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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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):
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Hydrogen or low capex thermal.
The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen.
The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia.
Yeah, nuclear is better than that.
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-...
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'.
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.
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.
Depends on the load, but nuclear isn’t dependent upon batteries or the wind.
[delayed]
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> "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)
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
> 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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
Wasn't all that bad PR mostly caused by the coal/oil industry, doing some serious astroturfing for a decade or so?
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...
Oh, sorry! Shouldn't have said "all" there... :'D
And Windscale (now Sellafield) and Three Mile Island
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...
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
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 beautiful high voltage power lines again.
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.
> 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.
“like IKEA” sounds misleading at best.
Hopefully not another HS2
Horrible news. The next 50.000 generations will have to pay for this. Will this madness never stop?
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
You’re talking about the unhindered release of CO2 into the atmosphere, I assume
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.