Nuclear - future for Ireland?

There's also the cooling pumping requirements. Liquids are easy to pump because they have a relatively low volume. Some of the early UK reactors used 10% of the electrical output to pump the Carbon Dioxide gas around. Still don't understand why they didn't pressurise it to a liquid after cooling.

IF you could get nuclear started how do you keep the public occupied for the ~20 years it takes nuclear to get up and running ?

Nuclear is not a short term solution.

Nuclear is not a long term solution either because renewable prices are in freefall when measured against the timescales of nuclear.

The amount of nuclear we import is essentially zero. This is because nuclear is only used for static base loads. French peak export today 9557MW but renewables at that time were 9961 hydro , 8315 wind, 869 biomasss, 383 solar

Flaws in French nuclear plants mean multiple reactors offline and gas prices across Europe have gone up.

How do you get to net zero with nuclear by 2035 given most of the existing plants will be closed down or closing down by then, not to mention how long it would take to payback the carbon debt built up during construction and ore mining.

More importantly how much will it really cost and what will the effect be on the price of uranium ?

Large scale hydrogen production via electrolysis and transport pre dates nuclear power. Gas storage in old gas wells isn't exactly a new technology either. Gas turbines will run on just about anything that doesn't leave deposits on the blades. Re-lining pipes from the inside is routine these days. Grid level hydrogen storage is low risk with the potential to store 3TWh here, and that's a factor of 10 more than the global production of lithium batteries.

Yes at present lithium is too expensive to use for extended grid level storage , but ...

A - prices have dropped 90% in the last 9 years and are still falling.

B - by (re)using existing pipes, pumps, gas wells and turbine tech we could store nine years worth of global lithium production as hydrogen in the old Kinsale gas field.

Just a reminder that both the French and UK have kept their missile subs on patrol continuously while at times they've had problems keeping one attack sub in service. This tells me that small modular reactors work, if you are prepared to throw resources at them.

None of the seven Royal Navy subs were on active duty.

So including the 'undiscovered' uranium there's 230 years at current usage, which is 10% of global electricity, or on a sliding scale to 100% of current electricity production, which ignores future demand for electric cars or heat pumps, that would be 23 years.

So your plan to be carbon neutral by 2050 is to build power plants that won't output any power before 2030 or after 2060 ? That's some serious can kicking.

PS. you can discover uranium by detecting gamma radiation from a low flying aircraft so all the low hanging fruit is long gone and nuclear power can't afford to get more expensive.

"Still waiting on that final costing of renewables and H2 storage and energy production"

Apart from the electrolysis gear O&M costs should be similar and capital costs are close to zero for most of the other equipment that is already in place.

I don't know the upgrade costs or even if the pipes need to be lined (not all steel is subject to hydrogen embrittlement) but it's standard process. Electrolysis costs - we’ll be at £500,000/MW at the 100MW level in the next three years,” but mostly the inefficiencies (assume 40% round trip) and surplus electricity at 2.5 times cheaper than peak electricity.