I am a fan of nuclear because it will give us a highly reliable, consistent energy source for decades. It beats pretty much any other energy source hands down.
Historically the reason not to like nuclear was because it is hideously expensive to build and subject to huge cost over runs.
The primary reason for that is that every build is started from scratch and nothing was really learnt from previous projects. Sizewell C is going to use the previous design. That’s pretty revolutionary thinking for the UK.
_IF_ they can actually keep to that design and not try to enhance/extend/scope creep then you will get huge amounts of learning on building a standardised reactor. It will have a cost overrun but that should put a lid on them. I believe this standardised approach is working well for South Korea.
Having a base load capability built from a set of common reactor designs will seem a no brainer in future decades. |
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It is still hideously expensive. And it takes 15 years to build one in the UK, if you are lucky. Even the Chinese take 7 or 8 years to build these things and they have huge resources and virtually no bureaucratic obstacles. The two preceding reactors of this design still have technical difficulties to overcome. I find it hard to believe they are the solution. We need long term grid scale storage and more interconnectors to cope with the dunkelflautes, I don’t know quite how that would work but I’m really unconvinced that nuclear is the answer. |
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"It is still hideously expensive. And it takes 15 years to build one in the UK, if you are lucky. Even the Chinese take 7 or 8 years to build these things and they have huge resources and virtually no bureaucratic obstacles. The two preceding reactors of this design still have technical difficulties to overcome. I find it hard to believe they are the solution. We need long term grid scale storage and more interconnectors to cope with the dunkelflautes, I don’t know quite how that would work but I’m really unconvinced that nuclear is the answer."
100% agree that long term energy storage would be the answer - the problem is that it doesn’t exist at scale. It’s the scale that is the problem. Until someone can solve that then it is just not viable and you need to look at generation.
Interconnects are fine until you end up in a place where the people you are interconnecting to don’t want to interconnect anymore. The last six months have clearly shown that the world is too unreliable to get all the energy from somewhere else. |
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"I’m on the fence with this one. Convince me……
We need to move away from fossil fuels.
Wind and solar are unreliable.
Nuclear provides stable predictable power for decades."
This, a mixed bag etc is better than one or two options when some of them are susceptible to the weather ironically.. |
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