[Closed] Nuclear power , not that cheap or safe it appears

ernie - wind farms are subsidised, so worth mentioning when talking about subsidising other energy generation.

But we weren't talking about that when I made the point that I had never heard of nuclear energy being described as cheap.

Nuclear weapons factories have a beneficial side effect - producing electricity

So you saying that you can't estimate the power generated/cost to built/cost to disassemble/jobs generated by a number of wind farms over say 40 years?

Not realistically - no. It isn't like for like. Without suitable energy storage, renewables can never replace the likes of nuclear as they don't produce constant electricity so you can only have it when it is available. We can't do without the steady base load that wind adds to at this time.

I really like the fact that the people who are most opposed to nuclear, and so for renewables, are also the people who so often tell us that Britain needs more manufacturing... how we don't [b]make[/b] stuff anymore

Ever wonder why there were all those gert big power stations & coal yards dotted round Yorkshire?

Ever wonder why there were all those gert big power stations & coal yards dotted round Yorkshire?

renewables can provide base load - tidal will which is why it is being installed of the scottish coast now. Mind you I don't know how any of the machines got installed this summer nor how many will be left by next summer

"The cost of decommissioning offshore platforms is massive, however, those offshore windfarms are the biggest legacy anyone is going to be left with.
(I'll get my coat.)"

While I'd agree the cost of building and running offshore windfarms is very high, I'm not sure the decommissioning costs are going to be comparable to nuclear.

My position on nuclear remains the same... An obviously bad option, but currently the best of a list of bad options, and so it's a suitable stopgap til we can improve some of these bad options. Renewables seem to have lots of potential but we're not there yet and rushing into things isn't generally a very smart approach.

renewables can provide base load

Nuclear power can be safer.

If you are going to knock supposition in nuclear, best you stick to what works now in renewables. Are you sure tidal can provide base load? It seems you would have a fluctuation throughout the year with spring tides etc. Not very base. Slack water goes against a steady flow as well.

tootall - you need to look into the scottish tidal setup - two locations far enough apart that the tides are at different times, its done on flow not height so spring tides make little difference. So yes - it should provides a steady baseload 24/7/365

The main issues is the robustness of the hardware and getting the energy to the consumer.

the other way to get baseload is use pump storage (planned undersea connector to Norway to use pump storage there as little more can be built in the UK and hydrogen generation / storage as in the unst project might have a role on a larger scale but is only proven on a small scale

Doesn't it only cost so much money to decommission because rabid anti nuke nutters like TJ make decommissioning so difficult?

Yes, damn all those "do gooders" for putting all those rules and regulations in place. I mean, we should just dump all that radioactive material anywhere we like. Isn't that what the Irish sea is for?

Nuclear power is here for the foreseeable future, we should be focusing on what will replace it after that. Renewables aren't quite there yet and simply telling us to use less energy isn't being particularly realistic.

How is that relevant to the fact that nuclear energy is so expensive that nowhere in the world has it ever been practical without government support ?

Is this argument really a valid one? While the burning of fossil fuels for the production of energy is so relatively cheap it's never going to make financial sense to pursue any form of alternative.

Be an interesting debate to consider what we would do if we had to stop using fossil fuels right now.

it should provides a steady baseload 24/7/365

Should - when and how much? Not enough soon enough.

Planned undersea connection to Norway and use pumped storage there? You voted for an independent Scotland and you believe it could happen as well don't you? 😀

I love futuristic possibilities, but you really need to pin your hopes on more affordable closer-to-realities.

Tidal, its the future.

Is this argument really a valid one?

Well it certainty was when the OP suggested he had just discovered that nuclear energy isn't cheap. Very valid indeed I would have thought.

Tootall - the tidal is being installed now with proven tech. It will provide base load quicker than new nukes which will take more than ten years to do so. In ten years there should be enough tidal for Scotlands base load. Its a multiphase plan for many many years. stage 1 is get the north south interconnect up and install the offshore tidal wave and wind - this is all underway.

Interconnnects to Norway and further afield are further away in time but are well into planning - thats real joint government planning - its a useful idea for them as well.

You voted for an independent Scotland and you believe it could happen as well don't you?

I love futuristic possibilities, but you really need to pin your hopes on more affordable closer-to-realities.

As I say - the major problem as I see it is: will the hardare survive the winter storms?

I was too young for the referendum in the 70s and must have missed a recent vote on Scottish independence.

Considering how much stick you get on here, it's surprising how little some people read of what you post. Specially on a subject such as Scottish independence.

i ll have wager if anyone will take it that No new nuclear power station will be operational in the uk before petrol hits 3 quid a litre

Hiroshima, nagasaki incidents were nuclear bombs not power plants

chernobyl explosion that blew the lid off the core was thermal not nuclear.

It's a mistake to conflate weapons with power generation in this discussion.

It's also a mistake to compare modern commercial reactor designs to old soviet designs. You would not confuse the safety of a 2011 honda with a ford pinto

To beclear I advocate mix energy sources including renewables andrenewal of existing uranium reactors and fast breeder research to resume to usefully use that dangerous stock pile of weapons grade plutonium up. And then we need to be looking into liquid thorium salts in parallel with fusion

i ll have wager if anyone will take it that No new nuclear power station will be operational in the uk before petrol hits 3 quid a litre

Is that because you predict that petrol will more than double in the next 14 years ?

Well it's more than doubled in the last 14 years, so you could be right.

How much will a pint of Guinness be ?

Tidal is the way ahead, but TJ in ten years, bolloks! 50 years maybe, a mate of mine was involved in the project that put the turbine in the Pentland firth, he said it was way over engineered and the designers/engineers said it would withstand blah blah, 5 weeks after they put it in he was back up there taking it out because it was f#####d.

TooTall - Member
So you saying that you can't estimate the power generated/cost to built/cost to disassemble/jobs generated by a number of wind farms over say 40 years?
Not realistically - no. It isn't like for like. Without suitable energy storage, renewables can never replace the likes of nuclear as they don't produce constant electricity so you can only have it when it is available. We can't do without the steady base load that wind adds to at this time.

Someone wanted comparative costs??

£4.5Bn gets you 300 offshore turbines generating 1,500MW.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/new_scots_coast_wind_farm_to_be_biggest_in_the_world_1_1977990

scotsman - Member
Tidal is the way ahead, but TJ in ten years, bolloks! 50 years maybe, a mate of mine was involved in the project that put the turbine in the Pentland firth, he said it was way over engineered and the designers/engineers said it would withstand blah blah, 5 weeks after they put it in he was back up there taking it out because it was f#####d.

Cheers Druidh,

So is nuclear cheaper? I don't see any power output number here mind, and obviously there are a million other factors to consider..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7180539.stm

The Olkiluoto project is Western Europe's first new reactor in a decade and is expected to cost about £2.25bn ($4.5bn), but there have been serious delays there.

From that bbc link...

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has said the cost will be £72bn over 20 years - up from an estimate two years ago of £56bn.

Critics, such as Greenpeace, say that the bill for building new waste dumps will be a further £21bn and then £30bn to build the new nuclear power stations.

This might give you a clue...

[img] [/img]

What we don't have are the decommissioning costs for 300 offshore turbines and the actual amount of electricity they'll produce averaged over windy and non-windy times.

To be fair it'll take a better man than me to figure it all out! I still think we should use both until renewables can eventually take over. Imo we'll need a new generation of nuclear plants in the meantime. As it's all well and good the scottish government planning all our energy from renewables within 10 years but that becomes a different prospect when you think uk wide.

especially as there are unknowns all round - no solution to waste from the nukes and no real idea of what decommissioning will cost.

Unclear the longevity of the turbines both tidal and wind in the scottish seas as well as the rest of the hardware

Aye - I don't think the same possibilities exist across the rest of the UK (yet).

seosamh77

UK wide more could be done - there are possible tidal generator places in England. Nukes are only a small part of the generation in the UK and it will take tenplus years to build any new ones

TJ, That's a big if though, I'd be more than willing to be convinced otherwise mind.

I think there are timescales that need to be kept to, to ensure a constant supply? In that building will need to start sooner rather than later because it takes so long?(unsure on that)

So for renewables on a UK level they are really running against the clock? Plus it really is a case of proven technology against unproven technology at the moment. So still both for me. I'm not one for betting on the energy needs of the future.

Don't get me wrong, I'm more on the renewables side, in that I'd like to see them as the main and the only source, I just don't think they are there yet and we'll need to bite the bullet on nuclear this time round.

the timeline is around ten years IIRC. The renewables are hardly less proven than Nukes, remeber people keep talking about fast breeders and thorium cycles - non of whichcis working commercially yet. AGRS are known yes.

In ten years we could install a lot of wave and tidal. similar scale to the nukes

By going for nukes you are gambling - the time effort and money devoted to them mean not enough investment in alternates. Spend the money for one nuke on energy efficiency and you save more power than the nuke generates.

Nuclear fuel will run out soon but the main issues remains what to do with the waste and the huge open ended costs involved

Working within the infrastructure/civils industry I don't really regard 2.6 billion as a huge number for the amount of work involved. Whether or not it represents value for money in the bigger scheme of things depends on how much it would cost the economy to put up with the vagueries of a power system that may/may not generate enough to keep all the lights on.

I'd imagine the most cost effective way of ensuring enough energy is provided is to drive down power consumption in the homes/offices/factories and employ more smart technology at the final user end.

Oh well at least there's some facts/numbers getting posted....and the OP has left coincidentally left the thread.

Three of us in this household, leccy:

Consumption Production

September 160kWh 352kWh
October 160kWh 301kWh
>Nov 22 126kWh 118kWh

Gas: zero

Wood: about one tenth of a metre cube so far this heating season, I cook the evening meal on the stove which cuts our electricity consumption during peak demand.

And you Project? We are all part of the problem and can also be part of the solution.

Come on guys, nobody really wants an electric car or an ipad, everyone really wants to stop using electricity and start burning wood again to keep warm during the winter, you all know we don't need nuclear power. We definitely don't want to run a Mars mission or keep CERN finding out awesome things about the universe we exist in.

Also nuclear fission kills millions of people every day, Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack are worse then Hitler don't you know.

They just need to work on a cheap rocket and blast the nuclear waste into space, there's relatively little of it generated in comparison to the power generated.
Then again if the UK shale gas reserves are as big as some are saying then who cares, we're fine...

I’m happy to see more nuclear power here. It’s been proven over the last 20 years or so that it’s a reliable source of energy. I’m surprised that successive Govt’s here have been so reticent TBH. As for wind farms I’m all for them, more offshore if possible, but I’m happy with them in my back yard, shame others think differently, If there is some way of making wind farms more efficient and give better ROI then that would be good as currently they are inefficient, so too tidal gates, bit heath robinson at the moment with the only reaserch going into them are a few universities, shame the mahooosive energy companies aren’t ploughing more of our hard earned into finding other ways to supply humans with the basic needs of heat and light.

But really with all this talk of renewable energy.. .. we ought to have been thinking and putting in place this back in the 70’s at the latest
Never say never, now’s as good a time as any.
Only thing I worry about is if we build all this/these nuclear power stations is, do we have the skill base here in the Uk or indeed the world, to cover the builds.. I fear we don’t. I fear we’ll start some rushed programme and suffer the consequences.

so too tidal gates, bit heath robinson at the moment with the only reaserch going into them are a few universities,

tidal turbines are up and running and are being installed. This is proven tech

I doubt there are enough tidal turbine locations to meet the demand created by homes like yours though TJ.

TandemJeremy - Member
tidal turbines are up and running and are being installed. This is proven tech

How much output is expected? How many installations are needed to generate a flat-ish output suitable for base-load?

See dead spots here:
[img] [/img]

Tootall - the tidal is being installed now with proven tech. It will provide base load quicker than new nukes which will take more than ten years to do so. In ten years there should be enough tidal for Scotlands base load. Its a multiphase plan for many many years. stage 1 is get the north south interconnect up and install the offshore tidal wave and wind - this is all underway.

I'd be interested to see the reports that say that there will be enough tidal to support Scotland's base load. It sounds fairly contrary to anything I've read. Who's published this?

I take it you capture the carbon from burning the wood, edukator?
Well done for being energy negative. Out of interest, how do those figures tally against what the providers estimated that you'd get?

(Regarding Dounreay)

You will be told this is not representative and modern stations will be much easier to decommission.

correct.

well done TJ, it seems that you do listen after all 🙂

[img] http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSXWYC4HXHMnGZ_jGdJJF3A_AZqYiA58FzYWev3t4LL_c6NnBDGKQ [/img]

retro - the two locations for the tidal flow generator arrays are such that the high tides are around 2 - 2 1/2 hrs apart IIRC so you would have another blue line almost exactly out of phase with the one on that chart.

Ian - "some base load" might have been better - but the potential is there