Nuclear - future for Ireland?

And in totally unrelated news, Ireland now has the most expensive electricity in the world, with the possible exception of some tiny remote island nations in the Pacific. I wonder if the fact that our energy policies have been written by the eco movement since 1978 have anything to do with it?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/

Meanwhile, French energy costs are about half of ours … but I'm sure that's just a co-incidence.

You know that this is distorted by how various governments dealt with the energy crisis, right? Those who imposed a rate cap (France, UK) will show as having lower prices than those who provided energy credits (Ireland, Italy).

Even still, my average price per kWh for 2023 was around €0.40 (US$0.43) before government credits (I know this because I installed solar panels in January this year, and wanted a baseline for comparison), so I think there's a methodology problem here, or just Statista posting figures without the accompanying notes as usual.

I think the figure given for the UK is also wrong, for the same reasons.

A big chunk of tax payers money has also been wasted propping up power companies like SSE profit gouging Irish consumers on the back of extortionate power prices here despite all the BS from the usual suspects about "cheap" wind power

Still you have to admit that this raises a lot of questions, how we got to have such expensive electricity. And you can't blame Vladimir Putin for this, we knew that he was a maniac bent on conquest and that he'd already taken chunks out of Ukraine in 2014. We in Europe were on notice in this regard - and we had seen precedents in the 1930s.

Removing nuclear from any view of French electricity would be like removing wheat from bread or cocoa from a chocolate bar. And they produce very little energy from gas.

Offshore wind is at least four times the cost of Korean built NPPs based on APR-1400 reactors and adjusting for capacity factor difference, and excluding storage costs for the OSW energy and the 26-30% O&M costs (based on capital construction cost)

Six APR-1400 reactors are operational with a further two under construction and another two likely to be built in Poland.

It's ridiculous to lumber nuclear with negatives that are based on Irishness.

One reactor is only 1.4 GW. We need at least 10 of them to meet future energy needs with regards to EV's, heat pumps and de-carbonisation of transport and industry. Poland was just offered 6 reactors for the same price as the two currently under construction in Korea. So yes, you can compare the costs with Korea. Easier to transport stuff from SK to Ireland than Poland, given we are talking ships.

I would love to see nuclear here, and I'm sure this has been said in this thread a few hundred times, but there is not a chance in hell we'd build it for less money than landing on the moon. It would take decades to decide where to put it, and then you'd have tribunals and enquiries into the selection of that site.

From the second article regarding 75% drop in electricity prices since OK3 went online. That level of price decrease was not because of OK3, which supplies 15% of Finlands power.

• Last year, prices rose to unseen heights after Russia stopped exporting electricity to Finland. The country even then prepared for periodic power cuts due to the high demand for energy for heating during winter.

'We' wouldn't build it, the Koreans would. If the cost of nuclear has to be inflated dramatically because Ireland is such a basket case, then the same holds for the construction of offshore wind, ne'est-ce pas? Or is there some financial nonsense of an argument that makes Irish nuclear inevitably more expensive while the same logic doesn't also apply to Irish offshore wind projects?

UK offshore wind is at least 4 times more expensive than APR-1400 based Korean nuclear, based on actual output. If One is more expensive to build by X amount, then so will the other be, so the relative cost difference will still apply and nuclear will still be a quarter the cost in relative terms.

And here is the central point that continues to be lost on everyone: The whole point is CO2 reduction, not renewables for renewables sake, which is what it has become in Europe. You build nuclear capacity and you get net zero CO2 from that capacity. You build renewables and all you get is a CO2 reduction, because it's got a low capacity factor, is inherently unreliable and has to backed up with fossil fuels, being expensive imported gas.

France has the only net zero grid on the planet, and it's because they have 100% nuclear capacity on paper, which translates to 75% of their energy being from nuclear, not because they built loads of renewables that need fossil fuel based backup.

French CO2 output is currently 11g per KWh, the winds finally picked up here after days-on-end of near nothing, so our CO2 output has fallen dramatically to only 189g per KWh, instead of up around 289g yesterday.

Both in financial and CO2 terms, nuclear is the better choice because it's lower in emissions and cost.

KHNP offered Poland six 1.4 GW reactors (8.4 GW) for €24.6 billion. That's €2.93 billion per GW. OK3 is 1.6 GW, so €6.88 billion per GW.

In other words, if we had the nouse of Poland we could get an OK3 level of capacity for far less than €11 billion, actually less than half the OK3 price.

So I think we could easily secure a deal with KHNP, if we wanted it.

Would you vote for that, or say €4 billion per GW, allowing for some Irish cost inflation?

Earlier, competition between Westinghouse and KHNP for the main contract
had become contentious. KHNP had reportedly offered to build six
APR1400 reactors with a capacity of 8.4GWe for $26.7 billion. The
Westinghouse offer was $31.3 billion for six AP1000 reactors with a
total capacity of 6.7GWe, while EDF’s bid for its EPR technology was for
$33-48.5 billion for four to six reactors. Polish media reported that
KHNP had also proposed post-construction technology transfer to Poland
and media speculation was that the contract would go to KHNP.

KHNP, are they the same KHNP that the following was put to you just two days ago...

"Park Jong-woon, a former manager who worked on reactors at Kepco and KHNP until the early 2000s, believed so. He had seen that taking shortcuts was precisely how South Korea's headline reactor, the APR1400, had been built.

After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, most reactor builders had tacked on a slew of new safety features. KHNP followed suit but later realized that the astronomical cost of these features would make the APR1400 much too expensive to attract foreign clients. "They eventually removed most of them," says Park, who now teaches nuclear engineering at Dongguk University. "Only about 10% to 20% of the original safety additions were kept."

Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building ‒ a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident. "They packaged the APR1400 as 'new' and safer, but the so-called optimization was essentially a regression to older standards," says Park. "Because there were so few design changes compared to previous models, [KHNP] was able to build so many of them so quickly."

Having shed most of the costly additional safety features, Kepco was able to dramatically undercut its competition in the UAE bid, a strategy that hadn't gone unnoticed. After losing Barakah to Kepco, Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon likened the Korean unit to a car without airbags and seat belts. When I told Park this, he snorted in agreement. "Objectively speaking, if it's twice as expensive, it's going to be about twice as safe," he said. At the time, however, Lauvergeon's comments were dismissed as sour words from a struggling rival.

By the time it was completed in 2014, the KHNP inquiry had escalated into a far-reaching investigation of graft, collusion, and warranty forgery; in total, 68 people were sentenced and the courts dispensed a cumulative 253 years of jail time. Guilty parties included KHNP president Kim Jong-shin, a Kepco lifer, and President Lee Myung-bak's close aide Park Young-joon, whom Kim had bribed in exchange for "favorable treatment" from the government.

"Several faulty parts had also found their way into the UAE plants, angering Emirati officials. "It's still creating a problem to this day," Neilson-Sewell, the Canadian advisor to Barakah, told me. "They lost complete faith in the Korean supply chain."

10c or 35% higher than the EU figure.

14c or 60% higher than Finland.