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Comment by ElBarto | Hacker News Reader

Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point and you'll see that it is not really realistic.

Then, take into account the goal of making of vehicles electric in the next 20 years.

There is no viable alternative to nuclear as of today even if renewables should of course be pushed as much as possible.

Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons. (wood fired plants are counted as renewables in the EU, by the way)

The absolute priority should be to get rid of emissions, i.e. fossil fuels. Germany decided to get rid of nuclear energy first.

They are not a good example to follow.

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> Germany is emitting heavily because most of its electricity comes from fossil fuel and it decided to kill nuclear power of purely ideological reasons

It does because it is a relatively industrialized country. CO2 emissions fell last year by 4.5%.

These are actual numbers for electricity production in Germany: from 2017 to 2018:

5.6% more wind electricity, 6.3% more solar electricity.

2.7% less coal/lignite, 6% less hard coal, 9% less gas.

The share of renewable energy of electricity production is 40%.

In 2030 it is projected to be at around 65%.

This is going to be a revolution. We now have working days in 2019 where >60% of the electricity are coming from renewables. There was a week this year with 64.8% renewable energy for electricity, with wind providing 48.4%. Two decades ago this was thought to be impossible.

> It does because it is a relatively industrialized country.

No, it does because its electricity comes from fossil fuels.

You are completely avoiding the point of my comment. Germany could have much, much lower emissions with nuclear but it has decided to continue emitting for political reasons, while trying to claim that they are 'green'...

We could also be much much less habitated with one Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event.

We know how to make nuclear power safe. Nuclear power is safe.

It's not helpful to try to kill the discussion by stroking irrational fears.

> We know how to make nuclear power safe.

No, we really don't. We know how to make all sorts of things reasonably safe. Yet planes still fall out of the sky, refineries catch on fire, dams fail, etc. In essence: Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.

Much about accidents in complex high risk technologies has been said in "Normal Accidents" by Perrow in the 80s. The reasons he identified why complex systems fail will always be with us. Especially the notion that it is more often than not the organizations and not the technology which enables major accidents.

> Any nuclear reactor will have a probability different from zero for producing an incredibly expensive nuclear accident.

A coal fired power plant will also have a probability different from zero for producing nuclear waste.

In fact, AFAIK the radiation risk from living near a coal powered power plant is significantly larger than living next to a nuclear reactor.

I guess if this was taken into account coal powered power plants would also require incredibly expensive cleanup.

That said as long as renewable is cheaper we should go with that going forward.

We have "probability different from zero" to be annihilated by an asteroid...

This is again spreading irrational fears.

>Calculate how many wind generators you need to guarantee the same production as Hinkley point

Hinkley Point = 3200 MW Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

That's about 1,100 wind turbines at current tech. GE is working on a 12 MW wind turbine - it would take 270 of them would replace Hinkley point.

... when the wind blows.

Yep, although:

* The wind is always blowing somewhere.

* At current prices it makes sense just to overproduce and figure out ways to time shift demand (e.g. start using electric storage heaters again)

3MW is the peak power when the wind is blowing constantly at the maximum speed the wind turbine was designed to operate (and not over, at which point the turbine enters safe mode and stops to prevent damage).

Load factors for wind turbines are rarely over 40%. Nuclear's is 80%. So you'd need 2200 turbines to replace one Hinkley point. And all the gas power plants to make the energy when the wind is not blowing...

Germany has 30000+ wind turbines.

https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind...

Quite right, my mistake.

GE's new turbine has a 63% capacity apparently. So, 428 of them are needed, apparently.

Either way, I don't see what is so intrinsically unrealistic about setting up 500 of these things offshore as compared to a hinkley point.

Gansu Wind farm in China is 8,000MW - already 2.5x onen Hinkley.

> Nuclear's is 80%

Why is that?

I'm sure we're all broadly in favour of free markets. Do electricity consumers buy nuclear because it's good value?[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

Because the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy.

It's not 100% because you need to do maintenance at times.

I would think that they'd run it closer to 100% and do all the maintenance during a scheduled outage...at least that's how I understand they do the maintenance planning/scheduling at Palo Verde.

> the nuclear reaction is not dependant on the wind blowing to produce energy

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, I was alluding to the lively debate about how the selling price for electricity is set, and how it should vary depending on market conditions.

I see no reason to lock-in minimum pricing for any kind of electricity generation many decades in advance. Why is that necessary for new nuclear plants?

In other words: do we need to guarantee a minimum market price 30 years in advance in order to make it look like building a nuclear plant makes economic sense?

You seem to be leaving out the fact that most nuclear plants have a fair amount of downtime as well in order to refuel. While I don't have UK statistics, in the US it's typically 30-40 days per year when they don't run (so 10% of the time or more). So, you would need more than one source to make up for the nuclear plant's downtime just as you would to make up for areas offshore where the wind isn't blowing at top speed.

>Average wind turbine generates = 3 MW

it doesn't work like that , capacity factor of wind is almost half of the capacity factor of nuclear

> An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year

(Source: http://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/)

That's an actual average of 685 kW, so 4,700 turbines for Hinkley Point. But that's still the _average_ production. If, or rather when, there's no wind during a high demand period you get a nice blackout.

Also:

> So a 2-megawatt wind turbine would require a total area of about half a square kilometer

(Source: https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-1230463...

So for those 4,700 turbines you need more than 2,350 km^2, so the whole of Dorset covered and as said, you'd still need a backup.

Regarding your comment on wood fired plants: To me it seems that you imply that that is not renewable, which I do not understand. If you regrow the trees that you've burned (cleanly) down then your net impact will be zero, right?

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