July 2025: Wind not doing very well

Once you actually look closely at renewables it becomes clear that in every single case you get a better result for the cash invested with nuclear, and far less environmental impact.

To save you asking, nor have I done the calculations, but remember that any one site has to able to generate the entire UK demand for electricity at any one time, unless you have backup from other sources (in which what's the point of having any of it, see above). Remember that in winter evenings electricity demand peaks at around 50-60GW. That's one hell of an ask! Sites that I recall when I looked into it a few years ago as being mentioned as possibilities were The Humber Estuary, The Wash, The Solent, The Bristol Channel, and Morecambe bay, and I'm not even sure that they could individually be able to produce all the power needed.

Why does it need to be "one site" for all? There are multiple Nuclear Power stations, none of which are rated to power the maximum load for the entire company, so why does tidal need to do so. There is no reason why it couldn't be a contributor rather than a sole source.

Chris hasn't been clear, but what he means is that you need multiple barrages to cover the entire day. Say if you have four 1GW barrages perfectly positioned to cover all periods of the day. You will only get

If you had four 1GW nuclear reactors, you would get 4GW.

Tidal barrages have repeatedly been dismissed as too expensive, and that is cherry-picking the best sites. There doesn't seem any way we could get enough to power the entire county. Even if the UK had enough sites, most of the rest of the world doesn't.

If you want to stop CO2, you need cheap energy for the entire world, not just the UK. The best thing the UK can do is develop cheap technologies that will scale globally. Solar is pretty good in much of the world, just not the UK. Nuclear is good for everywhere.

Grid operation can be easier to manage, with a fraction-of-one-day sized battery. With a battery, there might be fewer instances of "paying people to throw away power". You can take power generated at 2PM and make it available at 8PM.

You still need sufficient excess power generation capability, to handle when "any" unit goes offline. The people of New Brunswick, who built one reactor and not two reactors, they would have known that some day, their "reliable" source of power would not be there, while it was being rebuilt and new piping put in the core. Having two reactors, with one offline, they would still have had power. Assuming no hardware failures happen on the second unit while the first one is being serviced.

The problem with having 1xnameplate exactly matching the load, is the battery can never be large enough to satisfy everyone. If you have an excess of generating capacity, plus a smaller battery, that makes a "manageable and useful" grid. No matter what the absolute mix is. You know you need a certain minimum number of nukes, any windmills added on top of that, is gravy. the nukes don't need batteries. The windmills don't need to be exactly matched with batteries. Even a sub-sized battery (or adding a little battery capacity every year), is better than nothing.

Adding tidal power, is roughly like adding a windmill, and could benefit from the same additional infrastructure that would make a windmill useful.

Even "reliable" hydro dams, are not really, necessarily, that "reliable". One dam out in British Columbia had to stop generating power last year or the year before, due to drought. We sometimes have to close down the upstream dam on our river, during drought, which may curtail output from the new 30MW generating station.

This is why we have mixtures of generating devices, bailing wire and binder twine, to fasten them all together. To try to keep enough nameplate, so if some of it goes offline, there is still enough of it left.

They didn't tell us this, but right now, we are backfilling with natural gas. And not a small amount of gas either. And that is sloppy workmanship, especially for not making that public.

Some day, the s*it is going to hit the fan, when the nukes age out, and the "extension to the extension" of the service life, will finally expire. I don't see any rush, any plan to fix that. Yet, there is money available for other (vanity) projects, the kind of money that could build three nukes instead. When you run a mix of generation types, you still have to maintain those devices and replace them when they wear out. You can't just keep building natural gas plants like the natural gas is free or something. There is only so much fracking you can do (earthquakes).

Paul

I think that says pretty clearly that the powers that run the world, and 'lobby' the various governments, have no long-term plan to supply continuous electricity to even the portions of the world which have it now, at current levels of population.

That's not 'conspiracy theory', it's simply a rational deduction from what we *see* happening, or not happening, in various parts of the world, particularly in the West.

The short answer is that tidal power has been discussed since I was young i.e. for many decades, and we do not today see a world, or even a country, powered by it.

We had the idea maybe as much as a century ago, and if it was seen to be potentially profitable, profits would have been made. There were sightseeing flights down the Grand Canyon within 25 years of the Wright Brothers' first flight, with the first commercial flights in the US thirteen years before that. That was an idea that worked.

Fusion power ....

It's because the amounts of power that could be generated by smaller sites is trivial and the cost would be enormous, making electricity quite unaffordable.

The top tidal power producers are listed here:

In fact, I doubt that even those sites could cope individually with the country's total demand in winter, 50-60GW, which raises the question 'why do it at all' if alternative, reliable, continuous generation will be needed anyway, such as nuclear (what else?).

... is twenty years away and has been for the last seventy years.

Yet Rance has recently finished paying for itself?

That is part of the point. Nuclear isn't available on any scale for at least a decade. And when we do it, the UK seems to be spectacularly incapable of delivering anything remotely on time or budget.

I'd agree that on current technology a few big ones are a good idea.

But you've not convinced me on smaller contributors (such as renewables) adding to the mix.

So what are you going to do on a cold evening in January with a 'blocking high' over Europe, WTWDBATSDS, and the tidily tidal generators that between them can only produce a few MW can't cope? Just shut the country down?

It was hard enough identifying one UK site for a potential UK tidal barrage so where are you going to put a second?

Some of those sites have busy shipping lanes to major ports so with limited capacity to be a barrage location.

Read the sentence that starts: "I'd agree that . . . "

Yes there is. If its three times the price of a reliable nuclear power station to add yet more intermittency to a network suffering badly from massive power fluctuations...

I think you will be rather surprised

That assumes that they have a plan *at all*.

In most case governments and politicians have abrogated responsibility for the future in favour of lining their pockets now. The modus operandi is generally 'twiddle with the knobs the government has and see what happens, if it makes things worse blame the previous government. or brexit. Or copy what the EU does so at least they can take some blame.

Well its getting closer, but who knows when it will be economically viable?

Whereas fission is only held back by politics, not technology