Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352381#Comment_118352381

These are all very important points.

Germany should never have closed it's nuclear plants, at least not till capacity is on the ground and ready to go.

Personally I think things like energy etc are all strategic national issues and should be organized and run as such. That can still be private ownership but it should be subject to oversight with long term state energy requirements.

If Europe has a cold snap in January or February then it will cause a severe economic crisis, and things weren't that good prior to Covid, nevermind the last 2 years damage on top.

Nuclear has a place but it has lost out to technological advances.

Germany made 25% of its electricity from nuclear power a decade ago. 40% from coal then to 20% now.

It was an incredible arrogance that led them to decide to phase that out by 2022 and coal as well by 2030. Going fast on phasing out but slow on replacement.

Add on top the exit from coal. Both are fine but too fast and without any real plan in place has left Europe with eye watering energy costs and questions over the grids ability to meet demand if there is a cold snap.

They should have been called out on it, a desperate jaw dropping arrogance and narcissism.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118351314#Comment_118351314

Until summer the expectation was that the UK would have 16 nuclear generator units available in mid December. According to EDF's own website the reality last week was that only 8 were running at normal load - shockingly unreliable. It's not 92.5%

Of course the fallback could be to import a couple of GW from France. Unless of course there's also 4 French reactors currently offline because you shouldn't cut corners on operation and maintenance. It's going to cost billions and gas is now more expensive because nuclear is undependable. And it could get worse if similar issues are found elsewhere on the network.

And don't get me started the sort of clowns who have multiple "scheduled outages" during peak annual demand. And remember that 4 UK units close next year and 4 in 2024.

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352705#Comment_118352705

If there are black outs this winter across Europe, the backlash will be against renewable energy and those advocating for it.

I'm all for it and it is not just for cost reasons, it returns power supply to local markets, a more secure supply, better environmentally.

However closing existing capacity before there is excess capacity was always asking for trouble.

Plants closed here in the last few years should have been extended.

Never mind the insanity in Germany regarding closing plants before replacements were in place.

If cost is not a concern but net Zero is then nuclear probably has a place in that mix. It isn't problem free, it's not cheap by any means but it creates incredible amounts of near zero carbon electricity.

If there is a cold winter in Europe energy prices will be beyond the ability of many to pay and power supply will be unstable. Electricity futures for December 2022 are at 6 times last year in France.

There could be an almighty working class backlash against Green movements.

That would be purely down to lack of planning and eager to close for headlines.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118351393#Comment_118351393

Not this rubbish again. H2 as storage is having a lot of money thrown at it currently, and it needs that because it's completely unproven technically and uncosted at whole grid scale - no one has done it.

Did you quote the wrong post or something?

Markcheese

A lot of the vast costs associated with renewables are also associated with nuclear - it'd need major grid alteration , it'd need vast gas back up , it'd need interconnectors to Britain and Europe , it'd need huge amounts of storage to handle the peaks and troughs of consumer demand .. and it'd need huge amounts of capital , but it's going to be orders of magnitude more expensive to produce electricity from nuclear than wind in the first place ..

Markcheese

By the way , the nuclear decommissioning Authority in the uk has a budget of 3.2 billion pounds a year ,employing 15000 through subsidiary componies and contractors ... They've a busy several decades ahead of them just with their current contracts ...so far in the last 17 odd years they've completed 0 decommissionings , but that's okay they're working off a 100 year program time ..

I assume edf is not on the hook for decommissioning stations as they go off line ? ( edit- They're not - they'll do the work on contract for uk gov - that'll be an extra )

So all the stations above need to be added to the list ...

end of the road

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118352125#Comment_118352125

storing waste is pollution and a burden on the tax payer.

people in ireland aren't afraid of nuclear any longer and haven't been for a couple of decades, they simply do not want to spend multiple irish childrens hospitals worth of money on a reactor when there are cheaper, actual ifficient options out there.

forget it, nuclear in ireland isn't going to happen, it's over.

Markcheese

I don't know about the fear factor in Ireland - gridwise if we were going to build a couple of nuclear reactors it'd probably be at aghada and or moneypoint ...

Ideally you'd build it just outside Dublin because that's where the greatest energy density is required - but I can't imagine it going down to well close to dublin .. for the same reason aghada would be out - so stick a reactor or 2 in Clare ... That's anywhere between 1.5 to 3 gig ( 1 or 2 reactors ) on the Shannon estuary.. would carnsore point be out of the running current grid wise ?

Either way I can't see it being accepted by the public even if it was going to be cheap electricity... Although cheap is a relative term what's expensive today could be considered a bargain tomorrow...

Capt'n Midnight

Oh look, after 55 years there might be some progress on addressing one type of systemic corrosion in nuclear plants.

So should help uptime and slightly reduce costs. But it doesn't address other corrosion issues.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118355629#Comment_118355629

The Finish reactor was supposed to come on line in 2009 and it will be 6 months time before they get full power from it.

Delivering full power in June 2022 means Finland subsidising nuclear by paying for alternative power sources for 13 years.

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118356500#Comment_118356500

And ran 3 times over budget.

And they must be feeling a little bit nervous about having gone for the relatively novel EPR design. The only others world are the two Chinese reactors in Taishan. Both reactors have had multiple admittedly mostly low-level incidents already in just a few years service. But not all minor issues - the first reactor has been shutdown since the Summer to investigate damage to fuel rods and no commitment has been made in terms of time to get it back online.

And all EPR construction projects have been disasters in terms of cost and schedule - even the Chinese ones - and they were unlikely to have been hampered by regulatory obstacles or legal concerns.

Whatever about the pros and cons of nuclear, the Finns have exposed themselves to a lot of risk by making such a huge commitment to EPR.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118356401#Comment_118356401

H2 has an embrittlement problem that isn't going away.

Markcheese

Still , it's good news that the reactor in Finland is up and running - bodes well for hinkley point - and even better for sizewell . The aim is for the plants to be largely a standard design and build - so sizewell should be considerably cheaper than hinkley - cheaper in this case meaning 18 to 20 billion sterling to build it ... But it looks like the uk gov are going to have to put some of their own money in to this ..

Of course if hinkley point goes badly - then it's likely that the entire of edf will go bust - the bulilt facilities will keep producing,obviously , but I assume the french government would have to bail them out ... and projects still under construction ?

bk

"Both Finland (15% of Finlands needs, country similar population to Ireland) and China switched on new 4th generation reactors today"

Genuinely delighted to hear that it is finally almost complete. But hardly a ringing endorsement for EPR's. 13 years late and almost 4 times over budget (11bn instead of 3bn)! It has been such a bad experience for the Finnish, that even though they have long been big promoters of Nuclear power, they have as a result cancelled the planned construction of a 4th reactor at the same plant and are pulling back on Nuclear in general.

BTW Your comment on them being the same population size as Ireland isn't comparable. They are part of the inter-Nordic power system, with multiple DC and AC interconnectors to Sweden, Norway, Denmark and thus onto the wider EU grid. Ireland on the other hand is a small, independent, island grid with currently only a small amount of DC interconnection.

The Chinese HTGRs are interesting if a little weird. They call them 4G reactors, but HTGRs are nothing new, they existed decades ago in US and Germany. They have all been shutdown decades ago as they suffered various accidents, with leaks, etc. Hopefully the Chinese have sorted those issues.

What I do like about what the Chinese are doing, is that they are trying out all sorts of different reactor technologies. Hopefully they hit on one that works well.

BTW Interesting to note that next year they will also be opening 90MW battery storage facility at this Finnish Nuclear plant. It seems that even Nuclear power can benefit from the emerging battery storage technologies.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2021/1223/1268346-belgium-nuclear/

Belgian reactors to be shutdown over the next three years. Decommissioning, including the removal of all radioactive materials and demolition of buildings, is to be completed by 2045.

Nuclear power isn't above local laws and local politics. Even if everything works there is no guarantee that there will be a return on the money spent on nuclear as it can be stopped dead through circumstances outside of the industry's control.

Nuclear power plants here would take more than one election cycle to plan, get permission and build. Since most of our parties target the middle ground they won't want to take on controversial issues unless there's a solid return.

end of the road

excuses excuses.

the fact is, by all possible metrics, nuclear cannot compete with all of the other alternatives clean and not so and is ridiculously bad value for money with long construction periods that grow and grow, and serious cost over runs.

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118371962#Comment_118371962

What requirements were changed exactly?

From what I've read, it was always planned to be an EPR and once the government gave the go-ahead to TVO in 2005, that was the extent of their involvement in the spec. The 13 year delay and 3-times overshoot of budget was all down to the usual pattern of reactor construction. Is the same excuse being used to explain the 6 times budget overshoot for the construction of the same reactor design in Flammanville, France?

There always seems to be someone else to blame for nuclear project failures, yet anyone interested can just look at the history of reactor construction - for example at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors - especially note the start and end construction dates. The statistics are stark and clear - and paint a clear pattern of failure and blowing through budgets and schedules. Yes occasionally, a reactor is built on time and budget but it's the exception.

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118372149#Comment_118372149

No it didn’t - where did you get that from?

The EPR design was chosen for Olkiluoto 3 before it even got the go-ahead and the EPR is a large reactor design and always was. It was specifically designed to take existing PWR designs and scale them up to 1.5GW+.

Ironically the idea of the EPR was that building larger reactors would reduce costs given the market for new nuclear reactors had collapsed in the 1980s as everyone realised how outrageously expensive nuclear electricity is.

The EPR has failed to offer value in an absolutely spectacular fashion which has doomed the entire design. Even by 2015 or so, EDF were making noises that they would have to reconsider the entire approach.

Your excuse for the massive Olkiluoto overruns makes no sense.

Oscar Madison

No county in Ireland would accept the idea of a nuclear power station within their borders!

Can you imagine the outcry if one was going to be built in Kerry or West Cork for example!

I personally would not want to see one here but in saying that I'm sure that we're getting the benefits

from one in the UK. I know that probably makes me a hypocrite but I'm comfortable in being one!

end of the road

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118372472#Comment_118372472

people not wanting one near them is the lowest issue on the issue list with nuclear tbh.

the costs to construct, the cost to subsidize and the costs to the consumer just don't stack up and the project is just as poor value for money as it gets, those are the real issues for nuclear in ireland.

as far as i know we do import nuclear from france at least and no doubt some from the uk, but how much i do not know off the top of my head.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118361473#Comment_118361473

Just on your very last point it could easily be a scam. When they're down for maintenance they'll be able to import from the grid and then send it out at whatever stupidly high guaranteed price they get. :P

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118372149#Comment_118372149

It wasn't a custom design as this EPR was to be the first in a large production run of next generation reactors. Hence the initial low price to start the ball rolling.

ESA already launched a telescope with a much bigger mirror than Hubble to L2. Project cost of Hershal was €1.1Bn. It can be done if you keep control of the politics and pork-barrelling in a way NASA can't.

The Budget overrun on JW was because NASA didn't want to use a European rocket which could easily handle an 8m x 4m single piece mirror. Billions were wasted on delays and a transformer design. And they went back to the Europeans anyway. Overpriced and unreliable white elephants like the space shuttle got many other projects cancelled and delayed. I'd consider nuclear power plants to be similar white elephants. Like the shuttle they suck capital from other projects and frequently let you down for years.

Note SpaceX-Starship, SLS and New Glenn could all take a single mirror larger than JW which would massively save on construction and testing costs. It's a dead end design, like many nuclear power plants that will be bypassed by renewables and storage before they could be built.

AFAIK the only nuclear power construction projects that are currently on their original schedules are where Russians or Chinese are involved.

Danzy

Closing so many nuclear and coal plants in such a short time across Europe has left Western Europe in a very precarious position.

Another 9% jump in electricity coming in the Spring.

Nothing wrong with closing plants but there should have been a capacity put in place to cover it.

Europe needs a very mild January and February to guarantee that it will have enough gas till March.

The entire economy of Western Europe is being left to chance.

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118375783#Comment_118375783

Germany shut down it's nuclear power stations early ... But as far as I know the Belgian and British ones are going off line because they're obsolete - and uneconomic to upgrade - if they could have upgraded them economically then they would have ..

I assume coal and oil stations are somewhat similar - but up till recently gas was so much cheaper and more dispatchable - that coal just couldnt compete -

Hopefully when it comes to turning off tarbert and moneypoint instead of decommissioning them they'll be mothballed instead ... It'd be 1.6 gw of available that's not dependant on a gas pipeline...

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118372472#Comment_118372472

No county has a say in the matter as it's only the irish government that has legal authority. It's not a federation.

The EPR overruns are also very similar to the U.K. history with their own advanced gas cooled AGR design, which also took decades to build and was vastly over budget.

As for the U.K. graphite problem, nobody in their right mind would use that approach again. No western nuclear plants other than British ones use that approach for a moderator. There were some old gas cooled, graphite moderated designs in france too, but they’re long gone 1st generation stuff.

The current designs all use water. So if you lose the coolant the reaction also generally stops as there’s nothing to moderate it.

The Soviet RMBK design, used at Chernobyl is the other example of a graphite core in a power rector, but it’s also a totally different and far more potentially dangerous design. The graphite cores however did cause an extra problem as when they were exposed to air they went on fire. Graphite burns in oxygen and when they lost control, they REALLY lost control as there’s no way of removing the moderator, so the state of criticality and the chain reaction keeps going, without the coolant and … the rest is history.

Modern reactor designs in use in “the west” aren’t ever likely to have anything like that happen, but earthquakes aside, the Fukushima disaster would tend to lead me to conclude there’s been a bit of arrogance in the industry. That plant was older and built very much in harms way, but there are similar issues in California for example and the older GE BWR design didn’t perform very well at all in reality when it was pushed to its limits.

Perhaps nuclear has a role but I think you’ll have a hard job getting an electorate here to ever buy in to it and economically it’s not all that commercially viable without heavily subsidising it. The enormous capital overruns and the costs of the fuel cycle and decommissioning can’t just be magicked away here. In the bigger nuclear powers like France, the U.K. (more so historically) and the US etc they tend to disappear into general government expenditure off the books of the plants themselves.

In the big spend days of those countries’ nuclear build outs those projects were seen as strategic as part of national energy security or even linked to development of arms technologies, so a lot of the costs just melted into other budgets.

A lot of costs could be justified then as part of fundamental nuclear R&D etc etc

In an Irish context, and in this era, you’re looking at private financing and projects needing to make commercial sense and provide return on investment.

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118377501#Comment_118377501

It's the financing that's the killer (currently ) from an Irish Government point of view ..

If the government fund a reactor or 2 directly - then they're on the hook for the whole cost ,straight on to the national debt - cost overruns - time overruns and all , ( terrible if the thing doesn't work reliably) ,but the cost of finance should be lower because the state can borrow more cheaply than a corporation or semi-state...

Going the uk model - getting someone like edf to build - finance and operate for 40 odd years , ( and then pretend to think about decommissioning) is off balance sheet entirely.. but very expensive power For 40 odd years -

Plus hinkley is probably a loss leader , get the industry started in the uk .. and then build another few stations (with a comparatively low strike price ) that they actually make money on ..

Not really going to happen in Ireland though ...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118377459#Comment_118377459

I'm not sure you even live in Ireland with a post like that lol

But anyway, there is no party which is going to ram through a nuke plant against the wishes of the voters.

None.

Ireland's very much an example of a country that is absolutely not an executive driven state. If there isn’t the public will to support something, there’s no way in hell you’ll drive it through.

The public can swallow bitter pills and deal with crises like COVID lockdowns and the financial meltdown, but there was across the board support for those things, even if they weren’t pleasant.

I think you’d have to have a very, very, VERY convincing argument that building a nuclear plant was a worthwhile expenditure and risk before you’d get it though the political policy making stage, never mind the rest of the hurdles.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118377501#Comment_118377501

The critical temperature of water is 374°C which means you're stuck with graphite if you want to increase the thermal efficiency of a reactor. Graphite builds up energy over time and burns quite well. But the extend of damage to it didn't show up for decades in the case of some reactors, something to keep in mind when reactors have similar payback times. Pebble bed reactors will usually use graphite and with them dust and clogging are issues.

Beryllium could be used but very toxic, more likely to be used as a reflector around the reactor to keep the neutrons in. Isotope enriched Lithium-7 could be used in a molten salt reactor but there'll be graphite in there too.

It's all moot until nuclear can be constructed on time and on budget and then run reliably, other wise they are just money pits because if you aren't spending on the nuclear you are paying for the backup and worrying if it will keep running long enough to contribute something to the decommissioning costs.