Should we consider nuclear energy to be clean ?

I’m not aware of any major fuel shortage for nuclear plants beyond 100 years? Especially with recycling of spent fuel in Gen IV reactors?

I also strongly disagree with using Hinkley as a reference point for how long it takes to produce a nuclear plant. It was the first plant built in the UK for decades so there was a huge amount of investment in people and equipment required, along with the fact that the project has been run poorly – its no exemplar.

A common design plant, once the skills base is there, could be done much quicker than 30 years.

What Gen IV reactors – There aren’t any.

We shouldn’t be placing more money into Fission in its current form.  I’d rather we placed more into Deep Geothermal (It’s still nuclear, but far away) A report published by UK Gov last year showed the potential sites, their practicability and the technology exists today (Cornwall Eden Project), is controllable and scalable and can fit well with other forms of renewables.  From planning to operation was 5 years (and that included drilling a 5.5km deep hole!) and ~£23m

Plasma drilling technology (currently in development) will further enable this by exposing vastly deeper options and MUCH higher temperatures.

Enigmas

Ita always ” going to be better in the future ” with nuclear.  The actual record is somewhat different.

25 plus years is the normal time to build a reactor from deciding to build to getting electricity out.   Thats the reality.

25 plus years is the normal time to build a reactor from deciding to build to getting electricity out.   Thats the reality.

In January 2008, the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) indicated that it would pay attention to new nuclear power projects in countries with no experience in this area. ASN said it takes at least five years to set up the legal and regulatory infrastructure for a nuclear power programme, two to ten years to license a new plant, and about five years to build a power plant. That means a “minimum lead time of 15 years” before a new nuclear power plant can be started up in a country that does not already have the required infrastructure

If I’m going to listen to anyone about how long it takes to build nuclear from plan to energy out, I’ll take the experience of folks who’ve actually built them over you (no offense). so these folks thought it takes half the time you originally said to build in countries that don’t have the required infrastructure.  Just becasue it takes so long in the UK to build is no indicator of how long they actually take to build

So the reality is ignored?    The actual record of what has happened?

A minimum lead time of 15 years is absolute best case, and surely translates to 25 years in the real world. You wouldn’t reasonably plan for anything less. Regardless, it’s an awfully long time to wait while the climate continues to change.

Nuclear cannot be the saviour technology.  Its a distraction from the real issues

No-one’s saying it’s the saviour, they haven’t said that since what, the 60s?

Ita always ” going to be better in the future ” with nuclear.

Pretty sure that’s the case with most technological things.

Regardless, it’s an awfully long time to wait while the climate continues to change.

Maybe we should invest in renewables and storage in the meantime.. oh wait – WE ARE.

If I’m going to listen to anyone about how long it takes to build nuclear from plan to energy out, I’ll take the experience of folks who’ve actually built them over you (no offense). so these folks thought it takes half the time you originally said to build in countries that don’t have the required infrastructure.  Just becasue it takes so long in the UK to build is no indicator of how long they actually take to build

It’s certainly ironic that the French said this.  EDF are the primary contract for HPC and the EPR (Flammenville) started in 2007 and planned for commissioning in 2012 has now been pushed back to 2024 with subsequent sites now pushed back to 2035 and 2039 respectively.  Total time for the EPR from planning to commissioning is now estimated to be 25y.  The subsequent reactors are now supposed to be 14y and 12y respectively, but that’s after site approval.

Hard to argue the French don’t have the required infrastructure with 56 operational plants…

Q;Should we consider nuclear energy to be clean ?

A: No

HInckley C was supposed to be online by now and the project was started well before that

Actual time from deciding to build to starting to generate is 25 – 30 years for all recent reactors. You are using a false starting point. Its from decide to build to generate electricity – which is 25+ years. Hinckly is already 15 years late and now pushed back to 2031

Er, it wasn’t even identified as a site for new build until 2009, round about when the various companies started building their cases for Generic Design Assessment.

Spending all that time and money on nuclear means that is not spent on more workable solutions.

Excuse the comparison, it’s not personal, but here you are spending time on this, I take it Right to Die is all sewn up then? Or is it completely different and able to be worked on simultaneously? It’s not a case of one or the other, that’s not sustainable whatever way you cut it.

What Gen IV reactors – There aren’t any.

Yet. As I pointed out LFR is already in the works and if approved likely heading for GDA.

Hard to argue the French don’t have the required infrastructure with 56 operational plants…

None of which are EPRs.

A minimum lead time of 15 years is absolute best case, and surely translates to 25 years in the real world. You wouldn’t reasonably plan for anything less. Regardless, it’s an awfully long time to wait while the climate continues to change.

Well you wouldn’t have the setup or same regulatory hurdles so 15 years seems like a reasonable outside estimate.

As for the time whilst things change, you can thank successive governments and their can kicking for the mess we’re in now. Maybe if the lights weren’t on people would pay attention.

Aaaand today Sizewell C got its site licence granted. Projected to start operation in early 2030s as long as nobody pulls an HS2 on it.

Hinckley-C projected to start generation of power in early 2030s…….if they’re lucky…….(originally sposed to be 2017)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/23/hinkley-point-c-could-be-delayed-to-2031-and-cost-up-to-35bn-says-edf

And Sizewell C isn’t yet fully funded, so early 2030s sounds optimistic…..especially as sea defences on an at high risk suffolk coastline are not designed yet.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/07/sizewell-c-suffolk-granted-nuclear-site-licence-edf

So if we assume £70Bn to build energy generation that won’t happen for another 10ish years – what progress could we make if we invested similar amounts in renewables?

Aren’t we already investing lots in renewables?  And we still need some base load don’t we?

Not investing enough in renewables according to multiple sources.

https://www.cieh.org/ehn/environmental-protection/2023/may/uk-investment-in-clean-energy-fell-by-10-in-2022/

And renewables is a better way of reducing carbon emissions:

Put plainly – if countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritise support for renewables rather than nuclear power. Pursuit of nuclear strategies risks taking up resources that could be used more effectively and suppressing the uptake of renewable energy.

Tories stopping offshore wind to allow oil/gas exploration instead….

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/02/sunak-to-allow-oil-and-gas-exploration-at-sites-intended-for-offshore-wind

And renewables is a better way of reducing carbon emissions:

It is, but without nuclear how do you meet base load demand?  We can only store so much renewable energy.  This has always been the problem.  Everyone knows nuclear has tons of problems, but so do all the other options at the moment.

Like I said above – using deep geothermal.

None of which are EPRs.

Irrelevant – You’re arguing that rapid nuclear deployment using new technology is possible, yet all evidence to date is that it’s not.  The EPR will have taken 17y to build and commission, HPC was started over a decade later and will take no less time.  the next two in France are predicted to take a similar amount of time reducing only by 1-2 years per reactor.  France has 56 to provide most of its power.  At that rate, we’d need to build 10-20 to meet baseload, so assuming 2 building at once, we’re talking talking what 50-60years?

SWC will not be operational before 2035.  Not a chance in hell.  If even the French are saying 14 – 15 years, 11 in the UK is just not feasible, especially with HPC ongoing for much of that period.

Hinckley-C projected to start generation of power in early 2030s…….if they’re lucky…….(originally sposed to be 2017)

Considering they didn’t break ground until 2016 and a GDA wasn’t completed until December of 2012 I’d say that sits in the ‘nonsense’ pile.

And Sizewell C isn’t yet fully funded, so early 2030s sounds optimistic…..especially as sea defences on an at high risk suffolk coastline are not designed yet.

Guardian needs to do some proper journalism. If I said the moon was made of cheese that doesn’t make it so, campaigners can say what they like, fact is I’m currently looking at the publicly available Development Consent Order application with the proposed sea defences in it. That was published June 2021.

So if we assume £70Bn to build energy generation that won’t happen for another 10ish years – what progress could we make if we invested similar amounts in renewables?

I don’t know, you seem to be assuming you can just throw money at a problem and achieve linear results. As I said before, we need an energy mix, nobody is saying we shouldn’t be pursuing renewables but throwing everything at them isn’t necessarily going to correlate with proportional increases.

Like I said above – using deep geothermal.

And how long and how expensive would it be to get that even close to replicating an EPR in the UK? It’s exactly the same problem as we don’t have the expertise, infrastructure or supporting industry to do deep geothermal and that’s before you get into plasma boring (Coming Soon™️).

deep geothermal

Deep geothermal is limited by current technology, but also by imagination. You could easily drill down to the earth’s mantle using hydrogen bombs sequentially. Each bomb would melt the bedrock and you could then use that heat to power geothermal power generation until it ran out of heat, then just drop another bomb down the hole and repeat until you  hit the mantle. I’ve sent schematic illustrations to all the relevant ministries, plus potential overseas parties that might be interested, but never got any response beyond, “We have received your correspondence.”

Okay, theres a few things to unpack here.

Irrelevant – You’re arguing that rapid nuclear deployment using new technology is possible, yet all evidence to date is that it’s not. The EPR will have taken 17y to build and commission, HPC was started over a decade later and will take no less time.

HPC, Flamanville and Olkiluoto were three separate projects, the latter two were started before the design had even been finalised hence the redesigns.

the next two in France are predicted to take a similar amount of time reducing only by 1-2 years per reactor.

The next ones in France, to the best of my knowledge are EPR2. So a different design again with a lot of simplicity added but still a new design.

France has 56 to provide most of its power. At that rate, we’d need to build 10-20 to meet baseload, so assuming 2 building at once, we’re talking talking what 50-60years?

Why assume that? I assume in that time they will ramp up EPR2 and also start on SMRs. But who knows, that’s entirely a planning strategy and logistics problem. Again, you could ask the same question of where several gigawatts of renewables over and above what we currently install are going to come from.

SWC will not be operational before 2035. Not a chance in hell. If even the French are saying 14 – 15 years, 11 in the UK is just not feasible, especially with HPC ongoing for much of that period.

Going back to my first point we’ve at least been clever about this. The plan is that resources are redeployed to SZC from HPC which gives continuity and means no duplication of resources. It’s also going to be built to the original EPR design so there is a lot of commonality between the two. I agree however that early 2030s is more likely to be 2034 than 2031.

You could easily drill down to the earth’s mantle using hydrogen bombs sequentially. Each bomb would melt the bedrock and you could then use that heat to power geothermal power generation until it ran out of heat, then just drop another bomb down the hole and repeat until you hit the mantle.

But surely we need those for Orion Plates?

And how long and how expensive would it be to get that even close to replicating an EPR in the UK? It’s exactly the same problem as we don’t have the expertise, infrastructure or supporting industry to do deep geothermal.

Tough to say, but the Geysers is through to have cost between £1.5 and 2bn (22-30 plants) and produces 1500-1800MWe…Offshore drilling and pumping we have plenty of expertise in.

and that’s before you get into plasma boring

We don’t need it to get to 500m-1km deep. It would just be vastly more capable and require less sites if you can go deeper without incurring massive additional costs.   If you could get down to 3km, the basic ground temperature is over 100 degrees, so every site is viable so long as it’s stable which most of the UK is.

(Coming Soon™️).

Juuust like HPC and SWC.

SWC

It’s SZC. Don’t ask me why, it just is, the same convention has run all the way from A station.

But yes. It’s all coming soon. It’s not a lack of will on the builders part but the political will to make it happen in both cases. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that your proposal has any less merit. We can and should be throwing our resources at everything we can, we’re going to need all of it!

Yes, appreciate that I am just an interested observer – relying on ?reliable? news reporting like the graun – rather than someone with professional expererience within the industry. And thanks for the insights.

However, it feels like the the timescales/approvals for nuclear are so tortuous, nuclear is not making up the gap.

And in that interim between 2008 (Hinckley and Sizewell C decision) and now we could have put in much more renewables that would reduce the need for some of that base capacity ? And innovating in that 16 years we might have made lots of useful progress, linear or not.

As you say we need it all, but at the moment UK energy policy seems a bit cockamamey and overreliant on a couple of nuclear stations that are still somewhere in the future

Don’t even get me started. I totally agree and whilst there are very sound reasons for the time taken to get things approved the push to get things done is almost non-existent.

We’re back to the same place we were in 2009 when the government of the day announced 4x EPR’s at Hinkley Point and Sizewell, 4x ABWR’s at Oldbury and Wylfa and 3x AP1000’s at Moorside. I appreciate Fukushima put a lot of things on pause and screwed some of the consortiums but there was no need to sit back and wait for a miracle. And now we’re finally at the stage where the government is doing what it should have in the first place and taking a controlling stake.

At the end of the day, whilst we can disagree on the how I’m sure we can agree that this is all critical infrastructure and shouldn’t just be left to chance to plan and deploy. This is why we’re so short of what we require, by any projection, that we need everything we can get.

Just out of curiosity, what happens if you refuse to sign? Do you get dragged off to a dungeon, put under surveillance…?

You can expect to find this lot hiding in the bottom of your garden.

You can expect to find this lot hiding in the bottom of your garden.

At least it’s better than Vinnie Jones being there!

You can expect to find this lot hiding in the bottom of your garden.

Well none of them have a moustache or obligatory black eye shield so I wouldn’t worry too much.

And in other news Flamanville 3 got permission to start up yesterday so will now be loading fuel over the next few days before testing and connecting to the grid later in the summer.

@tjagain I hope you have a tasty hat for when Hinkley C hits the bars 😉

Its a decade away yet😜

😂