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.

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

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! )

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.

Nuclear power is far cheaper than offshore wind, even without the potential for cost and time reductions of SMRs. This 20 years to build a reactor BS is getting real old.

The S Korean Shin-Hanul units 1 and 2 took ten years to build, and that's because political interference caused a five year delay. The current government reversed the wholesale policy of complete abandonment of nuclear and re-started the project. Currently a further two reactors are under construction. S Korea will than have 30 nuclear reactors when they are complete.

We don't even know what the capacity factors of units 1&2 are because they haven't stopped producing at 100% of their design capacity since 2022! The projected cost of reactor units 3&4 is $3.2 billion per GW, reactor units 1&2 cost $2.7 billion per GW.

Barakah NPP in the UAE has four reactors, the first 3 each took 8 years from construction start to switch on, the fourth took 9, not 20 years. Those reactors cost $4.36 billion per GW.

Korean Hydro and Nuclear Power offered Poland six APR-1400 reactors at $3.18 billion per GW, which given that eight have been built to date and are in operation, it's likely that price is realistic as it's essentially the same cost as the Shin-Hanul units 3&4.

So we have 8 APR-1400 reactors in operation and another two under construction and the current cost of construction is $3.18 billion. Nuclear power in SK has a capacity factor of just over 96%.

East Anglia one offshore wind farm was commissioned in 2020 and cost $3.12 billion for 714 MW, which works out at $4.37 billion per GW. Dogger bank is the worlds largest OSW project: 3.6 GW for £9 billion works out to $3.12 billion per GW.

These two OSW farms have life spans of 30 years, capacity factors of 46.8% and O&M costs of an additional 25-30% of their original capital costs. So Dogger bank over 60 years - the design life of an APR-1400 - would actually cost 3.12*2*2.0513 per GW, or $12.8 billion per GW. Since I don't know the O&M costs of an APR-1400 I have left out the additional 1.27 multiplier which would have brought OSW up to it's real $16.26 billion per GW. The 2.0513 multiplier is to balance the capacity factor differential - 96/46.8.

$12.8 billion per GW for OSW vs $3.2 billion for nuclear - OSW is hideously expensive compared to Korean built APR-1400 nuclear power. No wonder Poland, the Czech republic and the Netherlands are all currently lining up for KHNP reactors.

The cost of OSW leaves out the energy storage system you would need to actually balance the capacity factor differential in reality and the nuclear cost is leaving out backup, but as I have suggested previously, that could be achieved with over capacity and having the output of those 'spare' reactors producing hydrogen for transport/heating and switching to being backups as required.

I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to listen to yourself, I'm struggling.

S Korean build cost was lower, so with your level of reasoning skills we must conclude their slaves are paid even less. Clearly Poland have told them the going rate for slaves there in order for them to assemble the bid. Remarkably, Polish slaves are paid about the same as slaves in S Korea.

Of course the ultimate irony is that cheap Chinese solar panels being installed en mass in Ireland are actually produced with Uighur slave labour.

There are no commercially viable SMRs and the companies who propose them are all slowly going bankrupt. Its a grift