Nuclear Energy for Ireland?

The IDA had a word last month and complained that Eamon Ryan was damaging Ireland`s credibility among international companies over his stance on data centres connecting to the the gas grid to power their operations if they have to come off the strained electricity grid.

They also warned last year that they were having increased difficulty attracting FDI here due to uncertainties over our electricity generation plans.

A quick google suggests there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation globally. Since 1961 there have been 4 serious nuclear power plant accidents. SL-1 in 1961, Three Mile Island (1979) Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011)

There's a list the length of my arm of gas, coal and oil related accidents in that same time. The historical stats back up that it is quite safe and environmentally friendly.

But if our offshore wind plan goes ahead as planned we will have no need for nuclear

Whatever about this being a viable option for our country. It's scary to imagine what a mess the government would make of such a project given the sh1tshow that is the national children's hospital. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Creating reservoirs and dams is awful for the environment - completely wipes out entire areas of natural habitats.

Also there are not nearly as many suitable sites as you think. And the capacity of hydro storage is not great for the significant investment and ecological damage it requires.

That 3GW from the ORESS auction is part of that 37GW wind/hydrogen proposal and like the 37GW it refers to the installed nameplate capacity. The capacity factor for offshore wind fixed turbines is at best 42%. That will only deliver 1.26 GW not 3 GW.

Agree.

Went to one of the Offshore Renewable Energy Development Plan public consultations year so ago. Some interest form local businesses hoping to make a buck.
Whatever about the east coast, most of the rest fantasy.

Thay didn't a Scooby how these projects might be built, connected, never mind maintained in one of the harshest maritime environments in the world. The location of the fixed inshore proposed one in Connemara is not technically feasible. As for floaters think Ryan's wrong/misinformed, would be technical possible but the cost would be mind-blowing.
As the CO2/Net Zero scam seems to be developing some very big cracks, UK, Norway, Netherlands and others are ramping up their petroleum development.
Ireland has potential to do the same, lots of very high quality gas on the west (and east) coast and high quality oil off the north west.
The Corrib infrastructure already in place was not constructed for just the five wells there. There's good potential for more development out there with tie-back to existing subsea infrastructure

For me Eamon Ryan and his supporters have an ideology that is nothing much more than a blind faith that they know best that ignores both the financial cost, the engineering realities and the end results of that ideology.

They have spent years fighting against LNG while being told by Eirgrid and the CRU that it was needed for our energy security with Corrib being depleted and Ryan only accepted the reality when a report he himself commissioned, even though he tried to tie their hand on, also pointed out what Eirgrid and the CRU had spent years telling him. Has he done anything about it though, not a damn thing. There is a ot of noise now about the over-spend on the Childrens Hospital, et we have this offshore wind plan that nobody can give a price for. I find it impossible to believe that the relevant Minister and the driver behind this proposal does know the cost, or even more likely he has chosen not to because even he knows it is financially unviable.

Occassionaly though with Eamon Ryan he gets a rush of blood to the head when his ideology is questioned. Lisa Chambers criticised him over the lack of progress for wind turbines off the West coast, Ryan jumped straight in and said that the technology was not there to build floating turbines and would not be foe 20 years or more. I would find it one hell of a coincidence that he just found out then that a proposed plan that required 25% of it`s turbines to be of the floating variety off the West and South coast were not even possible.

As to whether he is wrong or misinformed, the Hywind floating wind farm in Scotland would tend to show otherwise. The turbines there that were supposed to operate for 25 years are being towed en mass this Summer to Norway because the damage they have sustained in less than 6 years is so extensive it is too dangerous to attempt doing "the heavy maintance" required on site.

Can't we eventually build pumped storage underground? All you need is a difference in elevation between two pools of water, there's enough vertical space for that underground.

10Twh of storage sounds extremely inflated. What possible reason could there be to store, what, an entire year of electricity demand? There's absolutely no reason to store that much ever, especially when Celtic Interconnector would just let us buy electricity from the continent in case there's somehow no wind nor sun over the island. That, and hydrogen is pretty much discredited as a long-term storage option at this point.

The plan for net zero is not just for the grid, but includes transport, heating and industry, achieved by electrification of everything, or hydrogen as a fuel where that isn't possible.

Transport energy requirements are greater than the current grid's output and heating is also massive, so we are not talking about today's grid, but the one where almost everyone is trying to charge their EV at night, and heat their homes with a heat pump. The generation capacity required using renewables is 45GW

It's not my plan and I didn't do the calculations for the required levels of storage, that was the ESB, argue with them.

It amuses me that even the ESB can't help themselves and rather dejecectedly point out they don't have the nuclear option. The crazy hydrogen idea is precisely because intermittent renewables are useless without massive amounts of storage if you want to satisfy the high and constant demands of a grid. Nuclear does not require the massive hydrogen storage the ESB is touting out of desperation. I can't fathom why they don't just tell the government that what they want is impossible and to grow up and grow a pair..

The Celtic interconnector will cost as much as the national childrens hospital for a meagre 0.7 GW. When we are supposedly going to need generation capacity of 45 GW, the interconnector isn't going to do anything meaningful when the wind isn't blowing sufficiently or the sun is doing it's usual nothing.

I'm glad you think hydrogen is not a viable option, I do too, which is partly why I am in favour of nuclear energy, as it's the only way to achive net zero carbon emissions as there is no feasible storage mechanism that can enable renewables to supply base-load.

The OL3 reactor hasn't been particularly reliable since it went online 14 years late - for example, it's currently down due to a turbine fault.

While it's a new type of reactor, it is at least part of an existing facility with two older reactors already present.

Realistically, it's hard to see Ireland building anything similar with no existing infrastructure - it would probably take decades for a new Irish nuclear power plant to start producing electricity. I'm not sure if the political will is there, and then any project can always be countered with "SMRs are coming soon" (which I feel might be similar to the 90's style hopes of "fusion reactors are comng soon").

I don't have any particular opposition to the idea of nuclear energy in Ireland, it's just difficult to see it happening.

So OL3 has a teething problem. How is that terrible when here, solar panels don't work 89% of the time and wind turbines don't work 72% of the time? This was our reliable wind turbines just 32 or so hours ago:

The two APR-1400's built and commissioned at the Shin-Hanul NPP in S Korea have a current capacity factor of 100.1%, because in the 2 years since, they have not stopped producing energy. Nuclear energy is the most reliable commercial source of power there is

Unit 2 of the Heysham II nuclear power plant on the north
west coast of England yesterday broke the world record for the
continuous operation of a commercial nuclear power reactor. The reactor
is due to be taken offline next month for maintenance.

As of 1 August, the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) achieved 895 days of
continuous operation, having operated non-stop since 18 February 2014.
The reactor - also referred to as Heysham 2 unit 8 - is scheduled to
continue operating until 16 September, when it will be taken offline for
a planned maintenance and inspection outage. Assuming the unit carries
on operating until that time, it would have run continuously for 941
days.

Offshore wind farms require 26-30% of their total initial capital cost to be spent on operations and maintainance, and thats with them only having a 30 year life span.

It does not take decades to build APR-1400s, it takes 8 years with hold ups and snags. The UAE didn't have any NPP infrastructure or experience before having the Barakah NPP built. During the period their 4 reactors were being constructed, they established a nuclear engineering course at one of their universities and trained up the staff to run them and no doubt sent them to Korea for some hands-on experience as well.

Poland has no nuclear power reactors or infrastructure, they are planning to build 6 soon. No country has a NPP until they go and build the first one.

A major plank in our renewables plan is to build multiple offshore wind farms. We neither have the skills or infrastructure to do so. The ships that install the turbines and service them cost €700 million a pop. We need to get at least one built, and that will take years. None of our ports can handle the job and facillities at existing ones will have to be expanded and upgraded before they can - more tens of millions. Even Scotland, with it's extensive oil platform servicing experience and infrastructure, had to build anew and expand ports to build and service OSW farms.

The lack of something that can be acquired is not a valid reason for not acquiring it; it's no more valid a negative in terms of nuclear power plants than for offshore wind. People keep mentioning fusion hoping there will be a breakthrough soon. Would our lack of experince and infrastructure suddenly be trotted out as a reason why we couldn't build and operate fusion reactors here if they suddenly became a reality?

Any syatem can be down at times due to a fault or for maintainance. We have seen how our own all eggs in the wind basket plan has dropped to providing little or nothing for prolonged periods when demand was high.

As a poster said earlier nobody had a NPP until they built their first. I don`t know why people keep coming up with this "it would take decades", it`s not as if we would be looking for a couple of Irish lads with shovels to build one. Even if it took 20 years you would still be ahead of the current 2050 offshore wind/hydrogen plan. The technology for a NPP has been there and working for decades, whereas the technology for 25% of the turbines required for the offshore wind/hydrogen plan according to Eamon Ryan has not been invented, and will not be for at least the next 20 years. So what does that say for that plan other than it leaves a major hole in a plan, for not just being carbon neutral by 2050, but not even able to provide our projected requirements for 2050 even after a spend that is so financially unviable even those that favor it hide under the bed when cots are mentioned.

I was remarking on how industrial energy storage was about as much of a moon-shot as fusion, but otherwise yes all good points. Touch and go whether I'll see production fusion reactors in my life-time.

A lot of the time Ireland looks at the UK experience with fission reactors, but the British AGR program was an utter botch-up.

….continuing on from the infrastructure thread:.

>snip<

€13 million for 8.5 MW, that's €1.53 billion per GW of capacity for solar. Finland commissioned the OL3 1.6 GW reactor that was a cost disaster, at €11 billion, in 2023. It was their national childrens hospital cost blow out at 3 times the original estimated price.

But work it out based on actual energy generated using a capacity factor of 92% (the capacity factor of the other two reactors at the same site) and… 100/92*11/1.6 = €7.47 billion per GW of capcity.

Do the same for cheap Irish solar and it's €13.9 billion per GW, and that's just a simple cost of energy produced and not even beginning to cost the storage element you would need to add to actually make it work. Oh, and then there's the 25-30 year life span of solar vs 60 years for OL3.

Even a massive cost overun disaster like OL3 is vastly cheaper in terms of energy actually produced, than Irish solar, and there are cheaper and faster to build nuclear options than OL3.

I'll let someone who is warmer to nuclear than I am pull up examples.

The AGR program was a complete screw-up because each reactor was a bespoke project by a different consortium, which is not how to organise any sort of civil engineering.