Get those construction contacts signed!
As far as I’m aware, we don’t have any natural deposits of fissonable material in the UK so we’ll bot be truly independent. Green energy is what we need for that, we have plenty of wind, waves and sunlight.
Raw materials are not the choke point for nuclear energy independence- enrichment facilities are, of which the UK has three that produce an exportable surplus. Even if it was, Canada and Australia are second and third in the world in Uranium reserves, which is convenient for the country that houses their King.
Nuclear energy is green- it’s the only energy worldwide that internalizes its externalities and is made to cost what it costs to the environment.
Demanding tithes of nuclear material from commonwealth nations by royal decree is so wonderfully neo-feudal sci-fi, I love it.
And if the royal decree doesn’t work I suppose we could pay them for it but it’s better to not try that one out of the box just in case it works.
Sorry but that’s an absurd way to construe the point I was making. “Energy Independence” when used in a geopolitical context involves essentially fuel-exporting nations exploiting their supply chain position in order to win political concessions from importers- such as Russia holding Northern Europe hostage over oil and fossil gas in response to European resistance to the invasion of Ukraine. Commonwealth nations share close relationships that are unlikely to degenerate to the point where Australia or Canada are invading their neighbors and holding the UK’s electricity hostage.
I know, I was just having a bubble, I sware people are far to literal on thos site compared to Reddit.
I don’t know if that’s true lol, this is reddit we’re talking about.
But yeah, I missed that you were pisstaking; my b.
I mean, we can’t even build a rail line on time or to budget, I can’t see us being able to build nuclear reactors any time soon.
Starmer Voice Where I come from, we’re not great at building rail lines because we’re too busy railing lines from the bosom of this beautiful nation
Nuclear power is green energy.
Technically yes, it still creates some waste to be dealt with. I guess arguably you have the same with decommissioned turbines, solar panels, etc with other forms.
UK, plenty of sunlight? Edit: for the down voter, this is what the UK thinks of the sun https://lemmy.tf/post/538103
This year’s been a bit odd with all the rain, but we’ve been having great summers of late. We get plenty of sun the winter too despite the temperature.
It’s a bit of a meme that the UK is always rainy. It isn’t always rainy, it does rain a lot but it doesn’t rain anywhere close to all the time and when it’s not raining it can get quite hot, quite unbearably in fact because we don’t have air conditioning.
Anyway heat isn’t really relevant to solar panels, what they really need is just sunlight in general, and we get plenty of that even if it isn’t particularly hot. In fact solar panels don’t actually like being particularly hot so they probably won’t work very well in the Sahara desert. Despite what everyone may think.
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone and I wish that wasn’t the case. Pairing renewables with emission free nuclear is the only option we really have to meet current and future demands without fossil fuels.
Google search found some uranium in England: https://www.nature.com/articles/246180a0.pdf
You can definitely achieve more if you can work the supply-side as well. In theory if the smart grid were well executed then it’d be possible for consumers to modulate their heat, charging, tumble dryers etc… to provide more elasticity.
Unfortunately in a lot of places the incentives aren’t that high. I don’t have that option where I live, but in denver the lowest consumer rate is around 7c and the highest around 17c/kWh. It’s hard to invest in new appliances to exploit that difference, but if the off-peak number were 1c then I think you’d see much more take-up of smart car chargers and people delaying when they do laundry.
So how does modulation work? Does the smart grid turn off dryers until midnight? Does the dryer have to be compatible with the drig? I’ve never heard of this and am interested.
Yeah, you can get electric car chargers where you can set rules something like “Charge whenever power is under 5c/kWh, but try to make sure i’ve 60% charge by 8am each weekday”. Logically you could have a thermostat control AC - we’ve been playing with that at work because our power goes up at 1pm, so we turn down the thermostat at 12:00 and then turn it up at 1:00 so it shunts some of the cooling a little earlier.
I’ve never seen a tumble drier that can do it, for some reason mine has WiFi but can’t do shit like that. But, yeah I imagine the rule I’d want would be : Dry this anytime in the next 4 hours, and try to spend as little as possible.
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone
They absolutely can when paired with storage. Nuclear is absolutely not needed.
Storage? Like battery storage? Lead? Lithium? Go on, tell me more.
Or will we flood river valleys? What are you thinking?
Batteries of all kinds, compressed air, green hydrogen, pumped storage, flywheels, etc.
I took graduate level courses in storage with these technologies at scale. Neat that this knowledge is useful again.
Pumped and compressed require specific geologic formations. Most of the sites for pumped have already been developed in NA. There’s room for growth for compressed, but compressed also suffers from losses when the air that’s pumped into the crust cools. Hopefully, there are undeveloped compressed sites near regions with energy demands.
Flywheels are a neat idea and still just that: an idea. It’s yet to been demonstrated they can reliably do more than grid frequency moderation. The reason it’s not very attractive to investors is that we don’t have materials to match the energy density of other technologies.
Green hydrogen is also just an idea at the present. Nobody’s pursues this because of losses incurred generating hydrogen from water. I want this one to work!
Finally, batteries. Do you think there are enough metals on the planet to build enough batteries for current and future demand?
Is your contention that a combination of all the methods I listed is insufficient for a renewable future that doesn’t include nuclear?
Yes, nuclear is the only one that’s sufficiently developed, with a supply chain that’s sufficiently developed, that’s ready for deployment right now.
The others could get there some day, and I hope they do, but we cannot wait for that.
It’s not. We HAVE to have baseline power generation. Today that comes by either burning fossil fuels, or nuclear, with hydro/geo etc making up a trivial percentage. Only oil industry propaganda conflates nuclear with solar/wind.
Iron-air batteries seem rather promising for being cheap and scalable
Another person who doesn’t understand power-grids being anti-nuclear, wow!
So educate me, if you can. Your comment contributed nothing of value.
Oh no, we will have to buy it from that evil super state Australia!!!
How many dollerydoos do they want for it?
And Hinkley Point was such a roaring success, let’s pour more money down the bottomless barrel!
It’s an obvious distraction pushing the topic of nuclear power again, just days after they prepared to open massive new oil and gas production sites while stifling the well-going UK wind industry.
But there are enough people out there brain-washed by decades of anti-renewable propaganda that it will work. And in the end we have just another country failing to build the proper amount of nuclear base load AND the proper amount of renewables… but at least someone smart “thought ahead” and worked for enough fossil fuels to compensate.
The conservatives just operate on the assumption that everybody else doesn’t have a clue what’s going on because they don’t.
I bet they were told that the nuclear commission were going to open another power plant and just ignored them and gave out the oil drilling contracts anyway.
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.
Storage? Like battery storage? Lead? Lithium? Go on, tell me more.
Or will we flood river valleys? What are you thinking?
And only a fool would think that Renewables + [magical] storage was sufficient on it’s own.
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.
You could have made an actual argument here… but then you decided on the “renewables only work because of nuclear imports from France” fairy tale.
And we all know that this is a lie and also who likes to tell it. So please, stop reading that bullshit and use those trash tabloids as the only thing they are somewhat useful as: toilet paper …
I no point did I make that argument. I posed a series of questions. Right now renewables only integrate because of masses of gas plants.
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.
You’d have to strip mine the entire planet’s worth of supply lithium and other required metals to be able to do it
Neither of these are questions. These are statements. False ones repeated again and again by the same fossil fuel and nuclear lobbyists lying to you.
Oh, sorry. No. They don’t lie. They pay millions for desinformation so people like you tell the lie while seriously thinking it’s true. That might actually be worse even but ymmv…
Actually coal energy is expensive. Renewable energy is cheap energy.
Nope, burning coal was cheap a long time ago and allowed the people to accululate enough wealth to push for more coal (and brain-wash people to believe coal is cheap; and also how expensive renewables are). Just like the nuclear producers did decades ago to tell the tale of how there’s no alternative to nuclear.
The actual reality looks like this. And if you think that you need to pay more for electricity to not destroy the planet that’s already their propaganda having done their work.
Dollars is a metric that is easy to understand and complex problems are complex. Do you really think it’s that simple?
Some parts of it are… there is a certain amount of either nuclear base load or storage infrastructure needed.
But more than 50% renewables are easily doable without much strain on modern grids (modern models for nuclear usually plan with ~30-35% minimal base load needed…).
Also another argument for specific fossil fuels -domestic availability and thus more independence- is also a pro argument for renewables.
So no matter where you stand, if you are not at least using (or planning to use in near future) 50% cheap renewables in your electricity mix (or see narratives about expensive renewables even) then you know that the decision is not taken for economic reasons but because decision makers are getting money to stick with more fossil fuels than necessary.
Renewables are an economical no-brainer right now. Actual complexity of balancing out their fluctuating production with base load or storage comes much later (although in the case of nuclear the build times are often long enough that you should start soon). And still there are so many countries so far away from the absolute no-brainer amount of renewables.
Hundred percent. I’m happy that the UK is considering going nuclear for the other 50% instead of just saying, “we’ve done 50% wind and solar so we’re done. Let’s jut burn coal and gas for the remaining 50%.”
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.
I totally agree and it is the same for Germany. That’s why especially wind energy for South Germany was held back for so long, how dare communities go energy independent. It seems the resistance there is broken now, at least I hope it is and not just an election promise that gets broken after the Bavarian election.
Germany’s logic for energy is wild.
“Our biggest supplier for fossil fuels is imploding from failing to conquer a neighbor a tenth their size, let’s become even more reliant on them for energy”
The cost of burning fossil fuels isn’t measured in pounds or dollars. Nuclear is the only tech we have that can meet current and future load. We must pair it with renewables. There is no other option right now and if we wait for fusion, it’ll be too late.
And Germany added 36M tons of emissions because they replaced the decommissioned reactors with fossil gas.
Yeah, if you tell that lie often enough it will surely become true one day… Seriously, it will happen. Just another ten thousand times or so. By current rates that should be doable by the nuclear-cult on social media in only a few weeks, so you are sooooo close to changing reality…
This happens all the time. It happened to New York State after the decommission of Indian Point, it happened to Germany, it literally happens everywhere nuclear reactors are decommissioned, because fossil fuels provide the reliable and tunable capacity of nuclear power with explicit domestic and foreign subsidies driving down its cost. We keep talking about renewables displacing fossil fuels but German fossil gas consumption is going up, not down.
The last three nuclear power plants generated 6.7 TWh until their shutdown on April 15. In the first half of 2022, the figure was 15.8 TWh.
Coal-fired power generation also fell: Lignite-fired power plants generated about 41.2 TWh, a sharp decline of 21 percent from 2022 (52.1 TWh). Net production from coal-fired power plants also decreased by 23 percent, from 26.2 TWh in 2022 down to 20.1 TWh in 2023. Electricity generation from natural gas decreased only slightly from 24.3 TWh to 23.4 TWh. In addition to gas-fired power plants for the public power supply, gas-fired plants in the mining and manufacturing sectors also supply the industrial own consumption. These approximately produced an additional 24 TWh for industrial captive use.
And we are getting the fossile gas consumption down by laws made towards changes for the industries and private households that will have to have other means of heating in the near future, although it is not an easy process. We also lead when it comes to home insulation and other means of saving energy, even our stubborn automobile industry is finally turning.
We are not going back to nuclear energy and we are going towards renewable energy more and more and it has already proofen that not even a war in Europe can change that. We will sit and watch when you fight for uranium and pay 10+ times more money than planned for the next nuclear plant that’s 14 years late and will not add to the grid, but just be finished in time to replace an old nuclear plant that is falling apart and then you pay for that and pay for the old plants because they aren’t sustainable by themselves, like these in New York:
New Yorkers are paying $40 million every month to subsidize nuclear power – over $480 million in the first year alone, nearly 200 times as much as the state is spending to develop renewable energy. And the nuclear costs will take a big jump in April 2019, because the subsidy is scheduled to increase every two years – even while solar and wind power keep getting cheaper and cheaper.
It is not working. It is not the future. It is not even a good investment anymore. And I don’t even have to talk about nuclear waste or uninsurable risks to proof it.
We are not going back to nuclear energy and we are going towards renewable energy more and more and it has already proofen that not even a war in Europe can change that.
Yeah because America opened our strategic reserve wide open to keep you from freezing to death last winter.
Gas import from LNG (US) ist the lowest of all imports we do and don’t pretend it is a gift, you had too much of it and didn’t know what to do with it. It makes your country a lot of money: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_gasversorgung/_svg/Gasimporte/Gasimporte.html
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_gasversorgung/start.html
To secure gas supplies for the coming winter, a storage level of 75 percent must be reached by September 1, 2023. The storage target was already reached in June 2023.
Gas imports are way down and our reserve is filled to the brim for Winter and Germans actually know how and are willing to safe energy. You can’t beat the numbers with words. It is not going to happen.
Renewables alone can’t meet New Yorks base load. Nuclear is the only technology that can. Gas turbines were connected to the grid to cover Indian points load which is a disaster.
Nuclear must be complemented with as much renewable capacity as possible. There is no other way.
Yeah, let’s just keep burning fossil fuels, amIrite?
Ya know, wind and solar are independent too, and much cheaper.
They’re great technologies and we should be building them out. Unfortunately, they struggle with intermittency. Renewables like wind and solar would best complement base load, always-on, capacity of a nuclear generating stations.
I’m honestly surprised the UK hasn’t invested in wave power. Plenty of crashing waves all around it. Can’t cost that much to build. I remember seeing some pilot projects with vertical turbines installed at the base of shoreside cliffs.
There’s been a lot of research into this area because many people, yourself included, can see there’s energy to be had. From what I remember from classes on it, the issues with capturing power from waves has most to do with ecosystem damage and scalability. Not to mention, they’re build on waterways which are already being used for things like fishing and shipping.
I’ve helped people who where working on a project of wave power.
It seemed like the biggest challenges are corrosion from sea water and the marine fouling. As soon as you put something in the sea water it will be covered by algae and organisms.
These issues make collecting energy from the sea extremely challenging.
Thanks for chiming in with your expertise
But with lots of solar and wind we can store the extra to smooth over dips. We can also import/export power (as now) as it’s not going to cloud and windless everywhere. Southern Europe could be big solar exporters and we can be big wind (and wave) exporters.
Then do it. Fight for it. I have trouble seeing a 100% renewable solution at the moment but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. Don’t back down when people dont want generation in thier backyard or when you’re “pretty close” to 100%. We must decarbonize energy.
I believe nuclear is a way to do that and advocate for it by writing letters to my governor and lawmakers to remove the moratorium on building new nuclear facilies in the state I live: Illinois. However complete decarbonization is done, doesn’t really matter. My experience and formal training on the subject matter influences me to believe in nuclear and your a person with an equally valid opinion. Fight for what you believe.
I’m not anti-nuclear, it’s just more expensive than wind/solar/wave/hydro + storage (and hydro can be storage). Give it a few decades and V2X is going to be common and with have a large amount distributed battery. You can make money today doing V2G with a Leaf. I’m just not sure we’ll need much nuclear. I’m only against nuclear in geologically unstable places. Maybe politically unstable places… which you never know were will destablize. Lots of crazy popularlism since 2008 crash.
