Nuclear - future for Ireland?

What I seriously believe is that irrespective of the technologies you think are needed to achieve the current aims, they are completely unachievable with the current POS planning system in this country. So yes, I completeley agree with you that nuclear is unachievable in this country with the current planning system, which has to be thrown out anyway at some point, even if you wan't to spend way more money on stupid amounts of onshore and offshore wind farms and the hydrogen infrastructure to produce and store a couple of hiroshima bombs worth of hydrogen.

Once again, you are talking about mostly 30 year old infrastructure. Wind farms and solar need massive amounts of backup because they are fundamentally flawed as a provider of base load and are completely unreliable. Just a few years ago we had a string of unplanned shutdowns of major gas turbines here and were in dire straits for a while.

Had that been a nuclear plant you would be banging on about unreliability and how gas fired power plants were inherently unreliable and so we shouldn't have any.

A nuclear power plant does not 'generate' CO2 any more than a wind turbine does, each of which requires close to 1,000 cubic metres of concrete for it's foundations for a 200m land based turbine. What's more, with double the lifespan of a wind farm, it's likely the CO2 associated with the concrete in a NPP gets amortized to a greater extent.

We lost 2 fossil fuel power stations simultaneously.

I do not have the slightest concern about continuing to rely solely on gas fired power stations in prefernce to nuclear. What Ireland does to reduce CO2 generation is utterly meaningless in the scheme of things, at a paltry 0.3% of the global total. The only reason I favour nuclear is if you really want to achieve net zero, which is unachievable using wind and solar, and a lot more expensive while you make the doomed attempt.

You are blind to the basic logic that a wind turbine is inherently unreliable and solar is so far worse it's a joke. Nuclear is the worlds most reliable energy generation technology, yet you spend inordinate amounts of effort cherry picking instances of 30 year old reactors shut temporarily for maintainance, to dishonestly try and spin an endless stream of BS that it's not.

We have over 4GW of installed wind generation capacity and for the past week it's been generationg next to nothing. At midnight, that unreliable infrastructure was generating only 334 MW, it's picked up a bit since. Korean nuclear capacity factor exceeds 94%, but you think Irish 24% capacity factor wind is more reliable?

End of conversation. We do not have the same concept of what reliability is. A 30 year old UK NPP can set a world record of generating power for 2.4 years straight, but if it then is shut down for maintainance, it suddenly becomes unreliable in your eyes. I'd recommend spec savers, but they can't fix what ails you. To me, a wind turbine that takes a week off generating anything in the cold dark depths of winter when energy is most needed, is unreliable, to you it's more reliable.

60 years is the current design life for nuclear power plants built today with technology that is more advanced than it was over 50 years ago, it wasn't for the ones built in the 70's and 80's:

Arguing that we shouldn't buy a new car designed to last 60 years because there are 30 year old cars only designed to last that long originally, that true to their nature, now require some maintainance, is pretty stupid.

You want inherent unreliability and maintainace issues, well you need look no further that offshore wind farms. Apart from their starting point of 56% unreliabilty, they are barely expected to last 30 years and that is only with prodigious amounts of maintainance. If it costs €6 Billion to build an OSWF, you will spend another €2 billion on maintainace - 25-30% of initial capital investment worth of Operation and Maintainance costs.

France's current CO2 output is 53g per KWh. We are 332g per KWh, but something about some concrete poured 30 years ago, ignoring of course all the concrete poured in just the last couple of years for turbine footings.

Oh look, a 6 GWh gap between wind output and current demand. I know, lets build interconnectors and buy all that zero CO2 electricity neither the UK, France or any other country in Europe has to spare. Let's see, in 2050 demand will be something like 14 GW, we will maybe manage 2 GW from wind by then in conditions like these, so what does 12 GW of interconnectors cost, hmmm... €2 Billion per 700 MW, that's only €34 billion on infrastructure that generates not a single watt.

Of course maybe we don't need 12 GW of incredibly expensive Interconnector capacity, maybe we will have 12 GW of generation capacity from our vast stores of hydrogen, all built out and developed in just 26 years, I mean just look what we can achieve when we really think something is important, like a national childrens hospital, which has only taken 27 years to build since the need was identified. What, it's not finished yet?

I'm sure we'll have clean burning hydrogen fueled turbines by then, even though none exist outside of one small test rig that hasn't been independently scrutinised. I wonder what is the Carnot efficiency of a gas turbine you have to spray ultra pure water into continuously to suppress NOX creation?

The 30 GW of offshore wind is coming along nicely. i wonder who's going to build them now that Equinor and Shell quit and ran away after realising what the planning system was like.

We had an auction for the first 3 GW of offshore wind 7 months ago. No planning applications submitted yet or announcements of funding being secured.

Ha, ha, ha:

Commissioned in 2017. I hope EDF are laughing their heads off.

France seems to have sensed which way the wind doesn't blow in winter:

Critics who don't understand what capacity factor is or that the world does not have a demonstrated or affordable energy storage technology that can make up for woeful capacity factors.

Like I said, you had best let the IPCC and UNECE know that their data for nuclear power is full of crap, and let us know how they respond.

And by your own standard, Irish windmills emit 500g/kwh when the wind doesn't blow - because that's what Irelands emissions tend to be when wind farms aren't producing. This despite the fact that anti-nuclear environmentalists have determined Ireland's energy policies since 1978.

As for the Finns specifically, their EPR came online in 2023, the year after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. So it will help to replace Russian energy, which Finland had distanced itself from as a result of that.

There are no tried and tested designs, they all hit the same issues of delays and price over runs.

Anyway we don't have a nuclear warhead arsanel to justify investing in nuclear (unlike our good friends the Brits).

We also don't have a credible armed service to defend against an attack on a reactor which would render Ireland uninhabitable - and there is no indication we ever will have.

I'm not doubting the staggering costs associated with building, running and maintaining a nuclear power station , and then decommisioning..

The fuel is relatively cheap , the operating and interest arent ,

The french did pretty well with their copy of the US design , well they did till the 80s, the koreans seem to be able to knock out the same westinghouse design pretty reliably ( i dont know much about the fake parts scandals, or how much it cost , who paid )

The US did pretty well ,with their standard westinghouse design in 70s abd 80s -didnt go so well when they tried to restart production in the late 90s .

There is a tried and tested design, it's what the UAE built and Poland are about to, the Korean APR-1400 reactors.

The contrast between Polish politicians and the Irish greens and anti nuke lot couldn't be greater. Many of them are in a panic because after having done the environmental and other assessments for the site of the proposed NPP, the new PM, Tusk, is making stupid noises about throwing all that out and starting the whole process from scratch at a different location. Delays and cost escalations with nuclear are often due to such political stupidities and meddling.

You don't want to know of any NPP builds that went to schedule or were a reasonable length over. The overall average is 7.5 years. Some have been built in little more than 3 years.

You would think from the negativity on this thread that no one in the world would ever build a NPP, but 60 are under construction and 110 are planned. France jus seemingly threw renewables under a bus in favour of concentrating on building more NPPs.

If they had been less politically greedy, they probably wouldn't have needed to. Since the 70's, they earned so much from exporting electricity that it could have funded a new reactor build every 2.5 years.