Nuclear - future for Ireland?

The fact that nuclear will never be cost or capacity competitive with renewables in Ireland - so discussing it's possibility is just another fanboy wet dream. It's frankly a pointless thread at this stage.

We will be importing plenty from France via that new interconnector in Cork. So it will be very much part of our energy mix to back all the white elephant virtue signaling nonsense on the Irish Grid beloved of the WEI fanboys on here.

Yeah but to the energy luddites and cranks in this thread, any electricity energy technology which doesn't involve boiling big tanks of water is a form of strange and mysterious witchcraft. Their belief is that we reached the end-game in terms of energy technology in the 1980s and any technology or tool that emerged after that "won't work". To them anything that doesn't consist of a huge steam engine attached to an alternator cannot be useful in the electricity generation field.

So international trade using interconnectors, solar PV, wind turbines, batteries, electrolysis - any technology which has emerged as a useful tool in energy and electricity generation in the last 30 years is viewed with extreme suspicion and skepticism.

If the invention of the personal computer was associated in any way with environmentalism or "the libs", then these guys would be championing big-iron mainframes as the only viable form of computing. Pointing out that you can emulate a Cray on a current smartphone at 10 times the speed and 1/1000th of the cost would not change their minds.

While it's somewhat important that their ludditism is challenged here, i've sort of given up on this thread as the interesting information is drowned out by the crypto-climate change denialism. It's a pity because I'm fascinated by and interested in the history and technology of nuclear power and enjoy technical discussion of the same - unlike the pro-nuclear luddites here - who are driven by a politically motivated hatred of newer tech and not by any real fondness or interest in nuclear.

A person who has demonstrated the ability to maintain skepticism about climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence, science and reason, is likely to be able to apply the same sort of knuckle-dragging resistance to facts and figures about nuclear power.

Nuclear capacity beats renewables up a stick every day of the week 52 weeks a year. As for cost competitive with renewables, I have asked you over various threads (seeing as you alone appear to be the only one having those renewable figures), and I`m still waiting for them.

Things are bad if you're citing Olkiluoto 3 in an argument about cost-efficiency: It's kind of like arguing that one venereal disease isn't quite as bad as the others.

The Nuclear industry has a cost control problem, and that's the real reason no government will touch it. Can anyone find a power plant that has come online at less than 200% of the original cost estimate? Olkiluoto 3 was offered as a €3.2 billion fixed-cost contract by its constructor, Areva. After literally years of suit and counter suit, the client ended up paying €5.5 billion for that "fixed €3.2 billion cost", and the contractor still made a fatal €5.5 billion loss on the project - that sounds like it cost €11 billion to me, or 340% of the original agreed price.

I'm not a luddite on Nuclear power; I just think the way it's run right now is a scam, where constructors bait and switch governments, and leave taxpayers holding the can. Olkiluoto 3 was unusual because the Finns stood their ground, but by doing so they bankrupted the constructor, leaving the French rather than Finnish taxpayers with the bill. There's always a bailout in every nuclear plant build...

+60% is not +240%, and there are plenty of renewable projects that have come in on budget.

When has a nuclear plant build come in on budget? The actual budget given at signing of contracts, I mean.

Nuclear is supposed to be a mature technology, but it's getting more and more expensive to construct. That's not how things happen in any other kind of engineering.

How many engineering projects are you aware of that were proposed without anyone having a clue as to what the price would be? Because that is what is being proposed with an offshore/hydrogen plan that will not even meet the projected demand, where we know that just the Capex for the offshore section alone will be nothing much short of €200 Billion with further massive Capex being required every 20 -25 years, plus a hydrogen plan on top where nobody has a clue if it will even work to scale or how much it will cost where the cconsummer will pay for all the electricity generated even if we neither want or need it ?

How is nuclear getting more expensive to construct compared to offshore. We know that even over budget and late 3 Olkiluotos 3s would provide all our present needs for €33 Billion, so how does that compare to providing the same from offshore wind where costs rose by 60% - 70% within a year and wind companies pulled out of agreed contracts until they got more money ?

Something that some posters were warning a year earlier that was going to happen from turbine manufacturers alone losing billions and going out of business for other posters here to hand wave away because economy of scale was somehow supposedly going to lower costs. That didn`t age well.

Oh Charlie

The IAEA regulatory requirements on nuclear are the same for every country. It`s farcical to suggest they are not.

If you can drag yourself away from naval gazing at Hinkley for a minute take a look at Finland a country with the same population as Ireland.

I was asking a simple question, it has an answer that anyone who is so interested in nuclear power should know… if it made an argument in favour of nuclear.

Projects are proposed all the time without detailed costings, but no project is ever commenced without an agreed, budgeted cost. With all other types of generation, once you sign off on contacts, you can expect to get the thing operational more or less when you asked for it, for more or less what you said you'd pay; for nuclear these days, nobody can predict it, and that's why governments aren't interested.

You seem to be under the impression that €11 billion is good value for a power plant. It's not, and things are looking even worse for Hinkley C.

The other end of the problem for nuclear is that the cost of decommissioning plants at end of life has turned out to be far higher than estimated too. Decommissioning a gas or coal or oil plant is quick and easy; a solar or wind farms can be disassembled and taken away, but a nuclear plant takes years and billions to safely bring out of use.

Yep. Renewables alone won't cut it; we need renewables plus storage or something else to carry the base load.

I actually think nuclear would fit that bill in theory, but the experience of other nations, who have experience and infrastructure on their side, rules it out for a country like Ireland.

Storage is an area that's seeing a lot of investment in existing technologies that until now had limited use. Before, a battery technology like iron-air that is dirt cheap to make, but too big to move anywhere had no commercial viability. But "dirt cheap" is exactly what you need for huge storage, and in a static installation, weight and density don't matter (same reason nobody builds houses out of carbon fibre composites)

By "may not" I mean that there is uncertainty as to whether renewables will suffice, not that it is definite that they will not suffice.

I definitely hope that they will be, as there isn't really another option available in a carbon neutral world.