Nuclear in the UK has a capacity factor of around 60%. Availability is in the 70-80% range.
Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants.
Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity?
Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a retail customer for less per watt than recent reactors in UK/France or even USA. 8kW nameplate solar and 16kWh storage capacity is about $10k which matches 1kW of net from eg UK projects of around 2.5GW net for 26 billion pounds fairly closely.
Yeah if you live far north or have a long cloudy month in winter you'll be relying on that gas plant, but so does the nuclear reactor. Plus you'll be dumping 10-20kWh/day into the grid on the good days. Provides a decent incentive to figure out how to store it, and even if you're only getting 5c/kWh for it, it'll pay for replacement in 7-10 years or so when prices have dropped another 50-80% without sacrificing your kilowatt.
That is the admitted cost of Hinkley C and lower bound on the cost of Sizewell (it will go up, they always do). Sizewell is a rolls royce smr. Matching end user retail cost of solar. Right now. By the time sizewell comes online it'll be a fraction. It's also calculated with a 12.5% capacity factor which is winter in the UK. Add in overnight costs and it's extremely one sided.
You could add as much net capacity as the UK has in nuclear in just above the space used for parking cars.
You could add twice to four times that again just on detached house rooftops.
Even as a commercial installation with no other purpose, a 4km square is hardly an insurmountable barrier.
The initial capital budget of sizewell and hinkley alone could provide 30-80GW of nameplate solar or a rooftop system on every building in the country.
If there are trillions in the pot, by all means go ham with fission, but when low carbon sources are fighting for the scraps left over after subsidizing fossil fuels we have to do the thing that is effective first.
There are always trillions in the pot, because the UK is a sovereign country with its own currency. Money is never the issue.
Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.
To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.
Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.
Commenting about fiat currency is a pointless distraction when the purpose of using it is as a proxy for labour and materials. 'Trillions in the pot' is just a proxy for a certain amount of access to raw materials, trading ability and labour power, all of which are finite and don't really increase if you sink your country into hyperinflation.
> Therefore it's only overnight costs that matter in a build (and hitting the deadline). The real issue is one of manpower and stuff. We don't make solar panels in the UK. We will make SMRs. Therefore we're not reliant on Chinese manufacture, or the whims of export markets to fund them. A problem we're currently having with gas and oil.
> To have security of energy supply over time you have to be as decoupled from world markets as possible. We don't want to be in the situation where we're relying on China for replacement advanced manufactures to keep the lights on.
Spending an amount on computers and steel and exotic alloys and uranium ore and then also spending 10x as much on labour is no better than spending that first amount on foreign solar panels. Far better to overpay for solar panels by developing a local industry, or overpay for solar thermal systems (which are still vastly cheaper than fission).
> Solar has no reliable capacity in winter in the UK unfortunately. You wouldn't want to rely on solar with several weeks of grey miserable UK winter weather even with storage. The same with wind, which is still suffering from a degradation in capacity due to the as yet unexplained overall reduction in wind speeds - which may itself be a result of climate change.
Renewable-derived hydrogen is already at cost-parity with fossil-fuel-methane derived hydrogen in some markets. Renewable-derived methane isn't much further off and is one of many ways of solving the storage issue. When a gas plant (which you need anyway) and the renewables to provide enough net power in winter and a massive overprovision during summer cost a fraction of nuclear there's no point.
Plus your argument about energy security completely precludes nuclear as an option for over 50% of the world as they're not allowed to make their own fuel. There are also about as many countries with a credible manufacturing base for solar panels than countries with viable uranium reserves, and there is more than one chemistry that you can make solar cells with.
Finally being entirely beholden to one of four or five corporations worldwide is no better than being entirely beholden to one of four or five countries with the cheapest solar.
Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.
Yeah it's (usually) planned, but it's a decently long time in which you need those gas plants.
Why not just build solar instead and fuel those same gas plants with hydrogen or methane you plucked from the air with your $20-30/MWh unscheduled electricity?
Plus, you can get solar and storage as an off the shelf item today as a retail customer for less per watt than recent reactors in UK/France or even USA. 8kW nameplate solar and 16kWh storage capacity is about $10k which matches 1kW of net from eg UK projects of around 2.5GW net for 26 billion pounds fairly closely.
Yeah if you live far north or have a long cloudy month in winter you'll be relying on that gas plant, but so does the nuclear reactor. Plus you'll be dumping 10-20kWh/day into the grid on the good days. Provides a decent incentive to figure out how to store it, and even if you're only getting 5c/kWh for it, it'll pay for replacement in 7-10 years or so when prices have dropped another 50-80% without sacrificing your kilowatt.