Ireland needs to invest in a modern Nuclear Power Plant?

What's going on with those Korean nuclear builders which are been held up as an example of how it can be done on time and on budget ?

No need to wait for the answer - they have been using knock off parts compromising safety.

And yet no one died. Which is more than can be said for these two unfortunates.

This scandal did not involve 'fake' parts, it involved falsified test documentaion. The parts didn't fail, but all were replaced anyway.

Sure it's not a great look, but it happened 8 years ago and that stuff and the culture that allowed it appears to be fixed.

Nuclear power has an incredibly good safety record and a US study actually attributed it with saving far more lives than had ever been lost.

It's on par with wind and solar for overall safety, but hype away with the scare tactics and anti-nuclear BS.

By the way, the Norwegians are very likely about to close a wind farm in the north of the country because it sheds so much dangerous falling bits that locals won't even go for a walk on the mountin due to the danger of being hit.

Siemens and Fluor have been fined £650,000 after a worker was killed and another seriously injured during construction of an offshore wind farm.

This is from a video just put out by the ESB.

If you use actual figures for offshore wind projects that have recently been completed, like East Anglia One (2020), off Scotland. and actual figures for NPPs that have actualy been completed, like Barakah in the UAE, then 30 GW of offshore wind will cost:

£105 Billion

Compared to 15 GW of nuclear costing:

£51.46 Billion

Since a Korean built NPP will have capacity factor at least double that of OSW, you only need half the capacity.

Then there is the life expectancy difference where East Anglia one will last 27 years while Barakah will last 60. So that yawning chasm of of £53.54 difference in cost becomes £107 Billion over 60 years.

Of course one thing is missing from this massive cost difference based on actual, recently completed projects, not your steaming pile of made up horse sh​it, and that is the intermittency of wind means it's not suitable as a provider of base load power, so if you want to compare it to a constantly reliable base load source like nuclear, you need an additional layer of costs for energy storage, which the ESB is aiming mostly at hydrogen, but they say the storage requirement is so vast, in order to meet a 6 week wind lull - which is documented in the video, that they will need to use every storage tech there is - the sound of desperation in the video is palpable.

So in addition to that massive cost difference, you have to add the cost of multiple storage technologies like H2, compressed air and flywheels and very expensive batteries.

Nobody knows what that gnarly mess of multiple systems will cost, but it will add billions to the cost difference.

Of course you need backup for the 3.5% downtime with a Korean built NPP, so if you assume you build 8 GW of gas turbine power plants from scratch (current demand on the Irish grid is 5 GW) then that will cost £5.97 Billion for the most gold plated system imaginable, bringing the cost difference down to £101 Billion.

Hinkley is not a yardstick for anything. There are 437 nuclear reactors world wide, Hinkly is as much of a UK disaster as Brexit and it hasn't been built. It's projected costs would make it the most expensive NPP ever built. Only a knuckle dragging idiot would seek to emulate that mess.

The South Koreans have built nuclear reactors in 4.5 years, the longest they have taken is 10 years, which is how long it took them to build all four reactors at Barrakah NPP - it took 8 years to build the first one before it was switched on.

Your lying nonsense about £519Bn costs and other people's 25 years to build is just epic dishonesty.

Dunno man,

i think i'd prefer my new nuclear plants to be built by people who were not found to have faked safety tests on critical parts of the machinery. Maybe thats just me, though.

How is it a scare tactic to point out something that has actually happened? Its a fact.

You were the one suggesting the South koreans as the gold standard of plant builders. I'm just saying they might not be all that.

Nuclear is not a runner for a country of this size.

Whatever way you look at it, you trot out claims about comparative costs without a single figure or link to back them up. Renewables do not back each other up, that is lie. Last year there was a 6 week period with essentially no wind in Ireland. It sure wasn't backed up by solar - gas, coal, oil and peat are what backed up renewables.

The Swiss Beznau nuclear poper plant was built in 1969 and is still running. That's 53, years, since you seem to have a problem with figures. Your '40 years at a stretch' just became 53 - duh!. More BS from you.

Technology in many areas has improved in the last half century, so anything built now will have that advantage, so 60 years should be easily achievable. By the same token, I can as easily claim that 27 years for EAO is BS because the normaly accepted figure is 20.

The French are having a corrosion problem after 30+ years of continual zero CO2 energy output. That's like saying my 2005 Honda is unreliable because after 16 years, it had to have the front shocks replaced by a garage - that being the only time in 16 years it's ever been in a garage.

Can you explain why the new president of the Irish Institution of Engineers said Nuclear should be looked at as an option and that there should be a debate about it?

Would that be because engineers don't have as much of a clue as you? Are you more qualified, if so, how?

renewables will eventually back each other up when implemented at scale at a fraction of the cost, the costs being shown to you in the infrastructure threads which i linked to in one of my posts for the delictation of the members of the urrent affairs forum.

the swiss plant was life extended at great cost, it was supposed to last only 35 years.

nuclear's costs are increasing and the reliability isn't improving, the construction methods are but even then it's small scale in reality.

the president of the irish institution of engineers is expressing a viewpoint, from an engineering point of view as they love big projects, that's their job after all to like big and bold.

nuclear isn't going to happen, the debate has been had and people don't want it near them as a best case, and as a worst case the cost is out of control and could be better spent on alternatives that would be a fraction of the cost and give us more output.

Hinkly C doesn't have a cost because it hasn't been built, so its incomparable to anything. Your endless nonsense has run out of steam.

Not only have the ESB floated their vision of what's needed for renewables to deliver net zero CO2, but they have demonstrated it's not achievable in anything like the time scale current plans call for but the numbers are so vast, the cost of it all is clearly going to be preposterous and well beyond this countries means to afford.

The head of the Irish institute of engineers has said we need to look at nuclear and now William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC has come out saying the same thing.

All we need is a few more loud voices and the government are going to have to deep six this renewables sham/scam.

no government is going to look at nuclear unless the costs come down by 3 quarters at least and the reliability improves hugely.

renewables aren't a scam as they are proven to work, are proven to be cheap and reliable while nuclear on the other hand is a technology from a different era that was being passed by by newer technologies from not long after it's conception.

as i said, regardless of loud voices, it won't be happening because it makes no sense in any form by any metrics for ireland.