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New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

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Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#171

Post by pfdietz »

korantu wrote: post #68
pfdietz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables + storage (both short and long term). At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper. Building expensive baseload now is a recipe for stranded assets not far down the road.

> At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper. As you imply here, it is not cheaper now, and plan something on hopes that it will be seems not very prudent. Past performance is not indicative of future one. We don't know what technical and engineering problems will surface when building battery packs orders of magnitude bigger than current biggest ones.

Making plans ignoring where prices are likely to go doesn't seem prudent to me.

Investors are used to operating under uncertainty and placing their bets. The market, which reflects the combined input of all those investors, seems to think NPPs are not a good bet.

The technical issues of storage are unique to particular kinds of storage. There are many different kinds being pushed. Are you saying ALL of them are going to fail? That's a bold position, especially as cheap renewables make the environment more and more lucrative for anyone who can provide better storage technology. We're talking many trillions of dollars here, and the economic incentives will only get stronger as duck curves and CO2 taxes increase.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#172

Post by pjc50 »

skitout wrote: post #144
radu_floricica wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decad…

But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)... It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray... SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on,…

Indeed. We need to keep rolling out renewables until nuclear is ready.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#174

Post by phaemon »

florimondmanca wrote: post #121
dane-pgp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the reasons that the electricity that Hinkley will one day produce is so expensive (£92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with gas and wind at about £40) is that the constructors were required to shoulder the risk of any cost overruns themselves. EDF estimates that the cost of electricity produced at Sizewell will be somewhere between £40 and £60. So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate…

> So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be at best as expensive as wind energy already is. ... And be low-carbon (~10gCO2/kWh). Whereas the £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation, which is at 400gCO2/kWh. Given how wind has a typical load factor of 20-30% max in Western Europe, you’d be using gas at best 70% of the ti…

> £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation

No, they're totally separate things. It's not "wind and gas" as a single entity, it's "wind farms supply power to the grid at £40/MWh and gas plants also provide power to the grid at £40/MWh". In other words, it just means they cost about the same which is half the cost of nuclear. There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.

Which makes sense. Scotland gets around 90% of it's electricity from renewables, of which around 70% is wind power. It couldn't possibly do that if your figures were correct.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#175

Post by gambiting »

stinos wrote: post #162
gambiting wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, have you replied to the wrong comment? Besides, very soon all new construction in the UK will be required to be heated exclusively by electricity, so for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas.

for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas Isn't it more nuanced than that? Don't know UK rules, but since you mention new housing: aren't these required to adhere to some minimum of insulation, likewise for renovations, thereby drastically reducing the energy required in the first place (I mean if I just compare our renovated house with my parent's, energy requirement is 4 to 5 times less…

I mean, yes, there are standards, but the standards are sometimes shit. As an example - my friend just bought a very expensive brand new house, fancy insulation, but.....all radiators are like 2 feet wide? Even for the living room where intuitively, that cannot be the correct size of a radiator for that. But apparently(having complained) nope, these are regulation size etc. Now he spends 2x as much on heating for a house the same size as his old one built 20 years ago, because predictably, the rooms never get hot enough in winter with those crappy undersized radiators.

Again, that's just anecdote, feel free to ignore it.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#176

Post by socialdemocrat »

wahern wrote: post #105
Gwypaas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy due to failed nuclear construction in the U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos... Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva

Western industry has progressively lost their ability to efficiently manage many types of heavy industry and large construction projects. This is particularly true for nuclear, which requires the application of disparate and highly specialized techniques and skillsets that are quickly lost. Though not to the same extent as the U.S., Japan, France, and South Korea have lost many of the same skills even though only a c…

Interesting stuff you are mentioning here which I don’t normally see brought up. Do you have any links summarizing this information?

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#177

Post by Udik »

pfdietz wrote: post #160
Udik wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> offshore has continued to get cheaper What is the cost of an offshore generation plant that can produce power with the same reliability of a nuclear one? This needs to get into the equation.

Probably the 100% renewable system will end up cheaper than one that includes nuclear. This requires prediction of where costs will be going, but the worldwide the market seems to be betting on that outcome, not nuclear, which only gets built when governments heavily tilt the scales. https://model.energy/

The cost of wind turbines has little to do with the cost of ensuring that the power plant will provide a set amount of 100% renewable energy all the time. Because when the wind is not blowing the plant has either to provide energy from a storage system or source it somewhere else, again with 100% reliability.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#178

Post by grey-area »

Udik wrote: post #153
socialdemocrat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed. If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage. And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if…

> If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the othe…

This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#179

Post by rwallace »

skitout wrote: post #144
radu_floricica wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decad…

But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)... It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray... SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on,…

> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)

The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that.

But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside from the successful use in Australia of batteries to damp fluctuations on a timescale of minutes, which is great but doesn't address timescales of hours to months). What am I missing?

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#180

Post by pfdietz »

Udik wrote: post #177
pfdietz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the 100% renewable system will end up cheaper than one that includes nuclear. This requires prediction of where costs will be going, but the worldwide the market seems to be betting on that outcome, not nuclear, which only gets built when governments heavily tilt the scales. https://model.energy/

The cost of wind turbines has little to do with the cost of ensuring that the power plant will provide a set amount of 100% renewable energy all the time . Because when the wind is not blowing the plant has either to provide energy from a storage system or source it somewhere else, again with 100% reliability.

You didn't look at that link, did you? It has models using predicted costs for wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and computes the minimum cost system to produce reliable baseload power using real historical weather data (at 5 minute intervals). You can alter the assumptions and see what the costs optimize to. Nuclear is "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced settings.
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