Shannon LNG terminal plans rejected by ABP

As I have said earlier, SMR's are comomg down the track globally and it is expected that early models will be available from c2030. That is what the nuclear industry is suggesting. It is not hype, indications are positive, and yes, it has been slow-moving, but that is normal with anything to do witj nuclear.

I never suggested that Ireland should invest hundreds of millions in SMR R&D, that is being done elsewhere but I would expect that the government of any developed country would honestly investigate and review options and not behave in a Luddite fashion.

I again revert to the main thrust of my comments - Ireland is ignoring the risks of relying on current sources of power, the Greens which garner a minute percentage of the vote have prevented discussion and have an opposition based on fanaticism, not science or economics. There was further negative comment in today's Sunday Times by academics on ABP's refusal.

Here is a link to an Irish perspective on SMRs. https://www.engineersireland.ie/Engineers-Journal/News/nuclear-smrs-and-their-future-will-startups-disrupt-the-established-players

The nuclear industry globally does believe in a strong role for SMRs and it also is generally believed that Sizewell C and a couple of French projects are the last of the old-style plants (excluding Russia). Where is your information to the contrary?

My opposition from the outset has been to the fanatical and trapped mindset of Eamon Ryan and the Greens. Ministers meet and greet people all the time. It’s their job as elected representatives to examine risks, mitigate them ans make informed decisions. Meeting someone does not necessarily mean that cash will be doled out.  It is common knowledge in the energy sector that Ryan has refused to meet NFE – please correct me if I’m wrong.

Do you really believe that the UK would continue to pump gas into Ireland at the cost of leaving some of its own people in the dark? Do you recall Brexit and the NIP?  If something happened to an undersea pipeline how would Ireland fare?

Ireland is not being asked for cash, it is being offered a removable LNG storage facility along with other alternative energy facilities ranging from a shore base for offshore, storage, etc. 

Ireland should not be dependent on a couple of high-risk sources for its power. It’s called risk management, something that this government has little understanding of, as demonstrated by its oversight of state boards, building projects, IT security, etc.

You are jumping to all sorts of false conclusions in that post. Yes, governments are behind much of the funding of SMR development, because they see the need for alternatives and energy security; they also can see a long term benefit. However, there are several listed firms both specifically set-up for or active in the sector. (EDF, Westinghpuse, Rolls Royce, BWXT, etc.). To suggest that Ireland would be asked to contribute should it express an interest in the field is silly. When they arrive Ireland can - if it wants to - investigate their use, provided of course the Greens don't block legislation on lifting the ban on nuclear.

Yeah my adultering paid-off Congressman was also going off about SMRs lately. huh.

It remains yet to be proven if SMRs won't blow up as simply another Nukegate Scandal. Nukegate was a serious overrun of cost and incompetence, TLDR, and a lot of hyped promises, and a major cost passed on to the ratepayers.

In addition I'm not sure if it's a great move, is Nuclear even mature enough to mass produce at that scale. I shudder at the thought, I am familiar with inside commentary on the Boeing Dreamliner project, they couldn't get one plane to match the next in terms of workmanship and quality, it was a nightmare. And then they started catching battery-fire mid-flight when they ultimately started delivering to fleets. That on a nuclear scale workmanship defects would be horrendous. The day zero bugs and exploits of an incredibly complex mechatronic system. Nuclear assembly is only more convoluted, bureaucratic, and multi-partner than an aircraft.

Couple that we are in a unique global crisis where we're definitely going to or have exceeded that 1.5 C target. No matter how safe the nuclear reaction, the net result of the nuclear release is more heat. It only has to go places. Thermodynamically, you will always have incredibly high thermal losses. Thermal and fusion power solutions don't really help us there. eg. in France they had to lower reactor operating state to accommodate for warmer rivers this summer which supply its cooling water. Regardless of how you cool it, thermal waste enters the environment. See rejected energy versus work energy:

1 Quad = 1 Quadrillion BTUs or 1.055 exajoules.

Whereas, Solar in particular absorbs light and heat that is already pre-made. PV panels absorb light, Water loops (for home water heating etc) absorb heat, and those systems tend to result in a cooler home because less light and heat is heating and translating into the structure. A study last year found that 10 PV panels on 1 million Irish homes could produce 25% of all residential electricity demand (I don't think that study considered rejected heat, just power production potential)

Ah you couldn't make it up, the minister for shitshows. And we've had a few worthy of that over the years too.

If it comes from sea it has been washed clean of the dirt of fracking. And don't go looking for reason where there is none.

ER is an absolute bell-end. Instead of a private company paying for and building a useful resource on land that will last indefinitely, the tax payer will have yet another special charge added on top of all the other special chrages this country so loves, to build something with a limited lifespan and likely high maintainance costs. The charge won't go away, because operations and maintainance will not have occured to the greens, as so many other things manage to slip their feebile mental grasp.

Maintainance of offshore wind farms runs to a staggering 19% of the initial capital outlay and operations adds another 9% so 27% on costs just to keep them working.. The seas corrode and befoul all that is put into them.

Squeaky bum time for the UK gas network due to the present 'anticyclonic gloom' or as the Germans always have a great compound word for every situation: Dunkelflaute

yes, LNG being of high such compared to renewables.

Some day I hope you will explain how a nuclear plant can provide baseload on a small island grid without every MW having gas backup.

The go to reactor at the moment are the Korean APR-1400, which each produce 1.4 GW. Their capacity factor in Korea is something like 96%, which means they are incredibly reliable. The plan to replace fossil fuels with electricity in this country means our projected needs are far higher than our current generation capacity - EV's heat pumps. etc.

Let's say it's 12 GW. To provide that with nuclear you would build 10 reactors, with the energy of perhaps 4 of them being dedicated to producing hydrogen for fossil fuel replacement where batteries wouldn't suit. These reactors could also serve as backups for the direct power delivery ones, whenever those units are down for refueling, maintainance or whatever. You would of course have a storage buffer of the fuels and fertiliser they produce, easily produced by switching low demand period capacity from the baseload generators to their production or exporting some of it to the continent or UK.

During recent times in France when they had maintainance issues with multiple reactors, the proportion of energy nuclear produced was still in the 60-70% range. In normal times when most or all the reactors are functioning, the most they seem to allow on the grid is around 70%, with the rest being exported to that bottomless pit of energy demand which is the European grid. For most of the past 30 years those reactors have been running, they have been producing more than France want's so the excess was exported. This earned them so much money they could have used it to build a new APR-1400 every 2 years, or on better maintainance, but it went into general revenue and they spent it.

So in simple terms, you wouldn't need to backup your reactors with gas turbines because you would have a slight surfeit of them with the surplus output being used in a non time critical way. These would provide the backup, which with a reliabilty of 96%, you wouldn't need too often.

To do the same with OSW, you would need 2.6-3 times required baseload demand and a vast hydrogen infrastructure to make, store and use all that hydrogen for the 52% of the time your OSW isn't generating to capacity and to make up for the shockingly low round trip efficiency of the hydrogen cycle.

The APR-1400 is manifestly unsuitable for the Irish grid. It is far too big for a grid with baseload of a couple of GW. Even with the load doubling, it’s still too big.

The design goal for availability on the APR-1400 is 92 percent, not 96 percent. If you have spare reactor capacity sitting around waiting for something to go wrong and with no market for the electricity (as the French and Finns have through the synchronous continental grids) then the economics are going to end up being terrible because half the capacity will immediately go to waste.

During an outage, how fast do you think you could ramp up an APR 1400 from idling to full capacity without experiencing xenon poisoning? It’s designed to ramp up or down from 50 percent to 100 percent once a day over a couple of hours. It’s not the energizer bunny. You can’t just spin it up when you need it at least as it is currently designed.

Your magic box to rescue your idea from these obvious and serious problems seems to be cheap large scale electrolysis, a technology that again doesn’t really exist. And even with cheap electrolysis, you still need a fleet of gigawatts of gas plants to burn the hydrogen in.

The APR-1400 reactors are not remotely too big. You are out of touch with the government and ESB plans for the country and net zero. in 2019 our total energy usage was 190 TWH, which of course included fossil fuels. A central plank in future plans is to replace fossil fuels with electrically produced fuels or electricity directly. The current baseload of the grid is irrelevant, it's the future baseload that has to be accommodated. Replacing all ICE vehicles with EV's and all fossil fueled central heating with electric heat pumps is going to require a prodigious increase in electrical energy generation.

Dr Meadhbh Connolly, Future Opportunities Manager - ESB Generation & Trading, gives a figure of our net zero projected energy needs being 528 TWh. Those APR-1400 reactors are anything but too large for the future Irish energy requirements, as I said, you would need probably at least 10 of them, not the 4 you would need at present.

Also, as I implied, you don't need to throttle any of the reactors up or down, you just shift the output to the production of fossil fuel replacements, most likely hydrogen. and likely some for export. There would be no waste, that is for sure.

I was basing the capacity factor on this:

The electrolysis magic box is the ESB's crazy plan, not mine, so don't blame me.

About 26 Hiroshima nuclear weapons worth of the stuff held in storage:

The little black dot is Turlough Hill.

My idea is to reduce the need for so much hydrogen and electrolysis, which is based on tiding us through 6 week dunkelflauts. It's a lot more sensible than the crazy ESB plan. That need ceases to exist if you have multiple nuclear reactors. Your baseload reactors would be backed up by other reactors which are dedicated to producing hydrogen for industry and transport, and likely for export, which has been a nice little earner for France for decades. You don't even throttle down the baseload reactors during off peak, if such a thing would even exist with 2.2 million EV's all trying to chage overnight and everyones heat pumps going flat chat.

It's not just cars the government want to electrify, but also all heating, they want us all using heat pumps. So that's going to mean much more baseload demand, because people are always travelling, but enormous amounts of increased electricity demand for heating. And renewables aren't going to help - Germany has spent hundreds of billions of euros on their Energiewende since the concept was floated in 1980, and they have really nothing to show for it, (except for stupidly high electricity bills). And we can always increase our interconnection capabilities with the UK and France if we need to trade power and/or share spinning reserve.

DC interconnectors? Not a synchronous grid link like Finland certainly.

It has two 400kV AC lines to Sweden and the 220kV to Norway, which yes I overlooked. The rest is undersea HVDC. The point I was really trying to make is that just being part of the European synchronous grid doesn't of itself imply a high level of connectivity. Finland has more connectivity to the outside world than we do, but is nowhere near the top of the table for interconnectivity in Europe.

this is a fantasy of yours. I did not say that. The functions of AC interconnection cannot simply be replicated with a DC interconnector no matter how many times you say and no matter how much you insult people. AC is just not the same as DC.