Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Wood can be carbon neutral if you replace more than you burn

Yes, there's this (deliberate?) misconception that we're trying to remove every last mole of fossil fuel out of the electricity system. It's not true, and it never has been. We can exceed our climate targets and still use gas for up to 10% of generation, as an emergency cover. (And oil will have a long future ahead of it as raw material for manufacturing)

On the "battery" point, it's not just electrical batteries. There is a lot of investment in heat batteries, which are cheap, scalable and made of common materials (sand, salt, etc) but can hold temperatures of up to 600 °C for deferred use in driving steam-turbine generators. That tempetature is actually a lot higher than nuclear reactors ever reach - one of the huge disadvantages of Uranium reactors is that they're not very hot, so you need to build them huge to make them any way efficient compared to other kinds of thermal generation.

Thats a dangerous view for our climate, of being carbon neutral.

Drax power plant, not just being feed with virgin old growth trees, but named by Ember the green advocacy think tank group as being the single largest emitter of CO2 in the U.K. but also the 2nd largest CO2 emitting power plant in Europe.

But ssshhh you are supposed to pretend for the sake of the ideology bookkeeping it runs on harmless unicorn farts. Not doing so will get you tied to a ducking stool accused of being a green heretic until you recant.

A lot of silliness about German energy policty being regurgitated here. To provide a bit of counter-balance:

Germany electricity prices are high for domestic consumers because they tax the hell out of it - VAT and tax amount to over 30% of their bills. For non-household/industrial consumers, German prices are right bang on the European average - offical stats here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics

Try to use a bit of brain, ffs. If a Germany-based energy intensive industry could cut energy costs by 42% by simply moving a factory across a border to one of the many EU neighbours as they are entitled to do freely, then Germany's industrial base would have evaporated years ago. As it is, they remain the 3rd biggest industrial exporter in the world and industry supplies about 1/3 of jobs.

Before 2002, Germany was a perennial net importer of electricity from its neighbours - since 2010, Germany has been the biggest exporter of electricity in the world in 9 of the 13 years. Improving electricity self-sufficiency was a major Energiewende goal and they've clearly succeeded well in that regard.

In the last 15 years, the carbon intensity of German electricity production has halved. Also a key goal of Energiewende.

Renewable share of electricity generation - for the first 4 months of 2024 - is 60%. It was 6.3% in 2000. Another milestone achieved.

German grid reliability (SAIDI) has actually improved. 21.53 average minutes of service interruption per customer per year in 2006 down to under 12 minutes.

So they've managed to cut carbon emmissions in half, grow the renewable share nearly 10 fold, transform themselves into the biggest export of electricity in the world while doubling the reliabilty and stability of their grid. What a disaster!

It actually tickles me hearing US-based knuckle-dragging internet warriors who literally wouldn't know watt from a joule scoff at Germany's energy policy. The US has been shutting down nuclear reactors at an average rate of 2 every 18 months for the last 20 years but you never hear a peep about it, Germany retires its last 3 plants and people lose their ****. It's all just culture-war political rubbish.

Who said cut down mature trees - managed woodland is the best renewable source. Also fast growing varieties such as willow, with managed planting in rotation. Because of the land needed would only ever be a small portion of energy, but it is renewable.

Why is it not true to methane from Cattle and grass - it is. It however takes 10 years for atmospheric CH4 to be converted back to usable CO2 for photosynthesis. In essence raising organic grass fed cattle is carbon neutral. Except for that 10 years where the methane hangs around in the atmosphere when it is 28 times more potent than CO2 as a green house gas

I'm kinda done with providing facts, figures, links, etc. to counter some of the nonsense posted here. I've posted links to Eurostat reports on electricity prices across the continent many many times but like @SeanW earlier, the information is just ignored and 2 pages later the same rubbish claims are posted.

I don't believe most of the posters here criticising renewables are acting in good faith. I think being anti-renewable (and pro-nuclear) is really just a form of crypto-climate-change-denialism. You clearly look like a nutcase these days overtly denying anthropogenic climate change but being "pro-nuclear" or a renewable-skeptic is slightly less clownish.

The give-away is that most of the pro-nuclear "fans" have so little actual interest in nuclear generation at all. It's like someone claiming to be a Liverpool fan but showing no interest in who's in the current squad or how well the team is performing or the history of the team. So the discussion (from the pro-nuclear side) never elevates beyond quips and barbs and half regurgitated "facts" from US culture war idiots.

Price rises in France were less than elsewhere:

In 2022, the average price of electricity for French households will rise by 7.0%, at a faster rate than consumer prices (+5.2%). However, the increase has been contained by the introduction of the tariff shield. With the 14% rise in the average price of electricity including tax for European households, French households are paying 22% less for electricity than the European average, a gap that is greater than in 2021 (17%). In 2022, the price of electricity for French businesses, excluding VAT and over-the-counter subsidies, will rise by 23.4%, with the highest increases for businesses consuming the largest volumes. Against a backdrop of a 49% rise in the average price of electricity in the European Union, French businesses will pay 35% less for electricity than the European average (compared with 21% in 2021).

The reduction in nuclear energy output was 30%.

This pushed yearly nuclear power output down to its lowest level on record since 1988, some 30% below the yearly average of the past 20 years;

It's not generally appreciated that France is essentially 100% nuclear already. They have 61.37 GW of nuclear capacity, which if they were all working for a year could generate 537.6012 TWh, whereas their entire 2022 consumption was 459 TWh in 2022 so they theoretically already have a zero CO2 grid. What they actually do is they constrain their consuption of nuclear energy to being 70% of the total and export the rest, a nice little €3 billion a year earner on average.

So how did they ever manage this when captain doom is always harping on about Flamanville and any other nuclear cost overrrun he can find? It appears that what they did in the 70's and thereabouts, was to build one reactor design, many times over, thus achieving an economy of scale that resulted in relatively cheap and rapid construction, instead of every power plant being a from-scratch bespoke money pit.

This is likely the unacknowledged model behind the SMR idea, except factory production of nearly everything would introduce even larger cost reductions than France experienced. Norway is currently looking at at least one site with an eye to building 5 SMRs that would in total meet 10% of their electricity needs. Obviously Norway has a shortage of captain dooms.

SMRs are not efficient, and they never can be. A uranium reactor is a Low-temperature Carnot Engine (all thermal plants are Carnot engines, but every other kind runs at a higher temperature).

Because the heat from fission tops out at around 400 degrees, quite a lot of energy is lost before it can be used to do useful work. The temperature of the medium is fixed by nuclear physics, so the only way to compensate for this is by increasing the volume produced. This is why modern reactors are so big... any smaller and the low efficiency makes them financially non viable compared to other forms of generation.

So, yes, SMRs work for military use, where you're not trying to make a profit selling their output energy, but in the reality of commercial power generation they're a pipedream. You can't even use them for CHP because no private business can get their hands on the fuel supply (Also, if you think the planning for a windfarm is hard to get, try an application with the words "plus one onsite nuclear reactor" in it! )

"But you understand that if we only use gas for 10% of our electricity, it will cost much less than using gas for 60% of our electricity ?"

No it will not, and you have admitted that in your post. Under the marginal pricing policy it does not matter if the generation mix is made up of 60% gas or 10%, or even less for that matter, the cost to the consummer will be 100% the cost of gas. The only entities doing well financially from marginal pricing are the renewable companies.

If renewables are generating at such a low cost as we are being lead to believe, then at what level will the stand on their own two feet and compete ? From your post, and I agee with you, it will be never and a day due to the marginal pricing policy.

I haven`t seen anything in my electricity bill to show there have been any of these 30 minute bites that have made a blind bit of difference, and neither have the German`s who according to data here have piled up their percentage from renewables last year where they were still in the top 5 for consummer charges, well above the E.U average before taxes were included with us being having the dubious honor of being top of the pile.

It also looks like Germany do not have as much faith as you in the future need to gas. They are going to spend roughly €30 Billion of new gas plants and liquefied gas terminals to provide them with !0GW. THat doesn`t say much for their climate change policies being the reduction of emissions spending that huge amount of money on CO2 emiting gas withim =n months of them shutting down theit last nuclear plants that were providing 14% of their requirements.

But then green policy was never much to do with emission and everything to do with the ideology.

Temperature isn't an issue, otherwise companies that have been building reactors for 70 years wouldn't be designing SMRs - duh! You would think you and some others imagine that the only engineers in the world who know anything about building nuclear reactors are all in Ireland.

Rolls-Royce's figures were for one manufaturing facility, build more facilities and you can increase the rate of delivery. They are just one player, you also have multiple other companies in multiple countries that would start manufacturing SMRs. Your ability to create BS excuses is mind boggling. Nazi's, nuclear proliferation, slave labour, Hinkley, Just ignore Korea, the UAE, Czech Republic, Poland, Netherlands, Norway and multiple other countries that realise Hinkley is not the only way to do things, but is a salient lesson in how not to do things.

You even tried your special brand of BS with Japan, declaring their reactors examples of nuclear unreliability because they turned them off. "look, look, they aren't working, I told you, I told you!

If Australian's had your can't do negative narrow mindset they'd still be only a couple hundred of them camped in tents, huddled around a few fires on the shores of Botany bay.