Induced atmospheric oscillations.

Bless!

Its sightedness to satisfy EU muppets paid off by German windpower and solar companies as a maketing sop to the German Greens

That is the realpolitik of energy

No, the sytem needs to eradicate renewables altogether.

As I say, it needs compromise and

No it doesn't need compromise and balance ,. There is no valid argument whatsoever for any 'renewable' energy on the grid whatsofucking ever. It isn't cheap it isn't green and it isn't reliable.

We already have cheap storage. U235 an Pu239

Green ArtStudents™ do their technology based on faith that somehow if enough of someone else's money is spent on it, the right answer will come along all by itself

They are so ignorant they believe that this is in fact 'how stuff works'.

And there are plenty of people all to willing to take the cash, fiddle around, and then go out of business having stashed their salaries in Swiss bank accounts

Renewable energy exists simply because German Greens wouldn't tolerate nuclear power because the Russians scared them to keep them hooked on Russian gas, and the German nuclear companies needed something to make a profit on so they got mama Merkel to pay them to stick windmills and solar panels up.

Then in order to not become hopelessly uncompetitive, Germany forced the EU to issue a 'renewable obligation' to make sure everybody else's electricity was just as expensive.

And until now, they could get away with virtue signalling how f****ng brilliant 'renewable energy' was, lie about its ability to reduce emissions, lie about its costs, lie about its environmental impacts, and get away with it.

Now they cant lie any longer about it making the grid so unstable its no longer fit for purpose.

We need nuclear fission because we know exactly how to build it, and we know it works. We cant say that about either fusion or carbon capture.

By definition if you don't store CO2 *as* CO2, then it will take as much energy to turn it into something else as you got out of it by burning it in the first place. Much better to flood greenhouses with it. And grow tomatoes

Just put the cables underground. That will please many who wish to retain the serenity of the countryside instead of having green agendas ruin it. What a paradox?

Ain't got those hilly bits like le frogs have;(..

Agree with all the above. Does the amount of power you say we need include replacing gas for heating domestically like what the French have done?..

Quite, same thing in a way .. like a load comes off line frequency rises either way its the same end result..

Indeed, nuclear in reality..

You know as well as (or better, probably) than me. Producing energy in the way that we do is not sustainable - economically, environmentally, politically or socially.

We know nothing of the sort. Do you know how long it takes, and how much it costs to build a nuclear power station in the UK? Just google it . . . and then google the costs of decommissioning.

I think he's just tuning in to populism as a way to get into government.

Yes, that's all well and good, but the fact remains that we don't. When's the earliest we might see an SMR - 20 years?

A Spanish spokeman said it would take several months to determine the cause but I suspect that is mainly because angry members of the public wanting an explanation will have calmed down by then.

That's why we need SMRs, which would be type-approved. And you'll find that the decommissioning costs even of the one under construction now are built-in to the strike price.

Now you're being absurd.

The French did it, in the 1980s. The Koreans and Chinese do it today.

Decommissioning costs are about 10% of build cost.

As has been discussed, the main problems are excessive regulation. We know radiation is dangerous, but electricity is dangerous too. A comparison would be because electricity is dangerous, we should regulate

The French example showed the economic advantage of building the same design many times. If we accepted nuclear as the solution, we would benefit from that today. We have perfectly viable designs for nuclear power stations.

Finally, nuclear plants are long term investments. There is a risk a cheaper alternative may be developed, and a risk politicians might arbitrarily ban nuclear. While these risks may put off private investors, they are exactly the type of risk governments should take. The risk of doing nothing is worse.

SMRs are just more pie in the sky technology designed to overcome the problems caused by politicians. We should build traditional large scale nuclear power stations now.

That’s why we need nuclear.

But if the regulatory burden placed on nuclear was done away with on the same basis as was done for renewables, costs and timescales would plummet.

Decommissioning costs are built in to the building costs, so amount to no further burden.

And there’s billions of tons of uranium in the sea, which can be mined automatically.

Depends on the overwhelming regulatory burden, the like of which was swept away for renewables.

A silly realism is that under the current regulatory burden, nuclear power stations cannot be built in Cornwall.

Why is that, you might ask?

Because the natural background radiation dose in Cornwall exceeds that allowed for nuclear workers.

You couldn’t make it up.

We already regulate 1.5V batteries. The use of mercury in the electrodes has been banned which is probably why they leak much more than they used to. John

Yes. Its a bit wet finger, but when I did the calcs I looked at the total energy flow in the UK and multiplied it in sectors by efficiency

- so transport fuel at 30% efficiency would need 30% as much nuclear power as diesel or petrol, Heating I went 1:1 even though heatpumps...

As for industrial use hydrocarbons, I just went 1:1. I have no real idea how much electricity it would take to smelt iron ore, for example. Or make nitrogen based fertiliser. or Concrete.

I came up with an upper bound for the whole country of around 300GW and a lower bound of at least 100GW.

That is not an impossible figure.

Given favourable political winds - 400 small modular reactors of about

Ive added costings on here,m because it is intersting

Total capital cost would be around £660 billion. Spread across 20 million households that's about £33k per household. (RR is quoting £3.3bn per gigawatt)

For essentially free electricity for 60 years? Not a bad deal

If you amortise that over 60 years and put interest rates in its £11bn a year plus the interest on £660bn - at say 7.5%. that's another £50bn. Let's round it up to £80bn a year to include fuel and O & M. This is very wet finger stuff. Notice how heavily impacted the cost is by interest rates. That's what killed nuclear in the Thatcher era

So £80bn a year for 200GW ...that comes out at 4.5p a unit.

That is the 'barely profitable' cost of nuclear power using SMRs and paying 7.5% on a 60 year bond.

Which is a return - a gold plated return - the pension funds would love

- and if the government guaranteed not to shut it down, pretty much gilt edged.

Right now the risks are in uncertain build costs and operating approval, due to political interference and regulation, The Renewable lobby would destroy nuclear of they could. And they own the likes of Milliband.

If political tides turn and renewables become unfashionable, the actual real world numbers make complete sense. There is even meat in there for full decommissioning, although the more likely prospect is that each new build of reactors takes place on the site of the old and the gross profits of the new pays to keep the waste of the old under control and recycled.

When the anti-nuclear lobby talk about cost of decommissioning the presumption is that no nuclear will ever be built again. In reality a vibrant nuclear industry pays for its own cleanup and no nuclear site would ever need to be 'green fielded' since there would always be a new reactor built on it.

So ex tax nuclear electricity at around 4.5p a unit, which would equate to a raw oil cost of say 45p a litre (its about 60p now ex tax) - so broadly similar for house heating. And gas at 6.6p kWh.

In terms of transport, of course diesel and petrol engines are at best

Now I haven't included grid costs to go from 50GW capacity to say 200GW. Because these apply no matter what technology is in use. But of course nuclear uses the grid far more efficiently., It uses it at or near full capacity 24x7 which renewables do not.

That's the way things have to go. Once you throw out the windmills and solar panels - which work out in the 15p-50p cost range - its nuclear all the way.

Fossil prices will rise as resources run out, but nuclear power should stay the same in price.

And it can only get cheaper as mass production kicks in.

It certainly isn't sustainable with 'renewables'

It is with nuclear. Dor at leats ten thousand years. And then we can get fusion going.

Yes, in far more detail than you do, because you just listened to the antinuclear tree hugging climatards who are the reason WHY nuclear is so expensive.

No. He is *genuinely* ignorant of the true facts.

Here's a quote

"The Rolls-Royce SMR has successfully completed Step Two of the GDA which confirms Rolls-Royce SMR’s position as the leading SMR vendor in Europe and the technology that is the furthest through any regulatory assessment process anywhere in Europe.

Step 3 is currently underway, with an estimated completion date of December 2026. Once the GDA is complete, construction of the SMR could begin, potentially leading to a first-of-a-fleet (FOAF) unit being deployed in the early 2030s"

Notice that the regulatory processes have taken over 5 YEARS before they can even *start* putting welding torch to steel.

That's the tree huggers and the EUs fault

No. They have signifiant cost and deployment and safety advantages over large conventional reactors.

Obviously the chief advantage is type approval but

- they are small enough not to need active cooling when scrammed, and passive cooling is simpler cheaper and has far less to go wrong with it. Cheaper and safer.

- they can be factory assembled and shipped to site as a preconfigured unit, saving huge amounts of build time by sub contractors.

- they are small enough to go on any small industrial estate near where the demand is. Thus saving the cost of massive grid connections.

- unlike large reactors, the loss of a single unit due to unplanned shutdown is not a huge problem.

The problem with large builds onsite is that no two are the same and each one needs to be approved. Its not cost effective,.

And no doubt the stupid govermental will go for a foreign SMR ands kick RR in the nuts:(

The firm that helped the UK out of a bit of bother, in 1940, thats being marked next week;!..