Essay by Eric Worrall
Following French moves to downgrade renewables, Britain now also seems to be jumping on board the nuclear bandwagon.
UK government sets out plans for ‘biggest nuclear power expansion in 70 years’
Ministers hope to build fleet of reactors to meet quarter of electricity demand by 2050 but critics highlight long delays and rising costs
Jillian Ambrose Thu 11 Jan 2024 11.01 AEDT
The government has set out plans for what it claims will be Britain’s biggest nuclear power expansion in 70 years, despite concerns about faltering nuclear output and project delays.
…
The roadmap echoes plans put forward by the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, in 2022 to “build a new [reactor] every year” to wean Britain off fossil fuel.
Since then the developer of Hinkley Point C, the French utility EDF, has said the cost of Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation had spiralled to £33bn, a 30% increase from 2015 when it forecast the cost at between £25bn to 26bn. There are also concerns that Hinkley’s start date may be delayed from the summer of 2027 to the early 2030s.
Sunak said the government’s latest support for the nuclear industry was “the next step in our commitment to nuclear power, which puts us on course to achieve net zero by 2050 in a measured and sustainable way”.
“Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain – it’s green, cheaper in the long term and will ensure the UK’s energy security for the long term,” he said. “This will ensure our future energy security and create the jobs and skills we need to level up the country and grow our economy.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/uk-government-sets-out-plans-for-biggest-nuclear-power-expansion-in-70-years
What a difference a few years makes.
Back in 2022 British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told us renewables are the solution to climate change. “We need to move further and faster to transition to renewable energy and I will ensure the UK is at the forefront of this global movement as a clean energy superpower.”
Fast forward to today, and now “Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain”.
Britain may not have officially abandoned renewables, but they don’t exactly seem front and foremost as they once were.
Outside of specialised applications such as low power remote sensing systems, renewables have been a total failure pretty much everywhere they have been tried. Even sun drenched Australia is failing to make renewables work.
Perhaps the utter failure of renewables to deliver lower energy prices is finally starting to bite. Attempting to create a renewable energy powered economy at 50 degrees North of the equator was always a green pipe dream.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Gotta love how nuclear gets more expensive the more you make, whereas any other option that is approved of by the eco-tists is claimed to get cheaper which it then does not.
In fact the reality is nuclear has always been the cheapest energy. and built in modular volume will definitely reduce in price. Nuclear uses about 1/10 the resources per unit lifetime energy produced now. Nuclear is c.1/4 the CAPEX per lifetime unit energy of offshore wind now.
NOte: Per unit rated power is irrelevant because that is not sustained by wind, and a lifetime of 20 years for offshore wind versus nuclear’s proven 60 years is probably over generous.
The current MEASURED experience of renewables is that they have definitely already hit the floor, certainly as far as offshore which is well over £100 per megawatt hour LCOE cost, not allowing for the cost of supporting intermittency with either gas, or far unaffordably with batteries, etc.
The whole narrative is false, and based on demonstrably fabricated figures that are contrived by deliberate liars who know better. THis is not accidental, because the people making these claims are funded to know the facts, and test them. So they are deliberately lying, unless they are repeating the assurances of liars they should have checked, and have failed in their responsibilities to the bill and tax payer so to do. CPhys, CEng, MBA
Yes, I find it risible to exclude from LCOE the significant UNAVOIDABLE costs of making up for the uncontrollable 70% of time that wind & solar won’t produce anything.
The “unreliables” proponents even need to coin Newspeak descriptions of the inadequacies of wind & solar –
“firming”
and
“demand management”
“In fact the reality is nuclear has always been the cheapest energy.”
I’m not sure how you worked that, unless you deleted expenses for interest/amortization – caused by regulatory constipation.
I’m not an active nuclear engineer, but even with just the training I know nuclear is more expensive than CCGTs and super critical coal (probably some old coal plant sitting on top of a mine in a envir-reg-free country might be cheaper but just looking at realistic solutions).
However I believe in a utility having a mix of sources so it never gets caught with it’s pants down. Here in Ontario all the nuclear plants that green cultists tried to close down have been a God-send, along with Niagara Falls and such. Once Bruce gets a third row of reactors and Darlington starts deploying modular reactors, we’ll have plenty of electricity to sell to mentally and electrically challenged places like New York state.
That is not a universal statement.
CCGT costs depend critically on the cost of gas, and the capacity factor they run at. Coal depends on how much you have to spend cleaning up the exhausts and disposing of the fly ash and indeed the local cost of coal.
Nuclear depends crucially on the regulatory burden imposed, the cost of capital and the capacity factor they run at.
This is old, but it illustrates the relationship.If not the absolute costs today.
Nuclear became expensive almost entirely because of the regulatory burdens. Most of the overly restrictive regulations were a result of the efforts of the anti-nuclear lobby. If the same amount of onerous regulations (how many birds you can mince or fry per wind or solar tower, etc.) were applied to wind and solar and the taxpayer subsidies removed, they too would become a lot more expensive.
Nuclear fission is potentially very dangerous and needs sensible regulations, but the approval process is ridiculously complex, time-consuming, expensive, and designed to prevent, not promote the building of nuclear power plants.
Wife met a lady walking near our cabin. They lived in Downer’s Grove outside of Chicago. On a cross country trip we timed a stop at a RV park nearby and went to two White Sox Games (vs Red Sox, my team) and one Cubs game (SF Giants).
Amazing both teams were home at the same time. I thought that was silly because attendance may suffer, but the husband had never been to White Sox Game, their family were Cubs fans.
So to the point. They both lived near their jobs and SHE virtue signaled that she was on her second hybrid. (this was 4 years ago).
Now HE is an “engineer” who works for a consultant company who helps utility nuclear plants get their licenses extended, an business entirely dependent on excessive regulations.
They are WAY liberal so I didn’t discuss politics but when HE brought up unreliable generation, I fed him a steady stream of facts, which he was entirely ignorant of. Finally when I mentioned no backup power from solar or wind, he said that the spinning wind turbines were their own reserve. I asked him where he got that idea, and didn’t he realize they didn’t even provide any grid stability for frequency. He had no clue. I ended by asking him to just google the items I mentioned, and don’t get all his information from NPR, PBS, etc. look at actual non MSM sources of information.
BTW: As typical liberals, before they had children they lived in Chicago proper, enjoying the night life, etc. When it came time for their first child to go to school, they moved to predominantly WHITE Downer’s Grove to get away from Chicago crime, schools and taxes. Yep, liberals. $139 K average income and 86+% white, yep liberals.
The US utility nuclear fleet has a capacity factor of 0.9
Usually the plants run at near 100%, are down for a month for repair, refurbish and refuel every three to four years, then run again for three to four years, etc., already for decades.
It has to be obvious that the VAST majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant these days is bureaucratic red tape designed expressly to make nukes uneconomic.
I can’t find any cost data for the first commercial nuclear power plant in the UK, Calder Hall Power Station. (Neither can ChatGPT). However, Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the US, cost approximately $72.5 million in 1958.
Consumer Price Index data:
Dec 2023 307.92
Jul 1958 123.9
So in 2023 dollars, Shippingport cost about $180 million.
It had a nameplate capacity of 60MW and produced 7.4 TW-hrs until it was decommissioned in 1982.
I can’t estimate the operating costs, but the capital amortization works out to 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. As a small, early design, it only had a 24-year lifetime and nowhere near the capacity factor of modern designs.
What is the capital amortization on a whale killer offshore bird shredder?
Sorry bad CPI data
1958 annual ave should be 28.9
In 2023 dollars, the first US nuke cost $764 million
The amortization cost was 10.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. (In 2023 dollars)
Again, though, that’s for a low capacity, experimental design that was decommissioned after only 24 years.
From the book ‘Calder Hall The Story of Britain’s first Atomic Power Station’ by Kenneth Jay from the UK’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell ( Methuen & CO 1956)
“There was an enormous amount to do and the pace was hot – the design team began work on 7 April 1953 and less than 3.5 years later their £16,500,000 plant will go into full operation” (p 39)
Nuclear is cheap – like wind and solar – if you exclude the high capital cost, high installation and maintenance costs and in the case of nuclear the huge end of life decommissioning cost which is factored in as an up front expense and requires a contracted lifetime guaranteed kWh price to market to cover it all.
For the sake of argument, what do you suppose the cost of wind power would be, if the cost included a million-dollar fine for each bird and bat killed, and regulatory fees to cover the cost of bureaucrats dedicated to monitoring and documenting each death?
The capital costs and decommissioning expense to which you refer are analogous to the expenses which I proposed for windmills. The big difference though is that windmills actually kill endangered species and there is no practical way to prevent it. Nuclear power could be extremely safe without most of the costs imposed by the NRC (Nuclear Ruination Commission).
Only nuclear enrgy can replace fossil fuel in generation, because it is the only alternative that is more intense hence uses less resources is kore sustianable and available on demand at any scale at any scale required. Also cheaper than anything else on any full absorption lifetime cost comparison.
As a phsyicist and engineer, I consider these things to be self evident. Also easy to check the facts, physics and engineered reality of. Try the IEA cost of generation for s start. CEng, CPHys, MBA
Funny how reality can bite you in the ass. Too many unintended (or not) consequences for renewables to sustain itself.
The US navy is building reactors that never need to be refueled. They last the life of the ship.
A standardized, non refueled modular design is required for civilian application.
This would cut the bureaucracy out of the equation which are the biggest part of the cost and delays.
Navy ship life ~40 years. So the reactors are replaced once.
Correct they are not refueled, simply replaced. But the Navy design uses highly enriched uranium, unsuited for civilian use on proliferation grounds.
The excessive costs and delays of Hinckley C (and Voglte 3&4) suggest Gen 3 nuclear is not the best way forward. UK has plenty of frackable shale gas, if they would just use it to fuel efficient, inexpensive CCGT while Gen 4 nuclear is developed.
“The excessive costs and delays of Hinckley C (and Voglte 3&4) suggest” that political and environmental interference has been effective in hamstringing the domestic nuclear industry.
Other countries don’t have these problems – UAE just finished setting up a team of 1.6GW reactors from Korea without incident.
The next gen Columbia class SSBNs do have a life of ship reactor designed for a service life of 42 years. No refueling necessary.
But what does their fuel cost..
To last that long, military grade fuel is ultra-concentrated U235 rather than the diluted stuff put into a commercial reactor.
For The Military, cost is never any object.
The original thinking must have been that re-processing 2-year fuel was cheaper than making the military grade stuff
Until of course. the green nimby namby panbys put the mockers on anyone building/operating a re-processing plant – there’s ‘no winning’ with those folks.
How do the French get round it?
The US self imposed that by the whim of Jimmy Carter. Other countries are more sensible.
It was Gerald Ford who suspended all nuclear reprocessing in October 1976, Jimmy Carter then also banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in April 1977. The ban was reversed by the US DoE in March 1999.
Wrong. It was Jimmy Carter who was president in 1976. The development of Barnwell was suspended by the owners in 1982 after it became clear that private financing of the plant was not possible after TMI. It was Carter who had banned all commercial fuel reprocessing, not Ford.
Jimmy Carter was sworn in as 39th President of the United States of America on January 20th 1977.
He was not in office at all in 1976.
The French have standardised reactors.pressurized water reactors of just three types for 50+ reactors.
The French recycle a lot of their nuclear waste into fuel for reuse. The nuclear fuel recycling process involves converting spent plutonium, formed in nuclear power reactors as a by-product of burning uranium fuel, and uranium into a “mixed oxide” (MOX) that can be reused in nuclear power plants to produce more electricity.
Most of their reactors were in operation by the mid 1980s before the rise of groups like FOE and Greenpeace.
It’s actually easy and cheap to refuel nuclear utility plants on a regular basis as is done. Land based plants don’t have the volume and weight restraints of naval reactors, particularly on submarine power plants that have to exist within a relatively compact form factor within pressure hull that one does not want to cut holes in more than is necessary.
Refueling is extremely easy with CANDU reactors.
If the bureaucracy exists, it will NEVER be out of the equation
And in the 30 years it takes to get them built what will be the plan?
WH. Get government out of the way, with their burdensome and mostly needless regulations, and five years is do-able, even for a big reactor. Think, Manhattan Project.
Without government there would be no reactors.
Without government subsidies, there would be very few, if any, wind turbines or solar panels. They are not commercially viable.
Nuclear would be commercially viable if up-front construction costs can be met.
Your point is, as usual.. pointless.
Bollocks.
Reminds me of a “tax reform” movement in CA some time ago that tried to recruit the over taxed citizenry with their fantasy fundamental principal that no commercial activity can create anything of value without the partnership of government, therefore government has a fundamental right to the fruits of all commercial activity.
You calculation is not reality based as it does not include all the well funded activists group physical impediments and lawsuits and the many activists judges hearing those lawsuits.
Actual build time need be no more than 4-6 years. The rest is dealing with red tape. Red tape is under political control.
red tape and judiciary interference
It doesn’t take 30 years to build a nuclear reactor. Only to get past all the green lawfare obstructing them.
What is required is an assembly line approach to building lifetime sealed 30 year reactors.
The biggest problem is a fuel that cannot be easily diverted to weapons. Inherent in a 30 year reactor is a huge amount of energy
Reactors can last ~60-100 years judging by recent re-certifications.
Some UK business with extensive mineralized propeties that include uranium must have found that some of its stock was in Sunak’s portfolio and informed him of that fact.
With an unerring stupidity which has characterised the decision-making of Tory administrations for the last thirteen years, Sunak decides to go nuclear and chooses the vastly over-price French EPR technology. He maximises costs, maximises ecological and social damage while ensuring minimal benefits, and delays the transition from fossil fuels by more than a decade. Sizewell will probably not be producing electricity before the latest pie in the sky net zero target date.
It can’t just be stupidity. Blackmail, bribery, alien thought control rays, zombie body substitutes, take your pick.
My bet is that the UK’s ruling class is terminally thick.
JF
Why don’t they just copy the Saudi’s and use South Korean technology – huge savings.
Nuclear expert Mycle Schneider on the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear energy production
https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/nuclear-expert-mycle-schneider-on-the-cop28-pledge-to-triple-nuclear-energy-production-trumpism-enters-energy-policy/
I find it hilarious that they’re criticising the COP28 nuclear pledge for being unrealistic and unfeasable after all the fantasy-based renewables targets and pledges.
Basically what it seems to boil down to is that, despite political and activist opposition that has driven down nuclear generation in the past 20-30 years, tripling the nuclear fleet could happen without the previously mentioned political and activist opposition continuing.
Mycle Schneider has been a campaigner AGAINST nuclear energy since the 1980s
Sorry that should have been a reply to MyUsername
What is truly comical is you pretending that MS is any kind of expert other than producing BS.
An interesting read.
My take on Mr. Schneider’s approach is that based on activity in the sector over the past 30 years or so, projection of nuclear rollout is not going to deliver much production until ~ 2050.
Seems to me there hasn’t been any real momentum in nuclear plants development & installation ever since wind & solar started soaking up all the subsidies, investment and government fiat these past 3 decades. (China excepted)
IMO, nuclear will struggle to regain momentum until the patent inadequacy of wind & solar is acknowledged, and governments have to embrace the realities of reliable utility scale power generation.
We’re revisiting Charles Mackay’s 1841 observation in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” that –
So 2050 might well be a reasonable projection.
If nuclear is being driven by the need to restrict global temperatures to 1.5ºC, it’s the wrong motivation to build anything. Schneider seems to be suggesting that as a motivation when the objective should be to provide a reliable source of cheap electricity to society.
Schneider also utterly ignores that the decline in nuclear construction in the west is motivated by irrational fear, and associated fear mongering by ignorant, influential people who are fleecing the public with shockingly inefficient renewables.
Around 50+ nuclear reactors in France without a major incident over their lifetime demonstrates that nuclear is safe.
Schneider also notes the proliferation of nuclear in China and Russia and compares it to the decline of western nuclear, seemingly in an attempt to present the west as wise and far sighted. Instead, it should provide him a clue as to where the future lies and how much further ahead those countries are in providing their societies with cheap, reliable electricity. This will be very damaging to western societies as we play catchup.
China is apparently constructing more nuclear power than all western countries combined. They will undoubtedly begin to wind down coal use and begin decommissioning coal fired power stations as nuclear power comes online. The Chinese are doing what the west began to do with CCGT, use gas as a transition fuel between coal and nuclear except, they have largely skipped the gas transition and gone directly to ‘GO’.
Make no mistake, by the time the west begins building nuclear with any degree of urgency, China and Russia will be well on their way to eliminating almost all coal and gas domestically. Russia will be selling gas to the west they simply don’t need it. They’ll be profiting handsomely with a sensible policy of transition to nuclear whilst the west is still farting about burning stuff, including biomass.
Beware. They want to use nuclear as a weapon against fossil fuels. Doing anything for the wrong reasons is apt to give a wrong result.
That was, reportedly, the reason Margaret Thatcher embraced nuclear and anti-CO2 mantra, because she wanted to defeat the coal unions. Inadvertently she helped birth today’s terrible situation, though she did do the necessary with the unions.
Unfortunately her support of nuclear was only skin deep and went nowhere. Sunak might, just might, do the right thing for the wrong reason. But not only is he out of time, he needs a political bully boy like Norman Tebbit who will stand up in front of a hostile press and tell them to get on their bike.
I doubt there is one MP in the current parliament willing to take the flak and visible enjoy the lamentations of the greens and the BBC for such a job.
Sunak said the government’s latest support for the nuclear industry … puts us on course to achieve net zero by 2050 in a measured and sustainable way”.
____________________________________________________________
Which is why nuclear won’t be considered as the “Solution” because if it were, it would have been pushed by the billionaires who run the World Economic Forum from the start. The WEF really isn’t interested in tackling “Climate Change” or achieving net zero. At least that’s what the “Duck Test” says. Sunak will find out that he’s a useful idiot, and the WEF and the rest of the Climate Mob have been playing him like a fiddle.
I think he always knew that. But being their useful idiot gets him lots of airmiles the VIP lounge, a chauffeur and the chance to Look Important, so WTF should he care?
I hope all these politicians jumping on the nuclear bandwagon means that eventually all the onerous certification procedures get streamlined and the lawfare from special interest groups gets short circuited.
And then I woke up…
Parliament remains pro unreliables
It’s a madhouse
You know what the perfect antidote to the energy challenging the UK today are: Petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Just sayin’
Coal!? Where would they get coal!? /s
Ask Jezza Corbyn, he’s the one that wanted to reopen the mines.
> “Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain”.
“Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges we forced on Britain”.
What does the Duchess of Sussex think?
Does the Duchess of Sue-Sex think?
Does she actually think? I mean beyond what’s in it for her?
I don’t believe them. Somehow, they will come up with a solution that uses wood pellets from clear cutting forests in North America inside the reactors and also declare Drax as a nuclear plant.
Britain was the world leader in civil nuclear power in the 1950s.
We were promised energy too cheap to meter.
It could have been so without the Greens of the time and the Labour governments who let it all go.
Actually what screwed nuclear was uber cheap North Sea Gas and catastrophic interest rates that made it too expensive to build.
As interest rates crashed and North sea gas ran out we should have built reactors, but te EU was bribed by the likes of Siemens to mandate ‘renewable’ energy only, and nuclear was not classed as renewable.
Now every EU country is scrambling to redefine it as ‘renewable’, or somehow evade the Renewable Obligation.
Now every EU country is scrambling to redefine it as ‘renewable’, or somehow evade the Renewable Obligation.
In what reality?
The term may have been “sustainable” rather than “renewable”.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove wind and solar from the grid.
That’s the correct formula for a happy future for humankind.
Rishi washi true to form, any day now he’ll be talking about fracking
The biggest problem for nuclear, besides excessive gov’t red tape, is that the “modern” Western education system does not produce an adequate supply of skilled scientists and engineers! Until the universities are force to give up their zealous DIE religiousity there will be no improvement!
Most recent college grads are only suited for positions as baristas, waitstaff, or NGO activists; they don’t have any skills that would translate to a high paying job in the real world! Were it me, I would ask for my tuition payments to be returned! It’s not “higher,” nor “education;” just a fraud on the gullible!
My niece would beg to differ. Having just received her PhD, she was head-hunted by AWE as a researcher at Aldermaston. She’s got the intelligence and the skills but she’s always been way ahead of her age group.
Most college students and graduates expect someone to give them a high paying job because they feel they deserve it, with no idea of the hard work and commitment to go out and get a job like that. Doing the barista, waitstaff jobs is just temporary until someone recognises their talents and hands them a job.
Reality always intrudes
Don’t we just hate it when that happens? And I didn’t win the lottery this week either! (Admittedly, my chances might have been somewhat better had I actually bought a ticket.)
The problem is the government needs to grow a proverbial pair, tell the greens to stick their wind and solar where the sun don’t shine, and just get the f on with it.
Every UK government since the 1970s has failed this test.
UK – ‘it’s green, cheaper in the long term’
Australia – ‘At the Investor Group on Climate Change Investment and Finance Summit, Bowen also called nuclear energy the slowest and most expensive form of alternative energy.’
That crown is wholly for wind and solar right now.
Nuclear is slow and expensive because of government regulation and bureaucracy on the one hand and one-off designs (on the whole) on the other. Streamline government approvals and safety checks, and get a company that will, essentially, mass produce several in one go then it will get cheaper.
Totally agree. Except for one problem. Government.
All modern governments will create a fraudulent banking system so they can spend as much as they want and go into debt. Eventually the debt becomes unsustainable and the currency collapses. This always happens because it MUST ALWAYS happen. That is the nature of government.
Nuclear waste has been described as nuclear debt for similar reasons. Dangerous toxic fuel rods in the U.S. just keep piling up. Sure they can be disposed of in a safe manner. But they will not be for exactly the same reasons. Government will continue to pile up nuclear debt until it destroys something.
Proposing “solutions” to this problem are always based on an imaginary idea of government. Governments will allow waste to pile up because that is the nature of government. It MUST ALWAYS happen.