Wind & nuclear together. Britain already has large wind installations, since the sea to the east is quite shallow (it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago). Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
AFAIK the cost of nuclear is building it, but not running it. If you have enough nuclear to provide enough energy when there is no wind, then why do you need to build wind energy at all?
One immediate reason is its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors. Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind. We're deploying wind farms in large numbers right now (and even sometimes connecting them to the grid).
This slow buildout will logically limit nuclear power to a minor role in the UK. By the time we could possibly build out large amounts of nuclear it seems likely we will already have built out large amounts of cheap wind power. With some battery storage and solar this can cover us for 90-95% of the year. For the remainder we will need dispatchable backup power. That will be gas and maybe at some point green hydrogen or its derivatives.
I suspect we will always keep around a little nuclear to maintain expertise for strategic national security reasons but it is hard to see nuclear power making sense in an energy market dominated by intermittent renewables like the UK.
> its going to take another decade (conservatively) to even build one of these modular reactors.
So nuclear reactors can be built to supply the energy and power as the offshore wind farms get decommissioned. The rise and fall.
> Another is the vast cost of nuclear compared to wind.
What do you mean by cost? Capital expenditure per kW of nominal capacity, or by total energy generated? Plus should we consider other costs (backup, transmission, curtailment)?
A big part of the cost is design. China has built a lot of nuclear capacity at a low cost by essentially copying and pasting the same design, something that should be even easier with SMRs.
Relatively low cost. The cost of PV has dropped much faster and they’re building much more of it, even compared to their plans from a decade ago. SMRs are supposed to be the design that solves this, essentially moving nuclear into the same “build it at mass scale in a factory” footing that solar PV is on. But solar is deep down the production curve and SMRs are just beginning it.
Take California. The minimum demand is 15 GW and peak demand 52 GW.
What you’re saying is they they should use extremely expensive nuclear power to cover the easy portion and then have renewables when they are the most strained supply 37 GW.
Why not just cheap renewables for everything?
New built power literally does not make sense when real constraints are added.
Suppose you need 10GW of power for an absolute baseline. Enough to heat homes to a temperature that people don't freeze to death on a cold day, to keep power to hospitals and other critical services, etc. Then you need another 10GW on top of that to run aluminum smelters and heat homes to 80°F instead of 60°F and things like that.
If you have 20GW (average) of wind but you get an extended period of low generation and the batteries run down, people die. If you have 10GW (average) of wind and 10GW of nuclear and you get an extended period of low wind generation, the price of electricity goes up that week and people turn off their aluminum smelters and things but nobody dies. If you have 20GW of nuclear you can run the aluminum smelter 52 weeks a year instead of 51 but then people are paying more for electricity than they would with renewables in the mix, which isn't worth it.
Because it's not that simple. If you want 100% availability year-round then you need about 2X overproduction and quite a lot of storage, not just the four hours normally paired with solar today. That could end up being more expensive than nuclear.
But that doesn't change the fact that solar on the margins, without the availability requirement, is quite a bit cheaper than nuclear. So going 100% nuclear probably isn't the cheapest option either. The optimum is a mix in the middle somewhere.
The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.
SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.
Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that.
They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option.
Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable.
Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai.
This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year.
The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear.
Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor.
Please no more of Stop Sizewell C's Alison Downes a.k.a. (Moira) Alison Reynolds [0] & [1], who also happens to be one of the directors of the Greenpeace Environmental Trust [2].
> That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
> I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. By France did you mean EDF? And which power station are you referring to?
I am not sure either. But they keep increasing the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 program, and they still haven't been able to pass them.
The French government just fell due to being underwater while being completely unable to handle it. A massive handout of tax money to the nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1]
You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it.
As usual the answer is likely to be a combination of energy sources. It's not wind and solar (+storage) OR nuclear, it's wind and solar (+storage) AND nuclear (and of course other energy sources when appropriate).
But SMRs address the capex costs by reducing time and resources needed to provision them. The "M" stands for "modular" after all, ie components can be built offsite and imported, and capacity can be added incrementally.
That’s the theory, it has yet to be proven in practice.
Even by their own claims, the caped may be smaller but the $/MWh is substantially higher than large plants, and will stay so even after multiple doubling a of production.
If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely. And the contrapositive as well: if SMRs are not cheap enough to displace solar and wind, they aren't cheap enough to act as backup. The scenario where it's just a backup never arises in cost minimized solutions.
> If SMRs are cheap enough to act as backup to wind and solar, they are cheap enough to displace wind and solar entirely.
That doesn't follow necessarily. Wind & solar being the most cost effective doesn't mean you remove all backups just because they aren't as cost effective.
Its the other way around. If you have sufficient nuclear to act as a backup, then you have sufficient that you do not need the wind and solar in addition.
My point still stands though given that I specifically did not exclude any scenario. It makes more sense to optimize when you include all energy sources. It's still possible some sources won't end up in the final solution and that's fine.
If taking that step, why charge the batteries with extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity rather than cheap renewables?
It is done when moving electricity around when the grid is strained. Buy expensive electricity and sell it at even higher prices. But that is a vanishly tiny portion of the demand.
What is needed is an alternative storage that minimizes capex, even if that means operating at lower round trip efficiency. Hydrogen or ultra low capex thermal storage.
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government.
Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.
Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.
Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.
The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.
People have a problem with spent fuels sitting in pools for decades, as happens in Sellafield.
"Originally constructed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s these facilities - two ponds and two concrete silos - no longer meet the safety requirements that are required today and present some of the most difficult decommissioning challenges - not just in the UK - but in the world."
The industry does not have a good reputation, and it only has itself to blame for that.
The opposition to nuclear waste hazards isn't so much about "now" as about the far future. Hot alpha emitters which stay that way for 2K, 10K, 100K years.
Granted, there's other stuff in deep mines and mountains whose chemical toxicity and carcinogenicity is perhaps the equal of plutonium's radioactivity (lead, asbestos, mercury) and whose harms are similarly subtle and hard for unsophisticated people to detect, but as an environmental pollutant it's worse if it gets out due to sheer persistency.
And also granted, where long-term views are a concern, CO2 is going to continue to screw things up for at least 200 years, maybe not 2000.
But most of the eco-folk have argued for energy efficiency, for not treating the planet like something we can just do whatever we want to. Unfortunately the trend is in the other direction, with capitalism demanding endless growth even when the gains are negligible. So people buy trucks even when the marginal utility over a compact car with 25% of the energy consumption is wafer-thin, and fly long-haul for almost no advantage over a short-haul trip.
How much fossil fuel are acceptable to burn, should subsidizes count to the total cost, should grid connections and transport count to the total cost, and what is the time frame? Is the market allowed to freely spike based on supply and demand with no price roof?
The service that the money is paying for is to have a grid that is always producing enough energy for any demand at any given time. Having 10gw/h today but 0 tomorrow is worth close to zero. If people are asked how much they are willing to pay in order to not get disconnected, the current record in spot price are 580.55 per MWh (that is market price before taxes, connection fees, and so on). How long voters would accept a elevated price is a question that many countries in EU saw answered following the energy crisis.
So the best value for the money is the cheapest one that provide the service that people demand when all the costs are accounted for, and that does not cause voters to elect a new governments in order to have it solved.
A lot of this depends on the scale - and cost (two way relationship) of domestic battery rollout.
An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure.
It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough.
But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week.
Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.
Fall back on your domestic battery, which stores a thousand kettles' worth of energy.
If it's going to stay still and cloudy for a full week, from Jersey all the way up to Orkney, consider running things leaner than usual for a bit. Microwave instead of oven, showers every two days instead of every day, e-moped instead of eSUV to work.
(The outrage some will be feeling at this demonstrates exactly how spoilt we are in the West.)
The definition of prosperity, atleast to me is that even if something as natural as there being a bit less wind, or a few more clouds, or a small riot in the next town, my life can go on unchanged.
Just knowing that you don't need to plan and budget for scarcity is something that takes an incredible load off my mind.
I come from a place which has seen wide spread blackouts during hot summers, and know that I do not want my children to face that.
Maybe I am being naive here, but to me, the whole point of doing more with less is so that we can bring up the billions of people less fortunate than us, to have the same or better standards of living as usual, not making our standards worse!
The aim should be to grow the pie, not shrink our shares.
Two related but often confused concepts. Standards of living, quality of life.
We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier.
So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised.
I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.
> Two related but often confused concepts. Standards of living, quality of life.
>
> We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier.
>
> So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised.
>
> I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.
Growing up, I have always wanted to go and spend time in Italy. I am sure that there are countless other folks, from places emerging from the shadows of war, pestilence and suffering with similar dreams.
Who are we to say that no, you should instead go tour only places nearby?
Whenever there is scarcity of anything, the rich rarely suffer, but the farmer in rural rayalseema will go without. I fear that if we bake in this "encouragement" into costs of electricity (say), it is not a software engineer who will go drive in a moped, but a day labourer.
The issue with mopeds is not just that you consume less electricity, but that you put your life at risk!
At the risk of digressing, I am all for getting rid of two wheelers for non recreational use. They are bloody death traps (A person dying on a moped or bike does not even make local news in india). In my family alone, we have lost 3 cousins from my father's side to two wheele accidents) So no, not overbuilding only means that poor suffer more, for no good reason.
Would you like to go visit Italy? Of course, who wouldn't. But understand that the CO2 burden of a return flight from India to Rome is somewhere around 2-3x what the planet can sustain, per person, per year, and that for all the hype, carbon-neutral aviation fuel is so far nothing more than a dream. And you're telling me that you've seen all the wonders of the world within a short-haul flight from home?
So once in a lifetime? Sure. But if people do this routinely, the planet pays, which means someone somewhere pays. Our environmental debt is like a maxed-out bank loan at this point. And those people will paying the price will almost all be poor. Tell me what's more likely: a future where the poor get to fly to Italy every year, or a future where the rich and not-quite-rich do that until we really do run out of room on climate.
In my city we're using electric two-wheelers increasingly. It requires good road design, low speed limits (20mph or even 25kph), high standard of driver training, and well-designed vehicles with good brakes etc. With those things in place, it's possible to operate them safely, and on 1/20th the energy budget of full-sized EVs. 20mph doesn't sound like much, but in a big city it's fast enough to cover a lot of ground, and do so in relative safety.
True, but for most places you'll now be dependent on some other country selling you uranium. Which is something many countries are now factoring in into these kind of decisions.
Depends on over provision then. If lowest demand in the grid is 20GW, average 30GW highest demand is 50GW then you need to be able to generate 50GW, despite nuclear costs only being specced assuming they can always find 20GW of customers.
It’s the same problem as wind has where demand and supply are variable.
Nuclear cant scale up in an affordable cost as the first GW is amortised over 8,760 hours a year, but the top 10GW is only needed 50 hours a year. If it’s £8760 to generate 10GW for a year, that means you have to spend £43,800 to be able to cope with a peak of 50GW, but the average demand of 30GW means the average cost is £14,600 - 65% more than the average “base load”
No good answer to which is better for the money. I say bring it all.
Diversity in renewable energy sources is important for grid resilience. Some areas are gonna be terrible for solar and good for wind. Some areas might not have proper water access for nuclear.
Wind and solar are extremely unstable. Spain had a country-wide blackout earlier this year because of reactors being off. Days with peak solar and wind (heavily subsidized) made nuclear not viable. But you need a stable source to keep the grid from collapsing (and not fry appliances), like nuclear or hydro. It's like both a pace-maker and a goakeeper.
So you need a mix. Small reactors fix the problem of NIMBY caused by decades of fearmongering (now slowly reversing).
Nonsense. For a stable grid you need inertia. Traditionally this has been provided by the spinning mass of turbines, but there's no technical reason why those have to be used.
For example, the UK has been building a bunch of "synchronous condensers" for this reason - essentially a giant flywheel. Battery storage can easily provide a massive amount of inertia as well - provided it is configured to operate that way.
The Spain blackout was mostly caused by misconfiguration. It is not in any way representative of any inherent characteristic of a renewable grid.
Nuclear is surprisingly expensive and solar/wind/storage is surprisingly cheap. Even solar in the UK has better economics than nuclear, and it has no shortage of wind.
Unless there is a shortage of wind on a given day/week/month. Then the cheapness is no longer surprising ― you are literally paying only what it costs to provide the electricity now, not at any point in the future.
Maybe the guarantee of 24/7 supply is actually worth something?
The outcome of Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 6 suggests wind isn't cheap compared to wholesale electricity prices in the UK, which are already one of the highest in the world. The maths is quite simple.
And that doesn't include curtailment costs, which are not insignificant.
The average strike price for offshore wind in AR6 came in at £59.90/MWh. That's pretty cheap, and much cheaper than any new nuclear. Hinkley Point C's strike price is £92.50/MWh. (note: strike prices are always quoted based on 2012 currency, and get adjusted for inflation)
You can't really compare strike prices to spot prices on the wholesale market precisely because there's so much supply under CfD contracts, which distorts the wholesale market. When supply is abundant, the wholesale price plummets and even goes negative, yet suppliers still want to generate because they get the CfD price. When supply is constrained (eg: cold snaps in winter with little wind), the spot price can surge to £1000/MWh.
In 2024 money offshore was £102 offshore, onshore £89. AR7 estimates are >10% higher. Those prices were not high enough for Hornsea 4, who cancelled the contract (with a big write down for the entire project) after being awarded it.
Yes, like I said, UK CfD strike prices (both nuclear and wind) are always quoted in 2012 prices.
But even adjusting for inflation, offshore wind's £59.90 is a fraction of the retail price that UK consumers and most businesses pay for electricity. There's plenty of margin left for the middlemen (regulator, grid operator, distribution network operator, electricity retailer, etc).
... and Hinkley Point C's £92.50 is £133.79 today, and could be £160+ by the time it actually starts generating in (maybe?) 2031.
Nuclear and security, that’s a good one especially nowadays when companies tend to connect everything to the internet and drone wars are a thing since the war in Ukraine.
What ‘cult-like’ love would this be? If you are in a climate emergency it’s worth exploring all energy options and nuclear is one option for helping with baseload. It would be dumb to ignore it.
Just cut off the general public from power for like 1/6th of the day instead of going for unsafe solutions. Considering the amount of bullshit we power nowadays we can surely live without power for some hours of the day until we find better solutions.
There's nothing inherently unsafe about small nuclear reactors. We've been using them safely since the 50s. You can look it up, you have the entire history of the world at your fingertips. Here's a fun fact: the bloke that was the first commander of a nuclear powered submarine (1954!) went on to be the first commander of a nuclear powered boat. And he got to live till 90+ yo. The tech is safe. The fear-mongering people are boring. It's literally the reason we can't have cool shit.
The waste produced by solar/wind is no different that waste produced by general economic activity. The US produces about 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste each year; solar/wind waste will be small fraction of this.
So, the solar/wind waste bugbear is a red herring, since dealing with it involves solving a problem that would have to be solved in a nuclear-powered economy also.
The opposite is not true of nuclear waste: there is no high activity radioactive waste stream in a non-nuclear economy.
That sounds like a pretty unsafe solution, it'll injure people. What if a member of the general public trips while stumbling around in the dark? Or gets food poisoning from improperly refrigerated food?
It's The Ukraine in German and many other gendered languages. In German it's the feminine gender (die) and cannot be avoided when constructing sentences because the article used can completely change the meaning of the sentence.
The whole of Europe needs to get on with energy security and Britain can and should be a leader here, next to Netherlands, Sweden and France.