Nuclear - future for Ireland?

You could not build one Finnish plant and expect it to deliver your proposed capacity. To cover outages and maintainance you need at least one more and probably two to provide reliable baseload. This basic fact cannot be glossed over. However if they discover a systemic fault with the design, as they have done in both France and korea recently, you lose all capacity. Such a scenario never happens with renewables.

You also gloss over the demonstrable fact that wind only becomes a stable reliable source once offshore takes.up the bulk of wind capacity. This has been demonstrated by modelling of real data to be the case. These basic facts have been demonstrated numerous times by data modellers for them to have escaped your attention.

After a relatively strong start Ireland dropped the ball with it renewables roll out. It is way behind where it should be at this stage with most of its installed capacity in suboptimal onshore sites. It has also adopted a model which will continue to allow eirgrid to cripple future build out.

The current master plan for this country entails the deliberate over-supply of energy from relatively expensive renewables, and to turn this energy into hydrogen to decarbonise other energy usages such as transport.

I can't imagine what you could do with excess nuclear energy, though, that's a tricky one.

The Korean APR-1400 reactors that operate in South korea, the UAE and which are to be built in Poland, have a capacity factor of around 96%. nuclear is the most reliable energy source, by a wide margin.

The likelihood of all your several reactors being down simultaneously is remote, so you could probably get by with gas powered dispatchable capacity sufficient to cover for 1 reactor. But so vast is the insane cost of the offshore wind proposed, you could not only build enough nuclear capacity for this countries needs, but also provide enough gas turbine capacity to match the entire system demand, and gold plate the turbines, and you would still be many billions ahead.

With deliberate excess nuclear capacity devoted to hydrogen production for decarbonising industry and transport, you could even run your gas turbines on hydrogen with water injection, as inefficient as that is, for that 4% of the time the NPP's are offline. But in reality, your excess capacity would likely enable you to cover a reactors downtime by temporarily reducing hydrogen production and using the energy for the grid.

It's extraordinary that renewables proponents see no problem with a grid based on wind, which averaging offshore and onshore, has a capacity factor of probably around 40% - and see covering that 60% shortfall as not a problem - but nuclear with a shotfall of 4% is suddenly; oh no, how will we cope?

The UAE got the Koreans to build their NPP. Poland are getting half theirs built by the Koreans. The UK is turning to Korea to build theirs as well Maybe Ireland could do likewise?

As for that NIMBY argument - the French solved that by providing free power to locals within a given distance of NPPs. Offer that here and you'd have a ferocious bidding war with people demanding you site them near them.

And yet you think doubling onshore wind - with no freebies for locals - is a sure thing? Offshore wind will be a shoe-in, nobody will go NIMBY on those.

Ah now seriously. Do you think these private companies are charitable organisations ?

They will be generating under this offshore plan as much as 6X times the electricity we need. They will want that €200 Bn + interest + a margin of profit paid off over the length of time of their contracts. That is not going to provide cheap, let alone affordable, electricity by any metric you wish to choose.

The price to households will be determined by the cost whether the state or private companies provide the investment need, and that cost based on this private funded offshore plan is just not economically viable. And not just for householders either but for companies competing in the market place.

You do not understand what the €200 Bn offshore plan is do you ?

It`s not based on selling electricity to other countries. It`s based on generating and storing enough electricity to provide 100% of our needs at all times.

This idea of us supplying the rest of Europe is just a distractions side-show. There is nothing to even indicate that other European countries will require anything from us or that they would when we have it to spare.

Try going to your bank to get a loan to start a business on that basis, and while it would give your bank manager a good laugh, it would be a very short visit.

None of which has anything to do with this offshore €200 Bn plan. It`s a plan to provide us with energy security. Something both our own energy regulator and Eirgrid have pointed out we are in not in E.U compliance with.

The strategic policy of the E.U. has nothing to do with this €200 Bn offshore hydrogen plan. They could not care less how much we spend as they would not be funding it, the Irish consummer would be, and you have still not provided a single figure as to how it could be done without that totally unviable price tag for a country with a population of 5 million.

Do you somehow believe that there is some onus on other E.U. countries to supply us electricity through these cables with whatever we may need whenever we need it ?

If you do then you have no idea what E.U. energy security policy is.

Again you don't really understand the principle of grids do you. Grids are about balancing loads from where there is a surplus to where there is a deficit. With renewables there is always going to be a surplus somewhere and a deficit somewhere else. A country has a vested interest in selling it surplus when it has it rather than seeing it go to waste. Again I suspect you well understand it since I have seen you crow about France selling its Nuclear surplus to its neighbours.

The message is simple - the bigger the grid the more reliable the supply and that covers all sources put onto that grid. The EU understand this even if you pretend not to.

There is no possibility that Ireland is going to have the interconnector capacity to allow for backup of all renewables. At current prices that would cost about EUR 25 billion. For at least the next several decades interconnectors could only supply a small fraction of Ireland's needs on a becalmed day. We already have a vaguely thought out plan for how we will manage these situations and it is not interconnectors but hydrogen. The only problem is that solution is ever more expensive by a large factor.

Estimated cost of clean up of Fukushima is currently $660 Billion. Let that sink in for a moment !

Remember risk is both the likelyhood of an accident and the consequences of that accident. Nuclear, due to the consequences of accidents, is always classed as high risk.

Guess who has to underwrite that risk - you and I. This is why the industry is uninsurable and why most governments refuse to shoulder those costs and risks.

Ireland will never build a nuclear power plant, end of story.

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The Celtic Interconnector has an aspirational cost of €1.6 billion and yet won't generate a watt of power. With a capacity of only 700 Mw, It works out at €2.08 billion per GW. Poland's nuclear reactors are priced at €2.92 billion per GW.

The dunkelflaute conditions you might want interconnectors for as backup - though 700 MW when you need more like 7 GW - is near pointless, often cover the whole of Europe, so with so much of the regions zero carbon strategy being renewables reliant, they are useless because no country has a surplus to share.

These weather events can last months, hence the ESB current plan to generate and store vast amounts of hydrogen, as it would be required to power almost our entire needs for up to 3 months straight.

Conversely, interconnectors for exporting power when generation is in excess of demand are a crazy notion when you will need all the excess energy to generate the 27 Hiroshima bombs worth of hydrogen the ESB says we'll need tokeep the data centres and buses running.

When an interconnector costs 70% of the equivalent in nuclear energy generation capacity, they are a poor investment choice if you see them as a sop for lack of energy generation capacity.