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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

#151

Post by ZeroGravitas »

defrost wrote: post #10
dvh wrote: post #4

What would be equivalent solar/wind installed power?

Enough wind + solar + storage to deliver > which gives Hinkley Point C a total output of over 3.2GW. at least 3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 50 weeks a year (allowing for some step down in output for maintainance, etc) for some 30+ (?) years.

It's a common mistake to price up renewables delivering flat nuclear shaped energy in an effort to inflate the price.

It's as silly as demanding that a nuclear plant must emulate the delivery profile of solarn and install batteries capable of shifting night time power to the day. With a similar effect on prices.

Demand is not flat. It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets which is why initial solar deployments have a high "capture rate" (i.e. they are delivering when the demand and price is high).

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

#152

Post by adrianN »

littlestymaar wrote: post #140
adrianN wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#153

Post by mpweiher »

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…

> You can build a nuclear power plant, then do nothing for 50 years

Yes, that absolutely was a major problem, and quite the opposite of what anti-nuclear advocates claim. Nuclear is not too slow to build, it is too quick to build. Relative to the Hughe lifespan of the reactors.

So you have to pace yourself and build out slowly.

If reactors last 100 years and you want a fleet of 100 reactors, that's 1 per year. You can obviously vary the pace a little up and down, but don't build all the reactors you need in 15 years like the French did and then stop.

> Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

Actually he's not. So far, > 50% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been destroyed, including one huge hydro dam. Not a single nuclear plant has been destroyed or even heavily damaged. Not sure if there was even a determined attack. One is occupied and in cold shutdown.

Nuclear plants are very, very tough. The newer containment buildings are designed to withstand a fuel-laden aircraft crashing into them. That's half a kiloton of TNT equivalent.

https://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010...

The warhead on a modern cruise missile or tactical ballistic is maybe half a ton of TNT, so 1/1000th of that. You can just keep lobbing those at the plant and it won't care.

Since they are so concentrated, they are also easy to defend against attack.

These factors probably weighed into Ukraine's decision to build 4 more nuclear power plants, two of which have been started.

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

#154

Post by youngtaff »

chickenbig wrote: post #23
dingdingdang wrote: post #6

Very good to hear about upskilling taking place but also immensely sobering numbers (i.e. 1300 apprentices is seen a big uplift) for a country the size of the UK.

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-sta... 118,770 apprenticeships achieved in the UK last year. We're not that big on practical education, with a preference for getting degrees so we can sit behind a desk moving (electronic) paper.

Tragedy is that something like 50% of people don't complete their apprenticeships

Provision seem to be very mixed - we know some teenagers who've had good ones and others who've had awful ones and these were in practical skills

Best one I know of was a degree apprenticeship for one of the big accountancy firms. Person started work at 18, had a degree in their early twenties while being paid all the way through, and no student debt at the end

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

#155

Post by jillesvangurp »

DrBazza wrote: post #143
jillesvangurp wrote: post #50

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.

There's a mix of solar, hydro, wind, and battery connected by cables. Weather effects tend to be localized. Continental calm, cloudy conditions are not that common and globally not a thing at all. Certainly not for longer periods of time. And weather and seasonal variation is reasonably predictable so that could be an opportunity to fire up some gas plants as a last resort.

On the solution side there are a few more tools that might be deployed in the UK:

- Demand shaping and price incentives. E.g. when to plugin your car or when to start charging it. Octopus is a big energy provider that is very active on this front. They are also the largest energy provider in the UK and they license their solution to others. So, the UK is ready for this. And with millions of connected users, they could shift a few GW in demand simply by fiddling with e.g. car charging schedules, boiler heating schedule, etc.

- Localized pricing. This is a topic that is a bit sensitive in the UK. But effectively prices in Scotland are high when there is demand in the South; even though they are generating lots of wind that cannot be exported south because there is no cable capacity. So you get high prices (because the gas used down south is expensive) for energy combined with overproduction. Localized pricing would stimulate using the power closer to where it is generated. And it would incentivize investing in power generation where it is needed instead of in random places on the map.

- Virtual power plants. Octopus is getting into this as well. This would add many GW of battery to their mix.

The nice thing with these three solutions is that it doesn't require a huge investment in infrastructure and improves utilization of existing infrastructure.

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

#156

Post by youngtaff »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #100
ben_w wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally the wind farm requires backup (CCGT or OCGT), which cost money to sit there. Or batteries, but yes. Battery manufacturing capacity is growing fast, but still — figures from recent years as reported by the IAE are [2022: 1720 GWh, 2023: 2500 GWh], but that's global and I'm not sure if demand is currently driven (no pun intended) by vehicles or by grids. Still, if those batteries need replacement every d…

>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

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

#157

Post by chickenbig »

DrBazza wrote: post #142
blitzar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#158

Post by tmtvl »

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…

Well, look at it this way: what happened at Fukushima was an ageing, poorly maintained reactor built on a fault line in the Pacific Ring of Fire got hit by a record-setting earthquake AND a tsunami... and despite all of that the damage is not that massive. I mean, yes, the situation is a big mess and I wouldn't want to be in charge of handling the clean up and everything, but let's be fair: considering all of the circumstances it's impressive the damage wasn't way worse.

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

#159

Post by bpye »

matt-p wrote: post #24
lostlogin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand this comment - could you explain why? Do other countries benefit from UK railways?

Majority (particularly by ticket sales) of uk train operators (TOCs) are foreign owned[1] and operators are "TBTF" and subsidised by the government, in 2023 this was over 4 Billion pounds, meanwhile each TOC is paying out millions in dividends to share holders[2]. 1 - https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-reveals-that-75-of-uk-rail-n... 2 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-factsheet-2023...

That said the current government have introduced legislation to bring these TOCs into public ownership as franchises expire [0]. Rolling stock and freight will remain privately owned so it isn’t quite a return to the days of British Rail, but the privatisation experiment is coming to a close.

[0] https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3732

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

#160

Post by lpribis »

griffzhowl wrote: post #20
lostlogin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand this comment - could you explain why? Do other countries benefit from UK railways?

Privatization of UK rail services meant that they were given out on government tenders to "private" companies, and a few of these companies that won the tenders are owned by foreign govts. Netherlands is one I believe, maybe France too.

Some examples:

- c2c and Avanti West Coast: partially and fully owned by Trenitalia which is wholly owned by the Italian government

- London Overground, Chilltern Railways, CrossCountry, Grand Central: Owned by Deutche Bahn until June 2024 which is wholly owned by the German government

- Elizabeth line: Wholly owned by MTR transport which is wholly owned by Hong Kong government

I'm sure there are a lot more I missed. It doesn't just appy to foreign governments either. The UK government subsidized all TOCs with taxpayer money, many of which turned around and gave out dividents to shareholds (foreign government or not).

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