Unfortunately never gonna happen 😞
By the time they factor all the other bits and bobs and will cost double plus the ridiculous standing charges on top of that.

 

Unfortunately that’s what you get when you’ve got cluelessness idiots running the country.

Why use tax payers money to build reactors when you can take on all the risks but let foreign state owned companies take all the profits.

I expect the then energy minister got a copy of “Overly complicated reactors that are over budget and none have been completed yet” monthly and picked number one. Boy did they pick a good one!

Should have been a row of less powerful and much much cheaper Hitachi BWRs paid for with state money and privately operated. But that’s sensible so was never on the cards.

PM May realised it was ridiculous and nearly cancelled or kicked the Chinese out but it was too big to fail by then.

Amazingly they haven’t learned anything and are building another one!! But the government is taking a mighty 10% stake in that.

 

Probably worse.

This means that if the wholesale price of electricity across the country falls below £92.50, EDF will receive an extra payment from the consumer as a “top-up” to fill the gap. This will be added to electricity bills around the country – even if you aren’t receiving electricity from Hinkley Point C, you will still be making a payment to EDF. The current wholesale price is around £40 per MWh. If there had been no inflation since 2012, the consumer would be paying an EDF tax of around £52.50 per MWh produced at Hinkley. However, because it is linked to inflation, the strike price has already risen since 2012. (The price will be reduced by £3 if EDF develops another new reactor in Sizewell in Suffolk, as it is planning to do.)

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...7/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant

Also see HMG's own website: Hinkley Point C

 

Yep £92.5/MWh in 2012 but increasing with inflation every year so in 2023 that’s approximately £127/MWh.

That’s around a 35% premium over the average market price for 2023 according to electric insights.

 

For additional context…
2021 average is apparently £112.
2022 was £199.
It is not dramatically out of whack with those prices… though neither year was particularly normal price wise.

It does look a bit more mad in the context of 2019’s £42 and 2020’s £36.

The perhaps more interesting question is how it compares with things like renewable plus battery storage, or XLinks…. When it finally delivers some electricity. Time will tell.

 

I’m more disturbed by the cleanup costs.

For HPC they are supposed to be factored in to the price, but we’ve not been particularly successful at holding polluting companies to deals that mean they should pay to clean up when they are done… I think a degree of cynicism is not unfair, still the price is supposed to include paying for decommissioning costs as far as I can see.

The cleanup cost for previous messes is however truly astounding.
Around £260bn.
Or put another way £10k per household.
As it will be a multi year cost perhaps fairer to say something like £100 per household per year for 100 years. But I’ve no real clue how that splits up over time.


CLCC Thematic Review - Cross-Government Nuclear Decommissioning Cost - UK Government Investments (UKGI)
Nuclear power is a fundamental part of the UK’s future low-carbon energy mix, yet nuclear activity results in the production […]

www.ukgi.org.uk

CLCC's Annual Report on the UK Government’s Contingent Liabilities - UK Government Investments (UKGI)
This report from the CLCC brings together, for the first time, a complete view of the UK Government’s exposure to […]

www.ukgi.org.uk

 

Given the disgrace that is Flammonville one does wonder why EDF were given the contract. Still not complaining might help them come up with the talked about small reactors Macron says France needs not heard anything about this of late so no idea if they will ever be built.

 

Ok just found this had lots of Gov money but no concrete on the ground until 2030…….so not quite a quick fix and given the Flammonville debacle …….

https://www.nuward.com/en

 

Why is this surprising given the incompetence of successive governments of all flavours?

 

If the government had any sense it would just order a load of Rolls Royce SMRs and plonk them at all earmarked sites. The more they order the cheaper each unit.

As it is they are running a sort of bidding war so god knows what crap we will end up with.

One things for certain, it will be foreign made, over budget and more than likely the absolute worse choice of the bunch because they will be sure not to ask anyone that knows anything about it.

Edit: Oh look at me, I’m like mystic Meg! The fun part with this is the company that is close do a deal was once owned by the British state 🤬

UK's first small nuclear reactor deal 'poised' for signing but not with Rolls-Royce

Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) could be built in the north-east of England but not by Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC (LSE:RR.), Britain’s leading candidate...

www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk

 

While I can and did advocate for nuclear 2and 3 decades ago, and I can just about see a logic for investment in nuclear a decade ago as a hedge in case renewables didn’t work out as predicted….
[A time when cost curves for battery and renewables were already suggesting nuclear might be expensive and slow by comparison, but it was all highly uncertain so hedging bets seemed somewhat reasonable]
…I fail to see how it would be sensible to pour more money into nuclear now. It will neither be cheaper than renewables nor will it be faster. I mean I might be wrong I am only a humble biologist but LCOE and firmed energy reports seem pretty clear.

 

Is there some explanation for why it takes so long to build nuclear reactors these days?

The Japanese average less than 5 years to build all their nuclear reactors, the quickest was in 39 months.

Are there vested interests buggering it up (meddling folk with big financial interests in so-called 'green-energy')?

The 'oft quoted' 10 years comes from the skew of a small few projects that got suspended and delayed for decades.

Surely, if we really have a global emergency, why are we not mobilising to build nuclear reactors, done and complete, inside 2 years. It is possible, it has been done.

 

Is there some explanation for why it takes so long to build nuclear reactors these days?

The Japanese average less than 5 years to build all their nuclear reactors, the quickest was in 39 months.

Are there vested interests buggering it up (meddling folk with big financial interests in so-called 'green-energy')?

View attachment 185315

The 'oft quoted' 10 years comes from the skew of a small few projects that got suspended and delayed for decades.

Surely, if we really have a global emergency, why are we not mobilising to build nuclear reactors, done and complete, inside 2 years. It is possible, it has been done.

Think it’s down to government indecision and flip flopping. Combined with the world and his wife trying to challenge any decision to build something and poor reactor design selection.

By the time they start to get anywhere another government gets in and starts to review it.

If back in 2006 when they decided to sell Westinghouse they instead just decided build the reactors they actually owned the design for using state money and just bloody well got in with it they would all be running by now and would have cost a crap ton less money.

 

Still missing that TWh storage solution to compare solar/wind and nuclear.

 

We've waited 15 years for such solutions to present themselves.

Could have built 3 generations of nuclear in that time.

Insufficient will to do either, I think, is the answer to that. 'This CO2 thing' just isn't that big of an emergency for people.

 

Thanks @Bornidentity for the link understand what the SMR a bit more and accordance also builds nuclear subs etc it all makes sense. Utterly stupid not to choose the home grown option with Rolls Royce but UK is always doing that whatever flavour of government. France tends to go in the opposite direction…….

 

FWIW, I have actually spoken with engineers in RR in the course of the last year about SMR and I am sad to say that I am unimpressed by their approach, which is archaic in most important respects. It seems to me to be basically aiming to box up and market 1950's submarine tech, with as few changes as they can get away with. I mean, I can understand the logic of doing that from their POV, but I like to see 'innovation' to persuade me it is on a trajectory into the future.

I could go into detail but it might be more appropriate to discuss 'positives' than negatives, and Westinghouse already has "SMRs" (AP300s) deployed, in China, which has to be seen as a positive.

Personally, I'd call them 'medium modular' as they are 1GW (thermal) with a, let's say, 'stout' small building built around it. My view of SMR is that you build the building first and then move the bits in. At least, that is my understanding of the Westinghouse AP300.

 

Someone wondered why Japanese reactor plant was built so quickly. Do they know what types of reactor were being built?

 

Hitachi builds BWR’s. I remember at the time people at work saying they couldn’t under why we had gone for the ERP (PWR) when they still hadn’t finished one anywhere and all were way over budget and the Japanese were building BWR’s on time and budget using hardly any cranes!

BWR’s are generally less complicated than PWR’s.

 

Someone else was encouraging innovation. Personally I think innovation in respect of nuclear technology is a bit too 'courageous a decision' for me.

 

Nah, the USS Enterprise is a starship. The other thing is something occupied by geezers in awful spacesuits.

 

It’s not qualified for human space flight yet but it is the most powerful rocket ever built. Think it’s 1.5x the power of the Saturn V but fully reusable.

 

Oh, which one do the blokes in crap spacesuits travel in?

 

Falcon 9. The space suits do like a bit like something out of a budget sci-fi movie!

 

A nuclear explosion caused by a runaway chain reaction a la Chernobyl

The explosion at Chernobyl was not nuclear but rather an extremely vigorous chemical one. It was caused by a runaway criticality but one that's nowhere near the like of a nuclear weapon. It was a prompt criticality, I believe, but one that promptly stopped. To be sure, a prompt criticality is something which power plants strive to avoid and weapons strive to happen but they do still vary in magnitude: Demon Core produced a prompt criticality but not an explosion.

This is theoretically possible in a PWR or BWR but would require, for example, multiple control rods to eject at very high speed from the core all at once (much faster than the mechanism can move them due to a control error). A single rod ejection is always designed for but too many gets in to the realms of incredibility.

This may be theoretically possible in the context that, were all control and shutdown rods to somehow disappear from the core very bad things could happen but, it would likely need something like the Earth's gravitational field becoming negative to make this happen (this would be really bad everywhere). But, like you say, it's not plausible.

 

The explosion at Chernobyl was not nuclear but rather an extremely vigorous chemical one. It was caused by a runaway criticality but one that's nowhere near the like of a nuclear weapon. It was a prompt criticality, I believe, but one that promptly stopped. To be sure, a prompt criticality is something which power plants strive to avoid and weapons strive to happen but they do still vary in magnitude: Demon Core produced a prompt criticality but not an explosion.

This may be theoretically possible in the context that, were all control and shutdown rods to somehow disappear from the core very bad things could happen but, it would likely need something like the Earth's gravitational field becoming negative to make this happen (this would be really bad everywhere). But, like you say, it's not plausible.

I tried to avoid the term nuclear explosion but couldn’t immediately decide on an alternative. Regardless I think an explosion caused by a prompt criticality would count as one in most of the public's minds!

 

Despite 32 years in the nuclear sector, I don't want us building more nuclear plants. Dealing with the reprocessing spoil and end of life decommissioning is just too big a task.

What's the issues?

We currently contain all the waste from legacy electricity generation in ponds that were only meant for cooling periods before long term storage. Long-term storage is held up by political motivation, not science and engineering.

Every retired nuclear reactor has been decommissioned. Modern reactors have far less component and fuel waste than legacy reactors.

Look at the appalling mess that is Sellafield.

Sellafield has so little to so with nuclear electricity generation waste that I question your opening sentence and supposed experience.

 

What's the issues?

We currently contain all the waste from legacy electricity generation in ponds that were only meant for cooling periods before long term storage. Long-term storage is held up by political motivation, not science and engineering.

Every retired nuclear reactor has been decommissioned. Modern reactors have far less component and fuel waste than legacy reactors.


Sellafield has so little to so with nuclear electricity generation waste that I question your opening sentence and supposed experience.

I'm honestly unsure how to properly address your post. Either you are starting from a point of absolute ignorance or you're just being super argumentative. Or both. Oddly though, you did immediately go on to answer your opening question in the following paragraph.

I'm particularly baffled by your statement that the place had 'little to do with nuclear electricity generation waste'... what do you imagine that the long-term purpose of the site was? And why did they accumulate and continue to store vitrified waste at the site in a large warehouse?

I was employed for a couple of decades at the Aldermaston nuclear site as an engineer in the field of Health Physics and was a frequent visitor to the Sellafield site. Whatever radiological problems we had at our home site were dwarfed by what we witnessed at Sellafield.

 

Nuclear is just incredibly expensive.

 

Now if only we could as graphically illuminate the 5 million deaths a year from pollution from burning fossil fuel, then maybe some rational choice might be possible.
Nuclear in context of the damage done by coal oil and gas looks pretty safe.

But renewables are also very safe (well assuming we are excluding biomass). Wind and solar are both less costly and faster to deploy than nuclear and are not associated with catastrophic consequences in the public perception.

 

How many people have been killed and displaced by "clean" hydro?

 

You’d actually be surprised. It’s not as safe as it sounds.

Things can go horribly wrong with hydro:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures

 

The national grid future energy scenarios are a helpful reference:

Future Energy Scenarios (FES) | National Energy System Operator

Future Energy Scenarios (FES) 2025: Pathways to Net Zero provides an independent view of a range of future pathways for the whole energy system, exploring a range of routes to net zero in 2050 for energy demand and supply. It has become an important publication in the energy sector and is the...

www.nationalgrideso.com

Usually the storage for 'worst case scenarios' is only needed once a decade or so, so even if it has to be dirty fuel, it still doesn't amount to very much in emissions terms. i.e. I'm not that worried if the plan is to get to 95% clean energy and figure out the last 5% later. Or the last 5% might be something expensive like biofuel or H2.

2023 is pretty typical... there are a couple of low weeks in winter (end Feb and end Nov) but with wind still providing average of 5GW, which is more like half of typical output. Only in a bad year is a lot of deep storage really needed.

 

Usually the storage for 'worst case scenarios' is only needed once a decade or so, so even if it has to be dirty fuel, it still doesn't amount to very much in emissions terms. i.e. I'm not that worried if the plan is to get to 95% clean energy and figure out the last 5% later. Or the last 5% might be something expensive like biofuel or H2.

What is that dirty fuel that can be stored for that indefinite period of time? What powerstation can be held at a few days readiness indefinitely to provide that service? What infrastructure could be used to distribute it?

The question is then less about emissions and more about security of supply.

 

Well let’s be sure we talk final energy not primary energy since we currently waste most of it.
Then by rational I mean is it rational to plan for meeting power demand that is a 1 in 100 year event if it costs 5x the likely cost of that event.
Then I was really questioning the 50TWh figure. Seems too much. But if you are planning for zero fossil and zero nuclear maybe you get a big answer. Still interconnected grids are likely to balance power cheaply much of the time. Projects like XLinks suggest a price of firmed renewables at about £60/MWh.

 

Well, in the UK's case, it is mostly going to be gas, isn't it? Unlike (the rest of) Europe, UK has no significant gas storage at the moment. But it does have plenty of gas transmisson and gas power plants. And nearly-depleted gas formations that could be used as storage if necessary.

So putting significant gas into long term storage? The issue with that is then the need for distribution as the required geological storage is limited in the UK and generation/stability service is needed across the country.

Having gas power plants sitting there not operating most of the time is pretty much business as usual.

No, that's an order of magnitude or two different to what is normal business for CCGT or STOR OCGT plants.

 

I think UK still has about 40GW of fossil generating capacity putting out on average 10GW. Don't see why it couldn't end up with 30GW capacity putting out on average 2GW in 10 years' time. Cost of gas generation is dominated by capital costs of the plants and the fuel itself.

Mainland Europe already has several months of gas storage, so not like that is mission impossible either.

 

I think UK still has about 40GW of fossil generating capacity putting out on average 10GW. Don't see why it couldn't end up with 30GW capacity putting out on average 2GW in 10 years' time. Cost of gas generation is dominated by capital costs of the plants and the fuel itself.

It's happening faster than that.

31GW CCGT will decrease as the grid brings online frequency and stability services that don't require gas to run during high renewables.

The other 10 GW of coal and non-CCGT are end of life and STOR sites being replaced by battery services for the hour or so output required in the evenings.

This will be largely complete by 2025.