- cross-posted to:
- energy@feddit.uk
- cross-posted to:
- energy@feddit.uk
Get those construction contacts signed!
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And Hinkley Point was such a roaring success, let’s pour more money down the bottomless barrel!
Yeah, let’s just keep burning fossil fuels, amIrite?
Yes, that’s obviously what your nuclear fairy tales are aming for: Not building even the minimal capacity needed for base load, failing to build that insufficient capacity at a reasonable time/cost frame, failing to build the complementary renewables and then crying why you need to still burn fossil fuels in decades… while obviously blaming renewables (that you failed to build) and storage (that you denied is viable) for the failings of nuclear.
Please list the countries either planning/building or already having sufficiently modern capacities right now to cover just the minimal base load of ~30-35% of the projected electricity demand by 2050 and onward… Hint: The one country close is France, which will be able to (barely) reach 30% of their projected demand when they build all the planned new reactors… where “all” is the full 14, not the bullshit right now of only bulding 6 with 8 being optional. Because nothing about those is optional. They are the bare minimum that will be needed. But even in France you can’t honestly tell the people the required amounts and investments needed…
That’s the actual state of nuclear power right now… It’s prohibitely expensive and inefficient and only kept alive by lobbyists. And by people like you they brain-washed for decades who are now fighting their fight against renewables (that are actually also a requirement for every viable nuclear model) and cheering for every country building nuclear power even when it’s mathematically proven that it’s purely symbolical and not even close to relevant for co2-neutrality.
Why not nuclear and renewables?
They don’t work well together. Nuclear needs to operate at as close to 100% uptime as possible, otherwise it isn’t financially viable. What happens when it’s very windy and sunny and renewables are creating more power than we need? You can’t just run nuclear to cover the peaks in demand, it doesn’t work that way.
Also it works so flawlessly for the French (not*), why not do it too?
*France is slowly overcoming stress-corrosion problems (35 out of 56 reactors were down, drought is another problem), and Finland celebrates the commissioning of a new reactor (albeit 14 years late), while on the other hand monthly German nuclear generation will be zero for the first time in over 50 years.
The real thing is the cost, the cost per kWh is falling so going nuke and locking in to a price that’s already above market makes no sense at all.
The Tories are ideologically opposed to renewables because of some weird culture war thing, plus they hate the idea of locally sustainable communities not being totally under the control of billionaires - people are a lot easier to scare into obedience when you can tell them their power might be shut off. The main reason though is huge projects can only go to huge companies, they don’t want lots of little solar farms they want their oil baron buddies to maintain their monopolies, that’s the only reason we still hear so much about this now allbut obsolete technology.
Burning coal is cheap, that’s why we’re here. I’ll pay more for electric today to leave a planet for our children. Wish my parents did that for me.
Only a fool would consider the cost in dollars alone.
Only a fool would advocate for paying way more for nuclear when renewables + storage are substantially cheaper.
If intermittent energy would be held to the same standards of sustained energy, you’d see the real price. Right now, the dirty secret is that renewables are integrated into our energy supply by having a crap-tonne of gas capacity (and importing nuclear energy from France) standing ready on poor renewable days.
Go look at any historic data of U.K. power generation. We have multiple periods every year where there’s barely any wind and solar generated for a week. How do you propose to supply exactly every Watt required, at every second of the day, running only on renewables?
If your answer is batteries or pumped storage then please go look at battery storage capacities and what a week of energy needs look like for the U.K.? You’d have to strip mine the entire planet’s worth of supply lithium and other required metals to be able to do it … and if you think nuclear is expensive, have a look at battery storage.
If your answer is “imports” then my retort would be that every country has to solve this problem and we can’t just “turtles all the way down”-solve this problem. On the same days that wind turbines are still in the U.K. they are still in Denmark, Norway, Germany. Where does the energy come from then? Oh, they’ll just import their electricity from Eastern Europe and we can buy their little renewable generation for that week? Ok, but then you’ve just transitioned to coal plants in Poland, by way of a long supply chain. Every country has to solve this problem.
If your answer is “we just need to build such an excess of renewables that we have enough even on still/gray days” then we are back to cost of guaranteed generation, which is how renewable energy providers should be measured anyway. Where does their backup come from? If you held renewable energy supplies liable for guaranteed supply rather than just accept “oh on some days, you can’t generate any power” you’d see a then buy their supply from backup gas. As they currently do, they can just squirm away from the accountability.
Having said that, I’m a HUGE fan of renewable/intermittent energy. We need to build more, fast! Lots and lots more.
But we do have to answer the uncomfortable question of how we back it up too. That’s included in the price of nuclear.
So what do we do? Import our way out of it, moving the generation to remote, cheap, foreign coal? Over, and over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly. Accept gas peak generation, thereby keeping carbon in the mix? Or nuclear?
I know which way I’d choose.
over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly
Compared to nuclear? Go check out the cost and schedule overruns for Hinkley C and then talk to me about cost. $40 billion and counting so far.
No, compared to the cost that proponents of an all-renewable strategy argue it would cost.
Both nuclear and massive-oversupply of renewables are pricey. The difference is one works on a quiet night, while the other doesn’t.
Show your math.
Sigh. Really?
I’ll show you all the world’s power grid planners, combined, making a choice to include nuclear in their decarbonised grid planning!
But I’m sure you know better than all of them.
As far as I’m aware, we don’t have any natural deposits of fissonable material in the UK so we’ll bot be truly independent. Green energy is what we need for that, we have plenty of wind, waves and sunlight.
Nuclear power is green energy.
