Nuclear power in Ireland

In terms of worker deaths, the solar power industry is 10 times worse than the nuclear industry, mostly due to rooftop accidents involving installers, who are not generally old people.

The wind industry is worse, also.

"What are the most dangerous jobs in the energy sector?"

...After coal mining comes...

"Wind turbine maintenance

While wind energy is growing in favour due to it being a low-carbon and relatively low-cost process, the height of turbines – with the typical GE 1.5MW model consisting of 116ft blades atop a 212ft base – means it can also be a dangerous sector to work in.

Turbine-associated accidents were relatively unspoken about until a 2011 turbine fire killed two mechanics in the Netherlands, leading to increased awareness of other such incidents. Caithness Windfarm Information Forum compiled a summary of wind turbine accidents in June, highlighting that the trend is (unsurprisingly) rising as more turbines are built.

Numbers of recorded accidents reflect this, with an average of 33 accidents per year from 1998-2002, 81 accidents per year from 2003-2007, 144 accidents per year from 2008-12, and 167 accidents per year from 2013-17, inclusive.

Solar panel maintenance

Solar is a rapidly growing sector for green energy, with rising numbers of projects planned in the coming years. The placement of panels on roofs and in remote locations means workers face a range of potential hazards in the manufacture, installation and maintenance of solar energy. Such risks include arc flashes (which include arc flash burn and blast hazards), electric shocks, falls, and thermal burn hazards.

The Asian Correspondent says that due to the high numbers of solar sites springing up, solar is three times more dangerous than wind power and over 10 times more dangerous than nuclear power, by comparison to the amount of power produced.

The Next Big Future estimates that there are 100-150 deaths in the solar roofing industry worldwide each year."

https://www.power-technology.com/features/most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-energy-sector/

Horse shi​t. Nuclear is cost competeitive if you want energy without producing CO2. Intermittents only look cheap because of the dishonest accounting used to promote them.

It's impossible to argue costs with people who think we have a thriving hydrogen storage power industry and that i'ts as cheap as chips. Nothing is as cheap as pie in the sky. You can feed millions on it for a tenner.

A huge problem with nuclear is you can actually cost achieveing net zero emissions using it, whereas net zero based on renewables can be made to appear as cheap as you like because the costs are whatever fiction you care to spin.

the facts show nuclear is not cost competitive when examined against all other energy sources.

it is multiples of the cost of the next expensive energy source for less then half the efficiency of that energy source.

it's over, it's not going to happen, it just can't compete, we can get multiples of the generation for a fraction of the cost.

real clean green cheap energy vs a hugely expensive not so efficient red energy source that requires a large source to back it up anyway.

Why do you lie about this at every opportunity?

"Which energy sources are the most reliable?

Currently, nuclear power is the most reliable. It has supplied the US with well over 20% of our yearly power needs for the last thirty years 1. Nuclear power plants have the ability to produce power during 93% of the year, which is more than 2 times more reliable than natural gas and coal, and 2.5 to 3.5 times more reliable than wind and solar energy.

Of course, nuclear energy isn’t without its problems – namely, the waste it produces, which is highly toxic and requires careful storage and disposal. There’s also the risk of the damage power plants can cause if they encounter a major problem.

After nuclear, the most reliable sources are (in order):

• Natural gas
• Coal
• Hydropower
• Wind
• Solar
• https://www.inspirecleanenergy.com/blog/clean-energy-101/reliable-energy-sources/

"Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy Source and It's Not Even Close

March 24, 2021"

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close

Go on, post some links where this mythical unreliability is catalogued and reported, showing that engineers consider nuclear energy to be unreliable.

Ireland with abundance of water should invest in hydro - that would be the most logical solution plus wind which never quite stops on the west coast.

That way we would not be dependent on sourcing nuclear fuel plus bother with waste storage. I would love to see all nuclear enthusiast how happy they would be to have nuclear waste depot next door.

Hydro is one of the most environmentally destructive ways to produce power.

I'll take nuclear waste over windfarms in my area.

We wouldn't need to source nuclear fuel outside Ireland. Could be mined locally. Unfortunately that was banned by the same donkeys that sold diesel as a green alternative for automotive use.

We have very few hydro sites in this country - and not nearly as much rain as you might think. Also if you try and create reservoirs through damming and flooding it is disastrous to the environment - totally wipes out ecosystems across a large area.

Places with real mountains can do hydro, scotland, norway etc. Irish "mountains" are pathetic by comparison, and our rivers are on the small and short side.

You need much bigger river catchments than anything we can provide in Ireland, save for the Shannon, Liffey and maybe the Corrib - most others lack either the flow or the gradient to be worth damming.

I maybe expressed myself incorrectly. I meant hydro more in form of a tidal power plant. We are surrounded by pretty predictable energy source.

Tidal does not work - its been found to be completely uneconomical, so much so that all(?) commercial tidal energy projects have been wound up.

Also tidal only works on very select locations - large inlets with narrow openings. You cant just stick something on an exposed coast and rely on the tide to give you energy.

The mighty Shannon produces at best 86MW which is fúck all really and that's by far the best hydro source in Ireland.

What chart? My post didn't contain one and there isn't one on the page linked to.

The solar roofing industry is one where companies supply solar energy systems which include installing solar panels on roofs, and would include maintenance of such systems, like all The Tesla ones that caught fire.

If you want a chart, here's one:

(And before the inevitable person comes charging in claiming the our world in data figures are more recent, their source appears to be a paper from 2015.)

A caveat would be that it's very doubtful the true extent of solar panel installation related deaths is known or captured. The sources seem to be mostly US based and are estimates from deaths of roofers vs estimates of the percentage of roofing work that is related to solar panel installation. The world wide stats would likely be far higher some claim due to laxer safety standards than in the US.

Solar panel installations also are causing a lot of house fires. If any of those result in deaths they wouldn't be counted as solar panel industry related deaths.

There are no cumulative stats of worldwide solar panel related deaths, but it's certain that any real figures would very likely be higher than those being compared to other power generation technologies.

In Oz they were finding 21-26% of installations to be dangerous and faulty, mostly in terms of electrics, when inspected.

There have been complete building losses from fires related to solar panel installations - 10 at least in Germany alone.

Antis like to claim that the world is running out of uranium due to limited proved reserves, but what they never mention is reserves are a function of demand and prospecting. We only have 20-50 years of copper yet we aren't being persuaded to cut use. It's a similar story with many metals. The reality is though metals are non renewable, we have never run out of a non renewable resource. The only resources that we wiped out are renewables ones.

Btw middle of the night and winter and we are still only 16% renewable at the moment.

10% of the time that the wind does not blow? Wind has an average capacity factor of 30% on the island. In 2021, it was just 20%. I would think it doesn't blow far more than 10%.

And the capacity factor of wind turbines is?

Relying solely on wind/solar and storage of same is just a stupid strategy - there's no effective redundancy (other than burning fossil fuels, mostly gas), and we can be totally screwed by prolonged calm spells.

Using nuclear as baseload, but with wind/solar for peaking (and storage of course) puts the grid in a far more stable and resilient position. Can still export excess, can still store excess, but would be infinitely better positioned to deal with prolonged calm/cloudy spells, and not reliant on LNG importation.

Small scale reactors in this country are as feasible (if not more) than plans to reuse our gas infrastructure for hydrogen production, storage and transport.

You are unaware of anyone dying from the effects of radiation or hearing about it??

You talk about converting waste products to cylindrical slugs like it is nothing, finding a geologically suitable place to put them, DRILL DOWN a few KM's like it is nothing, drop the waste in, and backfill 1.5 KMs of concrete like it's filling in a trench being dug to put down utility or services a few metres under the ground.

Everything to do with Nuclear is wasteful/costs/energy intensive/creates CO2 before a single Watt of useable power is created, thats not to mention sequestering the waste byproducts in a safe and sustainable way which is an ongoing cost FOREVER.

I thought you were for Nuclear power, what you say are not arguments for it, aside from it being makey upey pie in the sky, no one just gets to decide we just drill holes and drop the waste down there and cover it with cement, dropping the waste so far into not very deep water bodies isn't the answer up to now.

The cost of the whole life of Nuclear energy is not viable, we in this county dont have the experience and there are a host of other factors which rule out Nuclear being safe, cost effective, sustainable.

It has been mentioned a few times, we could pay for everyone to have solar and battery storage before we got any power derived from Nuclear.

As for CO2, we could affect that by having very cheap projects of planting trees, EU wide/globally, changing farming practices, changing how much meat we consume (not as easy to do as saying it, but better than the alternatives).

Nuclear waste is the problem that keeps giving, talking about future technologies is a waste also, until they are available.

A vast amount of energy is wasted through poor designs of habitable spaces, improve that alone and we save a fortune on expended energy.