Get those construction contacts signed!
And Hinkley Point was such a roaring success, let’s pour more money down the bottomless barrel!
Also it works so flawlessly for the French (not*), why not do it too?
*France is slowly overcoming stress-corrosion problems (35 out of 56 reactors were down, drought is another problem), and Finland celebrates the commissioning of a new reactor (albeit 14 years late), while on the other hand monthly German nuclear generation will be zero for the first time in over 50 years.
The real thing is the cost, the cost per kWh is falling so going nuke and locking in to a price that’s already above market makes no sense at all.
The Tories are ideologically opposed to renewables because of some weird culture war thing, plus they hate the idea of locally sustainable communities not being totally under the control of billionaires - people are a lot easier to scare into obedience when you can tell them their power might be shut off. The main reason though is huge projects can only go to huge companies, they don’t want lots of little solar farms they want their oil baron buddies to maintain their monopolies, that’s the only reason we still hear so much about this now allbut obsolete technology.
Burning coal is cheap, that’s why we’re here. I’ll pay more for electric today to leave a planet for our children. Wish my parents did that for me.
Only a fool would consider the cost in dollars alone.
Only a fool would advocate for paying way more for nuclear when renewables + storage are substantially cheaper.
If intermittent energy would be held to the same standards of sustained energy, you’d see the real price. Right now, the dirty secret is that renewables are integrated into our energy supply by having a crap-tonne of gas capacity (and importing nuclear energy from France) standing ready on poor renewable days.
Go look at any historic data of U.K. power generation. We have multiple periods every year where there’s barely any wind and solar generated for a week. How do you propose to supply exactly every Watt required, at every second of the day, running only on renewables?
If your answer is batteries or pumped storage then please go look at battery storage capacities and what a week of energy needs look like for the U.K.? You’d have to strip mine the entire planet’s worth of supply lithium and other required metals to be able to do it … and if you think nuclear is expensive, have a look at battery storage.
If your answer is “imports” then my retort would be that every country has to solve this problem and we can’t just “turtles all the way down”-solve this problem. On the same days that wind turbines are still in the U.K. they are still in Denmark, Norway, Germany. Where does the energy come from then? Oh, they’ll just import their electricity from Eastern Europe and we can buy their little renewable generation for that week? Ok, but then you’ve just transitioned to coal plants in Poland, by way of a long supply chain. Every country has to solve this problem.
If your answer is “we just need to build such an excess of renewables that we have enough even on still/gray days” then we are back to cost of guaranteed generation, which is how renewable energy providers should be measured anyway. Where does their backup come from? If you held renewable energy supplies liable for guaranteed supply rather than just accept “oh on some days, you can’t generate any power” you’d see a then buy their supply from backup gas. As they currently do, they can just squirm away from the accountability.
Having said that, I’m a HUGE fan of renewable/intermittent energy. We need to build more, fast! Lots and lots more.
But we do have to answer the uncomfortable question of how we back it up too. That’s included in the price of nuclear.
So what do we do? Import our way out of it, moving the generation to remote, cheap, foreign coal? Over, and over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly. Accept gas peak generation, thereby keeping carbon in the mix? Or nuclear?
I know which way I’d choose.
over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly
Compared to nuclear? Go check out the cost and schedule overruns for Hinkley C and then talk to me about cost. $40 billion and counting so far.
No, compared to the cost that proponents of an all-renewable strategy argue it would cost.
Both nuclear and massive-oversupply of renewables are pricey. The difference is one works on a quiet night, while the other doesn’t.
Show your math.
Sigh. Really?
I’ll show you all the world’s power grid planners, combined, making a choice to include nuclear in their decarbonised grid planning!
But I’m sure you know better than all of them.
Yeah, let’s just keep burning fossil fuels, amIrite?
