nuclear industry is dependant on the military nuclear industry? [Genuine question]

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118138019#Comment_118138019

The big problem with fusion is that so little money is spent on the research. Hinkley C will cost more than the ITER.

The military have been building breeder reactors in volume since 1944 for plutonium production. But the industry still haven't got much past over unity. So over 99% of the uranium is wasted and thorium is still a pipe dream.

Also current reactors are temperature limited by coolant, cladding materials, expansion at phase change temperatures etc. etc. By the 1960's reactors with temperatures of 3000K were being built and tested for the space program. They weren't deployed but they'd have a much higher Carnot efficiency than any of today's reactors.

So the most efficient nuclear reactors should be able to deliver 300 times the energy from their fuel that today's ones do.

Sam Russell

The problem as I see it with nuclear fission is it is a system that is trying to contain and control a nuclear bomb.

We manage to contain petrol (which is an explosive) because we only put a tiny bit in the cylinder and then spark it. If only the same could be done with a tiny bit of plutonium. However, plutonium lets off a lot more than just fumes, and radiation is deadly to us humans. It is for that reason that we are fearful of it, and do not want it anywhere near us.

Tomatoes, which are related to Belladonna or Deadly Night Shade, were always considered poisonous because of that relationship. Who in pre Victorian times, would think we consume so much of them today?

If only nuclear matter could be proved harmless to humans.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118139922#Comment_118139922

Fossil fuels due to their volatility and their emissions are also harmful to humans - it doesnt stop their use either.

The harm to humans from nuclear fission can be contained - the idea that its harmful if exposed therefore we should not use it is absurd. Electricity would fit that criteria, so too would general combustion (fire) and a whole heap of other stuff.

Humans have always dealt with potentially dangerous stuff, but we learn and we create ways to harness these things and to use them safely. Your own example of petrol in a combustion engine is the same - its dangerous and explosive but we create ways to harness it safely. How many people are killed by their car engine exploding? Not many.

No reason nuclear fission cannot reach the same levels of safety too - but in order for it to get that safe and that cheap, it first needs widespread adoption. For decades nuclear has been smeared as a disaster waiting to happen (by the fossil fuel industries no less) which has massively hampered adoption, and in turn set back nuclear research decades. Only with more widespread use of nuclear will we see rapid advancement of the technology.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140095#Comment_118140095

So you are saying nuclear won't be safe and cheap unless there's widespread adoption. ?

And the plan is to keep throwing loads of money at the wall until it is ?

You can't cut corners with nuclear power because it will bite you hard. So you can't do it on the cheap and when you start to spend tens of billions per nuclear power plant then renewables and storage are a lot cheaper.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140549#Comment_118140549

No, I'm saying nuclear will get safer and cheaper with greater adoption. Like just about all energy technologies.

Its already very safe, most plants across Europe and NA have had no safety issues - it would probably surprise you and most of the population to learn just how many nuclear plants there are, and how long theyve been around. People assume its all chernobyl/fukushima and thats it.

Renewables are cheaper due to massive subsidies for years to initially get the cost down and encourage adoption - yet you denounce the fact that nuclear should get the same subsidies. The reality is nuclear is the most energy dense source of fuel, it has the smallest footprint per W produced, and it is clean.

Relying on solar & wind power alone also makes us increasingly reliant on several other countries for materials too, we will always be replacing and sourcing new turbines and solar panels and needing to source them from China. Uranium is sourced all over the world, but there may even be deposits of it domestically too.

gjim

"No, I'm saying nuclear will get safer and cheaper with greater adoption."

Nuclear already went through a 2 decade run when it was popular, favoured and heavily subsidised by governments the world over - back in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite this it never "kicked on" - in terms of getting cheaper or quicker to build. The opposite is what happened as reactor sizes got bigger and bigger, there was no reduction in price to compensate for the greater scale.

In total it's been around for civilian electricity production for nearly 70 years. How many more chances does it need?

Nuclear's day is over globally and it would be madness for a small country like Ireland to decide to buck a 3 decade global trend of steep declines in new nuclear installation, in the hope that building 2 or 3 nuclear reactors will have any sort of effect on global prices.

Nuclear's heyday was at a time when oil prices were high and fossil fuel generation was very inefficient. It lost to natural gas and coal back in the 1990s but these days the competitor landscape is a lot worse - it has no chance against wind, solar or batteries - where most of the cost goes into mass-produced components.

I don't think this factor - that solar, wind and batteries have the power of mass-production driving them forward is appreciated. Mass-production has started a revolution in the energy industry - like Henry Ford did in transport a century ago - and that genie isn't going back in the bottle. Mass-production has already delivered 95%, 90% and 85% reductions in cost for batteries, solar and wind in one decade. Anyone betting on a future of energy where it's not going to continue to deliver is naive. There are countless examples in history of mass-production beating "theoretically better" technologies - like when PCs killed mainframes.

Suggesting we go back to hugely complex, expensive and risky "big engineering" solutions for power generation - like nuclear - in an age where competitors like solar PV, wind turbines and grid-scale batteries use cheap, risk-free mass-production makes little sense.

Markcheese

There's a very logical argument that the nuclear power industry has to relearn the construction skills needed to build power stations , because there was a generational gap between the plants of the 80s and now. Except the plants built in the 80s were subject to hive delays and cost overruns as well ..

Just one problem with wanting everyone to go nuclear...well there's actually a long list of problems, but I'll go with the main one, its a fossil fuel therefore its supply is finite

Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. (Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141418#Comment_118141418

Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified.)

The scarcer it becomes the more it is justified to extract the harder to get at stuff. Just like oil and gas. And lithium and other rate earth minerals. Theres loads that are uneconomical at present to extract, but later when the price goes up its economical. Hardly a revelation.

smurfjed

What about thIS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/qpzp2j/rollsroyce_gets_funding_to_develop_mini_nuclear/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141762#Comment_118141762

Sounds great, will be interesting to see how much demand there is if they ever manage to get one built and brought to market

Still won't be used on the island of Ireland though

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141457#Comment_118141457

That's very true , and the more difficult it is to mine and refine the more energy (probably diesel ,but possibly hydrogen as well ) it will take to obtain ...

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141762#Comment_118141762

Great news, except for the BBC acting as an uncritical mouthpiece for lying greenies:

"Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies"

That is a lie. To configure a renewables based system incorporating Li-ion batteries that can store excess power so it's net output is a 24/7/365 power souce, is more expensive than current nuclear costs. Battery costs are still currently 8 times higher than would allow for comparable cost and will still be 3 times higher than needed in 2050, by industry estimates.

If SMR's can actually deliver cheaper power than conventional nuclear, the cost disparity would be even greater.

charlie_says

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118136397#Comment_118136397

Pretty much exactly what I was going to say.

The global anti nuclear lobby has been incredibly successful.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118141762#Comment_118141762

Doesn't really mean much, they have raised some private finance. Many SMR projects have done similar in the past and failed to deliver.

The UK government still hasn't ordered even one of these reactors (though they have given funding for R&D).

Don't get me wrong, it is a step in the right direction for the project, but only a drop in the ocean for the amount of money they will need to build even one reactor, still a very long way to go for this project.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140598#Comment_118140598

No, I'm saying nuclear will get safer and cheaper with greater adoption. Like just about all energy technologies.

So you should invest in the other energy technologies instead as they can deliver low carbon power within the next 15 years and have a payback time of less than 50 years from start of construction.

Nuclear requires nation-states to underwrite the construction costs, it's a massive subsidy. Hinkley C is getting a crazy strike price, which is index linked into the far future. It's an insane subsidy.

Fukushima's exclusion zone alone works out at little under one square kilometer per nuclear plant. Add in Chernobyl and it's over 7 Km2 per nuclear plant. The Hanford Site in the US adds another 3. So the uncounted average global overhead for nuclear power is 10Km2 per plant, thus far. And that's because of how few nuclear plants there are worldwide - it's about the same as the number of subway stations in New York city.

I'd argue that wind turbines have a smaller footprint. It's just the plinth because the rest of the area can still be used for most other purposes and the plinth may only be used for 20 years. You could stick 3GW of solar on Irish farm roofs - that's zero extra footprint. Offshore turbines take up little land. Geothermal using diagonal drilling could extract heat from a cubic kilometre with just a small plant on the surface. Cheaper drilling technology and Northern Ireland is sorted.

Solar and wind use zero fuel so their "fuel density" is infinite.

BTW the power density for fast reactors is about two orders of magnitude higher than general thermal reactors. Breeders are more like controlled deflagrations whereas thermal reactors are like hot metal. - During America's nuclear rocket program, the record average power density was set by the Pewee reactor (2.34 GW/m3)

Sellafield and Three Mile Island were before Chernobyl and Fukushima. There's been lots of other near misses too, Japan got lucky as it could have easily been four plants taken out. BTW nuclear power is inherently dangerous which is why there are loads and loads of control systems and "failsafes" and training and warning klaxons and evacuation drills and civil defence plans , way more other thermal plants.

There are lots of different types of solar panels made from different materials and lots of research into alternatives too. Silicon is abundant, organic dyes could be made from fossil fuel, recycling of old electronics into thinner, more efficient panels means new lamps for old.

Rare earth elements is just a name as they aren't all that rare. Processing them is messy but that technology will improve. And besides the main use is for magnets which can be replaced by using some electricity. There's new lithium deposits in Portugal etc.

Nuclear isn't a viable alternative to renewables.

Sam Russell

Nuclear is so safe in Sellafield (formerly Windscale) that I have a packet of Iodine tablets issued by our Gov - unfortunately they are now passed their use by date.

If there is a nuclear emergency, am I safer taking the out of date iodine tablets or not? Or should I just put my head between my legs and kiss my ass goodbye?

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118142363#Comment_118142363

After years of promoting SMR's they are relying on external money instead of funding it themselves. Their existing Global order book stands at over £78 billion and they have revenue of over £16 billion a year so they'd have no problem getting a loan and keeping all the "profits" for themselves. The only conclusion is that Rolls Royce don't truly believe in SMR's.

"If SMR's can actually deliver cheaper power than conventional nuclear," After the research costs the first 16 ones would cost about £2Bn on average each, and RR won't be making them until there's firm orders for £32Bn (for 7.52GW) However that's still cheaper than Hinkley C, unless they agree to over-subsidise them too for 35 years.

Why do you keep insisting that grid level storage can only be done with Li batteries ?

The ESB's plans for hydrogen storage in Kinsale is for 3TWh using mostly existing infrastructure. Storing that 10% of annual demand would need 8 times today's annual global manufacturing capacity for lithium batteries.

Here's a nice review of SMR hype. . The company worked out a way to make its non-existent SMRs almost 20% cheaper ‒ by making them almost 20% bigger! - Rolls Royce have done that too recently.

"Any plant you haven't built yet is always more efficient than the one you have built. This is obvious. They are all efficient when you haven't done anything on them, in the talking stage. Then they are all efficient, they are all cheap. They are all easy to build, and none have any problems.

Admiral Rickover to congress 1957

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118143381#Comment_118143381

Fukushima's exclusion zone alone works out at little under one square kilometer per nuclear plant. Add in Chernobyl and it's over 7 Km2 per nuclear plant. The Hanford Site in the US adds another 3. So the uncounted average global overhead for nuclear power is 10Km2 per plant, thus far. And that's because of how few nuclear plants there are worldwide - it's about the same as the number of subway stations in New York city.

I'd argue that wind turbines have a smaller footprint. It's just the plinth because the rest of the area can still be used for most other purposes and the plinth may only be used for 20 years. You could stick 3GW of solar on Irish farm roofs - that's zero extra footprint. Offshore turbines take up little land. Geothermal using diagonal drilling could extract heat from a cubic kilometre with just a small plant on the surface. Cheaper drilling technology and Northern Ireland is sorted.

This kind of stuff is incredibly disingenuous - comparing the exclusion zone in case of a catastrophic meltdown to the footprint of a wind turbine. If thats the case you might as well include all landslide areas caused by wind turbine installations, and maybe the area near wind turbines where people wont live due to noise from the blades turning. Its a specious argument at best.

You mention failsafes and security drills as a bad thing? They exist to prevent an uncontrolled reaction & to protect the public, its hardly a "con". Necessary because when working with the densest energy source (solar and wind are defacto less energy dense even if "infinite" in fuel).

And I believe the French have now committed to building more nuclear reactors, the first new reactors in decades. They clearly have a plan to get to zero emissions that doesnt involve rolling blackouts or being totally dependent on other countries for your short term energy needs.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118144737#Comment_118144737

And I believe the French have now committed to building more nuclear reactors, the first new reactors in decades.

The Messmer Plan led to France constructing a total of 56 new reactors during the 16 years from 1974 to 1989. The French have been building new EPR reactors since 2005 so they should have a whole fleet of them online by now if they were any way competent.

The only EPR plant completed was in China and it has had problems with the fuel rods, something for the plants under still construction in England, Finland and France to look forward to.

You mention failsafes and security drills as a bad thing? - "safe" reactors are snake oil.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118110787#Comment_118110787

Simply not true on the battery storage thing. For the cost of Hinkley Point C (only construction costs, not including long-run high guaranteed price) we could spend €10k per household on batteries. That would pay for a 13.5kWh Powerwall in every house and it just so happens to be just above the average Irish daily electricity use (4200/365=11.5kWh). That's for an over-priced, off the shelf solution that already exists as a consumer product. So on a cataclysmic event of 0 electricity generation for a full day the majority of people would be fine. Beef it up a bit in larger houses and have them charge overnight, it's already doable and the technology is there and ready to go.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118140769#Comment_118140769

What utter nonsense - the interconnector being built between here and France via Cork will be keeping the lights on here via French nuclear

tom1ie

What’s this thread about?

We already have gone nuclear?!

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118617160#Comment_118617160

I notice you aren't arguing about the insane cost of deploying consumer batteries at retail price to every house in the country.

Who knows what the wholesale price will for GWh of batteries by the time a nuclear plant could be deployed here ?

While I don't think batteries are a grid level solution the technology keeps getting cheaper and battery cycles are improving Prices have fallen 98% in three decades and there'll be future economies of scale and technical developments to be commercialised as well and research into other materials besides lithium.