Nuclear - future for Ireland?

"nuclear is so much cheaper". No. It might be "almost as cheap" if a lot of infrastructure has already been put in place, but that's as far as I would go. But really, how many nuclear plants have been built solely from the capital and resources raised at start of project and have completed on schedule? The taxpayers subsidise NPP construction to an extent that doesn't exist with any other type of generation.

Those credit guarantees, preferential loans and direct funding never show up in the price for electricity (agreed at the outset, based on the initial cost estimates of the plant), but you see them in the project costs.

Based on experience this century, NPP projects look a lot like a scam. The providers always lowball the estimate, then rely on politicians embracing the sunk cost fallacy to recoup the actual construction cost. And the electricity is "cheap" because the generator passed a huge chunk of the construction costs onto the host government. Also, the decommissioning cost at end of life is basically a finger in the air estimate, to keep the price per megawatt low, and made in the knowledge that the host government will have to pay whatever it really costs when the time comes anyway.

Even the champions of Nuclear power say that the very worst economic case applies to the first unit on a site, so the idea of having three separate NPP sites with a reactor on each is a non runner. Your only hope to get costs down is by sharing the underlying infrastructue (especially around fuel), and that means building multi-unit sites. If you think Ireland needs 3 NPPs, the only plausible plan is to have them in one place. So where will you build?

I have nothing against the principle of Nuclear power, and I consider it to be the safest thermal generation type, but the current state of the technology is colossally bad value when you count the real costs. The decision in the 1950s to pursue the Uranium cycle rather than Thorium was great for making bombs, but horrible for making reactors.

Historically the industry was kept afloat by soft subsidies from defence budgets on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Korea and Japan had their civil nuclear programmes heavily supported financially by the USA in exchange for those nations not developing their own nuclear weapons). Those days are gone, and now the only builds that make any sense are expansion of existing facilities. Gulf states with effectively infinite budgets buying NPPs doesn't make any kind of case that it would be good for Ireland to do so (the Gulf states also have a level of political corruption that makes every major purchasing decision suspicious)

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-drops-plans-develop-its-own-small-nuclear-reactor-technology-2024-07-01/

Another big player shelves it's plans to design a SMR. It's looking bleak for the fantasy of SMR reactors.

I am not sure Rolls Royce still have a viable project after the UK government dumped them.

Two very different topics so I`ll answer them seperately.

My original post was in relation to the claim that renewables replaced the generation being provided by nuclear. They didn`t. They didn`t even relace half over two years which resulted in generation dropping by 11% in 2023 (double the drop in demand) and resulted in Germany having to import 11.7TWh of electricity to keep the lights on and announcing a further spend of a massive €30 Billion on LNG terminals and LNG gas burning plants.

How anyone can look to Germany after that, (especially after them being more or less hand in glove with Putin encouraging others in Europe to avail of his gas), as some example to still follow on mitigating climate change is beyond comprehension. This is a country that based on nothing other than a governing green ideology shut down those carbom neutral nuclear plants while keeping coal burning plants open and pumping billions into LNG terminals and gas burning plants.

Will they get around to replacing the other 50% lost due to shutting down nuclear plants with renewables,as well as replacing the generation from their coal burning plants and gas plants, who knows, but there appears to be less confidence in Germany that is being expressed here. In December 2023 leading members of the Christian Democrates (CDU), the Christian Socialists (CSU) and the Free Democrates (FDP) as well as State Premiers called for those nuclear plants to be reopened, with an "overarching consensus" among the CDU and CSU on re-opening the technology in Germany, due to, as the Bavarian Premier Soder put it, "the current nuclear policy having burst on contact with reality" due to a court ruling in November that declared €60 Billion earmarked for climate and transformation projects unconstitutional.

A note on German politics, as statements from "German politicians" have entered the discussion. It's useful to know the ideologies behind those statements. Both of the parties quoted are on the political right, and both are very fond of big business. It's not a surprise to see either advocating for nuclear power, especially not the FDP who are happy to dabble in a little culture war nonsense from time to time (think of the UK Tories, but add competence and take away racism).

CSU/CDU (they are not two parties, but two regions of the one party.. imagine Fine Gael without some [CDU] or all [CSU] of the progressive social policies) was in opposition at the time those statements were made. FDP is the smallest party in the current coalition with SDP (basically "Labour") and Greens.

Germans often call Bavaria "Texas" in reference to its right-wing conservative politics, so again it's no surprise that Söder (a CSU politician, incidentally) is for it, or at least was that day.

It's also a mistake to claim that Germany had a "knee-jerk", unplanned nuclear shutdown. The country had already started to phase out nuclear power long before Fukushima: Gerhardt Schröder announced the plan in his first government in 2000, with 2022 as the final shutdown date, and the decomissioning of older plants was already underway in 2011. Fukushima just put the existing plan back on schedule. It was a long term, deliberate action, regardless of whether you agree or disagree that it was the right thing to do. Personally I'm in the camp that says once you've got the things you should at least make the best of the situation and keep them online, but I don't get a say, and the German people, who do get a say, never liked nuclear power from day one.

Germany's biggest failure was not to shut down it's nuclear fleet - much of it was going to be hitting very expensive 40-year overhauls by now if left in service; the error was to rely on Putin's gas as a replacement, rather than investing in renewable technology to replace nuclear. It's sad that a country at the centre of Europe's electrical engineering capability is such a laggard in both wind and solar, but when domestic domand was being met by gas, there wasn't much in the way of orders, and thus technical development.

There was no energy crisis when the decision was made.

There certainly was one after the decision was made where generation fell by 11% (twice that of the fall in demand) with Germany having to import 11.7 TWh of electricity, (a third of our yearly consumption), and announce a further €30 Billion spend on LNG terminals and LNG gas fired plants.

Germany stopped importing Russian gas in 2022 and still had the same generation output for 2022 (577.9) as they did for 2020 (574.7), and 2021 (577.8). A shortage of LNG didn`t effect their generation output in 2022, so how come it did in 2023 when generation fell by 11% to 514.6 where they had to import 11.7 TWh and announce a further spend of €30 Billion on LNG ?

The answer is simple enough and there for anyone who wishes to see. In 2022 they still had 4 months of generation from nuclear, and the 11% drop shows what the reality was once there was no nuclear generation in 2023.

And again no, the shortfall of 63.5 TWh in 2023 was not made up by renewables in 2022 and 2023. The total extra addition of renewables for those two years was 33.9 TWh, not much more than 50%.

Ramble away all you wish, but the evidence is there from the Germans themselves that when there was no nuclear generation in 2023, overall generation fell by 63.5 TWh with them for the first time in years having to import 11.7 TWh and sanction the spend of another fortune on LNG and all that is somehow just sheer coincidence and unrelated to the CDU/CSU, and even one of the present government coalition parties, the FDP, calling for those nuclear plants to be re-opened with an "overarching consensus" on re-opening the technology.

It doesn`t appear that the CDU/CSU and the FDP agree with you on €30 Billion being an irrelevance when you see the furore caused by the courts ruling on that €60 Billion earmarked for renewables.

A poster posted here that in the last two years Germany generated enough from renewables added in those two years to make up for the loss of generation from nuclear, and you appear to agree with that. The simple fact is that is incorrect and Germany`s own generation data shows that it is incorrect. The renewables added for those two years made up no more than half the generation lost due to the closure of those nuclear plants.

I said Germany's biggest error, and it was an error regardless of whether it was forced or unforced.