Military interests are pushing new nuclear power; UK gov finally admits it | Hacker News Reader

Military interests are pushing new nuclear power; UK gov finally admits it

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22 pointsrntn14 comments

Nuclear can work, it works really well for France, whose power costs about half of what UK power does. You can't just build onw reactor every ten years though, you have to build as many as you can as close to each other in time as you can, otherwise you'll drown in learning and fixed costs.

It does not compete well with north sea wind, on a cost per kilowatt basis, but The UK will need some quanity of base load to help normalize varibility (this does not replace the increasing need for energy storage). Nuclear is perhaps better than natural gas for that?

Nuclear is not working well for the French. Flamanville 3 is five times over budget and their fleet is nearing EOL.

Expecting hundreds of billions in subsidies to again try make nuclear economical is lunacy in a world where renewables are undercutting every single energy source available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

FLA3 is a first of a kind and is a bad example. Nuclear is working very well for France at the moment, we are back to high-availability and making a lot of money through exports.

It is always someone else's fault when nuclear projects does not match expectations.

I don't see much difference with Hinkley Point C started 10 years after Flamanville 3. Timelines and costs are about equal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

> It is always someone else's fault when nuclear projects does not match expectations.

...as opposed to wind, solar, biofuel, tidal and other similar technologies failing at large scale projects?

Solar and wind are among the most predictable large scale projects. Almost certainly coming in on time and budget.

I'm waiting on a small piece of solar park to be delivered and assigned to me and it is late by more than a year. When the planners are morons, anything can be late.

There are plenty of examples of large-scale wind projects failing due to budget overruns, here's two of the more well-known examples:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/giant-windf...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/01/rsted-ca...

Large-scale solar is less susceptible to these budget problems as the technology is more mature. The problems here mostly centre around power distribution and the unpredictable nature of (PV) solar power where production can go from close to zero to maximum in the span of a few seconds only to drop down to close to zero again after a few more seconds. Roof-top solar has become so popular that the distribution networks are getting overloaded on sunny days. In e.g. the Netherlands those who have roof-top solar power installations are starting to get billed for delivering power back to the network [1,2]. These problems can be solved by installing local energy storage - 'home batteries' - but these are as it stands too expensive to be economically feasible.

I live in Sweden and have a 14.5 kW solar installation on a barn roof. When I installed this I signed a 5-year contract which enables us to sell power back to the network at market rates. I do not expect us to be able to sign a similar contract once this one runs out and will have to consider adding energy storage to the system - this is why I installed a hybrid inverter when I built the system.

[1] https://www.centraalbeheer.nl/artikelen/betalen-voor-terugle...

[2] https://www.energievergelijk.nl/nieuws/bij-deze-3-energielev...

You are not making the point you think you are. The market conditions changed from zero interest rates to escalating material prices and the highest interest rates in decades.

Since the projects are so predictable the developers called it quits. In a perfect world they would have hedged their costs but here we are.

Have a look at Bent Flyvbjergs work. Nuclear power is only beaten by the Olympics and nuclear waste storage in risk of cost and schedule escalations. Solar and wind occupy the other end of the spectrum.

A hunch would say that the first large scale off shore wind projects in the US falls in the middle of the spectrum, but nowhere near nuclear power. As evidenced by the developers having such good grasp of the costs that they canceled the projects the instant they stopped being viable instead of continuing down a path of sunk cost fallacies.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why...

A significant part of the reason prices in the UK are so high is that our approach to spot pricing grossly overpays renewable generators when gas prices go up.

There is bridges between military and civilian nuclear, however keep in mind that nuclear reactors like the EPRs being built in the UK are designed such that producing the necessary fission products to produce weapons is basically impossible. To produce those isotopes you generally want a reactor that allows online refueling.

OTOH, it is possible to "burn" nuclear weapons in civilian reactors, as done in the Megatons to Megawatts disarmament program.

> There is bridges between military and civilian nuclear,

The article make it very clear: Without civil nuclear power the maintenance cost of the nuclear powered sub fleet would skyrocket. The civil nuclear power generation masks the costs associated with maintaining the necessary know how and industrial base to fuel military nuclear reactors.

> however keep in mind that nuclear reactors like the EPRs being built in the UK are designed such that producing the necessary fission products to produce weapons is basically impossible.

Really. Last I checked these reactors were fueled with 5% enriched uranium oxide. Plutonium is formed by transmutation of U-238 which is in ample supply in that fuel. What's really stopping the UK to claim that Plutonium is the 2022 shuttering of their only reprocessing plant in Sellafield.

It's not like they need more Plutonium anyway. The UK currently sits on a 140t civilian stockpile of Plutonium in addition to whatever the military has. The pit of a nuclear bomb (fission or fusion) requires approximately 5kg Plutonium.

For me, finally being honest about the why makes nuclear power fine to build.

It is horrendously expensive so no point in building more than necessary, but build enough to keep the industry allowing nuclear deterrence alive.

Just don't bill it as the solution for everything energy. It never has been, and would require a miracle to become it in the face of renewables.

It’s hard to take the dismissal of nuclear at the article seriously when it doesn’t lay out any numbers.

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