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.
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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.”
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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.
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The LCOE formula fails to account for intermittency. It accouts for interest rates, but simply sums up total energy produced.
The problem is that energy only has value when it is produced at the right time, otherwise it is a liability.
If you have a power supply that has a capacity factor of 50%, then at best 1/2 the time it is delivering power when needed and 1/2 the time it is not.
So really you should multiply the total energy by the capacity factor to get an measure of useful energy, rather than using total energy in LCOE.
Correct, factory owners with large capital investment in energy hungry plant that need to run 24 hrs a day to repay their cost are not interested in low cost wind/solar power when its midnight and the wind is 2 mph.
The perfect antidote would be a) to get rid of Government which over 30 years caused the problem; b) to get rid of net zero and restore the 50%+ electricity production from coal providing base load with gas in the mix to give flexibility.
Nuclear is expensive and not needed long time to construct – we need electricity now.
It is just the most expensive face-saver for the nitwits in charge.
Can nuclear and unchanging human nature ever expect anything other than what we have seen so far?
Go over to the sidebar here and click on “ENSO/SST Page” – then go down to the SST anomaly map and click on that. Click on the picture for a larger view.
Look at the one area with the values at the extreme end of the anomaly scale. Hint – Japan.
If anyone knows anything about this – other than what seems to be the obvious – I would really like to hear about it.
One of the biggest obstacles to expanding nuclear power capacity has nothing to do with capacity factors, regulatory burden, or fuel cycles. It’s the loss of the manufacturing capability to build the plants. In the 1960s and 70s, there were a number of foundries that could manufacture the pressure vessels and steam generators used in PWR construction. Now, they all come from Japan or China.
If the US wants to build more nuclear plants, the process should start with (re-)developing the ability to manufacture the specialized components needed to make them. Relying on other countries and shipping them across the world cannot support timely construction of any significant number of new power plants. We did this to ourselves by shipping our industrial base overseas to save money.