Why is EU leccy cheaper

[Joeboy]

EU electricity can be cheaper due to differences in regulation, transmission charges, energy mix, and market size, but UK energy production is crucial for resilience, control over energy supply, and meeting environmental goals; examining France and Germany shows how nuclear power can effectively achieve low electricity prices and emissions.

I'd rather see embedded nukes run than lignite mined and spewed (although I don't know their filter systems so could be wildly overstating). Just that naughty waste storage problem with nukes. Need a good algae strain with hot conversion properties ..

[Swwils]

A good way to frame it for people is;

Every spent fuel cask is 200 million tonnes of co2 that wasn't emitted.

If we bothered with more breeders 90% of those casks could be recycled.

If they are so concerned about waste why don't they support things to store it properly rather than leave it out and about?

[Joeboy]

A good way to frame it for people is;

Every spent fuel cask is 200 million tonnes of co2 that wasn't emitted.

What weight are the contents and then the whole cask, for comparison?

If we bothered with more breeders 90% of those casks could be recycled.
Why has this not happened, seems reasonable if a 90% reduction can be achieved and plants have a 100% historical. This is NOT a loaded question, I genuinely Don't know.

If they are so concerned about waste why don't they support things to store it properly rather than leave it out and about?

Ah, the ultimate human stumbling block, who is 'they', assuming entire species who constantly search for 'they', to blame, look up to, pursue?

Cheers!

[Swwils]

Caviat, not an expert but in my understanding;

The number of fuel assemblies varies by reactor. A large pressurised water reactor typically has 150-250 fuel assemblies, each containing 200-300 fuel rods.

After they are out they are cooled submersed and then most places dry store them in cask.

A typical holteck cask holds about 20 standard PWR assemblies, or 70 standard BWR assemblies. Its outer diameter is 3.3m height 5.8m. Cooled by natural circulation.

Cask room is about 70m long, 40m wide and 20m high. Will store 200 casks. (They don't generally get stacked).

All fuel assemblies ever discharged in the history of the USA power reactor history would fit in about 8600 dry casks.

Typical reactors get about 50 MWd/kg out of their fuel on average, which represents roughly 5% of the total nuclear energy in each pellet. The rest is regular U-238, which is usable as fuel in breeder reactors.

So if you did that, the stack of leftover fission products out on the floor in a single cask room, then would be just 15 cm high.

The reason we don't recycle the fuel is pretty complicated, it does happen in french LWRs that are meant to operate a "closed fuel cycle". Most long-term sustainable nuclear plans involve using breeder reactors plus recycling. We just never got around to the long term bit.

The use once fuel cycle (it's from the 1950s) is very cheap and we have enough uranium for a long time. Reprocessing is more expensive than this and you get some plutonium aswell that noone wants stolen. Which is the primary driver why the USA doesn't recycle.

I guess it's a big "they "- if I had an issue with something I would support efforts to deal with it priority 1; but often people just want things stopped.which leaves things jammed up and the issue persisting which seems counterintuitive.

It's catch 22, you need long term supporters to 90% reduces the waste but the waste isn't dealt with without long term supporters.

So instead burn coal that's also cheap.

[nowty]

When I worked in the nuke industry back in the 80's I had high hopes for our prototype fast breeder reactor at Dounreay to turn into a new generation of plutonium burning reactors which produced more new fuel then they used. The reality was very different, it closed for good only a few years later, most other countries who dabbled in it gave up too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned.[59][60]


Germany built one, spent 7 billion Deutsche Marks on it and did not even turn it on before giving up and its now an amusement park. How ironic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

[Mart]

Good video here from Rethink (also a great series of vids). Rethink X are the guys who with Tony Seba, look at disruptive technologies, and their impact.

The vid basically explains why nuclear is simply no longer viable, economically. Even if we were willing to tolerate all the delays, problems, waste, and costs.

[Swwils]

Fortunately many countries aren't taking his advice.

You need the be various dubious of any magical battery technology claims, as much as we would like that to be feasible.

[dan_b]

Found this article - some interesting nuggets in here as to why the UK prices are so much higher than in the EU

https://www.energyvoice.com/opinion/444 ... d-the-cap/

[Moxi]

The problem we had with Dounreay's fast breeders was we were trying to extract useful power at the same time as we tried to breed new fuel and transmute waste and as the then UKAEA found out you cant'. Breeders will do one thing well at a time and thats where they dropped it because once again the remit for the fast breeder reactor programme was can UK plc sell a reactor technology abroad and since it wasn't considered economically attractive we binned it.

Maybe the government should have taken the investment they had made in the sixties and seventies and used it to prove definitively if transmutation of radioactive daughter products is viable or not as this approach to waste reduction is still not a fully proven concept. Strontium 90 and Ceasium 137 are cited as potentially being extremely tolerant of further Neutron bombardment and therefore difficult to break down into shorter lived products.

If they had done then at least we would know what the Breeder reactor could do with regard to waste reduction rather than fuel breeding - France and America are considering this question anew although America has limited investigations to preparing a scope of work to achieve their ambitions.

Russia was reportedly running a fast breer reactor as part of its plutonium reduction agreement but the BN800 is specifically designed to burn mixed uranium and plutonium as a fuel at the core rather than being equipped with stillages to allow non fissionable waste to be bombarded by fast neutrons at the outer breeding zone which in the case of the BN800 is set up to investigate the viability of the Uranium Plutonium closed fuel cycle.

Like many things nuclear you have people who are pro citing the Breeder as the answer to all the problems and Anti nuclear citing its proliferation capability. I'm in the middle, its got potential but it has to be set up to do the specific job and that will cost money to investigate and then if its proven feasible it will probably not run as anything but a waste reduction unit and therefore continue to cost to run ?

Its a bit like the older Magnox stations - you either ran them to make heat and thus power or you ran them to produce "other stuff" and you forwent power production.

Private investment wants a return on investment, Nuclear power is by nature is large scale and long lead in and therefore doesn't lend itself to private investment.

Moxi