Nuclear - future for Ireland?

nobody does and no planking will ever be approved

It’s the same 1-2 posters across boards going on about nuclear and the main one hasn’t a clue

Was saying they would vote SF to stop the wind madness of Green Party till I pointed out SF plan was to increase spend on wind generation and not stop it

As you have posted this reply in reference to a post of mine I can only assume the poster you are referring to is me.

When it comes to posters not having a clue your good self has been ran out of numerous threads here when caught spoofing and I have never said I would "vote SF to stop the wind madness of Green Party" In fact I challenged you months ago to go through any of my posts and show where I ever supported SF and I`m still waiting for you to get back to me.

It was pointed out to you by me and others from SF material you posted that the only vague references to wind generation by SF were for community or state owned wind farms with no figures as to what this would generate, how it would get us to net zero carbon emissions ( something as far as I recall that had to be repeatedly shown to you that was not the same as carbon neutral emissions, which you still appeared to not understand), and SF had nothing to say on offshore wind.

An energy to fuel system using hydrogen would have consummers paying not only for the electricity they use, but the same again for the electricity used to produce hydrogen and then pay again for that hydrogen when burned to generate electricity. On top of the €200 biliion capital cost of turbines, they would also be paying the cost of the infrastructure required to generate green hydrogen, the cost of desalination plants that would be required , the costs of hydrogen storage and distribution, and nobody can give a figure for all that or even know if it would work to the scale required. It`s a load of hopium, and very expensive hopium. If producing hydrogen is your thing then doing so using nuclear is a much more effecient means than using intermitten sources like wind and especially solar.

You keep bringing up Hikley " the most expensive energy plant ever built" but keep ignoring that NPPs built in South Korea have been on average one quarter the cost of Hinckley and that the strike price for Empire 1 wind generation to supply New York is the same as Hinckley, and for anyone who still doubts the increase in offshore wind costs, Northland, the largest member of the consortium, have estimated that the cost of building the 1 GW they have contracted with Taiwan to build will cost €6.5 Billion. That would leave our proposed 37 GW of offshore costing €240 Billion just for the capital cost of turbines alone.

Batteries to keep the grid operational during the kind of extended periods we have seen to date when wind has dropped to 6% and less is a nonsense.

I do not know if you have every been to California but when it comes to sunshine we ain`t no California. Our hours of sunshine annually are around one quarter of those of California. Incidentally If you are going to plug a 6 GW gap with solar, then in theory with an annual capacity factor of 11% you would need to install 55 GW of nameplate capacity. In reality, with solar having a capacity factor in Winter of probably not much more than 7% it would require installing 85 GW of nameplate solar capacity. To put that in perspective, we currently have 1 GW of installed solar nameplate capacity.

Battery tech is the fastest growing area of the energy sector, lithium will be consigned to specialist high energy density batteries. For utility scale batteries sodium will take over and there is literally no ceiling on sodium supplies.

Unlike nuclear renewables are still evolving exponentially and since they are already cost competitive with all other forms of generation - they will sweep the board as costs continue to plunge.

We can believe it if it ever happens.

And many of those advocating more reliance on weather based renewables are clear that massive grid expansion plus a wide variety of other projects are necessary. I've been getting YouTube ads from an activist group called "Build Our Grid" which demands a variety of investments to support weather-based renewables.

https://buildourgrid.ie/about-the-grid/#whatdemands

That, in addition to a laundry list of projects promulgated by the ESB and Eirgrid (list elsewhere presumably) they also want battery storage (presumably in large quantities) AND foreign interconnectors.

Needless to say, what projects they have in mind are not listed, nor is anything costed.

California also has large economies (states) surrounding it on land. They also don't have to worry about dunkelflaute as much as we do.

I think to be accurate, that ground has been broken on Bill Gates' molten sodium cooling plant. The natrium reactor design isn't expected to be approved by the US dept of whatever until 2026 at the earliest, so they're going ahead with whatever they can. Presumably while Bill is still with us and able to wield a shovel for the photo op.

The USA isn't building offshore wind because its climate doesn't provide the country with much in the way of wind resources. You may as well argue that Norway is mad to spend money drilling for gas because Ireland doesn't…

As for "Natrium" (a brand name for a design of Sodium Cooled Fast Neutron Reactor), the idea has promise, but Sodium-Cooled reactors have a poor operational record that has dragged down their availabilty factor (fortunately they are among the safest type of nuclear, so those l faults haven't involved injury or damage). I also worry about any "startup" being responsible for this kind of engineering, where safety is paramount - spending lots extra to avoid something that "might" happen is just not in the American start-up mindset.

The reason this technology is attractive to the US is that it can be run on decommissioned weapons-grade plutonium, which the US was obliged by treaty to dispose of. It did dispose of that material, by storage, but burning it for power was the original plan. Guess what happened to the first reactor in that proposed family..? Cancelled after massive cost and schedule overruns.

I'm not against this if it can be made to work... but it's still too expensive for Ireland to take a punt on; the alternative current options are just too expensive full stop...

Costs for who?? No evidence of that for consumers for sure….

They would definitely lose support. They would lose it locally from the people who would have to live next to it. Since it's just about impossible to get an Aerobic Digester through planning how easy do you think it will be to get a nuclear power plant through.

It's very much a marginal obsession with nuclear in Ireland so it would undoubtedly lose more voter support than it gained.

They would also lose support in the Dail when they had to try to change the law.

It would be the kiss of death for any party who backed it - which is why it has not and will not ever happen.

So we would have an example of this impediment to selling agricultural produce in the form France being unable to find buyers for French food products, by what you consider to be logic? No one outside France consumes French wines, cheeses, butter or anything else.

In 2021 France exported around €70 billion from it's agri/food sector while Ireland exported €15 billion worth.

As an argument it comprehensively falls flat on it's Brie.

You would likely need three NPPs in Ireland, best located on existing thermal power plant sites which already have heavy grid connections. So that's just 3 local communities to convince with an offer of free power for the life of the power station. I think you would get communities actually lobbying to get them. France overcame local objections with free power and it worked a charm.

Every country that has nuclear power has overcome this supposed problem. Significant boosts to local economies through permanent stable jobs and the excellent safety records actually see local communities where NPPs are sited being very positive towards them.

Local communities in Ireland are not favourable towards either solar or wind either, With any attempts to establish them being generally objected to strongly, yet this impediment has managed to be overcome, almost 400 times. With nuclear you just have 3 communities to sway.

Nuclear is so much cheaper than renewables that it should be an easy sell with an honest public debate because it could actually reduce domestic electricity costs which renwables do not do, as is clearly seen here and in other countries that are attempting the renewables route to net zero.

So who's left in the SMR game? Lockheed Martin's SMR fusion reactor is due sometime in 2024. Cough. Cough. Is there anyone else?

You are so rabid anti nuclear electricity generation that you cannot see the wood for the trees.

2021 nuclear generated 69.1 TWh. Renewable sources, (even including biomass and household waste), in 2021 generated 233.9 TWh and in 2023 generated 267.8 TWh. An increase of 33.9 TWh. So no, renewable sources did not make up for the loss of nuclear generation. The did not even make up for 50%.

In 2022 Germany generated 577.9 TWh. In 2023 514.6 TWh. A 11% drop in generation when consumption dropped by half that percentage at 5.6%. That resulted in for the first time in years Germany having to import 11.7 TWh and a scramble to invest a further €30 Bn., (on top of the billions already invested), in LNG terminals and LNG fired energy plants to keep the lights on in the future.

Those are the realities of Germany`s insanity shutting down a carbon neutral energy source based on nothing to do with climate change, just green ideology

Absolutely amazing that amount of renewable generation can be rolled out so quickly. I

It's all well and good to talk about total production, but the fact remains that there's at best no correlation between the output of weather-dependent renewables and energy demand. And that's being kind, to some extent the correlation is reversed: i.e. that weather-dependent renewables produce the least energy when the demand for energy is the greatest.

As stated in the Energy Infrastructure thread:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/solar-panel-supply-german-electricity-prices-negative-renewable-demand-green-2024-5

The difference between the two actually widens even more in the summer, a season of peak production and lower demand. 

This also means that consumers are not necessarily benefiting from the low prices, as they typically consume more energy in non-solar hours. 

This situation will get worse in the coming years as the government wants us all to have electric heat pumps, most of which will be air source heat pumps, the efficiency of which go down with temperatures as do the output of solar panels and - in the case of blocking anti-cyclones - wind turbines.

All that these silly things are doing are complicating the economics for the traditional thermal generation facilities that we still need and will continue to probably for the foreseeable future. That's one of the reasons why countries following this model tend to not only have among the highest energy costs in the world, but in some cases among the dirtiest.

If you take a look at the most recent opinion polls from Germany it`s not that easy to handwave away that the CDU/CSU and FDP (a member of the present coalition government) have called for the re-opening of nuclear plants and having an "overarching consensus" on reopening the technology.

The present governing parties in the most recent poll received 32% support. (SPD 16%, Greens 12%, and the FDP, a party that favours re-opening nuclear plants 4%). The CDU/CSU received 31% with the AfD on 18%. THe CDU/CSU support alone is 3% higher than the combined support for the SDP and Greens who wish to keep them closed.

You may not look at the decision to shut those nuclear plants as knee jerk, but in the middle of an energy crisis to do so while leaving coal burning plants open, was so ill related to mitigating against climate change by reducing emissions that even Greta Thunberg thought it insanity.

Is it too simplistic to say that Schroeder was bought from the very beginning? And that while Germany's decommissioning of nuclear gets blamed on green ideology, the reality is that Russia saw useful idiots in Germany everywhere it looked and bought them all off in order to sell shedloads of gas to them?