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.
Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
China's happily selling panels so cheaply that you can use them for fencing material and still save money long-term. Batteries too. These things last decades. If they decide to cut you off you have at least 20 years to find alternatives.
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.
Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
I downplayed there, because occasionally I try to moderate my extreme cynicism.
It would be miraculous, in the biblical sense of the word. Not only because it would be a technical and regulatory triumph for RR and the UK, but because it would mean this is something other than what it appears to be to me.
None of this will get built. It's all fake, and after the benefits are taken, and the subsidy budgets are drained, and the various political and academic and regulatory folks have populated the requisite non-profit no-show jobs, and the professional opposition leaders have collected all the anti-nook bucks, and RR et al. have wiggled out of whatever obligations they're pretending to pursue via the holes they've already carefully arranged for themselves, these papers and headlines will be forgotten.
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
One has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
It might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details.
The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.
So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Nuclear subs are a "money no object" technology, as our supposed insurance policy against Soviet invasion and/or armageddon, it's whatever it takes.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
I believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
50 or 100 years from now we may run out of solar and wind resources to tap. We may consume a couple order of magnitudes more energy than now. Materials science may have unforeseen advances that make nuclear development safer and cheaper.
Nuclear will find its place in the sun - so to speak - at that time. But not now I think. The numbers don't work.
Surely in this magical future sci-fi land we also have new ways to create and store energy. Of all the issues with renewables this (space/land) is currently not even worth worrying about.
I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
Either you build enough nuclear to cover 95% of peak demand and essentially only run it a few weeks a year (because most of the time you have plenty of renewable supply) for terrible ROI or you need storage and peaker plants anyway. Nuclear energy is mostly interesting for cross subsidizing a military nuclear program by keeping relevant skills in domestic supply.
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
I'm just going on the fact that most energy experts say a diversified mix is what you usually want - although my lay assumption would be that if you have a portion of your energy need covered by a stable base load, you need less batteries per wind turbine etc and it lowers overall energy risk.
e.g. lets pick two overly-simplified hypothetical scenarios where you can have a 50/50 nuclear/wind mix, or 100% wind mix.
And then lets say in a shortage scenario you can:
- Suppress demand / demand shift (say you can reduce/shift demand 10% hypothetically)
- Import energy, up to 20% of your total requirement
In this simple scenario, in a 100% wind scenario, you would need to cover 60% of your energy need with batteries (every 1% of wind needs 0.6% of batteries), but in the 50/50 mix scenario the 50% of wind only needs to cover 10% with batteries (i.e. every 1% of wind needs 0.2% of batteries)
In reality there will be other things, like you might also have burst-gas power etc.
I'm not saying the numbers above are correct - just trying to show in theory that a mix / base load can still help reduce the level of batteries/storage required and make the energy mix more economic.
nuclear energy still causes a lot of prompt heating
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
How is a small drone, with limited power and a small sensor suite going to detect the quietest ships in the ocean? And then transmit tracking data? SOSUS is basically gone since the USN hates AWS work (much like the Air Force hates CAS). IUSS never went anywhere as far as I can research (see above why), and really isn't the same as a drone system.
It’s a huge design space. One easy to understand example is a passive sonar underwater drone that stays close enough to the surface to gather sunlight and easily communicate with satellites without also being visible on the surface or making sounds from surface wave action. It can then send high frequency radio signals to satellites which rapidly attenuate through the ocean creating a near perfect stealth system vs subs. The option exists to deploy a string of much deeper sensors via a tether.
Another option is close equivalents to the existing systems dropped from aircraft, though with significantly more stealthy deployment.
It's a huge design space but the sea is a harsh mistress. Look at sonobuoys for example; some are passive, just using a hydrophone and relaying any signals via UHF/VHF and others are active where they ping and then relay signals. Generally, they're good for about eight hours. And they have no propulsion system, they just float.
Now you want to add a solar array (without being visible). And easily communicating with satellites will rapidly eat into your power budget, even without worrying about propulsion.
Yes, sensors can be tethered. We've done that since the early 80's, and let our SOSUS systems deteriorate since the fall of the USSR. But these aren't drones, aren't anything like a swarm of drones.
Let's not shift the goalposts away from the original argument.
That’s a function of how aircraft dropped sonobuoys are used. Subs aren’t going to stay still and the ocean is a big place so long lifespans are pointless. However for harbors you want continuous monitoring and so use a different design.
As to talking with satellites, that’s become very efficient at low bandwidth. If your 100W radio is off 98% of the time it doesn’t add up to a lot of energy.
People often underestimate the amount of storage you need for renewables. Depending on the geographic location you might be looking at tens of TWh. The cost for renewables then suddenly becomes much higher.
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
Could you share your numbers as well? According to [1], the UK currently needs about 300TWh per year. Lets say we go entirely solar+wind+battery(whatever that means) and assume that battery has to bridge a gap of at most 7 days (meaning no wind and no solar at all during this time, which is at most a few days at a time). This adds up to 300/365*7= 5,8TWh of max capacity. Lets take it safe, round up and say we need 10TWh (which is already not "tens of TWH", but "ten"). [2] Says that grid-scale batteries come at around 350$ per kWh right now. kWh -> TWh is factor 1 billion (10^9), meaning if we want to build 10TWh of storage, it will cost 3,5 Trillion Dollars. Impressive number indeed. But there are multiple asterisks here.
1. This calculation takes into account that there is no exchange with mainland europe and no gas power plants or other sources of power (e.g. hydro or hydro storage). This sharply reduces the need for batteries.
2. Battery costs will fall in the next decades, compared to nuclear, which will take a long time (if ever) until costs will fall.
The problem is that the math is often done using faulty assumptions, such as expecting to rely solely on batteries to store enough energy to last several months.
In practice there are never long periods with and zero wind and zero solar and zero import capacity. Place the right price on electricity during peak demand, and suddenly the market is more than happy to install an overcapacity of wind & solar. Gigawatt-capacity cables to neighboring countries? Already being built!
A country like the UK needs an average electricity input of 45GW. It is totally fine to serve that with 60GW of wind operating at 25% capacity, 60GW of solar operating at 25% capacity, and 15GW of import operating at 100% capacity.
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
As for point one they are much less reliable because they are intermittent. I'm skeptical of how much cheaper renewables are. I haven't noticed energy prices declining recently. Correct me if i'm misinformed. I'm slightly confused by point 2. What are you saying, because soviet technology is getting sunk a lot we should stop bothering with having a navy?
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
But it's not a simple picture. The grid needs to be expanded to distribute power from renewables more efficiently, batteries aren't the only storage option, and the concept is still too centralised.
A combination of distributed rooftop solar with domestic batteries, maybe local storage in substations, strategic national storage, and a mix of sources would be a more effective strategy than trying to park huge batteries around the country in the hope they'll be big enough.
The UK still has a post-war mindset around energy which doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
So build three times as much? Solar has gotten cheap enough that such solutions are quite viable these days. And as a bonus, electricity will be basically free during the summer.
take a look at all the roofs next winter, if its anything like the other side of the canal, you'll see that the average roof coverage is substantially less than 1/3.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
> Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
> Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
Continue generation is great if you have continues demand. The U.K. does not have that (especially if you include heating and travel which is currently mainly provided by gas)
Even if you think everything shuts down at night, how can you think busy consumption days are highly correlated with the windiest & sunniest & waviest days?
Renewables are great, let's do more of that too, but it's patchy supply, and yes demand is patchy, but they don't match - so you need storage too, and that problem is eased by having non-patchy (coal, gas, nuclear) supply for the lesser more constant load demanded.
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
I’m sorry I struggle to understand your comment, but I’ll have a go.
> Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help.
That’s literally how baseload works, look at France’s energy mix for an example, they have nuclear handle the bulk of their demand (at least the very minimum it will ever be) and renewables + transfers handle the rest, if renewables goes up they export it or lower their nuclear output (yes, their nuclear output can be modulated).
> You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope
The goal isn’t to replace the entire energy mix with Nuclear, the goal is to add enough nuclear in the mix so that we don’t need gas being generating all year round (gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7). If you added just 6GW of nuclear you’d be achieving that on some days.
> gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7
I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.
But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price needs to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?
And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?
Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Misleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
That was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
This is a rare moment of sanity in energy policy. It’s not about wind vs nuclear. We (the whole world) need everything we’ve got. SMRs have the potential to move nuclear out of its mainframe era.
Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
That's not what we're seeing with nuclear power though. At least so far. Counterintuitively it seems to get more expensive the more you build of the same design: [1]
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
Mass production has never been tried before for nuclear so those 50 years don’t tell us much about the possibilities for the next 50 years. They built multiple mainframes of the same design too, but the scale remained tiny and so the costs remained high.
We desperately need regional pricing. If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
If a generation is ~20 years then 50,000 generations is around a million years. We're talking several times longer than recorded history. In fact, I was curious and looked it up - Homo Sapiens is estimated to be around 300,000 years old [0]. We should be so lucky if there are humans around in 50,000 generations. Just by nature of the amount of stuff that happens, if they have any conception of what the UK was or any idea what happened there then there has been some sort of transcendental enlightenment where there are no longer limits on how many memories a human can retain.
In short, I think you are exaggerating the downsides of maybe a potential 10x cost blowout on the budget of a government project and a trivial amount of waste disposal.
Paying for a few security guards to sit next to the dry casks and point out that you'd better not crack them open and snort the contents for 50,000 generations will be peanuts compared to all the other expenses associated with keeping a society going for 50,000 generations.
Anglesey is beautiful[0]. My ancestors came from there and I used to holiday there as a child. Today it is somewhat blighted by those ugly and noisy turbines[1]. I am in favor of this if it reduces the number of onshore turbines on the island.
Great news. Lets hope this is just the start.
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.
The question is what’s better value for money, wind and solar (potentially with storage when required), or nuclear.
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.
> it used to be a land bridge to Europe only 7,000-10,000 years ago)
Doggerland. I've always found its geography and the idea that people lived there fascinating.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Fisherman frequently dredge up stone age (or earlier) implements from there.
Stone age ... or earlier? You mean from before the discovery of stone?!
Maybe they are talking about fossils? EG: Before humanity stuff.
And that area of the sea is still known as "Dogger" in the shipping forecast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast#/media/File:...
That part of the sea as well as Doggerland itself are named afer Dogger Bank, a large sandbank that must have been some promontory on Doggerland.
Dogger Bank in turn seems to be named after a kind of Dutch fishing boat called a dogger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank
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.
I believe France does (or did) this also. The US seems to be the one country to custom design each one.
One option is to build enough nuclear to cover your minimum demand, and enough wind/solar/storage to cover the rest.
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.
Why not just build the wind/solar/storage to cover it all.
If that’s too expensive why not just build enough nuclear to cover it all.
Because they do different things.
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.
So which one should we do?
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.
> the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups
The lack of commercialization has exactly a single reason: The lack of commercial viability.
> The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.
The misinformation hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. The nuclear industry has been far from transparent in how it operates.
> Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security.
So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant?
What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor?
The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh.
It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added.
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 or low capex thermal.
The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.
Looks like someone is trying to push for it: https://ukenergystorage.co.uk/
Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned; https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p...
I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying.
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.
> Nuclear is endless clean energy.
The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems?
It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here.
It's so funny every time we build a nuclear plant we say 'ooooh expensive' then by the time it's built it turns out it's ~ at the cost of gas.
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.
Yeah, let‘s ignore that construction costs
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o
And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low".
That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs
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?
[0] https://stopsizewellc.org/core/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TE... page 5
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
[2] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/o...
> 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!
The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia.
Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
The thing Ive never quite understood is that the UK has no domestic supply of uranium.
Canada, Australia and Germany are all big exporters; without tempting fate, I don't think the UK will have issues importing from those countries.
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.
[1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-...
The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010.
There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol.
We could probably do with a small amount of storage as we do have days where we pay for turbines to /not/ generate.
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).
The problem is that nuclear powers profile with fixed output and extremely high CAPEX costs is the opposite to what a modern grid needs.
How would you add an extremely expensive new built nuclear plant to this grid? Would you shut it down for days on end or try to run it as a peaker?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
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.
Think 'agile', not 'waterfall'.
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.
That's South Australia, not the UK.
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.
Or add a load of batteries to the capex and redistribute the constant load?
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.
Because there is little solar in the 3 winter months, so you would need a lot more storage for solar then for nuclear.
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.
I'll point to Standard Thermal again here.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
Given UK wind capacity factors are not going to be as high as predicted [0], a lot more storage is required for the wind system so reducing its value.
[0] https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/desnz-to-include-some-reali...
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.
> they _really_ hate nuclear
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.
https://www.onr.org.uk/our-work/what-we-regulate/sellafield-...
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.
What do you do when there is no wind and it is cloudy. Dont turn on your tea kettle?
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.
Depends on the load, but nuclear isn’t dependent upon batteries or the wind.
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.
I always hoped reactor designs like CANDU would result in turn warheads into clean power!
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).
Why not just firm the renewables with batteries to even it out. seems easier and cheaper than building nuclear.
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.
In the UK, probably nuclear.
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.
Yeah, the UK is probably one of the best places for offshore wind, and they're building gigantic fields.
And compared to what Hinkley Point C is gonna cost... solar and wind is basically for free
With the big * of solar being fairly predictable, and wind not. You can be bereft of wind for weeks.
In a given spot yes, the UK continental shelf is pretty big though.
It is, but you can look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ and see wind go up and down depending on the weather.
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.
That £59.90 figure is 2012 prices.
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.
Hinkley C is, as everyone knows, a disaster.
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.
Not when you take the circular economy into account. We’ve always been very good at making boilers. Less so semiconductors.
Truly great news. Less competition in the renewable energy sector for us.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/09/ukraine-war-br...
Didn’t here similar about wind and photovoltaics
[flagged]
You're right perhaps we should just emit all the waste directly into the atmosphere like gas or coal plants do
Why don't the anti-underground disposal crowd advocate more for long term dry cask storage where monitoring and maintenance is both cheap and easy?
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.
If it is an emergency why waste money on multiples more expensive nuclear power rather than renewables and storage?
We still need to decarbonize tons of other industries so why waste money on the one we have solved?
Good enough beats imaginary engineer perfect solutions.
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.
Whats ur solution to nuclear waste?
What’s your problem with nuclear waste? And what’s your solution to the waste produced by solar/wind?
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.
You just store it?
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?
As if wind, solar arrays, hydro, transfer stations aren’t?
this pearl clutching is basically why we don't have breeder reactors making use of all this "waste".
> the Ukraine
Careful, your mask is slipping.
It is Ukraine, not The Ukraine. It is a country, not an area.
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.
> It's The Ukraine in German
They did not write in German.
> the article used can completely change the meaning of the sentence.
As it does in English, hence why I'm calling them out for using 1991 Soviet phrasing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18233844
I wasn't even alive in 1991, why would I think about 34 year old phrasing?
Thats a good question, that only you can answer.
Didn't know I was being followed by the grammar police.
They show a keen interest in your articles.
Nuclear is an industry that strangled itself with red tape and harmful PR, making every project fiendishly expensive and take so many decades that cost-of-capital costs are insane.
I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
Even if it had never had those issues, nuclear power would still be the textbook example of a fragile system - capital-intensive, centralized projects that can be shut down by disruption to fuel shipments halfway round the world, droughts in the cooling system's water sources, or any of a dozen unions of specialized workers going on strike. Add to that iteration cycles measured in decades instead of years and it's hard to imagine how Nuclear could ever even close the gap, let alone pull ahead.
I have a theory that smart financiers avoid nuclear because getting a new version done on time and under budget is so damn hard, and smart physicists gravitate to nuclear for the same reason. I wish the nuclear-curious factions would pivot to a project Orion style endeavor instead of powering a UK hamlet sometime in the 2030s. Now there's something insanely difficult and likely to fail that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent on.
But the wind &solar is highly dependant on rare earth minerals that China can limit at any time.
And their condition is for us to accept their highly subsidized products (cars, solar), which make our manufacturers go bankrupt.
It also makes us lose manufacturing capacity for dual use products like drones etc.
China's happily selling panels so cheaply that you can use them for fencing material and still save money long-term. Batteries too. These things last decades. If they decide to cut you off you have at least 20 years to find alternatives.
Not once it's installed! And no such conditionality exists.
Batteries are more or less consumables, need occasional replacement. OTOH, fresh nuclear fuel can be stockpiled for decades.
Capitalism is extremely poor at "fragile systems", and for whatever reason (water under the bride now) the nuclear industry never made the move to smaller modular systems - even for large installations (think a reactor hall with 20 small cores rather than a single large core).
Even this project sounds like a custom on-site build, although at the moment it is still vapourware.
> I don't think it will ever again beat solar+wind+battery for grid scale carbon-free power pricing.
The problem the UK has is their climate: Northerly enough that solar makes 5x as much power in the summer as it does in the winter, and much more demand for heating in the winter than cooling in the summer.
Batteries are fine for storing solar in the day and using it at night - but much less good for summer-to-winter storage. And the UK isn't exactly eager to start flooding desolate valleys for pumped storage reservoirs either.
Oh, and they don't just need to decarbonise their existing electricity output - they also need to greatly increase their electricity output to hit their goals on EV and heat pump adoption; and they need to lower electricity prices too.
I can see why they'd hedge their bets.
The UK has massive wind resources up north. Absolutely no need for summer-to-winter storage, that would be madness!
This was my impression as well, both watching Smarter Every Day and visiting a nuclear power plant myself and taking the tour.
Yes, safety is important, but I think they're far into diminishing returns territory, and we have to take the penalty in both energy cost and security.
Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?
Well, at least for Germany it was the actual nuclear fallout over large areas of the country after Chernobyl. Which is btw still measurable today. [1] That's a pretty scary thing to happen to you and one just has to accept that these are the actual lived experiences of people that form their opinions.
[1] https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...
Radiation detectors can detect very low levels of radiation (far below any measurable health effects, for instance), so claiming we can still detect fallout from Chernobyl doesn't really say anything.
To quote from the article I linked to:
> In the last years values of up to several thousand becquerel per kilogram were measured in wild game and certain edible mushrooms. In Germany it is not permitted to market food with more than 600 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram.
Another quote from the article is
> If wild game or wild growing mushrooms are consumed in usual amounts, the additional radiation exposure is comparatively low.
> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 1,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.0025 millisievert.
The numbers and actual risks don't matter to change regular people's feelings about a technology. All they know is that there was actual nuclear fallout and now the mushrooms in their forests are radioactive.
I think it was mostly caused by fear about nuclear Armageddon during the cold war - it's hard to feel like the world could end at any second due to nuclear bombs while also feeling grateful for nuclear electricity generation. Would be even if there was no overlap between military and civilian nuclear industries, which of course there is.
If by "the coal industry" you mean people in charge of Chernobyl and Fukushima...
And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2521/ML25212A115.pdf
> About half the size of a typical PWR reactor.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
Agree that it’s hardly small or modular tho.
“Doing pretty well”
I think you mean it will be record construction time for a western company in the last few decades.
I downplayed there, because occasionally I try to moderate my extreme cynicism.
It would be miraculous, in the biblical sense of the word. Not only because it would be a technical and regulatory triumph for RR and the UK, but because it would mean this is something other than what it appears to be to me.
None of this will get built. It's all fake, and after the benefits are taken, and the subsidy budgets are drained, and the various political and academic and regulatory folks have populated the requisite non-profit no-show jobs, and the professional opposition leaders have collected all the anti-nook bucks, and RR et al. have wiggled out of whatever obligations they're pretending to pursue via the holes they've already carefully arranged for themselves, these papers and headlines will be forgotten.
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
The underpant gnome version of nuclear power?
Step 1: Find and reserve site of nuclear plant
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Power!
One has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
It might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details.
The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.
So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
> Not usually, no; that wouldn't be cost-effective.
The reason being that the nuclear sub reactors run on very enriched uranium which is very expensive and not fun if some got away.
Nuclear subs are a "money no object" technology, as our supposed insurance policy against Soviet invasion and/or armageddon, it's whatever it takes.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
I doubt you could ship one. The cores need specialised port facilities to even get them into the subs.
> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"
Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)
Wylfa was Magnavox, not AGR. AGR was the next generation that never went full commercial.
Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.
I believe the more technologically advanced we live the more energy we will use. Travel requires energy, ai models require energy, healthy food requires energy
The cheaper and more abundant we can make electricity, the faster we can reap the benefits of new technology
imo nuclear is an important part to have abundant energy at all times
Abundant yes, but new nuclear is by far the most expensive way to generate power, and it gets worse everyday as solar and storage prices plummet
50 or 100 years from now we may run out of solar and wind resources to tap. We may consume a couple order of magnitudes more energy than now. Materials science may have unforeseen advances that make nuclear development safer and cheaper.
Nuclear will find its place in the sun - so to speak - at that time. But not now I think. The numbers don't work.
How will we run out of solar resources to tap?
Assuming energy consumption per capita continues to rise
Ok, how will we run out of solar?
Saying we will run out of space is a wild take. I'm interested. Anything to back that up?
A sci-fi future where we consume vastly more energy than at present.
Surely in this magical future sci-fi land we also have new ways to create and store energy. Of all the issues with renewables this (space/land) is currently not even worth worrying about.
It isn't currently worth worrying about. But I believe we'll use abundant energy in more and more creative ways. You have to think really big.
I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme. This is shortsighted because (1) for electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear, and (2) large naval vessels are enormously vulnerable to drones.
Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea fleet proves this for surface vessels. Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
The UK government's is more focussed on providing juicy contracts to large corporations than realistic preparations for the future.
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.
A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.
That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
Either you build enough nuclear to cover 95% of peak demand and essentially only run it a few weeks a year (because most of the time you have plenty of renewable supply) for terrible ROI or you need storage and peaker plants anyway. Nuclear energy is mostly interesting for cross subsidizing a military nuclear program by keeping relevant skills in domestic supply.
What good is a “base load” when the problem is peak demand. You’re saying nuclear gets to take the easy stuff and another industry can worry about peaker plants.
I suspect you need far ledd in peaker capacity - both GW and GWh - with a 100% wind than 100% nuclear if you spend the same amount on wind and nuclear.
I'm just going on the fact that most energy experts say a diversified mix is what you usually want - although my lay assumption would be that if you have a portion of your energy need covered by a stable base load, you need less batteries per wind turbine etc and it lowers overall energy risk.
e.g. lets pick two overly-simplified hypothetical scenarios where you can have a 50/50 nuclear/wind mix, or 100% wind mix.
And then lets say in a shortage scenario you can: - Suppress demand / demand shift (say you can reduce/shift demand 10% hypothetically)
- Import energy, up to 20% of your total requirement
In this simple scenario, in a 100% wind scenario, you would need to cover 60% of your energy need with batteries (every 1% of wind needs 0.6% of batteries), but in the 50/50 mix scenario the 50% of wind only needs to cover 10% with batteries (i.e. every 1% of wind needs 0.2% of batteries)
In reality there will be other things, like you might also have burst-gas power etc.
I'm not saying the numbers above are correct - just trying to show in theory that a mix / base load can still help reduce the level of batteries/storage required and make the energy mix more economic.
For civilian use I believe this has proven unnecessary (assuming mix of wind, solar, etc) plus battery and other storage
Still seems like a worthwhile pursuit though
nuclear energy still causes a lot of prompt heating
other forms of renewables could generate electricity while cooling the planet.
a super chimney (perhaps suspended with balloons) piercing the tropopause and carrying either air in open or closed loop fashion, or a "refrigerant" (not necessarily a harmful one, could just be moist air, or any other medium of thermal exchange, like a gravity assisted heat siphon) in a closed loop could generate power while cooling the planet, it would also be base load given the large temperature difference between surface level and tropopause (which persists day and night, summer and winter). Obviously this can also be used to desalinate sea water by freeze desalination.
as soon as such technology takes off and multiple blocs make use of such technology, they will probably even get into arguments about how long or what fraction of the time each nation state is allowed to generate power this way (arguing it was our Western excessive CO2 consumption to which we have to thank this excess heat availability, and India countering that we should take into account their proper share of excess CO2 due to the underground coal mines that have been burning uncontrollably for decades on end, etc...) to the point of nation states attacking each others superchimneys.
If you invest in battery and storage tech you'll get reliable storage long before the first "baseload nukes" start contributing to the grid.
Storage tech has been criminally underfunded and under-researched. There are many, many options. But because of poor investment decisions and lobbying from the usual suspects the tech is around twenty years behind where it could be.
That’s simply not true, or at least not today.
First of, the UK are investing in battery storage, there’s already a rollout of grid-level battery systems across the country*.
None of them hold capacity for longer than 2 hours before they need to start discharging. In fact, the record breaking duration is 6 hours. This is great as a short buffer, but it’s not “storage”.
To put this in perspective, last year the UK went 2 weeks without any significant wind, so a 2 hour buffer is nothing. This is why Hydrogen is still being kept as an option for long term storage.
https://stateraenergy.co.uk/projects/thurrock-storage
https://rhomotion.com/news/longest-duration-battery-energy-s...
The ratio between GW and GWh is always an optimization of the fixed costs vs potential profit.
A 4 hour battery can run at 50% for 8 hours or 25% for 16 hours.
The determining factor is what the market needs.
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme
It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.
RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!
If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
https://theconversation.com/military-interests-are-pushing-n...
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme.
Ontario, Canada is building a bunch of BWRX-300 SMRs and don't really have a desire for a naval reactor programme:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/carney-ford-announce-...
* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/d...
* https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/ge-vernova-hit...
Canada is currently looking at new submarines, and the final two candidates are both SSKs (and not nuclear SSNs):
* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/08/28/canada-shortlis...
* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...
As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
> Similarly, it is easy to imagine a swarm of small underwater drones detecting, tracking and trailing nuclear submarines.
Those are called torpedoes.
It’s way cheaper to build a drone that doesn’t need to travel quickly or carry huge amount high explosives.
How is a slow, lightly armed drone going to damage a nuclear submarine that can both outrun and outdive it?
The drone’s goal is to locate it, you’d then send something else to destroy it if you’re in an actual war.
America uses surface buoy’s to similar effect, going underwater would allow drones to be harder to detect. https://idstch.com/military/navy/navy-researching-new-buoy-t...
Of note you don’t necessarily need to be able to track a sub everywhere, an invisible underwater “fence” may be good enough.
How is a small drone, with limited power and a small sensor suite going to detect the quietest ships in the ocean? And then transmit tracking data? SOSUS is basically gone since the USN hates AWS work (much like the Air Force hates CAS). IUSS never went anywhere as far as I can research (see above why), and really isn't the same as a drone system.
It’s a huge design space. One easy to understand example is a passive sonar underwater drone that stays close enough to the surface to gather sunlight and easily communicate with satellites without also being visible on the surface or making sounds from surface wave action. It can then send high frequency radio signals to satellites which rapidly attenuate through the ocean creating a near perfect stealth system vs subs. The option exists to deploy a string of much deeper sensors via a tether.
Another option is close equivalents to the existing systems dropped from aircraft, though with significantly more stealthy deployment.
Etc etc.
It's a huge design space but the sea is a harsh mistress. Look at sonobuoys for example; some are passive, just using a hydrophone and relaying any signals via UHF/VHF and others are active where they ping and then relay signals. Generally, they're good for about eight hours. And they have no propulsion system, they just float.
Now you want to add a solar array (without being visible). And easily communicating with satellites will rapidly eat into your power budget, even without worrying about propulsion.
Yes, sensors can be tethered. We've done that since the early 80's, and let our SOSUS systems deteriorate since the fall of the USSR. But these aren't drones, aren't anything like a swarm of drones.
Let's not shift the goalposts away from the original argument.
> Generally, they're good for about eight hours.
That’s a function of how aircraft dropped sonobuoys are used. Subs aren’t going to stay still and the ocean is a big place so long lifespans are pointless. However for harbors you want continuous monitoring and so use a different design.
As to talking with satellites, that’s become very efficient at low bandwidth. If your 100W radio is off 98% of the time it doesn’t add up to a lot of energy.
People often underestimate the amount of storage you need for renewables. Depending on the geographic location you might be looking at tens of TWh. The cost for renewables then suddenly becomes much higher.
I recommend everyone who is using the cost argument to actually do the math on this first. It might be an eye opening experience. It certainly was for me.
Could you share your numbers as well? According to [1], the UK currently needs about 300TWh per year. Lets say we go entirely solar+wind+battery(whatever that means) and assume that battery has to bridge a gap of at most 7 days (meaning no wind and no solar at all during this time, which is at most a few days at a time). This adds up to 300/365*7= 5,8TWh of max capacity. Lets take it safe, round up and say we need 10TWh (which is already not "tens of TWH", but "ten"). [2] Says that grid-scale batteries come at around 350$ per kWh right now. kWh -> TWh is factor 1 billion (10^9), meaning if we want to build 10TWh of storage, it will cost 3,5 Trillion Dollars. Impressive number indeed. But there are multiple asterisks here.
1. This calculation takes into account that there is no exchange with mainland europe and no gas power plants or other sources of power (e.g. hydro or hydro storage). This sharply reduces the need for batteries. 2. Battery costs will fall in the next decades, compared to nuclear, which will take a long time (if ever) until costs will fall.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/322874/electricity-consu... [2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/93281.pdf
The problem is that the math is often done using faulty assumptions, such as expecting to rely solely on batteries to store enough energy to last several months.
In practice there are never long periods with and zero wind and zero solar and zero import capacity. Place the right price on electricity during peak demand, and suddenly the market is more than happy to install an overcapacity of wind & solar. Gigawatt-capacity cables to neighboring countries? Already being built!
A country like the UK needs an average electricity input of 45GW. It is totally fine to serve that with 60GW of wind operating at 25% capacity, 60GW of solar operating at 25% capacity, and 15GW of import operating at 100% capacity.
Import from where? Neighboring countries with similar weather? I think they will be asking you to import to them when you need it most.
Can you share the math?
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
It's dangerous to extrapolate much from the performance of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea. While Ukraine has had remarkable success in almost completely shutting down Russian naval activity in the Black Sea, it's not all due to the superiority of drones. Russian incompetence, both in naval strategy as well as operations is endemic, and the fate of the Moskva and other systems isn't indicative of a widespread vulnerability of surface vessels to drone systems. The Moskva was sunk with cruise missiles, primarily ones developed from Soviet era missiles (Kh-35). Much has been written about the materiel state of the Moskva, as well as operational decisions/inadequacies that lead to its demise.
Surface drones work well when air cover is limited/restricted. Tracking them via radar is difficult due to surface noise, but it can be done. Countering them isn't an impossible task either, it, like other threats are handled systematically. The Russians have a relatively slow OODA loop, and Ukraine has been very successful in leveraging their superiority.
Is the threat a universal one or limited to the UKR/Russian conflict? A little of both. We've seen where an unprepared ship can be easily damaged by a small boat laden with explosives (USS Cole). We've seen the Ukrainians shut down Russian activity in the Black Sea, even going so far as to down unwitting aircraft that didn't respect the threat. But militaries adapt, especially to proven threats. Witness how the West responded to the sinking of the Eilat in 1973. It developed countermeasures and weapon systems for the threat of cruise missiles, while simultaneously developing their own cruise missiles (Harpoon/Exocet/Otomat/Penguin).
Will undersea drones prove as concerning? I doubt small swarms of UUVs will proliferate like we've seen with FPV drones. Flying through the air is much much easier than operating in water. Propulsion, C2, and targeting is quite difficult underwater compared to UAVs. Both range and payload are a challenge, so I don't believe that a swarm of "small underwater drones" will be able to detect the quietest ships in the ocean any time soon, much less track and trail something that can travel at speeds above 40kts with ease.
Now will large UUVs have a role in future naval combat? Undoubtedly.
Russia's naval prowess have always been a joke so you can't make too many conclusions.
It would also provide a steady source of tritium for upkeeping nuclear weapons
This: nuclear energy is a subsidy for nuclear weapons.
As for point one they are much less reliable because they are intermittent. I'm skeptical of how much cheaper renewables are. I haven't noticed energy prices declining recently. Correct me if i'm misinformed. I'm slightly confused by point 2. What are you saying, because soviet technology is getting sunk a lot we should stop bothering with having a navy?
Either way you are giving way to much credit to the power of the UK military industrial complex.
Solar power is very cheap and still getting cheaper:
https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...
Solar power doesn't work well in the UK in winter, with 1/3 of the energy output of summer months.
Taking the limit of free solar power, what would the storage requirements look like for the UK?
The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
But it's not a simple picture. The grid needs to be expanded to distribute power from renewables more efficiently, batteries aren't the only storage option, and the concept is still too centralised.
A combination of distributed rooftop solar with domestic batteries, maybe local storage in substations, strategic national storage, and a mix of sources would be a more effective strategy than trying to park huge batteries around the country in the hope they'll be big enough.
The UK still has a post-war mindset around energy which doesn't make sense in the 21st century.
> The UK is aiming for around 27GW of battery storage by 2030.
How many GWh? Citation please.
I’m not OP but: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-the-uk-plans-to-rea...
It’s either 27 or 27GW they are installing sorry.
27GW for an hour or for a week?
There’s a massive difference.
The link doesn’t mention - that was my point.
Surely it’s per hour though?
27GW means 27 billion joules per second.
27GW per hour is a rate of acceleration of energy use.
So build three times as much? Solar has gotten cheap enough that such solutions are quite viable these days. And as a bonus, electricity will be basically free during the summer.
take a look at all the roofs next winter, if its anything like the other side of the canal, you'll see that the average roof coverage is substantially less than 1/3.
The Royal Navy only uses nuclear power for submarines, at least for now (unlike USN which uses it for big aircraft carriers)
Making the two new UK aircraft carriers dependent on natural gas has to be one of the worst military procurement decisions of the modern era.
Its fuelled with diesel, not natural gas. And all carriers need refuel at some point for their embarked aircraft.
Sounds like it is time to dust off those nuclear-powered airplane blueprints from the 60s!
The USN have a research project around using electricity to produce synthetic fuel from sea water.
Renewables are cheap but storage isn't.
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.
Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.
Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
> Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix.
Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
Agree with your point although it's about wind in the uk rather than solar, and about being able to last a few weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
> Assume you mean more expensive than nuclear in the second point?
No, but I clarified the comment. My point is when taken in isolation nighttime nuclear costs less than nighttime batteries on a near zero carbon grid, however the economics operate 24/7/365. Nuclear heavily favors 24/7 operations so gaining 3c/kWh at night while losing 6c/kWh during the day is a net loss. Operating only at night almost doubles nuclear’s cost per kWh so you’d lose money anyway.
> weeks if there is calm weather rather than a day without sun, which is when having a nuclear baseload makes sense.
If you don’t have enough energy for a few days randomly you need peaking power generation not baseload. Nuclear is really bad at ramping up to meet sudden shortfalls.
The scenario you described is one of the very few cases where hydrogen might make sense assuming all fossil fuel use is banned. Without that natural gas is going to win to prevent random outages every few decades.
In 2025 storage is cheap too, it's just that there's no need for it until you already have a large amount of renewables.
2025 is the year that storage is really being deployed in a serious manner in the US, more than 18GW most likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
And the prevalence of batteries in Texas means that they must be cost effective, because all grid assets in Texas are from private investors risking their own capital, and there is zero incentive for batteries except for their profit generative capacity.
> You can see on the map at the bottom of this page that almost all the batteries are in areas that already have high amounts of renewables:
It could be - but the battery investments map also align with the map below which shows that these states (Texas & California) are also states suffering from blackouts.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/power-outag...
So while this could mean that storage is cheap, it could also mean 'Texas's mix and grid is unstable, particularly as it's not connected to the national grid, and this has opened the opportunity to profit from higher levels battery arbitrage that doesn't exist in a better balanced grid'
There's quite a lot of pricing data available for the energy market and it might be possible to approximate battery profitability by rerunning normal and long-tail history.
See https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards and https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/energystoragere... for example.
That looks to be a population map:
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Which is what you would expect of a stat of "number of outages per state". If it's not normalized for land area, population, and all the other primary contributors to the total number of outages it's a useless stat. San Francisco has more people in it that the entire state of Wyoming.
Texas' power is also cheap, so to justify batteries they would have to not raise the cost of electricity that much.
The current cost of grid batteries is hidden, but it's not too hard to find out, and it is indeed quite cheap. But if there's no mechanism to get paid, ie ability to do time arbitrage in the energy market, then they do not get deployed.
Electricity market design and the ability of ISOs/PUCs/utilities to adapt to changing technology are bigger barriers to batteries than their price.
...just quite yet.
> electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear
Are they still if you include storage, vs. nuclear's continuous generation?
Continue generation is great if you have continues demand. The U.K. does not have that (especially if you include heating and travel which is currently mainly provided by gas)
Even if you think everything shuts down at night, how can you think busy consumption days are highly correlated with the windiest & sunniest & waviest days?
Renewables are great, let's do more of that too, but it's patchy supply, and yes demand is patchy, but they don't match - so you need storage too, and that problem is eased by having non-patchy (coal, gas, nuclear) supply for the lesser more constant load demanded.
That’s quite an odd statement to make.
The UK certainly does have continuous demand, our overall energy demand has rarely fallen below 25GW in the past couple of years. Right now gas makes up for much of that, the goal here is to replace gas with nuclear, using gas as baseload generation isn’t wise long term.
Source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Our demand varies from 25 to 45GW
Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help. You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope.
It’s like saying “wind can handle the bulk of the capacity you just need to top up the rest”.
I’m sorry I struggle to understand your comment, but I’ll have a go.
> Saying “nuclear can handle the easy part” doesn’t help.
That’s literally how baseload works, look at France’s energy mix for an example, they have nuclear handle the bulk of their demand (at least the very minimum it will ever be) and renewables + transfers handle the rest, if renewables goes up they export it or lower their nuclear output (yes, their nuclear output can be modulated).
> You still need 20GW of extra capacity to cope
The goal isn’t to replace the entire energy mix with Nuclear, the goal is to add enough nuclear in the mix so that we don’t need gas being generating all year round (gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7). If you added just 6GW of nuclear you’d be achieving that on some days.
> gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7
I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.
But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price needs to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?
And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?
Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.
So if wind produced 35gw and nuclear 20 and demand is 30GW, you just say “well nuclear is the base load and wind needs to be curtailed”
What about when nuclear produces 20GW and wind 5 and demand is 35gw
Of nuclear costs the same as wind then why not have nuclear produce the full demand?
I’ve been a huge fan of Morley’s 12-bit color palette since I first saw it:
https://iamkate.com/data/12-bit-rainbow/
I had completely overlooked that it was for this power-usage visualization.
This live dashboard puts this number in perspective - https://grid.iamkate.com/
Roughly: the demand is about 33-35GW. That’s projected to become 50GW by 2050 as transportation and home heating become electrified. So that’s the puck we’re skating towards.
Nuclear supplies a constant 10% of the demand today (more, if you count imports from France). The goal is to power 20% of the 50GW demand through nuclear. If it’s cheap, even more. Each of these Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them.
The plan is to set up a factory near Sheffield and produce the reactor parts like IKEA, so they can be assembled on site. The hope is that manufacturing and assembling the same product repeatedly makes people more efficient. That’s the main problem with nuclear - over budget and delays - that SMRs aim to fix.
I’m glad the UK is taking electrification seriously, and is investing in domestic industry that will hopefully export reactors if it’s successful. Some folks might look at the estimated date of completion (2035) and get discouraged, but I wouldn’t. The best time to plant this tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
“like IKEA” sounds misleading at best.
Misleading how? That’s precisely how SMRs differ from traditional plants - they’re manufactured in a factory instead of being constructed on-site. That’s exactly like the difference between IKEA and constructing furniture from scratch using blocks of wood.
> Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) generates 470MW, so we’d need about 20 of them
A more realistic target, one that would make this all more viable, would be 50MW and make 200 of them.
That was the SMR dream, but it largely hasn't worked out, for various reasons. Most 'SMR' designs have grown to suspiciously close to er, normal nuclear reactors.
>estimated date of completion (2035)
Ignoring cost, I sometimes wonder why we cant build this in 1 - 2 year. And if the first one takes 5 years, why the second one isn't 5 times faster.
It frustrates me that nothing in UK is done with any urgency. And I bet that the Estimate date will be off as well.
This is a rare moment of sanity in energy policy. It’s not about wind vs nuclear. We (the whole world) need everything we’ve got. SMRs have the potential to move nuclear out of its mainframe era.
Remember iPhones would cost ~$billions each too if you only made 12 of them.
That's not what we're seeing with nuclear power though. At least so far. Counterintuitively it seems to get more expensive the more you build of the same design: [1]
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
Mass production has never been tried before for nuclear so those 50 years don’t tell us much about the possibilities for the next 50 years. They built multiple mainframes of the same design too, but the scale remained tiny and so the costs remained high.
Some designs have several dozen reactors. If that's not enough to trigger cost savings, why would you expect it for a low-hundreds number of reactors?
We desperately need regional pricing. If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
And then electricity producers would have a huge incentive to build generation in places where electricity is actually used. And NIMBYs would be told to fuck off, because letting someone build an energy source would make your electricity cheap.
> If we had that, manufacturers and data centres would be able to move to places like this, or to scotland, and get almost free electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium used to be close to Wylfa.
The reactors will also be cast in the UK by Sheffield Forgemasters
So Rolls Royce makes cars, engines for planes, and nuclear reactors?
The car company is a different entity owned by BMW.
Hopefully not another HS2
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If a generation is ~20 years then 50,000 generations is around a million years. We're talking several times longer than recorded history. In fact, I was curious and looked it up - Homo Sapiens is estimated to be around 300,000 years old [0]. We should be so lucky if there are humans around in 50,000 generations. Just by nature of the amount of stuff that happens, if they have any conception of what the UK was or any idea what happened there then there has been some sort of transcendental enlightenment where there are no longer limits on how many memories a human can retain.
In short, I think you are exaggerating the downsides of maybe a potential 10x cost blowout on the budget of a government project and a trivial amount of waste disposal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution
Paying for a few security guards to sit next to the dry casks and point out that you'd better not crack them open and snort the contents for 50,000 generations will be peanuts compared to all the other expenses associated with keeping a society going for 50,000 generations.
You’re talking about the unhindered release of CO2 into the atmosphere, I assume
Anglesey is beautiful[0]. My ancestors came from there and I used to holiday there as a child. Today it is somewhat blighted by those ugly and noisy turbines[1]. I am in favor of this if it reduces the number of onshore turbines on the island.
0 https://www.celtictrailswalkingholidays.co.uk/wp-content/upl...
1 https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/article21841043.ece/ALTERN...
Hopefully we can go back to just having the big beautiful high voltage power lines again.