We’re talking about a country that spent £40.5 billion on a high speed rail, had to cut the scope because estimated cost rose 200% and reached £100 billion and still doesn’t know when and if it will be finished. Of course they are not able to build a nuclear plant.
That’s the cost of around 20 GW in wind turbines btw.
A nuthead will still tell you that wind is no equivalent because of missing winds.
You might have to factor PV and batteries in to make a even better point.
20GW of wind turbines would produce around 44TWh of intermittent electricity over a year, and around 880 TWh of electricity over their lifetime before needing to be replaced. (Around 20 years)
3.2GW of nuclear (the Hinkley Point C reactor) would produce 22TWh of baseload electricity in a year and around 1320 TWh over there lifetime of the reactor.
It really doesn’t make sense to compare build costs here. Nuclear uses fuel and that costs money. And you need to take the costs of dismantling the reactor after usage into your calculations. Wind turbines are much easier to recycle and you do not need to store the used wind for millenia
You can have a grid powered by wind only, but don’t expect your appliances to work 24/7.
Yeah and that is why nobody is building a grid only with wind. Some energy discussions really feel like talking to toddlers.
Let’s see if those nuclear fanboys are showing up in this thread
I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).
The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).
But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.
It was also fortunate that all it did was contaminate some towns and land forever uninhabitable.
I kinda understand the paranoia, I just wish I could hope that economies of scale would kick in after a while but we’ll just not build another one for almost exactly the right amount of time for all the institutional knowledge to disappear.
2.2% of Fukushima prefecture is nothing compared with the damage that fossil fuel is doing every single year to the entire planet. Even ignoring climate change, we are breathing pollution that is killing us. Radiation is a natural thing all around us, and our body evolved to correct for that below a certain threshold. Closing nuclear in germany before closing carbon killed a lot of people. If nuclear displace carbon I am more then happy with nuclear
Don’t get me wrong, I too want nuclear power, but we need to hit it hard enough and without outsourcing, and to do it long enough to build institutional knowledge and get costs down. I kinda want the Rolls Royce SMR to work out, but britain is crap at building anything.
I’m fairly convinced nuclear fanboys on reddit are either paid astroturfers or LLM bots paid for by the oil and gas industry to derail renewables
Or…people who know how a power grid actually works.
Lemmy has a lot of ponytail environmentalists who lack even basic STEM knowledge.
They are on lemmy too.
Or we have functioning brains and know that due to the inability of renewables to supply a guaranteed base load 24/7/365 that energy has to come from a mix of options which includes nuclear.
It’s a damn shame the hive mind has decided “nuclear bad” , without really attempting to understand the issue. A purely pragmatic approach demands the commissioning of nuclear power plants, and this vibes-based opposition to nuclear power only has the effect of strengthening fossil fuel’s grip on the energy economy and hastening the climate apocalypse.
This paper appears to be saying that in the future, if the entire European continent connects it would be technically possible to not have to add new baseload
Their findings indicate that a secure, net-zero European electricity system is technically robust and economically viable when based on VRE paired with extensive flexibility, storage, and grid interconnections, without requiring new baseload capacity.
Usually they prefer other platforms.
Nah, they are here as well and in numbers.
🍿
Makes you think how any of the old plants were ever built. Is it just mismanagement and corruption?
Makes you think how any of the old plants were ever built.
Experience. The first one you build will have massive teething problems, but then the second one will just be a copy of the first.
The problem nowadays is that we in the west go “Oh no, learning stuff was expensive! Lets not use any of that and instead never do this again!” then, ten years later we start over again.
Except this one is being built by a company owned by the French government which has loads of experience, so corruption it is.
I’m sure McKinsey are making a killing. All those risk assessments need 6k/day consultants.
I live not that far away from a (now decommissioned) nuclear power station, and from what I keep hearing from old people who lived through the time of its construction, there was a lot of lenience and looking the other way involved. For instance, (A very persistent) Rumor has it, that many houses built in the nearest town around that time, had their foundation, cellar walls, and floors poured with the heavy anti-radiation concrete intended for the power station, because quite a number of the concrete trucks destined for the containment building (which is made of an awful lot of concrete) did conveniently take a wrong turn and ended up at the wrong construction site for some odd reason. (Maybe the drivers getting a case of beer for every detour they took might have been a factor)
Nuclear reactors, despite being one of the safest forms of energy acquisition, have some of the strictest safety standards which drives up cost significantly.
Surprising absolutely nobody…
Nononono, nuclear power is cheap and safe!
Also, nuclear plants can’t explode!
And don’t forget the simple matter of sourcing, enriching, using, possibly reprocessing, storing, and then disposing. Simples!
No, you don’t understand. Uran and the tech to enrich and process it is widely available and they all are totally not dependent on Russia. Why so many still import from Russia then and fight sanctions year after year, you ask? Well… it’s because… Look! There! A squirrel!
Why so many still import from Russia
Isn’t that US related trade restrictions? Also Kazakhstan supplies some 43% of the world supply of Uranium, followed by Canada at 14%.
the tech to enrich and process it
If you watch some of the early American nuclear projects it seems like its about as hard to work with as coal, and enrichment means spinning it. Its all known quantities.
Also while I’m here, the quanties of nuclear waste are so small compared to the literal mountains of flyash power plants make. And the french are really good at reprocessing it. I think we can do better than what the Americans did with their miniature nuclear reactor on Greenland (just flushed the toxic waste into a cavern drilled into the ice, along with all the poops).
Also, nobody ever seems to want to talk about the radioactive output of coal stations just burning coal with trace radioactive elements in it. Just straight up the stack and over the neighbourhood.
A squirrel!!? Where???!
Just dig a big hole. Problem solved.
My bad, I keep forgetting!! Thank you.
How many people have died from nuclear plant accidents? We’ve had Three Mile Island, Chernyobl and Fukushima.
Three Mile Island: No deaths or injuries.
Chernyobl: 30 during the incident, by 2008 another 19 who received a dose high enough to suffer acute radiation sydrome although 7 of those had nothing to do with cancer. Another 15 from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination.
Fukushima: 1 death
Dumb ass. The radiation cloud that went over Europe was so bad whole harvests had to be destroyed.
That’s nice but that’s still not people dying.
Yes they did
If only someone could have foreseen this…
Finland and Olkiluoto smiles sympathetically and asks “first time?”
No it is not first time, not for UK, and not for the company EDF building it. They have working plants in France, but the latest of those were delayed too.
So not being the first time is no guarantee. You can have delays on similar kinds of projects many times.
I’m sorry, but don’t find your schadenfreude is funny, considering this is a crucial part for UK to reduce CO2.It’s a very stupid way to reduce CO2 and they knew this when they started it.
In hindsight absolutely, but had it worked as planned, it was probably OK.
AFAIK there have been calculations that show Wind turbines would have been better.
Still it would obviously be better to have the plant working than not working.
It wasn’t schadenfreude but a humorous way of showing sympathy.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/james-franco-first-time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Construction_delays
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost
That seems like a very inside joke.
The meme is extremely popular and well used. Olkiluoto is infamous for its delays and cost overruns, not just in Finland. I think at one point it was the most expensive building in the world. Or maybe it was the most expensive unfinished building. Or maybe the most expensive in Europe. Something like that.
Anyway, it’s completely understandable that not everyone is aware of it.
Chinas reactors are build for 3.5 billion and are more or less on time.
Ontario, Canada is building SMRs on time and 4 reactors will cost about 15 billion.
I beg to differ. For a start the 3.5 billion figure is for the reactor alone. The whole project was calculated to cost 8 billion and of course it got more expensive.
Not to be pedantic, but Wikipedia shows US$7.5 billion for the entire plan that means 3.75 billion for each reactor that is more or less in line with what stated above. Still, 7.5 is much cheaper then 35.
Hinkley Point C is getting built by EDF (France) and China General Nuclear Power Group.
