Nuclear - future for Ireland?

An article outlining why Hydrogen is a terrible idea;

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/the-hydrogen-economy-faces-big-challenges

If I can dig this up in a few minuits why are supposedly intelligent people promoting this guff. There is a fairly high probability that Toyota will go bankrupt for its reluctance to ditch hydrogen for the proven technology of batteries. It may already be to late for Toyota to recover lost ground.

Go tell that to the ESB, I think their hydrogen based master plan is unworkable. But hydorgen is what's needed if you reject zero CO2 Nuclear in favour of renewables.

Here is the ESB's Hydrogen based master plan for Ireland:

I'm not betting anything.

I think it could be used as filler for night time/low wind. All technology was new and unproven at one time you know.

I have been following the miracle of pebble bed reactors and Thorium reactors for the last decade now and I haven't yet seen them go into production. I was quite excited by them at the start of the hype - but the more I dug into them the more the promise faded. As is typical they are a just over the horizon technology which has no roll to play in us meeting our binding climate targets which are current and pressing.

Its funny how the projects that happen far away in a country with limited English language media always seem come in much cheaper than the closer ones where we have much more access to data on costs and projections....

I guarantee that any reactor built in Ireland would cost more than Hinkley C not less, and that is based upon a more difficult planning regime, a more difficult political landscape, the fact that we are an island nation with limited experience in heavy industy infrastructure and simple experience of watching every major infrastructure project overrun in cost and time.

And heres a clue as to why the childrens hospital has so badly over-run in cost and time - because of bad choices at the planning stage and political interference. These are both likely factors in any Nuclear project. Simply getting the necessary legislation through the Dail would be all but impossible without even considering the drafting of the enabling legislation necessary to allow a regulatory framework. Every man in the street and his dog understand how the children's hospital went off the deep end.

Ask any major operator in Ireland how easy it is to get a project off the ground and how long it takes to get an EPA permit to operate - and that is in industries where their is a track record.

Its fantasy land stuff going on here, but fortunately the political establishment seem to understand this.

"The technology Ireland is pursuing"

No they are not pursuing that technology since there is no realist plan to ever build a reactor given it is illegal with no plans to change that.

I dont doubt that the korean company are fine , any company on massive projects like a nuclear power station ( or a childrens hospital ) needs to be carefully watched , these are make or break projects , if you think westing house or EdF are above doing the same thing then ive a bridge to sell you..

If the plants were spread around the country 2 reactors per station they could effectively back each other up, the extra grid costs would be probably huge

Even if the entire population were on board,and a suitable site was identified it'd likely take a decade to get to construction ,

And then another decade for construction of the first plant ,

Such a huge projects would likely soak up the labour force and materials , creating huge inflation...

The cheapest way to build one , would be for the state to pay up front and assume all the risk , our state doesnt have a great history with that ..

And think , that time frame would be adding up to 57 billion euro to our national debt ... per plant , ( if we started at todays probable price of 20 billion per station + inflation)

You are totally misconstruing the reasoning behind SMRs. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build, but cheap to run. Their thermal efficiency isn't an issue, cost wise. The whole point of SMRs is to reduce their construction costs by reducing their scale so they can be manufactured in a factory in a controlled environment with standardised methods and tooling, and then the component assmblies will be small enough transport to the site where they will be assembled inside a weather excluding enclosure.

Toyota do this with houses in Japan. You choose what modules you want, the factory makes your house in a factory under controlled conditions with a workforce familliar with the mass production methodology, and then your finished house is transported to your site and erected in 1-2 days, ready to be immediately occupied. The houses come with a 60 year guarantee.

Rolls Royce believe that using this strategy they will initially be able to manufacture an SMR every 6 months.

Distributing small potential bombs across the country where you have a minimal defense force and a history of terrorism seems like a very dubious idea.

I don't think Nuclear is a solid answer... 2/3rds of the heat of a nuclear reactor is lost to atmosphere, it's an exothermic process. Nuclear is not a long term solution to fossil fuel replacement, another exothermic process. Look at what happened in France they had to cut reactor output because input water was out of the acceptable range (cold in, warm out).

Solar Panels, Wind and Wave Energy would be better solutions if the climate is heating up, they are functionally endothermic (extracting existing energy/excitation, not producing it and dumping most of it as waste). Geothermal also applies: https://www.gsi.ie/en-ie/geoscience-topics/energy/Pages/Geothermal-Energy.aspx

In the inverse situation, going into a global cooling, hell yeah fire up the nuclear reactors, warm this popsicle stand up.

Bigly expensive, hugely risky, single-basket investment, prone to even failing to launch, prone to corruption easily especially on cost overruns and fobbing off the ratepayers, and requires the top standards of qualified and educated individuals to run it, in perpetuity, for the lifespan and the decommissioning of it, etc.

"Nuclear power plants are expensive to build, but cheap to run. Their thermal efficiency isn't an issue, cost wise."

You're mixing up fuel costs and operating costs. Nuclear reactors are so expensive to run that the "cheap" fuel cost cannot compensate to bring the operating costs down to anything in the ballpark of competitive. A clear examples is the reactors at Indian Point closed early/before end-of-life - despite political and general public support for continuing operations (even the New York times weighed in on it) - because they were losing money on every MWh that they produced. Without subsidies, nuclear simply cannot compete on price.

Thermal efficiency isn't an issue, cost wise? Proof, if any was needed, that you have very little understanding about this technology and industry. Lower thermal efficiency means more fuel consumed and as a result more waste produced (which is expensive to handle and store) but worse, requires more frequent refuelling which means increased risk, more downtime, lower capacity factors, more radiation to be handled/managed per MWh, and each refuelling cycle lowers the life-span for the reactor. Why do you think every single designer/supplier has been moving towards bigger and bigger reactors over the last 4 decades? It's the same reason coal plants have also gotten bigger and bigger in the same period as they've struggled to compete with natural gas.

There's been a bunch of grifters touting SMR solutions for decades but I've stopped following them because they always either go belly-up or just quietly disappear without delivering a single working reactor - along with all the money they hoodwinked out of the gullible investors or naive government officials.