Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years
building.co.uk
building.co.uk
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Additional reading if you haven't read it before, "Nothing like this will be built again" about Torness: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...?
Previously posted several times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That paragraph might be the high point of the article.
But even if they didn't, losers don't have to take it quietly.
But even if they did, governments are complex representatives, not ongoing referendums on each individual topic, so we can agree with 80% of the party we vote for and strongly disagree with the rest of their policies.
The cynical alternative is that democracy is a way to get everyone to shut up: if you voted for them it's your fault, if you voted against them you need to obey the will of the people (if you voted for a minor party you wasted your vote), if you're too young to vote then you're naïve to real issues, and if you didn't vote at all then you silenced yourself.
(Sometimes I'm the cynic).
Democracy is a way to get people to acquiesce without violence. If you look at history, it's remarkable how common insurgencies and succession crises or breakaway warlords are.
Democracy isn't about voting people in. A monarchy or dictatorship can be voted in and stay permanently. The point is to vote people out of power.
I favour the middle ground of alternative vote.
Do other countries benefit from UK railways?
1 - https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-reveals-that-75-of-uk-rail-n... 2 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-factsheet-2023...
- c2c and Avanti West Coast: partially and fully owned by Trenitalia which is wholly owned by the Italian government
- London Overground, Chilltern Railways, CrossCountry, Grand Central: Owned by Deutche Bahn until June 2024 which is wholly owned by the German government
- Elizabeth line: Wholly owned by MTR transport which is wholly owned by Hong Kong government
I'm sure there are a lot more I missed. It doesn't just appy to foreign governments either. The UK government subsidized all TOCs with taxpayer money, many of which turned around and gave out dividents to shareholds (foreign government or not).
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hinkley-point-c
The Hinkley Point C CfD provides a Strike Price for the developer of £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), reducing to £89.50/MWh (2012 prices) if EDF take a FID on their proposed Sizewell C project, for a 35 year term from the date of commissioning.
I think the project has a certain momentum to it. Also failing to complete the project would rather call into question their competence for the EPR2 build-out in France.
Fixed price contracts in the nuclear industry have rarely if ever worked out well for the suppliers. Contrast this with renewables which typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
Interestingly the nuclear data implies that those (45% of) projects not in the tail (defined as >= 50% cost overrun) have a mean overrun of 17.33%.
120% = 0.45 * X% + 0.55 * 204% therefore X% = (120% - 0.55 * 204%)/0.45 = 17.33%
Note that the point of the article was that the design is being proven, lessons are being learnt, and the skills of individuals and organisations developed, which reduces the risk of overruns etc.
The most recent estimates put costs as high as £34bn at 2015 prices, £46bn in today’s money.
> that's the whole reason France is crying for relief here from the UK.
The overrun combined with COVID combined with the spike in inflation and also CNG being frozen out of the UK nuclear market/cooling of relationship with China.
> claims that nuclear will show good experience effects this time, for sure, are to be treated with skepticism.
Agreed, which is why the second unit at HPC will be interesting.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/nuclear-new-build-projects/...
It takes time to find and develop good people, so hopefully Sizewell C plus Rolls Royce SMR will gain momentum to allow their retention.
The cost of nuclear energy is dominated by the need to pay back the massive construction loan. Nobody is willing to take that risk on an open electricity market, so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand. If the price on the open market is less than the "strike price" the government will pay for the difference, and if the plant wants to supply power to the grid but the grid doesn't want it due to technical reasons the government will pay them for every kWh it could have supplied.
This in turn means nuclear power plants operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time - minus forced maintenance downtime. It can be used to supply a base load, but not to handle peak load. When there's an excess of supply, the grid is forced to turn off cheap wind/PV capacity to make space for expensive nuclear capacity.
I agree that it would indeed be nice if we could use nuclear to fill in the gaps left by a renewable grid, but the economics simply doesn't allow for it.
We have strike prices so that generators can cover the capital costs. But it will also hold prices down when the wholesale cost exceeds the strike price.
I agree that Hinckley may increase peaks and excess generation. But that will be a feature of the grid anyway. We will need storage/interconnector exports either way. And it will also help a lot with the valleys in production. That is less electricity that needs to be stored or generated using gas and diesel. Adding a couple extra GW's is useful.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...
For every passing year renewable penetration deepens and we end up with situations like this:
> On 100 out of the 144 days since 8 March, California’s electricity demand was 100% supplied by renewable energy for at least part of the day. Solar, wind and hydroelectric energy technologies fully powered the state’s grid for at least a few minutes and for as long as ten hours for 100 days.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/california-achieves-10...
That is an incredibly hostile economical environment for a nuclear power plant, and the only thing the CFD accomplishes is higher power bills for the ratepayers.
Matt Levine writes about a gas contract where the gas supplier was obliged to deliver gas at a fixed price. However the contract required that the plant be completed. The spot price has been above the fixed price so the plant owners have been selling gas on the open market and the owners have not technically "completed" the plant on purpose (perhaps by not painting one last rivet).
I think the geography of the UK helps with offshore wind getting good capacity factors, but the general averages aren't great, often peaking at ~40%:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I can see in real-time how wind goes up and down, while nuclear just keeps chugging along:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
And nuclear is cheaper (CA$0.101/kWh) than wind ($0.147) or solar ($0.474); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
Of course our infrastructure and/or geography may not be as well-suited for wind.
Bruce Power is responsible for decommissioning costs:
> Bruce Power receives a fixed price for its electricity generation that is inclusive of all its current costs and funding of future decommissioning liabilities in the Bruce Facility. As previously noted, the average price over the life of the contract was estimated by the IESO to be $77/ MWh (in 2015$).
* https://www.brucepower.com/who-we-are/delivering-transparenc...
As is OPG (Pickering, Darlington):
> From the earliest days of each project, OPG is required by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) to have a Financial Guarantee in place to ensure it can cover the costs of the eventual decommissioning of its nuclear facilities.
* https://www.opg.com/power-generation/our-power/nuclear/decom...
Federally, the generation companies are also responsible for handling waste:
> The Act required Canadian electricity generating companies which produce used nuclear fuel to establish a waste management organization to provide recommendations to the Government of Canada on the long-term management of used nuclear fuel. The legislation also required the waste owners to establish segregated trust funds to finance the long-term management of the used fuel. The Act further authorized the Government of Canada to decide on the approach. The government's choice will then be implemented by the NWMO, subject to all of the necessary regulatory approvals.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Management_Organ...
Do you have references that say otherwise?
You have not provided any, and have changed the subject. Do you retract your claim?
Or are you sticking with your claim and moving the goalposts as well?
118,770 apprenticeships achieved in the UK last year. We're not that big on practical education, with a preference for getting degrees so we can sit behind a desk moving (electronic) paper.
Provision seem to be very mixed - we know some teenagers who've had good ones and others who've had awful ones and these were in practical skills
Best one I know of was a degree apprenticeship for one of the big accountancy firms. Person started work at 18, had a degree in their early twenties while being paid all the way through, and no student debt at the end
They are often not very high quality, sometimes it will be things like the person who puts bread in the oven at a supermarket getting a level 2 in kitchen skills and so on.
1,300 high quality apprenticeships is noticeable (which is nuts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kin...
1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design
All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds.
Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite that pronounced, but it's there.
2. No nuclear industry/workforce
I think the article goes into this, but a lot of the cost of HPC, Olkiluoto and Flamanville (as well as Vogtle-3/4) is simply for rebuilding nuclear expertise both in industry and in the workforce.
China also buit both EPRs and AP-1000s, and they did it quite a bit more quickly and cheaply, because they have an experienced workforce and industry at hand. They current have 20+ reactors under construction. That makes a huge difference as we know from experience. Just in Germany, the difference between one-off reactors and the Konvois that were built at the same time in series was around 2x.
However, even in China the EPR took longer than other reactors. Partly due to it being a FOAK design, but also for the third reason:
3. The EPR is too complicated
For various reasons, the EPR is far too complicated, and in the end not a good design. Which is one of the things you find out in FOAK builds (see point 1).
That's not me saying this, it's the manufacturer, EDF. They have abandoned the EPR design, all new French reactors will be the vastly simplified EPR2. I haven't been able to find out whether Sizewell C and subsequent will also be EPR2 or whether the UK will stick with its heavily modified EPR.
One example is that the EPR has quadruple independent cooling systems. This is in order to maintain triple redundancy while doing maintenance on the cooling system, so being able to do that maintenance without having to take the reactor offline. Considering the German PWRs were above 90% capacity factor with "just" triple redundancy, this seems to be gold-plating. Nice-to-have if you can pull it off, but it appears they couldn't pull it off.
Also, all those cooling systems have to be active in order to comply with German nuclear regulations. The somewhat silly reason is that German regulators both (a) had no experience with passive cooling systems and (b) had a prescriptive approach to regulation, rather than a requirements-based approach. So "you must build a cooling system like this" rather than "your cooling system must be able to do this".
It's is also obviously a bit redundant considering that Germany no longer operates nuclear power plants and isn't exactly currently in the market for an EPR.
The Westinghouse AP-1000 uses at least some passive cooling, which is not only more reliable but also simpler, smaller and cheaper and makes the total plant a lot smaller.
Once you've built one, the EPR is apparently a great reactor (the Fins are very happy with theirs), and should last a long time, but it's just a pain to build.
https://youtu.be/6fM2k1xEHGg?feature=shared&t=2137 with World Nuclear Association's China lead Francois Morin
Now, if you look at the price per kilowatt, for instance, Chinese yuan per kilowatt, the, the, the Ap1000 are more expensive than the EPR.
Sticking to the UK EPR. There is no point in building another FOAK for marginal benefit.
If you decide to go the SMR route so that you continuously build nuclear reactors every year to sidestep this problem, then you run into the problem that the containment building needs to be airstrike proof. These high fixed costs are unrelated to the reactor technology and cannot be avoided by building a newer generation power plant.
If you decide to build the old designs, then you run into another issue: The savings obtained through building a larger scale plant, such as same number of staff, bigger diameter pipes and less material at the same fixed cost to obtain higher total power output per power plant, must be paid dearly by a cooling solution that scales with that increased power output. Placing a nuclear power plant near a river sounds intelligent, until you realize that climate change causes rivers to dry out or reduce their flow rate, shutting your nuclear power plant down, making your large scale power plant work against you. Meanwhile placing a nuclear power plant near the ocean has resulted in the Fukushima incident, so future power plants also need to be tsunami proof.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Before the failure of NuScale, I was confident that the problems with large scale nuclear power plants could be solved by SMRs, but the truth is that you simply can't operate nuclear power plants with the same lack of care you can operate a wind farm or a coal plant. If the coal/gas plant burns down or explodes, who gives a damn? Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
So there were and will be no negative health effects from the radiation, whereas 100% of the deaths and other negative effects on people were due to Radiophobia.
This feels like post-fact reasoning attempting to in a blasé paper over reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1607_Bristol_Channel_floods
Some nice maps in the referenced report [pdf]:
1607 Bristol Channel Floods: 400-Year Retrospective
https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/fl_1607_bristol...
Sea wall will have a crest height of 13.55m AOD.
Yes, that absolutely was a major problem, and quite the opposite of what anti-nuclear advocates claim. Nuclear is not too slow to build, it is too quick to build. Relative to the Hughe lifespan of the reactors.
So you have to pace yourself and build out slowly.
If reactors last 100 years and you want a fleet of 100 reactors, that's 1 per year. You can obviously vary the pace a little up and down, but don't build all the reactors you need in 15 years like the French did and then stop.
> Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
Actually he's not. So far, > 50% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure has been destroyed, including one huge hydro dam. Not a single nuclear plant has been destroyed or even heavily damaged. Not sure if there was even a determined attack. One is occupied and in cold shutdown.
Nuclear plants are very, very tough. The newer containment buildings are designed to withstand a fuel-laden aircraft crashing into them. That's half a kiloton of TNT equivalent.
https://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010...
The warhead on a modern cruise missile or tactical ballistic is maybe half a ton of TNT, so 1/1000th of that. You can just keep lobbing those at the plant and it won't care.
Since they are so concentrated, they are also easy to defend against attack.
These factors probably weighed into Ukraine's decision to build 4 more nuclear power plants, two of which have been started.
These probably also apply to Vogtle 3 in the US; IIRC, Vogtle 4 was less expensive.
Economies of scale applies to large nuclear plants as much as it does to small widgets: the more you build the easier it becomes to build them.
> which gives Hinkley Point C a total output of over 3.2GW.
at least 3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 50 weeks a year (allowing for some step down in output for maintainance, etc) for some 30+ (?) years.
It's as silly as demanding that a nuclear plant must emulate the delivery profile of solarn and install batteries capable of shifting night time power to the day. With a similar effect on prices.
Demand is not flat. It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets which is why initial solar deployments have a high "capture rate" (i.e. they are delivering when the demand and price is high).
The system as a whole has to deliver baseload plus variable demand. If the demand and supply do not match then there are problems. Load shifting/Demand Flexibility Service may be a promising concept, but there is only so much that will shift.
> It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets
That is not the case for the UK, the country being discussed, with peak electrical demand in winter. Electrification of heating (and not so great a need for cooling in the summer) indicates this will continue to be so.
Wind also peaks in winter, while nuclear fails to rise to the occasion so maybe we should force nuclear to invest in seasonal storage so that we get a really fair comparison?
> maybe we should force nuclear to invest in seasonal storage
Probably simpler to build a bit more nuclear, then use it in summer to drive DACCS (heat and electricity) or processes like raw material smelting. Better to have industry operating on fairly predictable schedules (summer on, winter off) than pre-empting them on a regular basis (as startup/shutdown could reduce useful work done/harm equipment).
This has sometimes been referred to with the cheesy catchphrase of "SWB Superpower":
3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 34 weeks a year.
or
3 GW 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
For instance https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.... shows Sizewell B has a load factor of 83.1% which is better than the AGR fleet.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/palisades-on-sch...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/constellation-to...
And China seems to be taking all forms of energy security seriously (intermittents as well as nuclear, combined with EVs).
Do you have a source for that and any context (eg: "not power" time being used for "experiments" related to UK military nuclear uses, etc)?
What would be interesting is expected vs unexpected downtime, some sort of reliability factor.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5c9a5d37ed915...
It appears approx ballpark with Europe reactors and as if they're designed with a 70% of max load operating target to allow for downtime inspections and statutory fettling, etc.
Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!).
It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35billion is still competitive, cost-wise, with the offshore wind farm.
Lifetime cost will be much lower - near 0 staff - no anti-terrorism policing operation - no fuel. If it were onshore, cost would be significantly cheaper and would be able to scale onto the grid and generate revenue (nearly) one turbine at a time as they are installed which makes a massive difference for financing and servicing a debt.
Cost wise certainly not orders of magnitude difference, and it is competitive. The sensible non partisan thinkers out there know it isn't a choice of building one or the other, you build both.
Maintenance cost for offshore wind is NOT negligible. This is possibly as high as the reactor maintenance cost already by itself. Then, for a fair comparison, you would also have to add costs for improving grid connectivity and/or local battery storage...
I'm not arguing for more nuclear power btw, just honestly suprised that the expensive reactor is somewhat competitive, still...
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/10/19/very-intense-r...
GE's 170 full-time turbine servicing jobs for Dogger Bank phases A, B and C will be based out of the Port of Tyne. That is more staff than I would have guessed, one worker for every 1.6 turbines!
Decomissioning the offshore wind turbines could get into the same range though, assuming £400M per installed GW (nameplate), this would be £3.2Bn
Numbers need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
The best I could find was a document by the National Audit Office from 2017 (using 2016 estimates); page 18, figure 2 - The expected costs of Hinkley Point C.
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po...
Back then the construction was estimated at £18.2 billion. Ongoing operation costs (including fuel, staffing, and grid charges) were priced at £29.3 billion and decommissioning (without the uplift) at £7.3 billion. Total project cost was put at £54.8 billion.
Again, it was from 2017 so things have changed.
Handling and disposing on the used fuel is 4.4B GBP (or 73M GBP per year of running, or 2.6 GBP per MWh of electricity). Cheap!
Is the operation cost of the reactor over such a long duration not significant?
Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
Yes. Also because maintenance costs are probably somewhat similar-- offshore turbines are still mechanical systems in a very unpleasant environment, after all.
> Also why are you comparing 8gw to 3.2gw? Is it due to peek output? if so won't this be solved by grid level storage?
Yes-- the turbines give you 8GW, but only 40% of the time. Reactor gives you its ~3GW basically all the time. This difference would NOT be erased by storage-- you would need the storage on top of the windpower, but it is not trivial to tell how much storage you really need (electrical grid connectivity can also somewhat compensate, or large consumers that only turn on when energy is cheap...).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/20/giant-windf...
What are the reasons behind believing prices will reduce further?
> I'm guessing Nuclear won't see the same level of changes
Parsons says the second reactor is being built 20% more quickly than the first one.
Parsons says he expects that Sizewell will be built between 20% and 30% faster than the second Hinkley reactor.
Economies of scale and room for technological/process innovation. The fact that solar reduced so significantly and battery costs too. This article seems a bit cherry picked about a specific project and not a global trend in costs. Offshore will naturally take time to become competitive since it requires complex installation and processes, but those seem like solvable problems for an admittedly laymen as myself.
This applies when going from 1 to 2 to 4 reactors.
See https://www.oecd-nea.org/mdep/events/conf-2023/presentations... page 27 for the Chinese approach to HPR1000 (Hualong One) innovation.
Plus the linked article mentioned improvements to manufacturing outside the constraints of the containment.
Even the most catastrophic nuclear projects are competitive if not better than the best renewable projects.
Yeah, I know this sounds like frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboiism, but run the numbers!
I did, and once I did I started sounding like a frothing-at-the-mouth nuclear fanboi.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper. In 30 years it might cost much less. How can Nuclear compete?
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33792
So perhaps 1B-2B USD a plant. 2,000,000,000/(60 * 1,600 * 365 * 24 * .9) = 2.6 USD/MWh
> Off-shore wind is still scaling to become cheaper and cheaper.
Why did the UK have to raise the maximum bid price for the Contract For Difference AR6? Wind farm costs have exploded, and turbine manufacturers are having reliability issues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-are-issues-with...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vineyard-wind-incide...
Bidders have to sell the government the electricity at the strike price. They pushed up the strike price to £54.23/MWh from a previous of £37.35/MWh with a current market price of £70-£80/MWh.
Nobody was going to offer to sell electricity for £37.35 for the next 5 years in a market where you can currently sell it for £70 - £100 (and where you could sell it for £300-£500 when the crisis occurred in 2021 / 2022).
The beauty of the CfD scheme is that you can choose when to start using it. But once you're in you're in, you're in until the end of the 15 years.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/significant-commercial-incent....
In truth I think it will be a mug's game to build offshore wind without a CfD. See https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... for a view of what the day-ahead auction will turn into in a few years.
A factory built plant or any economies of scale.
Start a company with a mobile workforce and go country to country building 5 or more large scale reactors in parallel in each country.
Small scale reactors (again factory built) are the other alternative. They would have to be installed in a 'farm' together for security reasons.
Each phase will have an installed generation capacity of 1.2GW and represents a multi-billion pound investment. Combined, they will have an installed capacity of 3.6GW and will be capable of powering up to 6 million homes annually.
Sounds about right in scale .. how many homes in the UK in total?
Additionally the wind farm requires backup (CCGT or OCGT), which cost money to sit there. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6556027d046ed... (take it with a pinch of salt) gives a figure of £80/kW/year for an H class CCGT; that's £250M/year (2015 prices).
Another talking point might be the lifetime of wind farms (20 or 25 years) versus 60 years design lifetime for the EPR. Note that there are lifetime extensions to 80 years being mooted in the US and Switzerland.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... tables Table 3.2a and 3.4a show that Korean CCGT cost 838 USD/kWe and Korean PWRs were 2157 USD/kWhe (all 2018 prices).
Anyhow, gas backup fuel costs (and carbon taxes) are where the real big costs are.
Citation?
> The Korean nuclear numbers are unbelievable
See https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Contract-awarded-for... and https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Contract-for-Shin-Ha... for construction deals relating to their latest reactors in South Korea.
There's no hard evidence, but the presence of the side deal does raise suspicions. S. Korea's nuclear industry has been notably corrupt, with many years of prison sentences being handed out.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/03/risky-business-south-koreas-...
Or batteries, but yes.
Battery manufacturing capacity is growing fast, but still — figures from recent years as reported by the IAE are [2022: 1720 GWh, 2023: 2500 GWh], but that's global and I'm not sure if demand is currently driven (no pun intended) by vehicles or by grids.
Still, if those batteries need replacement every decade, that global manufacturing supply can backup 150 GW of generation if they each need an independent 1 week backup and can't e.g. just use a broader grid to get e.g. Spanish sun for any of that.
Grid batteries make sense for those 30 second to 30 minute outages but it seems unlikely that they would be viable for those 2 week cloudy windless spells we get.
My understanding is the UK plans to fill that gap with peaker gas plants with CCS. They are being contracted for a maximum of two weeks in the year.
But in California batteries supply 20% of the power in the evening https://archive.is/IruIQ
Forecasts suggest supply will rise to the level where this is doable… but over the next decade or so of increasing global manufacturing capacity.
Considering what happened to global and local trade in the last decade, I'm not confident beyond 5 years, and even then only somewhat confident.
So does a nuclear reactor.
However offshore wind has a capacity factor of 40% to 50%, and its lack of output is correlated with other wind farms. Therefore one backup power station can only really serve one wind farm.
Not only is it capacity factor but demand correlation that weights against the intermittents.
All single power generators need to be backed up for downtime.
Finland's load factor over the last 3 years has been above 90%, as was the USA. Germany was up at 94% until ... stuff happened.
> At its lowest point, France’s nuclear availability sat at around 40% of maximum capacity for about a month.
Would they have shut down those reactors if alternatives were unavailable? I think they would have probably continued to run them, with permission of the regulators (at the behest of the government).
> All single power generators need to be backed up for downtime.
I'm not sure I follow what this statement means. What does "single" mean, as the preceeding comment talks about correlated downtime. Should we ensure that all methane plants are backed up too?
Also France looks to have winter-dominated electrical demand (50TWh in January 2023, 40TWh in April, 37TWh in August, 46TWh in November). See https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/monthly-e... and select France.
The map here:
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/map-where-are-frances-n...
shows 6 reactors on the coast, and 12 inland on rivers which are susceptible to summer river water temperatures and levels.
Yes, when the French grid needs them the least.
I'm not aware what the capacity factor for wind is in the north sea, I think it's about 25% globally.
> how many homes in the UK in total?
About 25 million.
(But also: ongoing political issue is that this isn't enough and housing is too exaggerated vs. vested interests in housing being expensive).
Offshore wind is at the extreme of renewables. It may or may not make sense, but it's not needed to kill nuclear.
Triton Knoll (855MW from 90 × 9.5 MW turbines) generated 1,687,138 MWh in 2024H1, giving a capacity of 45.1% for this larger turbine.
Source :- https://dp.lowcarboncontracts.uk/dataset/actual-cfd-generati... and doing pivots on the table.
About 25 million it seems.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/378391/uk-england-housin...
6 million homes powered per annum based on Typical Domestic Consumption Values (Medium Electricity Profile Class 1, 2,900kWh per household; OFGEM, January 2021), typical 55% wind load factor, and projected installed capacity of 3.6GW.the same qualifications apply to the nuclear reactors and turbines - it's unlikely they'll always run at peak all the time either.
What's even the point? Maybe this reactor is a live testament to the observation that "any new nuclear starting construction today will be obsolete before it's completed, due to competition from renewables"? It's been started almost 10 years ago and it seems to be already there.
> The energy storage market in the UK is currently experiencing substantial growth, as evidenced by the current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh, projected to increase to 7.4GW/11.6GWh by the end of 2024.
500MW/1GWh of batteries will cost 254M USD (in California Q2 2025). Assuming a 10% revenue per year, and cycling once a day implies a storage cost of 24500000/365/1000 = 67 USD/MWh.
~76 mins at 4.6GW.
The answer to this one is a pretty straightforward never. You have to realize that such a storage will sit duck most of the time, making it impossible to get any return on investment on it.
But stops during anticyclones, which can last several weeks (that makes it completely unfeasible to use wind power with gas as a backup, because there's no way we can build several weeks worth of storage).
> Nucular continues
The problem is that nuclear plants cost is roughly the same no matter if they produce or not, so nuclear + solar is strictly costlier than just nuclear.
Solar in a country as cloudy and rainy as the UK, and one that is so far north it gets very long nights in winter, doesn't make make any sense whatsoever.
Also, producing hydrogen from electricity requires lots of investments in terms of conversion units, and the economics is already dubious even when they run 100% of the time, so using it just for absorbing excess production a fraction of the year really isn't economical. In addition, what are you going to do with the hydrogen? Burns too hot for existing gas turbines so you'd need new ones. Fuel cells? That's expensive too.
There's a reason why everyone is betting on batteries instead of hydrogen, the economics of hydrogen is just too difficult.
And you know what? Even if you want to go full hydrogen, Nuclear + hydrogen is also more efficient than Wind + hydrogen since the hydrogen production units are going to be used at capacity more often, because wind is intermittent.
It's cheaper than running it on wind or solar, so no.
> Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten
Even existing storage solutions in Germany are already sufficient for the present day electricity network and build-out is progressing rapidly. The time for a nuclear build out was 20 years ago. We missed that window, now other technologies will prevail.
Because they bump coal, gas and imports in peak hours.
> The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?
I suppose you did not spend a lot of time researching this. That can be easily found by mere googling.
Sorry, I'm quite bad at googling, may you show me what you found regarding this topic? I mean how much energy storage does Germany need to not use fossils and to not import from neighbor states with fossil generation?
There literally isn't, it doesn't exist.
> current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh
Perhaps do some research before you speak of things you have no idea about
In other words, energy storage to match what the nuke plant will be able to put out 24/7 literally doesn't exist.
California has vastly reduced the fossil gas usage due to storage. It will only continue. Are they done? No, are we seeing massive change year by year? Yes.
And equivalent storage doesn't exist not as a WIP, not even as a project.
The whole skeptical approach here smells strongly of ignoring rapid exponential change, which is pretty remarkable for a SV associated forum like HN.
No it cannot, when you start building large hazardous (because of fire risk) facilities, then you face the same kind of red tape that you face with any big projects. Storage also requires adapting the electric grid to allow the energy to flow from and to the storage facilities.
Believing storage is easy is just magical thinking.
Nuclear isn't different, it's just big by default. And the French example in the 80s shows that building mass nuclear from scratch is in fact tractable in under two decades.
This is in no small part the reason why the countries with nuclear powered navies are most eager to build new nuclear power reactors.
Nuclear power is a dead end technology
And going into only one type of electricity production especially with the unpredictability of renewables is never wise.
The reasons listed in the article dance around the real underlying reasons and causes which relate to nuclear plants being a once in a generation kind of thing at this point. Most of the people executing these projects are on their first nuclear project. And they have to re-learn a lot of the things that make these projects complicated. There is no learning effect between projects. And in so far there is, it seems to be a negative one. And by the time they are done, there's a new generation that needs to build the next one.
The timescale doesn't help either because lots of things change and assumptions get broken. For example the relationship with China looks a lot less cozy than it did ten years ago. And that might change substantially again in the next ten. So them being a major partner in this project complicates things. In the same way, the relationship with Russia changed so relying on them for supplying the fuel rods might not be as good as an idea as it was back when Finland started planning its plant (the predecessor to this one). It's hard to predict these things on a multi decade scale. So, we're talking major changes with suppliers, project participants, and probably technology as well. And the competition.
The reason renewables are running circles around everything else is because planning cycles are short (<1-2 years), knowledge isn't lost in between projects, and consequently these projects are fairly predictable in terms of budgets and generally low risk. There's still some risk but most of that is bureaucracy. And it gets better with each project because of learning effects. Once you've done 100 wind mills, doing a 1000 more is going to be a lot easier.
Hinkley point C is about 3.4 GW of energy. Not nothing. But the UK has added a multitude in wind and solar since planning started and will add another multitude of energy by its completion (whenever that is). It's not even going to be close. Coal had a major market share when planning started (more than nuclear). The last coal plant in the UK closed last month. By the time this nuclear plant opens that will be ancient history and most of the grid in the UK will be wind, solar, batteries, imported power from abroad (cables), and a few gas plants. The good news would be getting rid of those remaining gas plants.
Sizewell C appears to be moving along; nevertheless Ed Milliband has not vocally supported the project (despite the junior minister Lord Hunt visiting the site last month and Keir Stamer visiting last year).
What is most curious is that the announcement of up to £5.5B of extra funding (taking funding up to £8B so perhaps 1/3 of final project cost) until the final investment decision was not performed by a minister; usually this level of investment would merit a great fanfare.
https://www.sizewellc.com/news-views/keir-starmer-hpc-visit-...
https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/lord/lord-hunt-of-kings...
We will seek to extend the lifetime of existing nuclear power plants while supporting the completion of new sites, such as Sizewell C.
Sizewell C joint managing directors Julia Pyke and Nigel Cann said the Devex Scheme is “significant support from the government and it further strengthens the position of this project, which is now full steam ahead”.On the solution side there are a few more tools that might be deployed in the UK:
- Demand shaping and price incentives. E.g. when to plugin your car or when to start charging it. Octopus is a big energy provider that is very active on this front. They are also the largest energy provider in the UK and they license their solution to others. So, the UK is ready for this. And with millions of connected users, they could shift a few GW in demand simply by fiddling with e.g. car charging schedules, boiler heating schedule, etc.
- Localized pricing. This is a topic that is a bit sensitive in the UK. But effectively prices in Scotland are high when there is demand in the South; even though they are generating lots of wind that cannot be exported south because there is no cable capacity. So you get high prices (because the gas used down south is expensive) for energy combined with overproduction. Localized pricing would stimulate using the power closer to where it is generated. And it would incentivize investing in power generation where it is needed instead of in random places on the map.
- Virtual power plants. Octopus is getting into this as well. This would add many GW of battery to their mix.
The nice thing with these three solutions is that it doesn't require a huge investment in infrastructure and improves utilization of existing infrastructure.