Get those construction contacts signed!
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Raw materials are not the choke point for nuclear energy independence- enrichment facilities are, of which the UK has three that produce an exportable surplus. Even if it was, Canada and Australia are second and third in the world in Uranium reserves, which is convenient for the country that houses their King.
Nuclear energy is green- it’s the only energy worldwide that internalizes its externalities and is made to cost what it costs to the environment.
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And if the royal decree doesn’t work I suppose we could pay them for it but it’s better to not try that one out of the box just in case it works.
Sorry but that’s an absurd way to construe the point I was making. “Energy Independence” when used in a geopolitical context involves essentially fuel-exporting nations exploiting their supply chain position in order to win political concessions from importers- such as Russia holding Northern Europe hostage over oil and fossil gas in response to European resistance to the invasion of Ukraine. Commonwealth nations share close relationships that are unlikely to degenerate to the point where Australia or Canada are invading their neighbors and holding the UK’s electricity hostage.
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I don’t know if that’s true lol, this is reddit we’re talking about.
But yeah, I missed that you were pisstaking; my b.
I mean, we can’t even build a rail line on time or to budget, I can’t see us being able to build nuclear reactors any time soon.
Starmer Voice Where I come from, we’re not great at building rail lines because we’re too busy railing lines from the bosom of this beautiful nation
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone and I wish that wasn’t the case. Pairing renewables with emission free nuclear is the only option we really have to meet current and future demands without fossil fuels.
Google search found some uranium in England: https://www.nature.com/articles/246180a0.pdf
You can definitely achieve more if you can work the supply-side as well. In theory if the smart grid were well executed then it’d be possible for consumers to modulate their heat, charging, tumble dryers etc… to provide more elasticity.
Unfortunately in a lot of places the incentives aren’t that high. I don’t have that option where I live, but in denver the lowest consumer rate is around 7c and the highest around 17c/kWh. It’s hard to invest in new appliances to exploit that difference, but if the off-peak number were 1c then I think you’d see much more take-up of smart car chargers and people delaying when they do laundry.
So how does modulation work? Does the smart grid turn off dryers until midnight? Does the dryer have to be compatible with the drig? I’ve never heard of this and am interested.
Yeah, you can get electric car chargers where you can set rules something like “Charge whenever power is under 5c/kWh, but try to make sure i’ve 60% charge by 8am each weekday”. Logically you could have a thermostat control AC - we’ve been playing with that at work because our power goes up at 1pm, so we turn down the thermostat at 12:00 and then turn it up at 1:00 so it shunts some of the cooling a little earlier.
I’ve never seen a tumble drier that can do it, for some reason mine has WiFi but can’t do shit like that. But, yeah I imagine the rule I’d want would be : Dry this anytime in the next 4 hours, and try to spend as little as possible.
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone
They absolutely can when paired with storage. Nuclear is not needed.
Storage? Like battery storage? Lead? Lithium? Go on, tell me more.
Or will we flood river valleys? What are you thinking?
Batteries of all kinds, compressed air, green hydrogen, pumped storage, flywheels, etc.
I took graduate level courses in storage with these technologies at scale. Neat that this knowledge is useful again.
Pumped and compressed require specific geologic formations. Most of the sites for pumped have already been developed in NA. There’s room for growth for compressed, but compressed also suffers from losses when the air that’s pumped into the crust cools. Hopefully, there are undeveloped compressed sites near regions with energy demands.
Flywheels are a neat idea and still just that: an idea. It’s yet to been demonstrated they can reliably do more than grid frequency moderation. The reason it’s not very attractive to investors is that we don’t have materials to match the energy density of other technologies.
Green hydrogen is also just an idea at the present. Nobody’s pursues this because of losses incurred generating hydrogen from water. I want this one to work!
Finally, batteries. Do you think there are enough metals on the planet to build enough batteries for current and future demand?
Iron-air batteries seem rather promising for being cheap and scalable
Another person who doesn’t understand power-grids being anti-nuclear, wow!
UK, plenty of sunlight? Edit: for the down voter, this is what the UK thinks of the sun https://lemmy.tf/post/538103
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It’s a bit of a meme that the UK is always rainy. It isn’t always rainy, it does rain a lot but it doesn’t rain anywhere close to all the time and when it’s not raining it can get quite hot, quite unbearably in fact because we don’t have air conditioning.
Anyway heat isn’t really relevant to solar panels, what they really need is just sunlight in general, and we get plenty of that even if it isn’t particularly hot. In fact solar panels don’t actually like being particularly hot so they probably won’t work very well in the Sahara desert. Despite what everyone may think.
Nuclear power is green energy.
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Oh no, we will have to buy it from that evil super state Australia!!!
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And Hinkley Point was such a roaring success, let’s pour more money down the bottomless barrel!
Burning coal is cheap, that’s why we’re here. I’ll pay more for electric today to leave a planet for our children. Wish my parents did that for me.
Only a fool would consider the cost in dollars alone.
Nope, burning coal was cheap a long time ago and allowed the people to accululate enough wealth to push for more coal (and brain-wash people to believe coal is cheap; and also how expensive renewables are).
The actual reality looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized\_cost\_of\_electricity#/media/File:20201019\_Levelized\_Cost\_of\_Energy\_(LCOE,\_Lazard)\_-\_renewable\_energy.svg And if you think that you need topay more for electricity to not destroy the planet that already their propaganda having done their work.
Dollars is a metric that is easy to understand and complex problems are complex. Do you really think it’s that simple?
Some parts of it are… there is a certain amount of either nuclear base load or storage infrastructure needed.
But more than 50% renewables are easily doable without much strain on modern grids (modern models for nuclear usually plan with ~30-35% minimal base load needed…).
Also another argument for specific fossil fuels -domestic availability and thus more independence- is also a pro argument for renewables.
So no matter where you stand, if you are not at least using (or planning to use in near future) 50% cheap renewables in your electricity mix (or see narratives about expensive renewables even) then you know that the decision is not taken for economic reasons but because decision makers are getting money to stick with more fossil fuels than necessary.
Renewables are an economical no-brainer right now. Actual complexity of balancing out their fluctuating production with base load or storage comes much later (although in the case of nuclear the build times are often long enough that you should start soon). And still there are so many countries so far away from the absolute no-brainer amount of renewables.
Hundred percent. I’m happy that the UK is considering going nuclear for the other 50% instead of just saying, “we’ve done 50% wind and solar so we’re done. Let’s jut burn coal and gas for the remaining 50%.”
Actually coal energy is expensive. Renewable energy is cheap energy.
It’s an obvious distraction pushing the topic of nuclear power again, just days after they prepared to open massive new oil and gas production sites while stifling the well-going UK wind industry.
But there are enough people out there brain-washed by decades of anti-renewable propaganda that it will work. And in the end we have just another country failing to build the proper amount of nuclear base load AND the proper amount of renewables… but at least someone smart “thought ahead” and worked for enough fossil fuels to compensate.
Also it works so flawlessly for the French (not*), why not do it too?
*France is slowly overcoming stress-corrosion problems (35 out of 56 reactors were down, drought is another problem), and Finland celebrates the commissioning of a new reactor (albeit 14 years late), while on the other hand monthly German nuclear generation will be zero for the first time in over 50 years.
The real thing is the cost, the cost per kWh is falling so going nuke and locking in to a price that’s already above market makes no sense at all.
The Tories are ideologically opposed to renewables because of some weird culture war thing, plus they hate the idea of locally sustainable communities not being totally under the control of billionaires - people are a lot easier to scare into obedience when you can tell them their power might be shut off. The main reason though is huge projects can only go to huge companies, they don’t want lots of little solar farms they want their oil baron buddies to maintain their monopolies, that’s the only reason we still hear so much about this now allbut obsolete technology.
I totally agree and it is the same for Germany. That’s why especially wind energy for South Germany was held back for so long, how dare communities go energy independent. It seems the resistance there is broken now, at least I hope it is and not just an election promise that gets broken after the Bavarian election.
Germany’s logic for energy is wild.
“Our biggest supplier for fossil fuels is imploding from failing to conquer a neighbor a tenth their size, let’s become even more reliant on them for energy”
The cost of burning fossil fuels isn’t measured in pounds or dollars. Nuclear is the only tech we have that can meet current and future load. We must pair it with renewables. There is no other option right now and if we wait for fusion, it’ll be too late.
And Germany added 36M tons of emissions because they replaced the decommissioned reactors with fossil gas.
Yeah, if you tell that lie often enough it will surely become true one day… Seriously, it will happen. Just another ten thousand times or so. By current rates that should be doable by the nuclear-cult on social media in only a few weeks, so you are sooooo close to changing reality…
Yeah, let’s just keep burning fossil fuels, amIrite?
Yeah, let’s just keep burning fossil fuels, amIrite?
Yes, that’s obviously what your nuclear fairy tales are aming for: Not building even the minimal capacity needed for base load, failing to build that insufficient capacity at a reasonable time/cost frame, failing to build the complementary renewables and then crying why you need to still burn fossil fuels in decades… while obviously blaming renewables (that you failed to build) and storage (that you denied is viable) for the failings of nuclear.
Please list the countries either planning/building or already having sufficiently modern capacities right now to cover just the minimal base load of ~30-35% of the projected electricity demand by 2050 and onward… Hint: The one country close is France, which will be able to (barely) reach 30% of their projected demand when they build all the planned new reactors… where “all” is the full 14, not the bullshit right now of only bulding 6 with 8 being optional. Because nothing about those is optional. They are the bare minimum that will be needed. But even in France you can’t honestly tell the people the required amounts and investments needed…
That’s the actual state of nuclear power right now… It’s prohibitely expensive and inefficient and only kept alive by lobbyists. And by people like you they brain-washed for decades who are now fighting their fight against renewables (that are actually also a requirement for every viable nuclear model) and cheering for every country building nuclear power even when it’s mathematically proven that it’s purely symbolical and not even close to relevant for co2-neutrality.
Ya know, wind and solar are independent too, and much cheaper.
They’re great technologies and we should be building them out. Unfortunately, they struggle with intermittency. Renewables like wind and solar would best complement base load, always-on, capacity of a nuclear generating stations.
I’m honestly surprised the UK hasn’t invested in wave power. Plenty of crashing waves all around it.
There’s been a lot of research into this area because many people, yourself included, can see there’s energy to be had. From what I remember from classes on it, the issues with capturing power from waves has most to do with ecosystem damage and scalability. Not to mention, they’re build on waterways which are already being used for things like fishing and shipping.
I’ve helped people who where working on a project of wave power.
It seemed like the biggest challenges are corrosion from sea water and the marine fouling. As soon as you put something in the sea water it will be covered by algae and organisms.
These issues make collecting energy from the sea extremely challenging.
Thanks for chiming in with your expertise
But with lots of solar and wind we can store the extra to smooth over dips. We can also import/export power (as now) as it’s not going to cloud and windless everywhere. Southern Europe could be big solar exporters and we can be big wind (and wave) exporters.
Then do it. Fight for it. I have trouble seeing a 100% renewable solution at the moment but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. Don’t back down when people dont want generation in thier backyard or when you’re “pretty close” to 100%. We must decarbonize energy.
I believe nuclear is a way to do that and advocate for it by writing letters to my governor and lawmakers to remove the moratorium on building new nuclear facilies in the state I live: Illinois. However complete decarbonization is done, doesn’t really matter. My experience and formal training on the subject matter influences me to believe in nuclear and your a person with an equally valid opinion. Fight for what you believe.
I’m not anti-nuclear, it’s just more expensive than wind/solar/wave/hydro + storage (and hydro can be storage). Give it a few decades and V2X is going to be common and with have a large amount distributed battery. You can make money today doing V2G with a Leaf. I’m just not sure we’ll need much nuclear. I’m only against nuclear in geologically unstable places. Maybe politically unstable places… which you never know were will destablize. Lots of crazy popularlism since 2008 crash.
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