Hinkley Point: the ‘dreadful deal’ behind the world’s most expensive power plant
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Meanwhile, the nuclear industry falls back on blaming environmentalists and has vague complaints about regulations, but no suggestions on what to change. They refuse to acknowledge their own incompetence and massive failures, preferring to fight lost and old political battles, reliving the past.
There's way too much old, dead, stupid weight in the industry. If any of the new nuclear startups succeed they will need to make sure to avoid falling into the same traps and have a lot more self awareness than the current batch of decision makers and proponents.
The current management framework for these kinds of companies doesn’t allow corporate managers to take risks, and the culture of excessive compensation for executives leads them to price too much risk.
There's been a long campaign to close the Indian Point plant in Westchester County, NY that's only gained traction over the last seveal years. The main concerns are: evacuation in case of emergency, waste storage, terrorism, and environmental impact on the Hudson River due to hot-water discharge. It also doesn't supply that much of the area's total demand and one of the reactors is inactive.
Not saying that means there's no local support elsewhere, but it's definitely not universal. Maybe if it were a new plant things would be different.
Older reactors like Indian Point were built before all the risks were fully disclosed to the surrounding population, or at least before the first disasters, resulting in a lot of people dead set against them.
Nuclear has also allied itself with fossil fuel allies, which have of course abandoned nuclear as soon as they were the least bit uneconomic. At least in the US there hasn't seemed to be much emphasis at all on the low carbon aspect of nuclear from proponents, and they are all too happy to rag on renewables with bullshit arguments like land usage. Natural low-carbon allies are still seen as suspect or the enemy. Any reasonable carbon tax would mean that (existing) nuclear could compete economically, but I've never seen a nuclear proponent advocate for that.
Solar and wind are great, cheap options right now, and they've really outperformed what people expected over the past few years. Is there enough potential capacity of solar + wind + hydro to meet total future demand though? Are we going to run out of land and coast first?
If we're going to reduce our carbon emissions enough by 2050, we need to electrify heating, industry and transport. That's going to increase electricity demand by a lot.
Carbon capture and storage is pretty clearly dead. Tidal lagoons seem like they're also just too expensive. Neither fusion nor alternative fission technologies will be up and running in time to make much difference to the 2050 target for 80% reduction from 1990 levels (UK specific).
The bigger issue to me seems to be the move from production we can control to production on nature's schedule. Nuclear plants can "just" "throw another rod in" and generate power as needed.
The promise there appears to be a distributed approach. Getting people installing batteries in homes as standard could make it so buying electricity when it's being produced rather than when you need it is the norm. The economics incentivise this and hopefully the tech is getting there. Combine that with the likely move to everyone having an electric car (read: giant battery) sat on their drive doing the same thing half the time, and maybe that problem is being solved.
That's very limited compared to most other options, but obviously much better than solar or wind.
Ok that only gives you 1 hour of charge, but your requirement was changing in minutes. These batteries respond to load change in milliseconds.
So 24 hours' worth would cost 72% of the cost of Hinkley C, and that's not including any amount of power generation. Looks like wind/solar + enough batteries to timeshift their output to match consumption would end up costing more.
> Ok that only gives you 1 hour of charge, but your requirement was changing in minutes. These batteries respond to load change in milliseconds.
The ability to change quickly is only part of the problem; if you want to run the country on wind or solar then you need to be able to handle several overcast or calm days in a row.
On a country scale yes, but not on a continental scale. Although in the case of solar, you probably just want to have peak output twice the size you’d expect for naive insolation, and it looks like it’ll be cheap enough soon enough for that to be economical.
Yes. And very easily too. ANU did a study in Australia and found pump hydro could cover 100% of the supply needs while only using a small fraction of available sites. Australia is a very flat country so I'd imagine it is even easier in most countries.
See http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-22000-potentia...
There is also a practical limit where wind energy takes too much energy out of weather systems, affecting climate, but that point is also far beyond the current world energy usage.
We're not running out of renewable energy anytime soon.
The Sahara desert is extremely sandy, and extremely windy, which makes it a pretty terrible, or at least prohibitively-expensive place to build a solar farm.
It is also extremely complicated and extremely expensive to transmit large amounts of power over long distances, particularly across national borders (everyone's on a different AC standard), particularly across many national borders.
China has many overland HVDC links, some thousands of km long and with huge capacities, to move renewable energy from inland areas to the coast.
The UK and Iceland are considering an undersea HVDC interconnector more than 1000 km long.
The distance between potential solar array sites in the northern Sahara and the electrical grids in Southern Europe are considerably less than this.
At an estimated cost of about 3 billion, for less than 1/3 the capacity of this power station.
Hinkley C's construction cost is £20.3b, and the cost to UK consumers over the plant's lifetime exceeds £50b.
Total sea area therefore is 1 million gw or 1,000tw, or 24ktwh/ day
Need 200k twh for global energy usage, with 30% to spare
Wind loading of average 25%, you need to cover less than 10% of the sea area to produce enough evergy to replace every form of power on the planet - not just electricity.
On land, it's the area of Russia, Canada and the US, completely covered with wind farms.
10% of land is set aside for agriculture, which is about 1/3 of 10% of water, but gives an indication. That's an area far larger than the entire US (including Alaska). We use a lot of space.
But you wouldn't produce your entire output from wind. In a desert you get about 2kwh per day from solar per square metre, or 2gwh per square km, or 100,000 SQkm of land for solar.
That's under half the size of Arizona's desert, or 1% of Sahara.
Not to mention as the article states the closest big nation, France, is on the verge of an energy crisis itself....
Usually when there's a cold snap it affects large swaths of Europe.
But comparing the mWh cost of wind power which is spectacularly variable Vs the cost of nuclear which is incredibly reliable seems dishonest to me.
As more and more variable renewable energy comes on stream the premium value of reliable energy sources will surely increase over time.
Fair enough there is battery storage + wind, but the costs of that are something like £1000/mWh+ now - hardly comparable.
Nuclear will never get cheaper, not to mention the rapidly increasing decommissioning costs everyone is keeping off the books. Batteries are mostly non toxic and easily recycled.
Acres per Megawatt Produced for different energy sources [1]:
Coal 12.21 Natural Gas 12.41 Nuclear 12.71 Solar 43.50 Wind 70.64 Hydro 315.22
100 football fields (required area for storage) is 130 acres [2]
130/832 is 1 in 6.4
Bird this is the storage that OP came out with his "100 story high" tale, not the generation (which you'd put off shore, perhaps beyond the horizon)
[1] https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pa...
[2] http://www.stack.com/a/how-many-acres-is-a-football-field
Renewable energy easily can provide all that. Guatemala runs mostly on biomass energy from their sugar industry, Germany runs on wind. There's enough cheap biomass and solar and wind. https://www.electricitymap.org/
If the project has some amount of delay (which is likely when you see Flamanville or Olkiluoto) it's going to end up as a really good deal for the British Government because there are high penalty fees in that deal. For EDF, not so much, that's why the project met that much resistance inside EDF.
I guess it's easier when you can't lose anything if things go bad: the former Areva CEO, Anne Lauvergeon didn't have any problem becoming board member in many big corporation[2] after her terrible management lead Areva to bankruptcy ...
[1] : the CFO resigned to protest against the deal, and the trade unions were strongly against
[2] : Suez, Total, Vodaphone, EADS ... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lauvergeon#Mandats_sociau...
It's a great lesson in things that have a long lead and a long tail can be hugely derailed by technology.
:-D :-D :-D
2,400 MW of power, for $11 billion to build it. Based on the size of the Belarus economy (GDP per capita), that'd be like the US spending $120 billion to build a new nuclear power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_nuclear_power_plant
https://gizmodo.com/the-first-nuclear-power-plant-in-belarus...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-nuclear-plant-stokes-eu...
That never have to make a profit. And that's the key.
The US Navy is INSANE about keeping the reactors properly tuned and serviced. The number of staff they throw at assembling, servicing, and decommissioning their nuclear vessels is astounding.
And as a matter of fact this plan was initially proposed by a Lib Dem MP[0] (he was also a Guardian columist after that). That reference also notes that nuclear expansion was favoured by most Labour MPs at the time.
I actually don't agree that facts always speak for themselves. I think it's very easy to pick naked facts to lead the reader where you want them to go without explanation of the decision making process or what the alternatives were.
[0]: http://bikeshed.com