The government granted the licence to build Hinkley Point C in 2012.
Construction started in 2017.
It's expected to start producing power in 2027.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
Construction started in 2017.
It's expected to start producing power in 2027.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
In 2022 we have significant energy shortage and the prices are now closing to 50 cent per kw/h (and rising). Inflation is at record high is directly linked to energy prices. Elections can be won or lost based on stances regarding electricity production and efforts to reduce the cost. A nuclear plant planned today should take significant less than 15 years.
Part of the process here has to be recognising that this outcome was the obvious base-case future right from the start. Indeed, from as early as the 1980s when the politicians started really cracking down on building new nuclear plants.
This is an entirely policy-driven problem. If I could see it, anyone who cared to look could - the free market would have been building nuclear plants in 2012 if the question was "how to make money and secure future prosperity?" instead of "how to build an impossibly safe plant, far safer than any standard we've ever applied before?".
People winning or not winning elections shouldn't be a factor in whether people freeze to death in winter or have to start burning wood fires because we're regressing to the early 1900s. People should be able to sort out their own energy needs in a free market.
I'd be happy with this if there wasnt a liability cap on all nuclear plants at ~0.1% the cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima.
The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however. That's why the cap exists after all - the government was desperate to get the private sector to build these things.
Arguing to chip away at safety standards in an industry that already has full liability protection against its own mistakes...doesnt make a lot of sense to me.
Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
People do make arguments like this, but when considering 2nd order effects it is a weak argument. The same argument could be made for fossil fuels (which have substantial negative externalities) and powered all the gains humanity made in the last 2 centuries - demonstrating that the positive externalities are far higher than the negative.
The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored. But it doesn't make sense to start pinning the problems on nuclear when the costs are probably smaller than the alternatives. There are some question marks when compared to solar and wind, but reliable generation capacity is worth quite a lot and people aren't taking the waste products of producing renewable energy seriously. (which sounds like a whine - but if we're going to go crazy about the issue of minute amounts of nuclear waste as people do then we can't give heavy metals a free pass! Or what they put in batteries)
> ...cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima....
Raising the question of whether the response to Fukushima was appropriate. The response we typically take (again, citing fossil fuels) is to ignore rare problems when they are too expensive to fix. It is enough to swap in a technology that is much better than status-quo. It doesn't need to be perfect.
This part of argument that sounds good, but doesn't actually hold up vs an inspection of what we currently treat as acceptable in the real world. The damage of Fukushima left without remediation is less than damage nations currently accept without blinking. Just a little more concentrated.
> Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
They said that before the Energiewende too, and now Germany is probably going to need to source some lubricant so that they can be comfortable while Russia has its way with the European energy grid. This pro-renewable argument has a long history of turning out not to be true when tested in reality and exposed to the actual demand people have for reliable power.
It turns out that "renewables are cheaper" - which was said when they started shutting down nuclear plants - was code for "we're going to buy a lot of nat gas". With discouraging results.
And there are additional strains on Germany's energy grid that nobody predicted, such as exporting lots of electricity to France in 2022 where half of the highly reliable base load generating nuclear plants were down for maintenance and generating absolutely nothing for months.
This is an interesting graph:
https://www.smard.de/en/marktdaten?marketDataAttributes=%7B%...
I think you've got it exactly backwards.
Free taxpayer fronted insurance that nobody "pays" for until a $1 trillion Fukushima event happens, the cost of decommissioning and storing waste and radiation induced cancers ARE all diffuse and easily ignored.
Whereas the fact that the sun doesnt shine at night and the wind doesnt always blow is fairly well known.
It just so happens that those costs come ON TOP of already being 5x more expensive.
Obviously same apply to fossil fuels. When they cause illness and air pollution their insurance to pay for those external costs should go up. When we have extreme weather or rising water temperature, insurance should go up. Anywhere in the world where historically a electricity generated unit create an external cost to society, we should make a note of it and tally it up.
Sadly we won't see those electricity generated sources paying out, but it would be good to have a factually number of how much they in theory should be paying and thus what the theoretical costs to society is when we use, maintain and construct new capacity. That way we can reason around what has more external cost to society and what has less. We can form a number on how much extra a consumer should be paying based on what energy mix they consumed.
Do you have a source for prices this low for nuclear? The best I can possibly find is about 4x that cost, from 15-20 cents per kWh. I'm interested in who can do it cheaper than that.
Building a nuke and running it while piling the waste in the parking lot runs at less than 10 cents/kWh. Probably less than 8 cents.
It’s entirely possible its builders will go belly up and need even more bailing out, but that’s some years away.
… and pocket it if higher, right?
If the wholesale price of power is higher than the strike price, then the operator pays the difference to the regulator.
what about the carbon/climate goals?
https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/fthr/b...
Thats only one that got approved. It will not even be enough to replace reactors that are going offline in this timeframe.
Another thing is that politicians tend to plan that things will continue to go about as well as they are going at the moment, and the only major crisis ahead is the one being discussed at the moment. Nobody has the nerve to think that e.g. France will have trouble with several nuclear reactors at once, and a major war erupts in Europe at the same time. Ah, and a global pandemic right before that. Who in their right mind would vote for an energy budget based on such paranoid view of a possible future?
Honestly I think we could get a lot more done if people were able to disentangle when policies were achieved from when they were implemented. Governments are fantastic for long term investments, but politics works on shorter timeframes than many corporations. Though I think changing the cultural mentality to provide that selective pressure is an unrealistic pipedream. That said, it does also really show the constraints that we operate under and why existential issues like climate change are extremely difficult to solve.
If you want to get the West on a path this way, you have to get the people to have a change in how they evaluate their leaders. But first, you need to have the people trust in the leaders, which they don't right now for good reason. It is a tough nut to crack.
I'm not saying this in approval of authoritarianism btw. I think the results of that are worse, but it does have advantages (which is why it is attractive to some).
I don't understand why you say renewables will be too slow. I've only done napkin math, but simple projection of continued growth of existing production capacity through, say, 2035, completely replaces all current electrical generation, as well as other energy uses. And when you account for the much much higher efficient of electrification, meaning that we get 2-3x as much work out of the same amount of energy compared to all the waste with fossil fuels, we can fulfill the developing world's needs for growth too.
But this is just my napkin math from taking production trends from top Google hits, it's not a sophisticated analysis. I would be interested to see one that is realistic, meaning that it doesn't assume that solar deployments plateau tomorrow.
Fusion is not a realistic power source for decades, and there's no reason to think it will be cheaper than fission, or that it could ever be cheaper than massive amounts of storage.
The problem is, even 12 hours of storage is a prohibitively large amount. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 6,000 GWh. The entire world produces 400 GWh of batteries each year. Most of it is going to EVs and electronics, not grid storage. Even if we stopped building EVs entirely and directed the world's supply of battery production to just America's grid storage needs were talking about a decade of production. And worse yet these batteries are good for a couple thousand cycles, and will have to be replaced after a few years of use. And even with this 6 terawatts of stotage, in the end we'll still have a fifth of our grid still dependent on fossil fuels.
Again, this is why plans for a renewable grid assume some other form of energy storage will be orders of magnitude better than lithium batteries. That'd be great if hydrogen, molten sand, compressed air, or something else delivers. But that's a big if on which to gamble the energy grid, especially when alternative paths to decarbonization that we have more than half a century operating are within our reach.
The silver bullets are called demand shaping, pumped storage and batteries and theyre already here.
The fact that renewables are 5x cheaper than nuclear means that any storage that is, overall, less than 4x the cost of generation makes dispatchable solar/wind energy cheaper than nuclear energy when the sun isnt shining and the wind isnt blowing.
Almost every form of storage is cheaper than that. There is no need for an if. The if is here.
What form of storage are you referring to? The only popular forms of storage are batteries and hydroelectricity. The former isn't produced in nearly enough quantities, and the latte ris geographically restricted.
Only a small fraction of the arc furnace's power needs to be provided as electricity. A large fraction of it is a reducing agent like carbon or hydrogen which -- shockingly enough -- can be stored as carbon or hydrogen. Your imagined 30% increase due to idle capital is on top of a 50-80% reduction due to lower energy cost.
In industries where energy is the dominant cost, then minor shifts in production methods to do high labour tasks during low energy periods and vice versa will happen regardless of whether nuclear energy is available, because building solar to reduce costs and ignoring the nuclear reactor will still be a cheaper option than buying all of your energy from it. Alternatively the plant does buy the nuclear energy, but only when the sun is not shining because building their own array to use in DC mode costs $10/MWh and the VOM costs of nuclear are $15/MWh.
The only out is mandatory payment to a utility or funding it entirely with public money to everyone's detriment.
Of course, but the amount of low hanging fruit in this regard is A) ridiculously high B) zero, according to the nuclear and carbon industry models (they think demand cannot be shaped and only expensive batteries can deal with intermittency).
>If you only run your smelters, chemical industries, etc. for part of the year then the cost of those commodities, and by extension every product using those commodities, gets more expensive.
If you produce 2x as much as normal aluminum on a Tuesday when it's sunny and 1/5th as much on a Wednesday you've created more aluminum.
The solar driven smelter can produce more at a much lower cost because electricity is such a large % of the overall product.
There are plenty more applications like that where 5x cheaper electricity that "decides" when you use it is way better than 5x more expensive electricity that you can use any time.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
An example is heating which is a huge portion of emissions and is also a dispatchable load.
Again, "variable loads" is a pretty euphemism for "shut off the power". If we're going to be shutting off power to industries the cost of reduced economic output needs to be counted.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/reader/pii/S2542435121002...
And pretending adding off peak EV charging to carparks or building hybrid renewable+electrolyser stations that provide all their own energy needs and export during high demand is the same as shutting off existing critical infrastructure is laughably dishonest.
According to the article, the UK now has less electrical generation than it would like / planned to have. Partly because the nuclear power plants failed to go online at the planned time. Partly because the amount of renewable generation that has been built in the meantime is not sufficient ether, because renewables need to be seriously overpeovisioned, due to their varying output.
Hence "both were too slow". Were they not, there'd be no energy deficit, I suppose.
* Peak energy demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production [1].
* Nuclear power is as cheap to run at 100% capacity as it is to run at 50% or 25% capacity.
If you build enough nuclear power to fulfill the peak demand when renewables aren't producing, then you've already built enough nuclear to power the grid all day. And since nuclear is just as cheap to run at 100% capacity there's no point in provisioning renewables. Renewables work well when paired with a dispatchable energy source like gas or hydroelectricity. The former emits carbon and the latter is geographically dependent. In areas without hydroelectric potential, nuclear is the only existing option for full decarbonization.
The upside of solar generation is its potential for really rapid deployment, and for piecemeal deployment. I can't afford to have a personal nuclear reactor, but I likely would be able to adorn my house with some solar panels, some batteries, and maybe a heat pump to create ice during the day's heat peak and use it after dusk. When I'd be able to afford a house, that is %)
I strongly believe who think renewables can replace all carbon energy sources are not realistic about what is needed and don’t appreciate the nuance and just think of it as “energy source” rather than as part of a complete energy production / distribution problem.
Oh, and if you are in a tropical area, you may also use solar concentrators for free-ish hot water (with an insulating tank), and get 24 hours hot water. However, if it was cloudy the day before, it will not be a great experience, and you may need to use amn electric heater.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-concentrating...
Looks like renewables where simply the better, cheaper, and faster option. Which is shocking considering how little hydro and solar they have.
Hinkley C will add 3200 MW, but around 9000 MW of nuclear capacity will have been retired between 2012 and 2028.
China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them.
estimated delay is strictly less than a year.
of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient.
....
the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all.
and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive"
and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
Chernobyl is an older design than plants we builds today. if I recall correctly Chinese plants include a lot of passive safety features especially in the wake of Fukushima (gen III / gen III+). Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered. If I recall correctly they used a mildly updated design than Chernobyl.
It’ll be interesting to start seeing gen IV reactors coming online since they have an identical safety profile to fusion. If anything goes wrong the reaction stops rather than the runaway reactions common to traditional reactor designs that are basically fission bombs hooked up to a steam engine.
Yes most nuclear incidents involved risks being ignored. But I don't see how this is an argument for nuclear. This will keep happening as long as we have this stuff built and operated by the lowest bidder bound to make as much profit as they can.
A) coal power plants ignore warnings too. It’s just that it ends up as a distributed problem of cancer clusters and failing lungs m as by years later that’s harder to link
B) shipping oil creates a lot of ecological and human damage through oil spills
C) even with all the incidents, nuclear is still safer than carbon-based energy sources. It’s death/kWh is closer to wind.
D) gen IV reactors have no risk of runaway reactions negating your argument
So even with the issues they’re still safer and only get safer
The plant (and those like it) had a flaw that when you slam on the brakes you momentarily turn *up* the fire in doing so. Normally this is harmless, but with Chernobyl the idiot in charge was so determined to proceed with his stupid safety demonstration that he didn't hit the SCRAM until the last second--and the momentary increase as the rods came in caused a major power excursion. Whether it went prompt critical or just came within a hair of it we probably will never know.
If someone were to try something like that in the US the phones at the NRC would have been ringing off the hook long before the reactor got in trouble.
The same way China is able to build anything quickly: access to a near-unlimited supply of cheap, motivated, skilled labour.