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

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

#121

Post by chickenbig »

pfdietz wrote: post #43
chickenbig wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obligatory "what's the capacity factor" discussion should happen here; 40% to 50% might be reasonable, with highly correlated availability. Additionally the wind farm requires backup (CCGT or OCGT), which cost money to sit there. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6556027d046ed... (take it with a pinch of salt) gives a figure of £80/kW/year for an H class CCGT; that's £250M/year (2015 prices). Another…

The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20.

> The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20.

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... tables Table 3.2a and 3.4a show that Korean CCGT cost 838 USD/kWe and Korean PWRs were 2157 USD/kWhe (all 2018 prices).

Anyhow, gas backup fuel costs (and carbon taxes) are where the real big costs are.

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

#122

Post by chickenbig »

pfdietz wrote: post #44
ben_w wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> installed capacity of 3.6GW I'm not aware what the capacity factor for wind is in the north sea, I think it's about 25% globally. > how many homes in the UK in total? About 25 million. (But also: ongoing political issue is that this isn't enough and housing is too exaggerated vs. vested interests in housing being expensive).

25% would be for onshore wind. I've seen claims as high as 69% for very large offshore wind turbines.

I recall a previous exchange on hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40336108

  Offshore wind is at the extreme of renewables. It may or may not make sense, but it's not needed to kill nuclear.
Hornsea One (1.2GW from 174 × 7 MW turbines) generated 4,862,438 MWh in 2023 and 4,982,624 in 2022. This represents and 45.6% and 46.7% capacity respectively.

Triton Knoll (855MW from 90 × 9.5 MW turbines) generated 1,687,138 MWh in 2024H1, giving a capacity of 45.1% for this larger turbine.

Source :- https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generati... and doing pivots on the table.

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

#123

Post by pfdietz »

chickenbig wrote: post #121
pfdietz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20.

> The capex per watt of gas backup is vastly lower than a nuclear plant. Like, by a factor of 10 to 20. https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... tables Table 3.2a and 3.4a show that Korean CCGT cost 838 USD/kWe and Korean PWRs were 2157 USD/kWhe (all 2018 prices). Anyhow, gas backup fuel costs (and carbon taxes) are where the real big costs are.

The Korean nuclear numbers are unbelievable. They certainly didn't come anywhere close to that in UAE (more like $6/W, and possibly more if the concurrent military deal was being used as a slush fund to hide overruns.)

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

#124

Post by chickenbig »

pfdietz wrote: post #105
chickenbig wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the Olympics, with a format designed to minimise the learnings. Note that the point of the article was that the design is being proven, lessons are being learnt, and the skills of individuals and organisations developed, which reduces the risk of overruns etc.

Hasn't it already greatly overrun the initial promises? I mean, that's the whole reason France is crying for relief here from the UK. Anyway, claims that nuclear will show good experience effects this time, for sure, are to be treated with skepticism.

> Hasn't it already greatly overrun the initial promises? Hinkley Point C got the green light in 2016 with an estimated £18bn build cost

  The most recent estimates put costs as high as £34bn at 2015 prices, £46bn in today’s money.
I believe the range is £31–35 billion in 2015 prices, so between 75% and 100% overrun.

> that's the whole reason France is crying for relief here from the UK.

The overrun combined with COVID combined with the spike in inflation and also CNG being frozen out of the UK nuclear market/cooling of relationship with China.

> claims that nuclear will show good experience effects this time, for sure, are to be treated with skepticism.

Agreed, which is why the second unit at HPC will be interesting.

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

#125

Post by chickenbig »

duckmysick wrote: post #116
myrmidon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough estimate for decomissioning the reactor could be something like £5Bn. Decomissioning the offshore wind turbines could get into the same range though, assuming £400M per installed GW (nameplate), this would be £3.2Bn Numbers need to be taken with a large grain of salt.

Pretty good for a rough estimate! The best I could find was a document by the National Audit Office from 2017 (using 2016 estimates); page 18, figure 2 - The expected costs of Hinkley Point C. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po... Back then the construction was estimated at £18.2 billion. Ongoing operation costs (including fuel, staffing, and grid charges) were priced at £29.3 billion and de…

The report states plant decommissioning is 2.7B GBP and ILW disposal is 0.3B GBP. That sort of agrees with https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792 which puts PWR at perhaps 1B USD per plant.

Handling and disposing on the used fuel is 4.4B GBP (or 73M GBP per year of running, or 2.6 GBP per MWh of electricity). Cheap!

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

#126

Post by chickenbig »

blitzar wrote: post #118
chickenbig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and decommissioning costs https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792 So perhaps 1B-2B USD a plant. 2,000,000,000/(60 * 1,600 * 365 * 24 * .9) = 2.6 USD/MWh > Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper. Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6? Wind farm costs have exploded, and turbine manufacturers are having reliability issues. https://ww…

> Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6? Bidders have to sell the government the electricity at the strike price. They pushed up the strike price to £54.23/MWh from a previous of £37.35/MWh with a current market price of £70-£80/MWh. Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100…

> Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100

The beauty of the CfD scheme is that you can choose when to start using it. But once you're in you're in, you're in until the end of the 15 years.

https://www.current-news.co.uk/significant-commercial-incent....

In truth I think it will be a mug's game to build offshore wind without a CfD. See https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... for a view of what the day-ahead auction will turn into in a few years.

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

#127

Post by throw0101b »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #97
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…

Why hold wind to a higher standard than a nuclear plant? A nuclear plant typically has 95% uptime. Wind/PV/storage can hit 95% or 99% or 99.9% a lot cheaper than Hinkley can hit 95%.

> Wind/PV/storage can hit 95% or 99% or 99.9% a lot cheaper than Hinkley can hit 95%.

I think the geography of the UK helps with offshore wind getting good capacity factors, but the general averages aren't great, often peaking at ~40%:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I can see in real-time how wind goes up and down, while nuclear just keeps chugging along:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

And nuclear is cheaper (CA$0.101/kWh) than wind ($0.147) or solar ($0.474); see Table 2:

* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...

Of course our infrastructure and/or geography may not be as well-suited for wind.

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

#128

Post by throw0101b »

mpweiher wrote: post #73
Moldoteck wrote: post #47

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…

> 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.

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

#129

Post by chickenbig »

blitzar wrote: post #93
oezi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the numbers for this, I don't see how it is better or even competitive at today's cost. Not taking into account the operating costs and decommissioning costs. Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper. In 30 years it might cost much less. How can Nuclear compete?

> How can Nuclear compete? A factory built plant or any economies of scale. Start a company with a mobile workforce and go country to country building 5 or more large scale reactors in parallel in each country. Small scale reactors (again factory built) are the other alternative. They would have to be installed in a 'farm' together for security reasons.

Even 4 stick-built reactors in a row is pretty good; look at Barakah in UAE, South Korea, China and Canada (Darlington, Pickering, Bruce).

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

myrmidon wrote: post #37
blitzar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogger Bank Wind Farm

Thats a very good comparison-- to be fair though, 3.2GW nuclear are comparable to pretty much the whole Dogger Bank (including Sofia/South) at ~8GW (nameplate power), because offshore capacity factor is about ~40% in the UK. Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!). It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35bill…

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