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

building.co.uk

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

#161

Post by DrBazza »

chickenbig wrote: post #157
DrBazza wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

France has around 20GW on the coast (21,444MW including Flamanville 3). Also France looks to have winter-dominated electrical demand (50TWh in January 2023, 40TWh in April, 37TWh in August, 46TWh in November). See https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/monthly-e... and select France.

Indeed. Though, as I said there are others next to rivers.

The map here:

https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/map-where-are-frances-n...

shows 6 reactors on the coast, and 12 inland on rivers which are susceptible to summer river water temperatures and levels.

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

#162

Post by crote »

mhandley wrote: post #91

Yes, Hinkley and Sizewell may be expensive - but they're unlikely to be that much more expensive than wind/PV plus enough storage to provide reliable 24/7/365 power. In the end, I'd much rather have some diversity in the system. If the choice was 100% nuclear vs 100% wind/PV, the answer would probably be different, but for 15% of the UK's capacity to come from a reliable (but expensive) source that is uncorrelated wi…

The problem is that you can't use nuclear to compensate for low wind/PV supply.

The cost of nuclear energy is dominated by the need to pay back the massive construction loan. Nobody is willing to take that risk on an open electricity market, so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand. If the price on the open market is less than the "strike price" the government will pay for the difference, and if the plant wants to supply power to the grid but the grid doesn't want it due to technical reasons the government will pay them for every kWh it could have supplied.

This in turn means nuclear power plants operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time - minus forced maintenance downtime. It can be used to supply a base load, but not to handle peak load. When there's an excess of supply, the grid is forced to turn off cheap wind/PV capacity to make space for expensive nuclear capacity.

I agree that it would indeed be nice if we could use nuclear to fill in the gaps left by a renewable grid, but the economics simply doesn't allow for it.

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

#163

Post by crote »

throw0101b wrote: post #136
bryanlarsen wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is only 10 cents / kWh after the OEB has off-loaded all the costs for building and decommissioning to the federal and provincial governments.

> decommissioning Bruce Power is responsible for decommissioning costs: > Bruce Power receives a fixed price for its electricity generation that is inclusive of all its current costs and funding of future decommissioning liabilities in the Bruce Facility. As previously noted, the average price over the life of the contract was estimated by the IESO to be $77/ MWh (in 2015$). * https://www.brucepower.com/who-we-are/de…

How many of their plants have already been fully decommissioned? What's going to happen when the reserved funds run out halfway through the decommissioning process? Who's going to pay for it when Bruce Power goes bankrupt? Are they going to claw back dividends decades after payout, or will the taxpayers end up with the bill?

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

#164

Post by mikhailfranco »

imtringued wrote: post #149
mpweiher wrote: post #73

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…

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 co…

The local moors flood every winter. However, this was the most catastrophic flood in recent times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1607_Bristol_Channel_floods

Some nice maps in the referenced report [pdf]:

1607 Bristol Channel Floods: 400-Year Retrospective

https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/fl_1607_bristol...

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

#165

Post by Moldoteck »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #150
Moldoteck wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours? The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?

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

#166

Post by Moldoteck »

imtringued wrote: post #149
mpweiher wrote: post #73

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…

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 co…

Related to the rivers & france- it's specific to a certain plant design, newer plants usually don't have such problems. For building experience: it depends. If the building time is 4-7 years, you can afford to slowly build plants one after another until old plants need to be decommission so you'll get constant workforce

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

#167

Post by littlestymaar »

adrianN wrote: post #137
littlestymaar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the nights a little bit more than 76 minutes.

Nobody claimed that the current battery capacity is sufficient to last a night. The interesting part is the growth curve of available storage.

Going from 76 minutes to a full British night (which can last up to 16 hours in winter!) is going to need a heck of a growth curve indeed.

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

#168

Post by littlestymaar »

adrianN wrote: post #152
littlestymaar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can theoretically be repurposed, but hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane and thus leaks in existing methane installations. Given that it is also much more dangerous when it leaks (it explodes much more easily than methane), that means reworking all the infrastructure around the storage site, which ain't free. Also, producing hydrogen from electricity requires lots of investments in terms of conversion…

Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big. And not everybody is betting (only) on batteries. A mix of storage technologies is most likely the cheapest solution.

> Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big.

It's cheaper than running it on wind or solar, so no.

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

#169

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

Moldoteck wrote: post #165
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours? The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?

> How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours?

Because they bump coal, gas and imports in peak hours.

> The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?

I suppose you did not spend a lot of time researching this. That can be easily found by mere googling.

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

#170

Post by tonyedgecombe »

youngtaff wrote: post #156
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or batteries, but yes. Grid batteries make sense for those 30 second to 30 minute outages but it seems unlikely that they would be viable for those 2 week cloudy windless spells we get. My understanding is the UK plans to fill that gap with peaker gas plants with CCS. They are being contracted for a maximum of two weeks in the year.

There's a weakness in the way the National Grid works which means we don't fully utilise the battery capacity that's available But in California batteries supply 20% of the power in the evening https://archive.is/IruIQ

I'm not saying we shouldn't use batteries, rather that they don't solve every problem. In particular they probably won't ever be suitable for week long outages.
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