Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Nuclear waste - the massive problem for the past 40 years that's never yet managed to be even a small problem. I am not aware of a single person dying on planet earth because of nuclear waste. Plenty have died installing or servicng those big windmills you love so much.

Turn nuclear waste into glass and put it in extremely stable salt deposits several km underground - job done. Dealing with nuclear waste is a political problem, not a technical one.

Hey, did you hear the news - Germany is revisiting their plans to shut their remaining nuclear power stations due to a huge reversal in public sentiment? Want to bet that the result from their anguished cogitations will be to keep them open?

I wish Rolls Royce were further advanced with their SMR ecosystem. Producing a 470 MW power plant every six months seems like something the world needs now, not years from now.

You are such a laugh:

"Macron clarifies French energy plans

27 November 2018

A total of 14 power reactors will be shut down in order to reduce the share of nuclear in France's electricity generation mix from the current 75% to 50% by 2035, President Emmanuel Macron announced today."

Note the 2018 bit. Now given a dose of reality, and we have:

"French bill delays nuclear reduction by 10 years - 02 May 2019"

And with an even bigger dose of reality biting their balls off, and you get:

"France announces plans to build up to 14 nuclear reactors - February 11, 2022.

"Even if we develop a lot our renewable energies, we have a nuclear sector that constitutes 70% of our electricity supply, we have to use this sector as much as possible," Pompili added.""

Thats the same anti-nuclear Barabara Pompei who only a few years ago was saying France would wind down nuclear.

What's truly ad nauseam is your constant dishonest attempts to portray nucear energy as being in decline when the opposite is true. Germany is going into reverse, the UK has gong into reverse, France is going into reverse, South Korea has reversed, Sweden were ahead of the game and went into reverse on nuclear phase-out in 2009.

World production of hydrogen electrolysers is 1 GW a year - total. Yes, turning excess energy into hydrogen sounds good, until you find out that's not really possible as electrolysers need to run constantly, not be switched on and off whenever there is an excess. I have seen plans for large scale plants to be constructed in Oz to use solar to produce hydrogen, and those plans call for a huge complication and added cost of having massive battery banks or molten salt to store half the daytime generated power so the electrolysers can be kept running after the sun goes away.

Then of course there's powering the refrigeration and compression systems to liquify the stuff and constructin of thick insulation walled hydrogen impermiable refrigerated tankers or pipelines to move the stuff at surface of Pluto type temperatures and then there's the ridiculous bunker oil powered ships, again with large refrigeration plants to keep the stuff Pluto friendly from Oz to Germany and Europe - again requiring a fair bit of energy.

The one commercial test bed liquid hydrogen transport ship that has been constructed makes the whole thing seem unlikely to be remotely commercially viable to me. You have a large ship and one comparatively very small hydrogen tank and masses of refrigeration plant - nothing at all like the huge LNG carriers, because the amount of insultion the tanks need is huge and because of the far lower temperatures the ships would need large refrigeration infrastructure that presumably requires a fair amount of energy to operate.

Just look at the risible cargo to ship ratio:

The projected large scale versions are scarcely any better:

Then of course there's the questionable logic of transporting a small amount of hydrogen on a large ship powered by bunker oil. If you think the ships would be powered by the cargo, think again. I had a stab at calculating how far that experimental hydrogen ship could get, using it's cargo as fuel and it was somwhere around a shockingly inadequate 6,000 km, which is pathetic in terms of the distances bunker oil powered ships can easily travel and need to.

Actually, probably the most sensible way to transport liquid hydrogen is with a nuclear powered ship - oh the irony.

The technical issues and energy requirements for liquifying hydrogen and keeping it in that state are just too much, it seems to me. It's fine to say we made COVID vaccines in a jiffy when needed, but it just doesn't translate and there is no logical linkage. You might as well say the vaccine effort means a nuclear fusion reactor should be a piece of cake if we just try a bit harder. It doesn't work that way.

The whole liquid hydrogen thing seems way too inefficient, complicated, cumbersome and costly. If the Germans need vast quantities of Hydrogen to wean them off natural gas, then it probably would make more sense and be less expensive to just churn out SMRs and use their output to make Hydrogen locally.

You cherry pick endlessly, and it's dishonest. It's always Hinkly as the measure of cost, while it's been ridiculed world wide as it's inexplicably the worlds most expensive nuclear plant ever. If a shop charges a lot more for something I can get elsewhere for less, I'll get it from where it's cheaper.

Your other favourite BS is to quote every French current woe as a truth about nuclear lifetime unreliability when it's an exception that proves the rule. It would be the equivalent of me touting nuclear reliability on the basis that in 2020, nuclear power in Slovenia had a capacity factor of 99.3%. Solar is about 11% in this region, and being cheap is pointless as it requires expensive CO2 emitting 19th century tech as backup. Of course you just pull some hopium out of your backside about some future if, if, if storage tech that no grid in the world is using at scale.

Those French reactors you love to cite for unreliability have been running with far higher capacity and availability factors for 30 years, it's like you saying my 17 year old Honda is woefully unreliable, basing it on the week last year in which it spent 3 hours in a garage getting new shocks fitted, when it's the one and only time in 17 years it's ever been in a garage.

The truth is your claim of nuclear being systemically unreliable is outright dishonesty and a lie. There is no energy generation tech that is as reliable or even comes close in capacity factor.

"In 2019, the global median capacity factor was 85.9 %" https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-releases-2019-data-on-nuclear-power-plants-operating-experience

No one should care about a French reactor needing repairs as it's a childish example and not a relevant metric for making judgements about a nations grid. Wind and solar require more CO2 generating backup than nuclear by a huge margin and both are far higher overall emitters of CO2 if you factor in the gargantuan amounts of gas that are actually used to fill in their gaping holes of unreliability.

While nuclear can be over 92% reliable - the US current situation - solar is 89% unrelible and wind is abot 65% unreliable - meaning you have to burn gas and produce CO2. There is no such thing as zero CO2 backup for these techs. They don't exist in use anywhere. Batteries are used like giant capacitors to smooth the massive grid scale ripples cause by solar and wind being so unreliable and hydrogen is a futuristic pipedream with no existing operational examples of use in any grid.

Trying to paint nuclear as generally unreliable is dishonest. The US 2020 capacity factor of nuclear was 92.5%, wind was 35.4% and solar was 24.9%. That solar figure is very misleading in an Irish context because the capacity factor of solar in the UK in 2019 was 11.2%.

But we're neither like France or Germany ,

We don't have Germany's heavy industry , we didn't have their nuclear and then decide to ditch it , we didn't go with an enormously expensive ( and largely unsuccessful) domestic solar subsidy scheme ..

Neither were we ever likely to subsidize nuclear production in the way the french do , we don't have their huge hydro resources as a reserve to that nuclear , and we don't have their position in Europe to export any excess power generation . Plus we don't have the french colonial hangover uranium mines in central Africa ..

We don't have oil , we don't have a nuclear history ,we don't have coal , we have limited gas and access to pipelines , we don't have abundant solar or hydro resources, what we have is wind .. can we do better with it ? Yup ,

You're dead right about the interest rates - on a big project they're a big deal , and you won't get much bigger than nuclear ,

One of the main reasons our wind sector isnt more developed is because our grid isn't up to it , well nuclear would have a similar issue ,

If we want to wait 10 to 15 years ( assuming all political parties are in agreement,and there's no decades long legal objection) ,then we could probably start a nuclear reactor , you're saying 15 to 20 years is no problem to build a nuclear station , so add that on to the 10 or 15 years of planning - ah feic it we might as well wait for fusion it's always only 50 years away ..

But anyway look at the proposed sizewell c station in the UK 35billion sterling over 15 years .. ( and that's after hinkey c - which is largely identical,and is supposed to be the test bed to iron out the kinks - )