Wind Farm Cancelled

[Swwils]

Its very tricky to get such information, it varies alot.

For nuclear the capacity factor is so good that it becomes a quality of its own. Global average is about 82% certain examples operate at over 100% for periods.

For some plants, they produce so much reliable power for so long that more than 50% of the realised energy cost is actually subsidy payments to others. So you can see how the information would be tricky to digest.

In Germany Emsland, Isar II and Neckarwestheim II supplied a total of 32.7 billion kilowatt hours of low-emission electricity. They only started operation in 1988 and had life extensions in place before shutdown.

There is certainly no comparison in terms of output per material input over such big numbers. Are there any turbines designed to go 40 years? Maybe the new 15MW+ units are meant for longer operations.

[Joeboy]

Twenty years max on gas turbines. Multiples of and rotate out I suppose as degrading serviceable parts? Much the same as any large standard power plant. Melt the parts down for relifeing and go again with new components. Impressive figures from the German nukes. Just that spent rod disposal issue. Similar story with WT's for longevity, just not the continuity of power transmission but parts can be recycled simply.

[Mr Gus]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ni ... be-avoided

Same topic. (vattenfall) but in more detail..

& what will the new numbers per unit produced be on a uk build of a nuclear reactor for a broader picture!? ..which will be the same scenario correct !?

[Moxi]

As good as weather predictions are - you still end up with some overlap where a relatively inflexible grid values dispatchable power over intermittent supplies.

It's not fundamentally the same value energy, abit like how we fudge energy being worth the same over the whole country despite it not actually being so.

That being that case why is the clean up, safe storage and disposal of nuclear power stations decoupled from the unit cost of power they generate ?

In your first response did you mean "More valuable" or simply that properly costed nuclear power is much much more expensive ?

I appreciate its hard to put a cost on safe disposal yet seeing as we haven't managed to find something in the last forty years of looking.

Moxi

[Swwils]

The majority of nuclear waste from a big processor like France is.... Medical.

And no the energy is just simply more valuable for our purposes, it is incredibly cheap.

Not as cheap as coal but hey thanks for that recommendation.

[Ken]

I suspect we are not hearing the full story on this. Perhaps Vattenfall can just not afford it,raise the finance,have better things to invest in (onshore), have big warranty claim coming. All the things they do not want to make public and whilst they are at it they might as well have a dig at the CfD price, remember there is politics in business as well.

It is my understanding that all solar and wind makes sense without the CfD it is just that it provides reassurance to the financial men and therefore cheaper finance.

[Mr Gus]

+1 moxi.

The trite BS " flexible" argument that nuclear crowds oft put out is that of idiots, treating disposal & destruction as a bill to be ignored & picked up by the "dumb" taxpayer. ..far from the reality.

As you rightly say 40 years of looking & no-one wanting to give it a home, ..and still no brakes applied, in fact new "support" via govt funds for a recently redesignated "green energy" an "independent body designed to aid the delivery of nuclear projects" ...ha! a by hook or by crook department! (by any means possible)

COST of safely stored spent fuel detritus is an annual expense never factored into any argument for nuclear, in which case we need to add in the growing mounds annual associated spend & final cost per measured unit of production.

How much per !egawatt hour "all in" based on 40+ years of production storage & clean up? & projections for the future based on the "additional 40%" costings that has made vattenfall walk away.


Yucca storage facility accrues over 1 billion dollars per year in interest accrued from the 44 billion charged to taxpayers as part of disposal & storage costs.
Yucca was meant to be receiving waste by 1998 ... yucca plant for all its money has never been proven "safe" thus dry casks employed for US storage "temporarily" . .25 years later? ..no storage, defunded, deemed to have a risk of groundwater contamination.

And the explosion at the new mexico storage facility the cat litter "incident" costing several billion to resolve? "wrong sort of cat litter" for gods sakes!?

Professional outfit yeah!?

[Swwils]

Lets keep this rational.

While there's often a perception that the costs of waste disposal are 'decoupled' from the cost of nuclear power, the nuclear industry is in fact one of the few energy industries that does account for its full lifecycle cost, including waste management and decommissioning. These costs are incorporated into the price paid by consumers for nuclear-generated electricity.

Your point about Yucca Mountain is valid, and it's true that long-term storage has been a contentious issue. However, it's important to note that progress has been made elsewhere. For instance, Finland has successfully licensed and is constructing a deep geological repository for long-term waste storage. This means that technically feasible and safe solutions do exist, also the majory of this waste is legacy by-product from various weapons projects etc. If you really wanted, you could reduce the waste profile if you just generated energy - but we dont bother.

Even factoring in waste disposal and decommissioning, the cost of nuclear energy is competitive with other forms of electricity generation. When we take into account the intermittency of wind power, the need for backup power sources, and the costs of grid integration, nuclear becomes an even more cost-effective option.

While incidents like the one in New Mexico are unfortunate, they are not representative of the entire industry. The nuclear industry has an excellent safety record. Incidents are taken seriously, studied extensively to prevent recurrence, and used to improve the robustness of safety measures everywhere.

Essentially you cannot ignore the exceptionally low emissions profile of nuclear and the volume of waste produced by nuclear power is substantially less than that of most other energy sources when considered on a per-unit-of-energy-produced basis - which is why its silly to not have it in your toolkit.

[Moxi]

Swwils,

I completely agree with everything you just said and I post an excerpt from the world nuclear association that effectively says exactly that - my point was your statement that nuclear was better than wind wasn’t correct on most fronts especially cost - as the world nuclear association affirms.

I’m not nuclear bashing, I’ve operated in every sector of civil nuclear so I’m familiar with the good and the bad. I just don’t see the UK government treating wind and nuclear on a level playing field and let’s face it for a small uplift in the promised CfD they could make all those wind farms viable again without it costing as much as Hinckley C’s CfD but the chances of that are slim so that’s more generation lost that could be on the bars before a second nuclear station gets going - possibly even before Hink C. I also reaffirm here that nuclear power is best run under the state control and if you doubt that take a good long read of the Nuclear association pages as even they agree it’s hard to finance a new Nuke in deregulated markets.

We need base load prime movers it could be big batteries but equally it could be nukes under the right conditions but let’s not just say they’re better than wind because I have loaded many cubic meters of fuel element debris into boxes and grouted them before placing them in overpacks for interim storage of a hundred years and that’s after it’s sat in the FED vaults for thirty odd years and even after all that time it still needs to be re assessed for integrity and assayed before being placed backs into safe store for another period of managed decay. That’s FED the vitrified material I have helped to put in to safe store will be hanging around for centuries, just like CO2 we pump into the air, but in a more confined space of a couple of large buildings somewhere in the UK. So all that work over twenty years tells me that Nuclear isn’t cheap isn’t clean and isn’t something people should consider a good model for making profits. It’s reliable when left to operate in steady state, it’s well understood and safe if operated on a not for profit basis so it’s got a place in the energy mix but it’s not better than wind - it is simply different. But it shouldn’t be afforded any preferential economics.

So the nuclear association clip and link:
minimized.The European Commission launched a project, ExternE, in 1991 in collaboration with the US Department of Energy – the first research project of its kind "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU". The methodology considers emissions, dispersion and ultimate impact. With nuclear energy, the risk of accidents is factored in along with high estimates of radiological impacts from mine tailings (waste management and decommissioning being already within the cost to the consumer). Nuclear energy averages 0.4 euro ¢/kWh, much the same as hydro; coal is over 4.0 ¢/kWh (4.1-7.3), gas ranges 1.3-2.3 ¢/kWh and only wind shows up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 ¢/kWh average. NB these are the external costs only. If these costs were in fact included, the EU price of electricity from coal would double and that from gas would increase 30%. These are without attempting to include the external costs of global warming.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-l ... power.aspx

Moxi

[Swwils]

UK doesn't have a great history of smart nuclear choices, not for want or trying.

As "good" as magnox was just... Yeah.

The scale of battery storage required is just unfathomable. Even the EU commission struggling with the maths.

We are in a pickle and we need all the tools we can get!

Quite like the idea of a ever increasing ice cube into the ocean, hence solving the problem once and for all.