UK energy bills 'used to subsidise nuclear submarines'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Something ignored here, is that electricity generation is not fungible. Wind power is not reliable, but nuclear is. Nuclear power is really the only practical solution for the UK to eliminate fossil fuel use from electricity generation, around the clock; we don't have the geography for adequate hydro.
(Cost is another issue, but it seems the parties are happy enough to spend $100bn on a nuclear weapons system that we hope never to use)
And you talk of overprovisioning. Crazy.
If anything, we must invest into making nuclear cheaper.
> invest into making nuclear cheaper
People have been talking about this since the 1950s. How much will it cost and how long will it take?
UK lagged behind the times, yes. Doesn't mean it shouldn't catch up skipping ye olde misdesigns.
I also don't get where you have youe numbers from. Wind power generally has a 60% capacity factor therefore replacing a 4GW nuclear plant requires 6.6GW of wind power.
To get there, the government would need to cancel plans to construct 15 new nuclear power plants, and instead replace its aging nuclear reactors with renewable infrastructure over the next several decades, according to a new report published Monday by the French environmental agency."
I hope it's just political bullshit.
It is just not happening.
As Germany scaled up their solar and wind infrastructure they NECESSARILY also scaled up their use of natural gas and also supplemented high demand with imported coal and nuclear power from their neighbours. There is no such thing as a solar/wind deployment without natural gas. Natural gas providers are now one of the biggest lobby group for solar and wind.
It may very well be that gas is going to play a major role in replacing coal, but that has yet to happen - while nuclear energy has already been cut back significantly.
This is not an example to follow, really.
In the current situation, getting rid of coal and fossil fuels should have higher priority than getting rid of nuclear purely for ideological reasons...
Your argument is also misleading: Of course use of nuclear power can be reduced by increasing use of renewables. But the important point is that renewables cannot replace nuclear.
Some natural gas? Some? You think those pipelines from Russia are there to only provide 'SOME' natural gas?? Nord Stream has an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic meters. Nord Stream 2 will double that to 110 billion cubic meters. Those are huge, politically sensitive, projects. And those aren't the only planned natural gas pipelines.
Second, biomass really sucks as the fuel of the future. It is environmentally destructive due to the land-use requirements. It's also expensive. It may be carbon neutral (depends if you burn dedicated crops or if you burn waste). Regardless, it's crazy that people would be pushing this as a fuel of the future just so they can get nuclear power off the table.
There is only one answer to cutting C02 emissions, and that's nuclear. We've already lost 50 years because we haven't internalized that fact, and we'll continue to lose time until we do.
Thanks for any pointers!
Current designs of PWR reactors are about 1000-1200 MWe, constant, and not really throttable. This makes them the best baseline supply one can wish for, for a comparably meager investment once the idiotic regulation premium is subtracted.
If we had bulk energy storage it would have been so much cheaper to just pump it with electricity from nukes than that from wind or solar.
Since we don't have the storage tech, the question is moot.
Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period.
That must come as an awful shock to everyone already driving their grid with increasing fractions of wind and solar.
Problem is, when the grid fails it's not like you can throttle down the load. Too late for that. It just goes out.
It's engineering, you know. Keeping politics from breaking things. Keeps getting harder to do though.
On top of this you can massively over provision and still be cheaper than nuclear.
Specific locations can get close to that, but as a system some areas are getting lower wind speeds and generating lots of power.
I agree that we should research energy storage, but there's no guarantee such research would be very fruitful. I don't think it's sensible to double down on the CCGT stopgap, and put our faith in technological breakthroughs. Nuclear fission is a technology which exists now, and we should invest in before the window closes.
That said, I can't see it happening in the UK because our politics are a dumpster fire.
Underground air pressurization is low tech, and can drive existing gas turbines, with or without added methane.
Catalytic production of ammonia from water and air is advancing by leaps and bounds, mostly enabling increasingly smaller synthesis systems. Ammonia is directly useful as industrial feedstock, liquid fuel, and fertilizer, once power storage reserve is met. Again, compatible with gas turbines. (A practical use for the waste oxygen would be helpful.)
Ammonia is excellent because it is directly useful at the sites of wind turbines at remote farms, avoiding need for connection to an electric grid. It can be injected directly into the soil for fertilizer, and used to power existing machinery -- trucks, tractors. Intermittent production, there, is no handicap. Excess can be sold to neighbors.
> "Plutus PowerGen’s facilities are anticipated to run for no more than 150 hours per year in 60 minute blocks of time during peak demand and may not exceed 300 hours as a result of the commitments made in the planning permission process. Despite providing valuable generating capacity, each facility is expected to be switched off for more than 97% of the time, ensuring that their annualised emissions are minimal. The Company’s facilities will conform to all UK and EU air quality standards The generators will be fired with either green fuel from HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) or gas."
A set of "backup" generators run for 3% of the year on vegetable oil is hardly a big carbon emitter. It's an expensive problem - no matter what the grid setup is, someone's got to be the generator of last resort which gets hardly ever used.
This is exactly the kind of market that a Tesla battery got deployed into in Australia.
http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-mo... is an interesting read too.
Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
> Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend.
Why would they not come down? In most technology we use it does come down. Nuclear is really the exeption where normal development has not happened.
Regulatory costs are comming down right now already. The US has started a wide range of reforms to address this problem. The US is going from essentially impossible to regulate a new reactor to only very expensive. Interestingly nuclear went from both parties being against, to both parties being for and 3-4 nuclear reform bills have gone threw congress with little issue. Its suprising to say the least. Its still baby steps but at least its not continued political deadlock.
Canada is doing much better and there is actually now feasable to go threw the regulatory process again. This has lead many US and British companies to move to Canada.
This should allow now reactor types comming to market in the next 10 years and those be much smaller in scale then PWRs and thus have very much smaller capital costs, thus building them should be cheaper.
None no of that is a certainty but its also not crazy either.
> In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
Fission is 10^12 more dense then chemical energy, Fusion is about 10^15. The difference there is not all that relevant specially not as a society already ignore the 10^12 difference.
Most Fusion don't really add much, other then maybe being better at nuclear proliferation but that is not really a hugly practical problem with fission specially in the western world.
Solar and wind have to replaced fairly often, and once first generation installations must get replaced, and cheap nuclear is available, the situation might reverse itself.
That said, in certain places it will be hard to beat these but there many places where they are not optimal and there is still the intermitency question. Many GenIV nuclear plants can be perfectly perfectly load following or can be connected to utility scale heat storages.
There should be no problems with such sites in the UK. There are a lot of sparcely populated coastal areas in the north or even in Wales.
>If we started planning a new power station now it wouldn't be online until about 2030.
What's with this desire for instant gratification? The world won't end in 2030. Even if you get a single plant running by then, it would be a great help. Not starting now is just an excuse.
You can also plan to use modern reactors for the next 30, mutlibe companies, including British Company are already in the regulatory process in Canada (and they went their because British nuclear regulation were so backwards).
Both options would be cheaper then building some costum plant based on old tech.
That said, if they are willing to build modern gas plants with wind, that's actually one of the better options.
Then the only alternative is natural gas supplemented by solar. No battery technology is forthcoming.
FYI
The issue is that government policy is that they should be funded by the private sector (and that the UK is no longer able to build a nuclear power station by itself).
No-one in the private sector can do that, as we've seen.
For Hinkley C, EDF could not (and the French government did not want to finance). For another power station Toshiba recently gave up and took a serious financial hit because it was just too much [0].
The only ones willing to throw money at this to build those nuclear plants are the Chinese, which EDF already called in to partly finance Hinkley C, but then everyone goes ballistic about "handing over our electricity supply to the Chinese Communist Party".
Considering that the UK developed and built the first civilian nuclear plant this is (yet another) monumental lack of strategic vision and huge waste.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-...
Let's ignore subsidies for a moment. Also lets assume I can have the plant operational in 10 years (very optimistic unless I'm about to be ready to start construction).
Onshore wind is already much cheaper than than nuclear. The wind turbines being built when I start construction will reach their end of life, be replaced by even more profitable wind turbines that will themselves reach end of life before I will start thinking about decommissioning my nuclear plant. So I'm not just competing about the current generation that already is significantly cheaper, I'm also competing against another few decades of cost reductions for wind.
So how long until wind plus storage is cheaper than my nuclear plant? Will it be in 10 years with economies of scale from EV battery demand, or 30 years until something more ambitious like storing molten salts or molten aluminium becomes serious competition? Or am I willing to bet it takes 50 years, giving my reactor 40 years of profitable operation?
It seems like a terrible bet to make. I would need a lot of subsidies to make it look like a good idea.
Except that it cannot possibly produce enough to replace nuclear or meet demand.
And nuclear is not more expensive than _offshore_ wind, which will also struggle to produce enough.
As discussed in this thread, people keep ignoring that raw cost per kWh is just one of the parameters. Another key parameter is that production must be able to meet demand.
At the moment it is simply not possible to operate only on wind and solar. This becomes is more true when you account for the boom in electricity needs that is coming because electric cars.
As a private plant operator that isn't also the grid operator I don't really care though about meeting demand. I care about a slightly different metric: can I sell my electricity at a higher price than it takes me to produce it? Of course if nobody can meet demand, prices tend towards infinity and I'm happy. Maybe that happens often enough that I can still make a profit despite all the times I make a loss when wind is too strong and electricity prices are too low. Growing demand is a good point that might help.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Providing 7% of the UK's energy needs is far from nothing but it comes at a very high cost. Bringing all the costs in-house might lessen the bill in the long run (if the UK were to be building a lot) but would require a lot of investment in relearning how to build the plants.
> The deal took over a decade and not only includes upfront costs but also British bill payers giving a "generous" subsidy to French energy for 35 years.
Not so. The deal is only to guarantee the price of electricity sold, which had to be done to remove financial uncertainty over decades in order for EDF/Chinese partner to agree to finance it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
If the strike price used were the current market rate (or maybe a bit lower), that would seem reasonable to allow a company to have the required long term security knowing the bottom won't fall out from under them, but an implicit subsidy does not seem like a good strategy.
That's just a direct consequence of the government policy of not financing the construction and operation with public money.
The alternative was to directly spend public money, which makes the complaint about this guaranteed price being a public subsidy rather moot.
All proponents of renewables bringing the topic of nuclear price fail to make the point that they are comparing apples and oranges. One is reliable, the other is not. To make a fair comparison, you have to include either
- the price of added storage, for which the latest estimates I've seen show would put the price at 5-30x the original price per kWh, including manufacturing, power losses, renewal, etc.
or
- the price of making the electricity less reliable for the industry. It's possible, and seriously considered in 100% renewables scenarios, to switch the electricity consumption for industries at specific times (e.g. the factories run at peak solar or peak wind only). And give incentives for individuals (variable kWh price) to try to pilot their consumption around the production. Problem: this might ruin the competitivity of the industry. The costs associated are much harder to estimate.
TL;DR even if it comes at a very high costs, nuclear would still be cheaper than renewables + adequate storage.
Here's an alternative model being proposed for future UK nuclear energy projects: http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/energy/energy/the-nuclear-rab-mo...
People who make this claim aren't looking at the trends. Local storage is rapidly dropping in price, pump hydro works as a large scale and cheap energy storage solution and the build costs for nuclear is huge.
Rolls Royce has been banging the ‘small modular fission reactor’ drum for a while now [1] — i'd love to see a discussion about the concept's merits or otherwise.
We need smart, adventurous thinking on power generation to fill the gap before fusion comes on line (fingers crossed) — the UK has one of the healthiest renewable markets in the world, I see no reason we shoudn't be pushing nuclear alongside. Just smart nuclear, not dumb monolthic last generation nuclear with little benefit for local industry.
- ed
[1] https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm...
What I find surprising is that nobody ever comments on the fact that the UK literally operates US nuclear missiles with warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs. Not to mention the lack of permissive action locks on the UK weapons...
Edit: I should have been clearer that I meant was discussion outside of the UK about these issues.
The thing being this was a negotiated outcome to prevent the destabilization of a system by the introduction of an independent nuclear source. France was bad enough: the Americans and Russians didn't want Britain making ICBM. (Obviously I doubt the Russians were consulted)
This is why black arrow was cancelled: the US promised Polaris if the UK ceased rocket tests in Australia.
This is mostly about the engineering capability for building submarine propulsion reactors, not weapons. Note the article never mentioned weapons. Sustaining that engineering capability through the lean years between submarine projects through power generation projects is seen by the pacifict environmentalist groups as a cross subsidy that they don't want to provide.
> warhead designs heavily influenced by US designs
Supposedly the UKs are domestic designs with more stealth and penetration aids.
We could always do what we did the last time we forgot how to build submarines and simply ask the US how to do it?
Huh? That's absolutely a common talking point whenever a conversation about "renewing Trident" or similar comes up.
The fact that they’re US designs was one of the major discussion points of the recent renewal debate - people from across the political spectrum commented on it extensively for months.
There are no PALs in order to support a credible threat of retaliation. The UK is small enough that it’s possible that the whole country would have been destroyed by a first strike. This is how nuclear weapons ‘work’ - by credible threat.
There's an official defence budget, and in a democracy voters express their opinion about the state of defence spending through the ballot box.
Real democracies don't scam their citizens with a secret defence stealth tax.
There are plenty of examples of this being done all over the world, because many defence industry capabilities are pretty fungible into areas like aerospace, chip design & manufacturing, optical engineering, and so on. So an industrial policy that results in development in those areas has dual benefit.
Half the reason Silicon Valley exists is because of this sort of cross investment. It's likely Airbus wouldn't exist in its current form either without it. If it's all humming along nicely, you get good cross-feed in between too, with a lot more stable and long-term low-TRL investment on the defence side feeding into the civilian sector, and high-TRL investment producing better completed systems for the defence side.
What will be important to prove in this case is whether the UK investment in civilian nuclear power is done solely to benefit the military nuclear energy industry, or whether there is a valid and viable argument for that investment on its own. I'd be interested in seeing the research.
For the state's POV, maintaining a nuclear capability is a very sufficient argument on its own! The voters may disagree, but no state really lets voters pick national security mechanisms they'd like.
Not when there is a anti-cyclonic high pressure system anchored over the UK and the wind isn't blowing. No wind, no turbine rotation and no electricity.
If the wind stops blowing across a significant area of Northern Europe then something has gone seriously wrong with the Earth.