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Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

building.co.uk

141–150 of 206 posts

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't you put yourself in that situation?

FPTP systems suffer from a very high percentage of wasted votes. If voting systems were judged like normal IT systems, FPTP would be considered defective by design.

FPTP has the redeeming property of being unstable. A fully proportional system ends up with a status quo, with people who are good at doing deals in power - this an recipe for a cesspool of corruption and indolence.

I favour the middle ground of alternative vote.

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#142
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear capacity should be around 90% when running baseload, with However offshore wind has a capacity factor of 40% to 50%, and its lack of output is correlated with other wind farms. Therefore one backup power station can only really serve one wind farm. Not only is it capacity factor but demand correlation that weights against the intermittents.

The UK’s average nuclear load factor for 1970 to 2017 was 67.4 per cent. Furthermore, France demonstrated the correlation of nuclear downtime in the summer of 2022 when it was too summery, compounded with overrunning maintenance. At its lowest point, France’s nuclear availability sat at around 40% of maximum capacity for about a month. All single power generators need to be backed up for downtime.

The French nuclear power stations are often built near rivers where the water was too hot for cooling or just not enough due to drought. The UK nuclear power stations are all on the coast drawing in much cooler sea water.

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#143

The budget overruns are predictable. To the point where you can confidently predict that neither year nor the budget will stay as they are currently predicting. Honestly, it sounds more like wishful thinking at this point. I would say late 2030s at probably > 40 billion is realistic. They'll find a way to make it worse. Maybe they'll get lucky and only overrun only a few billion. Every year it overruns will cost bill…

Imported power is interesting as when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine for us, it’s the same for other countries bordering the North Sea. So if they’ve gone green we’re all looking for electricity on those days and it’s expensive. And the reverse. On the days when we have too much wind and too much electricity prices drop to zero because we can’t export it for the same reason.

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wind keeps blowing at night But stops during anticyclones, which can last several weeks (that makes it completely unfeasible to use wind power with gas as a backup, because there's no way we can build several weeks worth of storage). > Nucular continues The problem is that nuclear plants cost is roughly the same no matter if they produce or not, so nuclear + solar is strictly costlier than just nuclear. Solar in a…

Most countries have the infrastructure to store several weeks worth of methane. That can be repurposed to store hydrogen.

fyi all current hydrogen plants use either a mix with 50-70% gas or 100% hydrogen but are creating huge NOx as byproduct due to high temp burning. That's just one of the many hydrogen challenges, another one is H2 handling is harder, another one is the more renewables you get, the more your H2 plants would cost since in some periods you use them extensively, in others - very little and to compensate such infra cost&maintenance the plant owners will jack up the prices or seek govt price compensation. That's why many say hydrogen plants/energy is somewhat of a pipedream

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to: 1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds. Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite tha…

> That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to: These probably also apply to Vogtle 3 in the US; IIRC, Vogtle 4 was less expensive. Economies of scale applies to large nuclear plants as much as it does to small widgets: the more you build the easier it becomes to build them.

yep, V4 did cost 30% cheaper than unit 3. It's interesting if the next plant will be built and if yes - how much cheaper/faster

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#146
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there? What storage?

Batteries?

lol, look at California and how much it imports & used gas. And that's WITH a nuclear plant. Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#147
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is storage for that There literally isn't, it doesn't exist.

https://www.energy-storage.news/massive-growth-potential-con... > current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh Perhaps do some research before you speak of things you have no idea about

Yeah, that's why California with >10GW of installed battery is not using gas/not importing at all in off peak hours... Oh wait

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#148
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> democracy is a way to get everyone to shut up Democracy is a way to get people to acquiesce without violence. If you look at history, it's remarkable how common insurgencies and succession crises or breakaway warlords are.

It's like a release valve, no point in going out rioting if you can vote the bastards out in the next election.

This is also how most professional licensing works. The idea isn't that the license guarantees quality, it's that the license can be revoked when the licensee in question makes an egregious mistake.

Democracy isn't about voting people in. A monarchy or dictatorship can be voted in and stay permanently. The point is to vote people out of power.

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#149

As far as I understood it takes so long because UK has some customization requirements which impacted a lot delivery time

That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to: 1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds. Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite tha…

Nuclear is doomed to fail, because people's lifespans are too short. You can build a nuclear power plant, then do nothing for 50 years and have no workforce left to build new ones. This leads to nuclear power being excessively expensive and slow to construct.

If you decide to go the SMR route so that you continuously build nuclear reactors every year to sidestep this problem, then you run into the problem that the containment building needs to be airstrike proof. These high fixed costs are unrelated to the reactor technology and cannot be avoided by building a newer generation power plant.

If you decide to build the old designs, then you run into another issue: The savings obtained through building a larger scale plant, such as same number of staff, bigger diameter pipes and less material at the same fixed cost to obtain higher total power output per power plant, must be paid dearly by a cooling solution that scales with that increased power output. Placing a nuclear power plant near a river sounds intelligent, until you realize that climate change causes rivers to dry out or reduce their flow rate, shutting your nuclear power plant down, making your large scale power plant work against you. Meanwhile placing a nuclear power plant near the ocean has resulted in the Fukushima incident, so future power plants also need to be tsunami proof.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Before the failure of NuScale, I was confident that the problems with large scale nuclear power plants could be solved by SMRs, but the truth is that you simply can't operate nuclear power plants with the same lack of care you can operate a wind farm or a coal plant. If the coal/gas plant burns down or explodes, who gives a damn? Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

Re: Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries?

lol, look at California and how much it imports & used gas. And that's WITH a nuclear plant. Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten

I am not sure what your point is honestly. Batteries are a very viable option for storage, competing cost wise with pump storage which has been in use for decades.

> Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten

Even existing storage solutions in Germany are already sufficient for the present day electricity network and build-out is progressing rapidly. The time for a nuclear build out was 20 years ago. We missed that window, now other technologies will prevail.

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