[sidehaas]

Yes, if reduce wind capacity by more nuclear you get to the point where there is no wind and no curtalment. A school child can work that out.

With the cost of nuclear power station, £40,000 million, one could put solar on every suitable building !!

Anyone who thinks they can build thousands of little nuclear to do that for less needs to be certified.

Just see what the Chinese are doing and follow-simples.

The Chinese already have 56 reactors with 30 more under construction (that number could include those planned but not yet started, I'm not sure.) They also have their own SMR (ACP-100) already in construction.

China approves 11 new reactors

China's State Council has approved five nuclear power projects - Xuwei Phase I, Lufeng Phase I, Zhaoyuan Phase I, San'ao Phase II and Bailong Phase I - with a total of 11 reactors. ;

www.world-nuclear-news.org

A large proportion of nuclear's costs are down to finance and interest payments. If you can build a few SMRs and get them running in a reduced build time compared to large nuclear, you could bring the financing costs down a lot. There are other legitimate arguments why a project to build an SMR could be of a completely different (smaller) scale than something like HPC. This is what their business cases will rely on. It's all theoretically possible but as yet unproven.
No one is talking about thousands of them. It's 5s or 10s in the UK.

As an aside one reason they'll be very attractive in China is because the cost of finance will be small or (perhaps?) nil.

 

[donald]

Amusing as it is, it is non-sequitur to any points made in this thread.

If people had suggested NOT investing in BEVs in the 2000s, like not investing in SMRs now, because they didn't exist and there were good low CO2 diesel alternatives, where would that industry be now?

As for the money aspect, no-one is arguing a case of it being low cost. So arguing it is a high cost is not opposing any argument made for it. Yeah, stuff will cost money, we are in a global emergency to cut CO2.

As for the time situation, let it take 20 years! The problem is not that it takes 20 years (it doesn't, but let's just run with that), the solution is simple; start it 20 years ago! It wasn't as if we didn't see this point in time coming, back then.

There are therefore no points of useful counter-argument made in that video. It is totted up as if there is a problem with nuclear, and .. there isn't.

House-of-cards building flimsy excuses on top of each other for not doing it, trying to make it look like a substantial case against.

 

[KenB]

51% of the WORLDS electricity comes from Renewable Energy and now i am told we need nuclear. We only need to do another 50% and the costs have plummeted to a fraction of what they were.

In the UK there is a pipeline of RE much greater than is needed, its already there.

The Nat Grid back along told us that by 2025 they could run at net zero CO2 and we have if only for a couple of hours so far.

When HPC is finished the cost of its electricity will be c 3X the cost of RE. This is madness.

 

[mishad]

@donald (and anyone else who wants to play “fantasy national grid”), if you were given a budget of, say, £100bn a year for the next 25 years to make the UK grid as sustainably green as possible by 2050, how much of the budget would you allocate to nuclear, what energy generation mix would you be aiming to end up with, and what would the resultant average LCOE be?

(you are allowed to borrow money to invest more money up front, but the repayments and interest must be paid from the £100bn; perhaps assume 0% RPI and 3% interest rate for the purposes of discussion?)

 

[donald]

@donald (and anyone else who wants to play “fantasy national grid”), if you were given a budget of, say, £100bn a year for the next 25 years to make the UK grid as sustainably green as possible by 2050, how much of the budget would you allocate to nuclear, what energy generation mix would you be aiming to end up with, and what would the resultant average LCOE be?

(you are allowed to borrow money to invest more money up front, but the repayments and interest must be paid from the £100bn; perhaps assume 0% RPI and 3% interest rate for the purposes of discussion?)

I'll play, but you need to tell me what the rate of £.over-night/kW, £.maintenance/kW and £/kWh.year is, and if there are any storage options we are allowed to buy in, again the £/kW and £/kWh.

If you indicate the peak GW daily demand to deliver with that £100bn, too.

Would you like me to ask deep-thought to give me those values, or offer your own?

 

[donald]

I just guided an answer and asked for its 'opinion' so as to optimise total annual energy using £100bn.

I suspect it guessed at a split between wind and nuclear because it came to the same split with and without maintenance drawn from the £100bn, but it is a starting point, and includes some data values;

£100bn installation costs, maintenance not included;-

Question	Nuclear	Wind
Installed cost (£/GW)	~£6-8 billion	~£2.5-4 billion
Annual maintenance cost (£/GW/year)	~£50-100 million	~£40-80 million
Total kWh per GW per year	~7.9 billion kWh	~3.5 billion kWh
Optimal spend from £100 billion	£60 billion (7.5 GW)	£40 billion (13.3 GW)
Total annual kWh (for optimal spend)	~59 billion kWh	~46.5 billion kWh
Typical peak power output per day	7.5 GW	~10-13.3 GW
Lifetime (assumed)	25 years	25 years

Maintenance included;-
Updated Table (Including Maintenance):

Question	Nuclear	Wind
Installed cost (£/GW)	~£7 billion	~£3.25 billion
Annual maintenance cost (£/GW/year)	~£75 million	~£60 million
Total maintenance cost over 25 years (£/GW)	~£1.875 billion	~£1.5 billion
Total cost (installation + maintenance) over 25 years (£/GW)	~£8.875 billion	~£4.75 billion
Optimal spend from £100 billion (installation + maintenance)	£60 billion (6.76 GW)	£40 billion (8.42 GW)
Total annual kWh (for optimal spend)	~53.4 billion kWh	~29.5 billion kWh
Typical peak power output per day	6.76 GW	~8.42 GW
Lifetime (assumed)	25 years	25 years

 

[mishad]

Yes you can buy whatever mix of generation and storage you like. Including spending on developing reasonably likely new storage tech if you want.

We can pretend it's a command economy wrt investment in the grid, generation and storage, so you don't need to worry about returns for investors for this game - success is measured by the greenest grid (average CO2) and lowest grid-average LCOE.

Shall we postulate electricity demand growing at say 3% pa, so approx doubling over the 25 year period.

I'd also allow diverting some of the spend to demand reduction (e.g. heat pumps replacing gas boilers, insulation, etc.)

 

[donald]

Shall we postulate electricity demand growing at say 3% pa, so approx doubling over the 25 year period.

It makes no difference I think. You'd optimise/maximise for annual kWh. Whether that is 'enough' or not is someone else's issue.

 

[donald]

Honestly, I'd probably not disagree with deepseek, because it seems a fair split and offers the sort of back redundancy for low wind I'd want to see.

If storage was readily available, sure, ramp off some nuclear to build up the wind that can then be stored.

 

[mishad]

Did you/deepseek take into account:

• The currently installed capacity of nukes, renewables and gas?
• The time required to build new nuclear vs new wind/solar?

 

[donald]

Did you/deepseek take into account:

• The currently installed capacity of nukes, renewables and gas?
• The time required to build new nuclear vs new wind/solar?

Nope. Why are they relevant?

Your challenge was 'by 2050', so that is a) plenty of time to build it all, and b) long enough that most of what is extant will be on its last legs or already replaced.

 

[mishad]

Well if we already have 6-7GW of nuclear it might be that 60:40 is not the optimal mix of N:W for any new generation build.

Which leads to the question as to why the "optimal" mix is 60:40 in favour of nuclear, which has roughly twice the LCOE of wind ?

Have you/deepseek got a rationale for why that particular mix is optimal, beyond the qualitative argument that "we need some base level of reliable generation?"

 

[mishad]

On the time to deliver, if nuclear takes longer thats more gas burnt in the meantime.

Perhaps I needed an extra success metric of "kg CO2 emitted by the grid and construction between now and 2050"?

 

[donald]

Well if we already have 6-7GW of nuclear it might be that 60:40 is not the optimal mix of N:W for any new generation build.

Which leads to the question as to why the "optimal" mix is 60:40 in favour of nuclear, which has roughly twice the LCOE of wind ?

Have you/deepseek got a rationale for why that particular mix is optimal, beyond the qualitative argument that "we need some base level of reliable generation?"

I asked it to maximise the total kWh. This is therefore independent of what is extant. It's just the max MWh for your money. In fact, if you look at the data (I didn't have it plot that metric) it estimates 4p/kWh nuclear and 7p/kWh from wind. I did not cost in decommissioning, so, obviously, the wind will get a priority punt from that, which it seems to have done.

A need for baseload was not requested, I did not specify a minimum power output, so it had free reign to assume the wind was 'always sufficient' (giving wind the 'advantage').

 

[donald]

On the time to deliver, if nuclear takes longer thats more gas burnt in the meantime.

Perhaps I needed an extra success metric of "kg CO2 emitted by the grid and construction between now and 2050"?

It's your challenge! You tell me, I will feed it all into deep-thought!

How would you wrap that as a question? Assign a CO2 per the MWh this combo puts out?

What displaced CO2/MWh would you say is the rate of CO2-displacement?

I'll give it a go, see if it presents something you think is ball-park ...

 

[donald]

... I started framing the question, but it is too leading. I mean, if I say 'minimise CO2' then it'll simply come back with 100% wind, because it can be built quickly. So the answer would be to build all wind, then replace it all in 2050 together with the nuclear build.

So, you'd build £50bn of new wind now, and start £30bn of nuclear, then in 2050 you'd rebuild £20bn of wind.

You'd therefore get £50bn of wind on stream asap, and replace it with £20bn wind (started 2045) and £30bn nuclear (started now).

I don't really think that is difficult to see?

 

[Bornidentity]

And where does the fuel come from-- Russia
Where does the waste go longterm --- no one seems to know

You cannot build nuclear alongside RE as it is not capable nor financially viable to ramp up and down.

At times we are already 100% zero CO2 and that is with exports and wind curtailment. Nuclear just means more curtailment and increased costs for the most viable tech. There is no business case for nuclear not now,not ever.

The cost of solar,wind and storage continue to fall. Its peanuts to do solar and can be done in days not yrs. The solar has little transmission costs over and above what we alredy have.

Must go the bloods boiling.

The fuel doesn’t come from Russia. The UK has been making its own nuclear fuel since the start of British nuclear power at Springfields.

We have our own fuel fabrication and enrichment facilities and more plutonium than we know (knew) what to do with. Unfortunately the government has decided to throw our 140 tons of it away by encapsulating it in ceramic for geological disposal, rather than using the enormous amounts of energy it could produce in reactors.

The only reason we don’t have a long term storage solution is people keep objecting to it. So all the high level waste people are so scared of, because they don’t understand it, is kept in temporary storage facilities where it actually poses more risk! Now an enormous amount of potential clean energy is going to be made unusable and made into a larger volume to simplify storage until the inevitable geological storage facility becomes a reality, because all the foot dragging about nuclear power means we don’t have reactors to burn it off in.

A link on the topic, though it’s easy to search: AMR developer ‘disappointed’ by government’s decision to immobilise plutonium stockpile | New Civil Engineer

 

[Bornidentity]

The Rolls-Royce SMR is not based on the submarine reactors. For various good reasons it's more of a scaled down version of a large PWR. However they have a lot of relevant expertise. There is quite a lot of public information about the design on their website (it gets published once designers enter GDA).

https://gda.rolls-royce-smr.com/documents

Not going to get involved in the rest of the discussion on the thread as I don't think there is anyone here who doesn't already have a fixed opinion.

Thanks for posting that GDA link! Shame all the juicy bits are redacted but they were bound to be 😂 I really hope the Roll Royce SMR wins the competition that shouldn’t even be happening and we get a fleet of them in the U.K. The US and France wouldn’t even consider a foreign design!

It’s way ahead in the GDA process, will create thousands of jobs and if enough are ordered it will massively reduce the cost of nuclear power, which is the entire point! It’s got significant export potential with many countries interested in buying them and finically backing it.

It’s not really an SMR in the ‘small‘ power output sense, more medium sized and makes perfect sense for the U.K.

I’d much rather have several of these dotted around the country than loads of 40 MW SMR’s on industrial estates and the like. I’d also rather they put 8 of them at Sizewell instead of what is going there. 8 there, several at Wylfa and Oldbury and the economy of scale will start to work. I’m not really a fan of another £30-40bn foreign owned mega project where the tax payer / bill payer gets clobbered and other countries get the profits 🙁

 

[Bornidentity]

To be frank, that’s like a MacMaster video about electric cars.

Nuclear energy has been stuck in a world where people that don’t understand it or are irrationally / ignorantly against it have gotten the biggest microphone to scare people away from it.

I understand the technology and the risks and would happily live right next to a nuclear power station in the U.K.

It’s expensive because every time anyone tries to build one it gets objected to over and over and the safety cases keep moving on because everyone keeps objecting to it so the technology moves on and then it gets modified and the safety case changes and it’s objected to again and again. Then you have governments flip flopping because it drags on so long. Review after review.

Nuclear power is nowhere near as expensive in China because they just crack on with it. There is an EPR in china like Hinkley point C that took far less time and money to build.

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

 

[dashpool]

It isn't just people objecting to nuclear that makes it expensive. Also, everything has to be done right, so if the welds are messed up or the concrete isn't right then you have to start over.

Flammanville had an issue because the reactor vessel casting process went wrong: all the carbon ended up at one end because they didn't mix it enough, and it was brittle on one end and floppy on the other.

Basically, you make one vessel every decade, most of the workers have retired or changed job in the meantime, and by the time you need to make the next one, everyone has forgotten how to do it.