Europe's Newest Nuclear Reactor Eases Finland's Power Problems
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But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy.
This is an emergency in both sovereignty and maintaining an industrialized, modern economy.
Source:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.
They've also been importing cheap electricity to avoid burning expensive fossil fuels for about a decade, so they probably want to continue with that.
They have a lot of power generation in the north, but not enough transmission capacity to transfer it to the population centers in the south, so they have to sell it cheaply to their neighbors, and buy expensive electricity from their neighbors in the south.
This all worked fine when they could buy cheap electricity from their southern neighbors. But now they have a problem.
A few weeks ago there was 10X or more electricity price difference between north and south Sweden.
Take a look at:
https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/
Pick, for example, August 26, 2022, at 11:04. Prices up north are 14 euro per MWh, and 750 euro per MWh in the south.
With the recent chaos at the French nuclear plants Sweden became the largest exporter of electricity in the EU. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
Nuclear and hydro are the baseload generation in Finland at the moment and will be far into the future. Hydro is also used to handle peaks. Imports are mostly hydro too.
Not that hydro is enough for baseload in itself.
If we're talking peace time, then there's loads of strategies. For Finland, Sweden and Norway there's immense possibility of hydro power to simply switch it to be used in a more dispatchable manner than baselod. For less hydro equipped countries see this research.
> *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability*
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Needless to say, the sheer need for resources to build all this will make the current state of global warming and climate change look like child's play compared to earth after.
Holy shit, how hard is it for zealots to understand and accept that our best, realistic solution to electrifying as much as possible is through a combination of nuclear and renewables, something that literally every competent actor has said time and time again ?
But you seem to be implying that those are renewable problems that nuclear doesn't have, and that adding nuclear to the energy mix will improve them.
Can you explain how?
Like, "pink hydrogen" is hydrogen made by electrolysis with nuclear power. You had a little rant about Green Hydrogen, so how does nuclear change that?
What's wrong with EVs charged from nuclear?
Does nuclear mean you don't need grid interconnects? Why do France and Germany trade energy back and forth then?
I like nuclear as a tech. It's you that I have doubt about actually supporting it as it seems to just be a hippy-punching shibboleth for you. Are you really just arguing for fossil fuels?
Solution: Build renewables on a scale never seen before, then do it again two more times, as well as once every ten years to replace the ones that failed.
Do you see the slight problem? We do not have the resources for that. We cannot afford that. Is nuclear perfect? No. We have spent fuel (that hopefully we can figure out how to reuse, but for now, it's just waste buried deep), it's big, it's unwieldy. But it's reliable. Resources are both plentiful and we don't need that much. A whole lot of concrete (still much less that we would need to put wind turbines), fissile material that can be found pretty much anywhere, and a good bunch of pipes and various metals (infinitely less than what we'd need for solar or wind).
I said green hydrogen was shit for storing energy, and so is pink hydrogen. But if that can make you happy, I'm more than willing to use whatever surplus we get from renewables to make hydrogen. I'd just rather we waste 70% of a small production, rather than 70% of all.
What's wrong with EVs charged from nuclear? Everything. The only green car is a car that isn't manufactured. For most people (especially in europe), an EV will pretty much take 10 years before it offsets its CO2 emissions. Should we stop selling ICEs? Yes. Should we replace millions of existing cars with EVs? Absofuckinglutely not.
Nuclear means you're less dependent on those interconnects. Which, you know, is a useful thing to be as a sovereign country. See: Europe and its dependency on gas.
> Are you really just arguing for fossil fuels?
Considering how happy fossil fuel companies are about renewables because it allows them to sell gas when it inevitably doesn't work for a day and you need something else to make up for it, you would do well to rethink your mindless support. Every 100% renewables plan is the equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum. We cannot mine that much. We cannot find that much space in ideal locations, nor maintain it. There is not a single mine in the world able to get the resources we need. Ignoring reality is all fun and games, and if we had infinite time in front of us, I'd be all okay with going full intermittent power. But we both know it's not the case. Pretending anything else is ignorance and optimism at best, and malice at worst. You need to learn compromise, and as it stands, we cannot afford not to.
Finnish winter crushes solar and wind generation. No sun and wind still days.
The Baltic sea is also definitely workable for off-shore wind. Not to the level of the north sea but not that far off.
See Table 1 in this review paper from June for a summary of grid simulations from 10 separate models running 100% renewables at various time step resolutions: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
Now its a rallying cry for some reason.
Additionally, I would recommend you read the remarks of Table 1, where half of them either make a gigantic portion of electricity needs disappear (not counting livestock needs lol), or assume that 10000TWh (or much more) will be covered by fossil fuels or nuclear. Hm, that sounds like a lot like a base load. It does not either cover how much you need to build (current best case scenarios are that you need to build 2.5x worth your needed consumption for it to be available at all times. Hope you're ready to cover Texas in solar panels you need to replace every ten years), or assume that you can just... transfer electricity through ? Yeah, sure, if we had a worldwide grid that just delivers energy where it needs to be without loss, but we don't.
You can also provide a base load with just solar. You just need to spread your panels all over the country to make up for the fact that sun is not always shining everywhere, but the idea stays the same: can we produce 100TWh over a year with our installation, no matter what ?
Energy isn't produced for the fun of it. Base load is related to total demand, at all times. Some of that demand is so you can run your USB powered coffee cup, some of it is to run foundries. You pick what you fit in that, but whatever you pick must be covered by that base load.
Needless to say, with sources as intermittent as wind and solar, making any kind of plans except "we're going to produce X over this month" is pretty much impossible, and you need to compensate by building tons of storage to smooth things out, otherwise you get brownouts.
- improve interconnects
- overdimension production
- CHP [0] with biomass fuel
- hydro storage
- increase demand flexibility
- generate carbohydrates for seasonal storage
- lower consumption
Technological improvements and breakthroughs are nice extras.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places (maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables), so there's not much place left for nuclear. If your energy system has variable demand it will need storage even with nuclear, which tilts the game toward renewables even further (their need for storage is partially covered by the storage one needs anyway to level the load; said storage can level supply and demand at the same time, to some extent.)
Nuclear also has the problem that it's not going to survive very well as a niche technology, as that would likely not cause enough construction of new power plants to keep the industry from seeing negative learning effects.
That is not true. Nuclear power has been used as a dispatchable / regulative source of power to compensate solar and wind power intermittency for decades in France.[1]
> These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places
And that's gross bullshit.
- Never storage of electricity has been deployed successfully at scale needed for a mid size country. Pretend that it is, today, a solution is highly hypocritical or plain gross bullshit.
- Even on the most optimistic (and untested) scenario, the cost plan of RE+Storage is (at best) on part with Nuclear energy (Pumped-storage) and or way more expensive (battery, power2gas). [2]
> maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables
That is even more bullshit. Finland has pretty large hydro reserves. Renewable does not stop to solar. [3]
[1]: https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document
[2]: https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-...
[3]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?solar=false&remote=t...
You take the most expensive energy source and run it at a lower capacity factor leading to even higher costs per delivered kWh. That is the issue.
Say you run Hinkley Point C [1] at a capacity factor of 50% because renewables crowd it out of the market half the time and assume marginal costs of running the plant at ~€20/MWh. [2]
€(120 - 20) * 2 + 20 = €220/MWh.
That would be expensive even by Putin energy crisis standards, that is the issue with mixing nuclear and renewables.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
[2]: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Very bad projection because:
- Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto 3 and EPR Flamanville are all prototype. Their CAPEX cost are not representative of industrialized Nuclear. As example, the production cost as expressed by the French ARENH is around 42-1€/MWh [1]
- Electricity price skyrocket when weather conditions make production of renewable impossible. This is where this kind of plant make a profit. [2] Your projection just fit a worst case scenario.
- At the current electricity price due to the Russian conflict, Some EPRs including the French ones are predicted to be cost effective in only few years.
[1]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-16/german-po...
No idea about Hinkley Point but TVOs 2 earlier reactors have costs in the 15 to 20€/MWh range with average market prices around 30 to 40€/MWh they are making healthy profits with the reactors (and have for decades now). Once OL3 is running their target combined operational costs of all the reactors are around 30€/MWh. It will be tight but they should be able to make it profitable especially as they don't have to sell all the production at day ahead spot prices but higher fixed rate contracts far into the future. Obviously nuclear also produces at the moments when wind does not and the price spikes.
(https://www.tvo.fi/material/collections/20210713150018/7Rllf... scroll down to page 7)
edit: And TVO does not actually sell anything on the open markets but instead at production costs to its owners based on the % of investment into each reactor. Those can then either sell it or use it themselves.
That is simply the operating cost. Yes, nuclear can be quite competitive if your reactor is provided for free by the Nuclear Fairy.
So in this case the nuclear fairy is the market buying the electricity just like for all forms of electricity it should be.
But if the question being asked is "should we build more nuclear reactors", then construction and financing costs must be included.
here is a newer one from Q2 this year https://www.tvo.fi/material/collections/20220713160120/7aj2c...
On the page 8 in the graph you can see the cash costs (operational costs) in blue and capital costs in purple (pink? dunno I'm quite badly color blind). Still with both of those the total costs of all 3 reactors is projected to be sub 40€/MWh. Obviously 40€/MWh is not ideal as the market every now and then is under that but they should be able to cover that during the moments when the price is high (it averages out they hope). Basically as long as the squiggly price line is above the colored solid area at the bottom profit is being made.
Also to the owners of the plant a easily predictable price is more important then the lowest so they can better predict operational costs of their billion euro+ paper pulp factories etc.
This report is based on their financial reporting to their share holders so I doubt they are lying.
You can find more at https://www.tvo.fi/en/index/investors/financialpublications....
edit: The math is quite simple for example 2021
14 414 000 MWh produced at the cost of 19€/MWh and average market price of 72.2€/MWh gets you 1 040 690 800€ of sold electricity at the cost of 273 866 000€ and capital costs of 220 000 000€ (OL3) giving them a profit of (well value made to their share holders who they sold the electricity to at cost of production) 546 824 800€
Not exactly like this as OL1 and OL2 do not have the exact same investor(s) and the split as OL3 but in the ballpark.
Could the investors have made a better profit by putting that 5.5 billion a decade ago in some random index fund or building wind mills? Maybe? But this is the gamble they took and seems to be profitable. Obviously not necessarily the most profitable investment as that is impossible to know at the moment you make the investment.
Remember folks -- according to nuclear defenders, nothing can ever happen for the first time. At least, when it comes to renewables, that is. Except for all the times new milestones are reached, I guess.
There is no valid technical reason you can point to that would prevent a 100% renewable grid from operating. And the cost of all the components have been falling rapidly as demand pushes them down their experience curves. I might forgive you for ignoring that, as a good experience curve is sadly not something nuclear has had, in general.
Also:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels.
(since nuclear is not available at a cost similar to fossil fuels, this implies renewables would be less costly than nuclear)
A renewable energy system to power the world would be an enormous undertaking. It's just that it would be less expensive than a nuclear system to do the same.
How much energy storage can we buy for 20 billion right now?
Where in Finland are suitable sites?
What are the costs per MWh to store and release energy from it?
That is sophism and what-aboutism and irrelevant.
> There is no valid technical reason you can point to that would prevent a 100% renewable grid from operating.
There is and it is named Energy Storage.
Funnily enough TVO (the owner and operator of Olkiluoto the site where his new reactor is at) also owns a bunch of hydro (and a little bit of wind). Though the hydro mostly exists as their own private backup generator. It has direct lines to the nuclear site so in the case they need to shutdown all the reactor and can't receive electricity from the grid to run the cooling systems they can get the electricity from that (they obviously also have onsite diesel generators too)
Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability.
Why are you asking for a source over a statement which op didn't make?
They paused their other nuclear plant build because of worries that the nation they were building it with would be able to mess with their electricity supply.
And grid forming inverter based tech is the new best option. Distributed inverters can provide all sorts of grid services cheaper than old centralised tech.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...
Existing ones, particulalry those built for multiple functions (water supply, recreation) still have some use but mostly you just want to be rolling out solar and wind until you run out of fossil fuel generation to displace. Only then do you really need to start comparing whether building storage would cost less than more renewables and interconnects and hydro is unlikely to be the lowest cost option unless you're going to build the dam anyway for other reasons.
I’d be really, really be interested in primary sources for the above claim.
See Figure 1.2 Global weighted average LCOEs from newly commissioned, utility-scale renewable power generation technologies, 2010-2021
https://irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/202...
Hydro costs are going up, solar and wind going down. Hydro is still less than fossil fuels, which is great, but that's not the target to beat anymore, and renewables are lower and trending even lower.
And that's before the more extreme geographical constraints for siting, with good locations already used, the project sizes and the longer lead times and investment paybacks compared with renewables.
But Hydro also has flexibility, which is really useful for balancing renewables and nuclear. It's important to switch existing Hydro into this mode to make the most of it. But again, for new build, since the raw power is more expensive than renewables, the flexibility would need to be cheaper than the equivalent flexibility provided by more renewables plus batteries to win back that lost ground. And it isn't.
Same story for pumped storage. Here's a worked example for the Snowy 2 project:
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
The key thing is, energy production is cheap these days. So storing energy has to compete against just building even more production and a small amount of storage. This applies to batteries as much as it does to hydro. But batteries scale down better.
”The key thing is, energy production is cheap these days.”
This is immaterial if cheap energy is unavailable when needed. See: winter (season)
“So storing energy has to compete against just building even more production and a small amount of storage.”
This is incorrect. More production is useless if the output is zero. Zero times a large number is still zero.
Again, see: winter (season)
”This applies to batteries as much as it does to hydro. But batteries scale down better.”
The problem with batteries is that they don’t scale up.
Using EVs as batteries is neither free nor always available.
Nuclear power's output stability isnt worthless but it requires some pretty impressive mental calisthenics to convince yourself that it's worth quintupling the price tag when you can just build a battery.
7 hours is apparently enough 99% of the time.
Overproducing a bit and turning it into windgas would probably work for the rest.
It’s nowhere enough and there aren’t any places to build more.
For reference current energy production is 7500MW in Finland.
That being said, Finland has a wild excess of solar energy in the summer, and I'd like to see the gov't get serious about nationwide schemes to store up that energy for wintertime use. Air-water heat pumps, sand batteries, it's a start... capture that summer heat and squirrel it away.
Periods with low wind and low sun do happen but theyre rarer and shorter than people think. It's much more common that availability of wind and sun anticorrelate (even in winter), which is why the storage needed to get to 99% is normally measured in hours rather than days.
This can drop to almost zero, if you build a dam near a location with preexisting cement plants, or, in an area where you snap build your own cement plant.
Even steel transportation ; is it local? Is their train? Is there a waterway, which ships can transport steel to you on?
Hydro is so clean, it isn't even funny.
Rivers naturally shift on their own. In North America, the land is still rebounding from the last ice age.
And it's not like the land is rendered hostile to life. A river becomes a lake.
And as there are beaver dams which can be seen from space, I'd have to say Beavers impact rivers far more than our measly few hydro dams.
It's normal, natural for rivers to be dammed.. it happens in nature all the time, unless you believe beavers are unnatural?
That's fine, as long as there are huge rotating chunks of iron. Nuclear can rotate the chunks, as can hydro and geothermal. Everything else emits carbon.
Europe is pretty tapped on hydro and geothermal, that leaves nuclear, or some very handwavey ideas of building a bunch of flywheels using resources which could be contributing to primary generation.
Metals are energy intensive and we can't afford to build generator-equivalent machinery that doesn't generate.
A lot of other replies are deluded about the scale at which inverters can operate, but what else is new.
Not "ultimately", "incidentally". How do you think microgrids work without giant spinning masses? There's no technical reason wind or PV can't provide inertia, just need to program the inverters to help maintain frequency rather than just follow it.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/08/new-model-for-grid-fo...
Other options include this where they demonstrate that they can switch between synchronous condenser and generator mode. Allowing a Power 2 X plant to provide system stability when it is not needed.
> 2011: first synchronous condenser conversion, from a 473 MVA generator to a +360/-210 MVAr synchronous condenser, making it possible to change between generator and synchronous condenser mode, depending on the season;
https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurege-synchr...
Inverters are solving grid issues at fraction of cost of spinning machines
https://reneweconomy.com.au/inverters-are-solving-grid-issue...
> Ian Christmas, head of engineering at Edify Enegy, told a Clean Energy Council large scale solar forum last week that the inverter tuning at four key solar farms – Whitsunday, Daydream, Hayman, and Hamilton – would address recently declared system strength issues in that part of the grid at one twenty-fifth of the cost of installing a synchronous condenser.
> He also said it could be done in a fraction of the time – around four months compared to fourteen months or longer for the alternative. “It’s significant enough (in terms of price and time) that it is a no brainer,” Christmas said.
Also note, synchronous condensers which you seem to believe are vaporware are a fine solution, just not as cheap.
This is what my government (Sweden) is actually doing, with one difference. Rather than a liability contract, if the investment fail the government will simply repay the investors regardless if it managed to deliver energy. The government intention is that regardless if energy projects succeed or not, the energy sector shall have any money they say they need as long they continue to invest and build more capacity. That is how desperate the situation is.
But there's various grid services which aren't just about delivering energy. There's a weird assumption that steam generator tech is automatically better at these things than modern inverter-based technology, but I'm not aware of any case where that is actually true.
The big question that the crisis seems to highlight is if price competition is relevant. What people want is energy on demand when people want it, and the supplier want to demand as much money as the market can take. What energy cost to produce doesn't influence either of those two unless there is an overcapacity with multiple producers competing for the chance of selling.
When customers pay 10-100 times the production cost, and are happy to do so over the alternative of not having heating or open factories, then the issue that energy politics is trying to solve is not about finding the optimal technology that in theory is cheapest or best. Any technology that can solve either short term or long term is desired technology as long they actually get implemented.
is that why they still get outrageous subsidies to be any kind of desirable to build?
Offshore wind (which is more expensive than onshore or solar PV) is now built subsidy free:
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/08/02/subsidy-free-offshor...
UK offshore is currently paying a negative subsidy, a little bit earlier than this was predicted to happen:
https://renews.biz/62009/uk-offshore-wind-to-cross-negative-...
Grid-scale batteries are fabulous for maintaining frequency, and handling the inconsistency of renewables.
it took a worldwide pandemic slowing down the rate of schedules maintenance along with a rare, unexpected potential failure along with the consequences of 30 years of not investing in training new people in the nuclear sector for it to happen, and France is still doing just as well/bad as neighbouring countries (actually, Germany with their full renewabls push is doing much worse). It's relatively safe to say that it's not exactly a common thing.
(and Norway too with its massive hydro capacity)
Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years[0]. This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.
"Designing a car? Building a pharmaceuticals factory? Coding JavaScript? Stop that, we have more important things to do. Just drop whatever you do and start making 5nm Fabs and Nuclear Power plants"
Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs?
It took 6 years to defeat the bad guys during the second world war.
Most of the guys that defeated them had little to no military training at the onset of the conflict.
The NIMBYs in that scenario were marketed to with either assured oppression, or war with a "better" future. Same can be done today.
You can't just throw all democracy laws and regulations overboard just because Russia is messing in their backyard (okay - that is an understatement, but you get the point)...
In the slightly longer term, the rest of the world really needs to get off of fossil fuels and be cutting carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. This is critical and urgent, but not at the cost of the rule of law or democracy.
We can't throw all democracy laws and regulations overboard, but we can't continue with statue quo. Without energy we don't have working cities, agriculture stops producing food, heating and then public health starts to break down. The agricultural sector was one of the first areas that got hit when energy prices jumped.
Those things are close enough to be wartime-like, and could easily turn into actually wartime.
For example, in both WW1 and WW2 a lot of capital ship constructions were canceled in favor of cheap quick to built ships (like cheap destroyers or submarines).
The liberty ships are another example, these things were kind of obsolete at launch and not really geared toward lasting that long (5 years engineered life span).
Lastly, we are not exactly in a wartime situation. Some emergency decisions need to be made (temporary LNG terminals for example), and also Europe needs to have an hard look at its energy policies, but that's a long term and for more complex set of decisions.
A long term commitment to nuclear energy is not something that could and even should be taken in the heat of the moment.
It takes 5-7 years to build a nuclear plant? That means the best time to build them was more than 5-7 years ago. The second best time is right now.
This is no heat of the moment decision. We've had nuclear power technology for 75 years and know how to use it by now.
Well, kind of, whatever the outcome, Russia will have depleted much of its military strength and will need to reequip its army. That costs money, so they will be more or less forced (or even willing in case of a coup against Putin) to sell gas to the EU.
The real question is more what the EU will do. Most likely, the EU (or each country individually) will really want to diversify their energy sources and maybe be more self-reliant to not be subject to one actor like it is right now.
Nuclear may be one of the responses, but it's far from the only one.
On a side note, Russia is providing ~25% of the EU's uranium right now (in fairness, this dependency is easier to circumvent compared to the gas one).
> "It is important to remember that no matter what solution is adopted, some of the cost of a severe nuclear accident will inevitably fall upon the state," the report notes. "Fukushima's compensation payments to date amount to about EUR75 billion (USD91 billion). On top of this are the costs of site stabilisation and regional clean-up. These numbers are beyond the resources of most private enterprises and are even challenging for the global insurance markets.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Study-examines-n...
What is the average time to build a grid-scale solar power plant?
The best time to build a NPP is 5-7 years ago. The second best time is now.
> This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.
This analogy doesn't hold in two different ways;
> it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing
That's not what people (like me) are saying. They're not saying "stop all the other programs", they're saying "heavily heavily prioritise over many other things, as this is critically important for a country's energy security, the continent/political bloc's security, and the planet's future". We're saying claw back some of the £16 billion lost on covid loans [0], or the £10 billion spend on useless PPE[1], or don't spend hundreds of millions to send 300 people a year to rwanda [2], and instead spend _that_ on building nuclear power plants.
> and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.
There's a big difference between selling shovels in a gold rush and investing in power sources that are likely to be operational for decades even after the current crisis is resolved in whatever form it resolves in. If you build a bunch of fabs, they're useless once the pressure wears off. If we build a bunch of nuclear power stations, they're usable instead of the coal and natural gas that we're currently reliant on. Coal can stay where it is, or be used for industrial applications, and natural gas can be used as a heating source for the next 30 years until it's phased out.
> Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs?
Educate them, show them the benefits, spend money on them, and the same as we do if they oppose to fossil fuel extraction - ignore them and do it anyway. Imagine if the UK had spent £100 billion on building 3 hinkley points for £75bn, and spent £10bn on shutting up NIMBY's over the last 20 years. We'd have 3 nuclear power plants, the ability to build more for cheaper, would have created dozens if not hundreds of high skilled jobs and thousands of jobs for manual workers, _and_ it would be cheaper than freezing the energy bills of the entire UK for 18 months [3]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/23/uk-lost-up-to-... [1] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/only-300-migrants-face-be... [3] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-cost-of-l...
Throw money at people who don't want NPPs and they learn to like NPPs? No more NIMBYs.
> Coal can stay where it is, or be used for industrial applications
I presume you're referring to the energy situation in the UK specifically, in which case I don't know how reliant you are on coal. At a global level, coal use cannot stay where it is beyond the very short term caused by the current crisis. We really need to get off of coal or work out a safe and long term carbon capture solution as soon as possible.
UK has basically phased out coal already for electricity, it's not going to be around much longer and is already a fallback choice. And I think the coal burned was mostly imported anyway.
ignore them
How do you ignore a subset of people when maintaining a democratic society?
It's truly absurd that, as just one example, California is simultaneously mandating electric-only vehicles and telling people that they're not allowed to charge them because there's not enough electricity.
In Finland's case the French state (Areva) provided the indirect €5 billion subsidy to get this plant built. Finland wasnt going to shoulder the full costs itself. It has no military nuclear interests. France does.
The Soviets built their other one.
The military is the underlying driver for nuclear power everywhere. Recent environmentalism is just moral cover for the real goal. It's always < 3/4 the cost of a combined solar, wind and pumped storage run grid.
The German green/anti nuclear coalition was a particular threat because it was (until the war) demonstrating a model that threatened to economically undermine civilian nuclear power globally.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
Areva made a bid so low that every other builder decide to not even bother leave their final bids. It is not TVOs problem that Areva made a bad contract (other then making sure Areva had enough insurances/financial backing to finish the project even if it goes over budged)
TVO did have other builds interested (Sweden, America and Japan) but their reactors were only in the 1000MW range instead of 1600MW and cost a bit more. So obviously TVO took the best option. The best would have been for the government give TVO the permits to builds multiple reactors so they could have built 2x800MW or something like that which would have been easier/cheaper.
I didnt say it was. However, France (Areva) making a "bad contract" is why this plant exists at all.
The French state being willing to eat a loss on this plant that is large enough to build an equivalent-in-MW wind farm doesnt happen just by accident. The private sector alone would have abandoned plans for this plant long ago.
If Areva did not make such a low bid they would have probably chosen another bid by another provider.
Fortum also wanted to build their own third reactor in Loviisa but was not given a permit. This not getting permit left Fortum with a lot of cash it really did not know what to do with so in their infinite wisdom they decided to buy Uniper.
So I would say at that moment there was a lot of interest to build a reactor and it would most likely have been built without Arevas involment.
Still even the original price was higher then expected. In the original paperwork to government to start the process of getting the permit the estimate was 1.7 to 2.5 billion euros.
you can plop down a nuclear plant like a house, for obvious reasons.
I am willing to bet a $100 russia will be long gone either from ukraine and/or be collapsed state.
I fully expect that the energy crisis in EU will last much longer than 7 years. The hydroelectric dams in northern Europe need to be replaced and reduced, while the industry and transport sector need to switch to using more electricity. Reducing energy capacity from the corner stone of energy production while at the same time increase consumption is going to take a while to fix. 20-30 years is a more likely time table for when those issues will start to be solved.
Leave aside wartime-like economy. Actual war, even the actual apocalypse are excellent opportunities to profit from, in capitalism. So such concepts like 'sovereignty', 'industrialization', less, 'the people' are irrelevant in its context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...
Nuclear is nice on paper but totally bonkers once you look at the numbers. And they aren't even accounting for all costs, e.g. insurance and long term waste storage are heavily subsidized.
You probably meant their output is unpredictable. But even this is wrong, since weather forecasts allow for a very predictable output.
Nuclear is neither - it requires extensive maintenance (see France), and they can go out unpredictably, taking out a lot of capacity at an instant (see France).
And turbines also take a lot less space than say parking lots.
Deploying such a high number of wind turbine might not be so easy since usually nobody wants them close by and even if Finland is vast not all space is probably suitable.
Nuclear is far from perfect but at least it’s low co2 and once built cost are usually stable (uranium price is negligeable).
And then we would also would have had to build ~8GW of new gas/oil/coal plants or dam more rivers for hydro.
Electricity is used for heating in Finland. Not having enough electricity in the winter is not an option. We need ~9GW of constant production with peaking to around 13GW to survive winters.
edit: Or some absolutely insane amounts of storage to store a week or two of that ~8GW to handle the worst case scenarios.
- interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)
- spread turbines across the entire country
- build as much PV as possible (there is plenty of space on roofs)
- combine renewables with hydro storage
- (in a few places) generate hydrogen and store for times where wind & sun are not enough. Doesn't have to be pure hydrogen, converting to methane or better yet ammonia)
There is effectively 0 sun during the winter in Finland.
Just go to https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... and look at last year Decemenber or January.
> - interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)
Until they don't because the country 10x your size with massive heavy industry on the other side of that country you want to import from wants to buy all of it.
PV produces absolutely nothing when electricity is most used and absolutely necessary (midwinter).
Hydro capacity in Finland is at its maximum potential and even now cannot make up for times when wind is producing close to nothing.
Also, all these workarounds cost money -- some of them, lots of it. For TVO, Olkiluoto 3 costs roughly 5B euros for 1.6GW of nuclear.
If you are going to interconnect with solar and wind you have to spread it across multiple countries. Of course we are seeing how well that worked out with gas and Russia right now.
The pro-nuclear people will argue any extreme incidents are just outliers that can be ignored, the high cost of construction is completely artificial and regulatory in nature, the high cost to build is just because we don't build enough of them, all the waste (from processing and from fuel) are solved problems, we need a base load in the grid and the time to build isn't an issue.
The anti-nuclear people will point out the devastating failure modes, no nuclear plant has been built without massive government support, in places like the US the costs of nuclear clean up in case of accidents is actually capped by legislation so the government is bearing these costs too, if base load is real hydro power is better, fuel waste needs can't just be locked in a cave (eg for years or decades it needs to be actively cooled because it generates heat), transport of fuel and waste introduces risk of accidents and mamlfeasance, humans are terrible at managing long-term and low-probability high-impact risk, nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant and that the plummetting cost of renewables make nuclear increasingly uneconomic.
Rinse and repeat.
Nuclear option: Environment cost, land cost, resource cost, availability of materials etc. Renewables option: Requirement for the correct geography, unbalanced grid, storage options, increase of energy efficiency etc.
Then at least work out that currently in situations a, b and c, only Nuclear is viable, whereas in situations d, e and f, renewables make sense.
In almost all cases, it will need to be a mix and I'm unsure that anywhere has so many renewables that have a massive problem. Australia struggled with too much solar but their grid is still alive so in many countries, we could probably scale renewables more quickly for some capacity. Nuclear is longer term and might be needed where you don't have Norway's water or Iceland's geothermal, great.
Why does everyone have to be an extremist on these discussions?
At that time starting up another wave of nuclear was the best choice we ever made, because renewables was too far flung out to be a certain solution. If Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer had been completed on time with amazing efficiency we would be running nuclear today.
The difference now, 10 years later, is that renewables have leapfrogged nuclear several times over and thus it does not make a sensible investment from either safety, economics or any other angle. Other than being a "known" choice because the grid has always been centralized and some people like the cool dangerous steam boiler technology of it.
So what we need to do today is to draw the learnings of those nuclear attempts and not pour another €X00 billion into pride projects.
Can you give me an example of a grid-scale solar plant that was built without massive government support? I don't know of any, off-hand.
In Finland during construction the local nuclear safety company found reinforced concrete that had 0 rebar in it etc forcing a lot of stuff to be redone due to someone trying to cut expenses.
Though those issues happened a long time ago. The recent delays are mostly issues with the automation systems and the turbine (both subcontracted to Siemens by Areva).
But yeah a lot of the issues are the "nobody has ever done this before". The steam turbine used by these plants is literally the largest ever built.
Thats what get when you loose skilled workforce.
We are incompetent at building all kinds of infrastructure - UK completed crossrail almost 10 years late,and HS2 is 3x overbudget. This country invented railways!
California also can't build a railway apparently. I am not sure how a functional country continues on this trajectory
When you look at industries allowed to be profitable, they go and build things like the Bakkan oil fields.
It's perverse that we regulate nuclear out of existence and build sprawling fracking infrastructure instead, and allow a dysfunctional political process to kill rail in California. But it's 100% about regulation.
US nuclear engineers are old? Great, Chinese ones aren't and we can pay them more. We hire them, problem solved.
It's the neoliberal fantasy that world of atoms doesn't matter, and skills of the population doesn't matter.
You can't magic your way out of a problem just because you have a fat bank account.
You can't hire 50 nuclear engineers into an organisation that never built anything of that complexity, with no suppply chain and no manufacturing infrastructure.
You can't get natural if you have no pipelines or LNG terminals.
Whem climate-change related droughts cause food shortages and countries ban exports, your bank account wont help you either
Money is just an abstraction, and it does a big correction every time suppy chains or markets faulter
It's no surprise when you can make way more money getting people to click on ads at Facebook or working at Goldman Sachs etc. than you can in engineering.
It has been running for months now (doing tests). And for these latest delays we should mainly blame the Germans (Siemens) due to their faulty automation systems and steam turbine. Can't put all the blame on the French :(
The country where I live historically used about 15% of its gas to produce electricity. (Most of the 85% were burned for heat at end-user sites, some were used as molecules in chemical plants.) I'd like to know two things. I can't find these on the web, but perhaps someone on HN knows.
1. Do any of the European countries that imported gas from Russia burn most of to produce electricity? I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed that most of it was burned in furnaces and other heating devices, like here.
2. Are there any countries with a sizable set of heating devices (furnaces, ovens, whatever) can can use either gas or electricity, depending on what's available at any given moment?
So if you normally need to run the last 1% of your production with peaker plants that used to cost X but now due to external reasons their costs are 10X then your electricity price for the moment they are on is 10 times more.
The pricing mechanism was designed to reward efficient power plants and prevent price gouging and it mostly does that.
If just one gas plant tripled their prices, then the market would simply not call on them to deliver unless everything else was already in use.
That doesn't work when the gas itself has gone up in price as all the gas plants prices rise (though it's good that it'll still reward the efficient ones and prevent intentional price gouging by non gas suppliers trying to take advantage of the short supply of gas).
Since the European grid is interconnected, this impact is spread around to a degree so that Russia can't just bully Germany or Finland into doing stuff and to reduce overall costs. Similarly the gas can be transported so that price equalises across borders too.
Europe will indeed lack energy this winter, mostly gas. The article writer may not realise that the energy lacking is mostly gas, not so much electricity, but that doesn't prevent the article's conclusion from being right. Because the price of electricity is one of "Finland's power problems".
Cluelessly happening to be right.
We wonder how much we could reduce the need for something as unwanted as another nuclear power station (another reactor on an existing site is probably less bad).
Countries in the far north have had years to learn that they need good insulation and with a low population density, a relatively small amount of energy goes a long way. Compare to the UK, France, Germany, USA, Brasil etc. who have very large populations and either very hot or very cold weather and you have the problem with privately owned buildings who you cannot easily coerce into spending on their own energy efficiency but the gains would be entirely in the homeowners pocket so why should the taxpayer foot the bill?
There are really obvious things that should be emergency legislation by anyone without their head in the sand and that is 1) Changes to the requirements for new-builds including improving the standard of checks since a lot of it is easily gamed by the developers and 2) Getting rid of VAT and possibly subsidising insulation products so that a good number of people who could do it might be persuaded that they can now afford it. Insulating a loft in the UK could easily cost £300 DIY or £500+ if you paid someone, which for many households is a large amount of money. Once you add it the more difficult insulating, the costs would be enormous.
It's pretty common (though not universal) in the United States for renters to be responsible for utilities, such as heating, water, and electricity. In those cases, the owner neither cares about, nor benefits from, increased energy efficiency, while on the other side of the coin, the tenant has little incentive to make capital improvements on a property he or she may only be planning on occupying for a year or so. In this scenario, anything that doesn't have a payback period shorter than the length of expected tenancy is unlikely to get done.
Call me an outsider, but I do want more nuclear reactors, since they provide clean energy and don't open up regions to geopolitical pressure, like what's happening during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Nuclear reactors have been expensive to build so far, but hopefully that's going to change.
I wonder why so much housing stock is so old in Britain though. I guess we tear more stuff down.
Also remember that it produces power at around €100/MWh if you include the loss Areva took. Any year but this year and that cost is laughably high.
- €30-50/MWh is the price of intermittent, uncontrollable renewable enegy.
- Continue to burn cheap Russian gas emitting CO2 and funding dictators for the next 35 years can not be part of the solution.
- If what we aim is controllable low carbon energy at reasonable price, the answer become obvious and contain at least partially is Nuclear energy
I'd far rather turn all of the gas turbines off 60% of the time than 15% of them off 80% of the time.
Add storage to the mix and nuclear is a terrible solution for avoiding having to choose between recent gas spot prices or shutting down your economy.
BlackRock has $10T in liquid capital available to put towards the best investments. Putting just 1% of that towards wind/solar ($100B), given the incredible returns you are indicating, seems like a wise and prudent (and lucrative) investment.
Is that happening? (I honestly don't know, but if it isn't, I'd like to know why—BlackRock is a major ESG supporter so they're clearly on the solar/wind train.)
It is being done. According to the International Energy Agency, $44 billion was invested globally in nuclear powered electricity production in 2021. $119 billion was invested in fossil powered electricity production. $367 billion was invested in renewables.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-energy...
4x the energy nuclear would net you for the price not 4x the investment (merely the original invested money and some residual value of a system that will run at 70-90% of original capacity but has a limited remaining lifetime). If we use the normally touted 3% discount rate used to make nuclear look viable then financial payback for LSS is about 6-11% pa. (ie enough to pay back your loans and fund another system before the nuclear deploys, then fund a third system before the first wears out). You may need to model things at a steeper discount rate to reflect reality, but then nuclear is a complete non option.
And people are doing it. Solar capacity is growing yoy at 20-25% in spite of supply chain issues and the first module price increase in years.
I don't know why it isn't receiving even more investment. Probably because of some constraining resource, fear of destroying the trillions invested in fossil fuels before they can divest, limits in available markets due to time lag on storage being as viable or maybe uncertainty that emerging tech will crater the energy price even further.
It's not that solar is an incredible investment, it's more that nuclear is such a bad idea that doing something sensible looks like free money in comparison.
Twenty years ago, if planners weren't accounting for geopolitical stability as a risk to petrochemical flows, they had holes in their heads.
And otherwise it means the price will have to be calculated once all EPR variant come online since it’s essentially the cost of restarting production after a 40 years gap and loss of expertise.
But certainly if stopped now it will not be pretty :(
In Europe basically only France and the other Nordic countries are ahead of Finland in the cleanliness of their energy production.
It really should not matter how the energy is produced the only thing that matters for clime change is how much CO₂ gets pumped into the atmosphere.
... which is an argument for building as much low emissions capacity as possible within a given budget over the next 5-10 years.
Which is 0 for nuclear
The best time to start building new low emission capacity was 3 or 4 decades ago like that France did but the next best time is today. I really don't care what kind you build as long as it is low emission. For Finland nuclear seems to be working really well. Having one of the cheapest and cleanest electricity in EU is more then enough proof of that to me.
Areva footed the bill for the overruns this time rather than foisting them on the taxpayer, so that's something at least.
> In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Have they, though?
> total war
Only Ukraine is in a state of war.
I'd like to quote Zelensky because he hits the sentiment of most of Europe brilliantly:
"Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without water or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you.”
“Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your ‘friendship and brotherhood,' But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food and WITHOUT you!”
I live in Finland. Nobody's freezing to death here next winter, and most of Europe is in warmer zones than we are.
We're fine. Russia is fucked if they keep following this insane path their dictators have put them on.