Fraid so.
China doesn't do nukes like that.
The entire world won't be doing that.
We'll see...
France didn't do theirs that way and that worked out fine.
France didn't do theirs that way and that worked out fine.
France didn't do theirs that way and that worked out fine.
We'll see...
France didn't didn't get that result.
Still not really proven. The Chinese built theirs and got them running relatively quickly, but one (or both?) is currently off because of fuel failures.
Okiluoto and Flammanville have been slow and expensive and had procurement/qa problems. Of course that might improve. But it is a complicated beast designed by committee, taking elements of French and German derivatives of the basic Westinghouse PWR. Arguably HPC was the wrong choice for the UK, but obviously that was the only thing EDF/Ariva were going to build.
There is now an EPR2 but I don't know anything about that.
ABWR is crude and inefficient but cheap to build. Who cares really? As long as it kicks out the gigawatts.
I think the RR design is likely to be fast to market if they dont run into hidden snags, and they chose the design precisely so they wouldn't.
And its probably the only design that can be mass produced.
SMR concepts have been around for 30 years, for example the South African Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (from 1994). Nuclear Electric had a (brief) sniff at it after privatisation.
Several more conventional water reactors are currently being talked about internationally. It's just that no-one has had the balls to launch a serious programme yet.
I totally agree with you that RR might finally make it happen. They have the technology and the international reputation that might attract both investors and governments. But, you really need a decent number of firm orders so that you can invest in the production line infrastructure that lets you get costs per unit down.
Why, do they take so long to build?...
Absolutely. Its a rolling ball of gathering momentum Nothing breedssucceess like success.
It's up to the gummint to start that ball rolling.
Red tape and box ticking mostly. Regulations are designed to make them as expensive as possible, so no one builds them. That plus the fact that every one is a 'one off' and needs to have every stage tested and approved. Hence use of 'type approval' for SMRs.
Not holding my breath. Thatcher was going to have ten more Sizewell B's, until she destroyed the miners.
Thatcher was going to have ten more sizewells, until....she realised that the only way to get inflation under control from then mess help profligate Labour government left was to raise interest rates.
Since the cost of a nuclear power station is all in interest on the debt incurred building them, this destroyed any hope of them being profitable at that time.
And there was plenty of cheap north sea gas that could utilise off the shelf Rolls Royce jet engines for a far lower capital cost.
And here we are.
It was the right decision at that time.
Then post Blair the time was right to build more with interest rates at an all time low, but instead that idiot Miliband decided to out virtue signal the EU and stuff in windmills instead.
Every one is ?different, plus "wading through treacle" levels of red tape, plus health and safety.
Interest rates were fairly normal from 1984 onwards, i.e,. Inflation plus 1% (*). It wasn't until late 1988, almost 10 years after Mrs T came to power, that they shot up again and that was to deal with yet another episode of the Great Unwashed playing poker with house prices combined with German Re-unification (which meant 9% interest rates in Germany) *plus* Lawsons folly of shadowing the Dmark.
People forget that we had inflation of about 6% all through the
1980's until 1989 when it took off. People who look back at those halcyon days of 7% savings rates forget the underlying 6% inflation, and this also flattered the returns on savings products that then paid big final bonuses (but not so big after inflation was discounted).
TNP is right, the silly inflation was in the 70's, the worst under Wilson and Healey, but the Barber boom under Ted Heath was pretty bad too. That was when Heath squandered an economy that Wilson had pretty much got under control in the 60's. It was amazing that Wilson did as well as he did, given the vitriol he faced from virtually all the newspapers.
The growth rate of money, inflation, is not per se a problem. It is possible to construct a debt repayment schedule where the payments increase over time. So that initial payments are more affordable.
The problem is that when you structure a loan to take into account inflation, i.e. make increasingly bigger payments over time, the risk/uncertainty is also pushed into the future.
The problem with Nuclear was, and to a certain extent still is, the risk that cheaper forms of electricity generation will come along. So investors aren't confident of profits in 40-60 years time. Wind power, was especially frightening, because whilst it wasn't economic now, it might become much cheaper. It still might. They might manage cheap floating turbines, that don't require massive concrete foundations, that can be used to generate hydrogen to balance load. So the free market is reluctant to take on this risk.
The thing that people don't understand is that Nuclear is the conservative, safe option. Wind is the risky strategy. We know we can deliver nuclear. France has already done it.
The real risk with nuclear is that someone in the world will f*ck up spectacularly like happened with Chernobyle and Fukishima and your pollys are stupid enough to shut down your nukes like the stupid krauts did.
Not for the reason you mentioned.
And the fix for that is to not bother with investors and have the govt do the nukes.
The problem with wind isnt that it might become cheaper, the problem is that it is intermittent.
That doesnt fix the intermittency.
Pity that comes at a much higher cost. In spades with floating turbines.
So the obvious fix is to have the govt do the nukes.
As I recall, hydrogen store efficiency, as an electricity generation battery, is ~40%. Plus, it could be used as a seasonal store for winter heating, transport. The more wind over capacity you have, the less vulnerable you will be to low wind.
Floating turbines, or land based, makes no difference. Floaters need to get electricity onshore.
It isn't what I would bet on, but I'm not convinced it couldn't work.
Yes. Which Boris has at least come around to pretending he is doing.
Not viable for that because of the difficulty with storing it.
Or that either.
That's wrong too given the difficulty of using the hydrogen.
I am, because there is no distribution system for hydrogen.
There is no pretending involved.
ROFLMAO!
Once you have built your nuke, it costs peanuts to run.
So
They don't have to be - paybacks of >25 years don't exist in financial planning.
Wind power,
And pigs might fly.
In the end the concrete per gigawatt of the wind plus the storage is always in nuclear's favour.
You have it precisely back to front. EVERYONE in the energy markets are scared of nuclear, because ultimately a nuclear power station is a big bucket of water with uranium rods in it and a lid on coupled to a steam turbine. The rest is all safety circuits in quadruplicate to make sure it is expensive.
They might manage cheap
You d0ont know anything aboiut ships stability either, do you, or why sailing ships with 200 meter tall masts with windmills on top never became poular.
So the free market is
There is no free market in energy. Its far too important to be allowed to plebs at a cheap price. All energy decisions are based on government subsidy.
At least you got one thing right...
In engineering, which you have little concept of, there are
- things that cannot possibly work. Like pigs flying under their own power
- things that can be made to work, like a steam powered aeroplane, human powered aircraft, and a lead balloon - yes videos exist of all these things flying, but which are hopelessly useless.
- things that can be made to work well enough to fool non engineers that they are 'the way of the future' like renewable energy, carbon capture, heat pumps, electric cars and the like, but which would never survive in a free market because, even after being bunged massive subsidies, they are not cost or energy competitive.
- things that work extremelyt well if they are allowed to operate, but do need government encouragement to de-risk them politically. These are things like nuclear power stations which only make financial sense if the government promises not to nationalise them, shut them down at a whim or require that a man walks in front of them at 3mph with a red flag.
- things that are so simple cheap and easy to build and useful, that they succeed despite efforts of government to stop them. Like motorised transport.
Of course to the ArtStudent? mind, there is only the first category and all the rest. Things can be made to work, or they cant.
Only if you can store and use the over capacity when the wind does blow. If the store is hydrogen then you will still need to maintain alternative electricity generation to cope with peak capacity to turn that hydrogen back into electricity. The efficiency of turning electricity in hydrogen, the cost of storage and normal leakage, the efficiency of turning it back into electricity and the cost of maintaining the backup generating capacity has to be factored in how much over capacity and exta cost has to be built into wind generation. If you produce too little hydrogen then there will be serious consequences when the wind doesn't blow for two weeks in the winter.
If you are going to builds massive over capacity into wind then building Nuclear may start looking really cheap.
What is the cost of connecting hundreds or maybe thousands of spread out generating sites to the grid compared to a couple of dozen new power stations close to existing grid connections.
At some time a hundred thousand thousand wind turbines are going to need routine maintenance requiring a much larger number of personnel and million more travelling miles than required by traditional type large power stations. Good for employment but not necessarily cost.
As I see it the main problem is always going to be the cost. All the proposed solutions related to wind generation rely of expensive backups making somewhat of a mockery about the headline low cost energy from wind. Obviously the population are more concerned about saving the planet rather than having cheaper reliable energy, especially those on lower incomes!
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