UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors The UK government's nuclear energy agency has embarked on detailed negotiations with four shortlisted bidders to supply small modular reactors (SMRs) to bolster the country's power generation. Great British Nuclear (GBN), owned by the government, says it will invite the four to submit tenders for evaluation, and decide on …
Equally the most sensible approach is also to use Rolls Royce in an attempt to keep at least some of the investment internal.
That will not happen because the UK appears hell bent on destroying as much innovation and manufacturing as possible.
Trains is a prime example. Whatever people think about the old BR, BREL was at the global forefront of train design yet we threw it all away with the franchises and skewed tendering that somehow only allowed Siemens or Hitachi to bid, but no UK companies.
Just think, it is only in the last year of so the HST was retired.
The Pendalino is built using the APT technology that the press slated and was sold to Fiat for next to nothing, Now it is the standard for high speed trains.
"“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”--Winston Churchill
Sadly, the few times that this could be said about the British is in regard to something which could be directly attributed to Churchill; cf one of his most formidable decisions, as First Lord of the Admiralty, that all future steamships would be powered by oil (submarine already were), and not coal...
In Churchill's defence it did increase the operational effectiveness of the RN to switch to oil, for the following incomplete list of reasons:
1. Enabled refuelling at sea (RAS) rather than having to put into a port to re-coal on a regular basis as oil can be pumped.
2. Required many fewer men (and it was all men at the time) doing backbreaking work in hot boiler rooms shovelling coal into the furnaces constantly. This meant fewer personnel per ship, which meant more ships could be manned for the same money and same toll on the population.
3. Removed the requirement for many of the bases around the world which we had retained for coaling the RN, although these were often kept for other resupply (mainly victuals) and for power projection.
4. Ships had longer ranges on oil as they could carry more of it (no air gaps as between lumps of coal) and oil has a higher energy/weight ratio.
5. Oil tanks can be positioned in more restrictive places on ships compared to coal bunkers, taking up odd shapes and existing below and above other compartments. Coal bunkers had to be vertical and had to be accessible to the outside at the top of the bunker to fill it and at the bottom of the bunker to get the coal out.
6. Coal bunkers couldn't be partitioned in the same way as oil tanks, meaning that watertight integrity of the ships was improved with oil. See above point about large open spaces for coal bunkers
7. Oil could easily be pumped around the ship to alter it's trim (how it sits in the water from front to back and side to side). This enhanced sea-keeping and efficiency by keeping the ship in the most efficient trim possible rather than having to choose which coal bunkers to use in what order and then not being able to alter trim rapidly.
About the only advantage of coal was that it was produced in great quantities in the UK at the time so didn't rely on oil imports.
So...why was NuScale Power, the designer and builder of the only SMR to receive US regulatory approval, not considered, at all, in this exercise.
NuScale's solution is ready to go, and right now.. This should have been a "gimme"; a 'no-brainer'.
Check it out, here--, and here.
(NYSE ticker symbol: SMR)
In the nuclear power industry "pedigree" is everything
People don't often appreciate it's deep reverence for "tradition." The need to show something has been built like this for decades and it's never failed so they go on building like this.
The PWR is the most common design of power reactor (of the 450+ power reactors) on the planet, CANDU is the runner up, possibly because it has never suffered a Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukishima level failure.
As you get closer to the actual fuel the amount of tests you have to run to prove a new design (of whatever bit you want to change) rise exponentially.
For example it is expected to take 25 years to both mfg and qualify silicon carbide for use as fuel cladding. So far General Atomics have made 3 ft lengths of it, but they need them in 14 foot lengths in production volume. What makes Zirconium a problem is that it's really good (at high temperatures) at "gettering+" the oxygen from water, releasing hydrogen.
So, if you keep the water outside the reactor pressure vessel to start with, by not using it as a coolant or moderator, you get a much more robust system.
*Incidentally the Magnox which you probably think of as British was actually copied from the design of the reactors at Hanford to make Plutonium. Electricity was a by product.The AGR was probably the closest to a truly "British" design.
+ I'd hoped this was some kind of catalytic process that could make hydrogen from water relatively cheaply. In fact it's just plain old water + metal --> metal oxide + hydrogen.
"Also why do we have to copy what the Americans are doing? "
The Americans aren't doing anything, only talking about it. In another 4 years or so, that talk will change again. Given the process to bring a nuclear power plant online, even a President and Congress that stays intact for 8 years (2 Presidential terms) is less than what it might take to clear all of the legal hurdles.
Isn't it fun to trot out the German case, without details, as evidence of bad policy?
But there's more to it than that. The original consensus in Germany to phase out nuclear power did give everybody sufficient time to plan and the main argument – that renewables compete with nuclear for base load is still broadly true – but Merkel reversed this only to reverse the reverse. This not only buggered up planning, but it also saddled German taxpayers with around € 11 bn in compensation payouts thanks to contracts hastily drawn up, against the advice of the responsible minister at the time, who also noted that small extension to the original lifetimes, wouldn't make much difference. But the bigger problem was a dramatic slowdown in the buildout of renewables, especially in areas with nuclear power stations. Yes, the attendant risk of hoping to use gas to cope with temporary capacity shortfalls backfired in 2022, but this was largely down to 15 years of different governments ignoring the arguments against a single supplier run by a dictator.
There's still work to be done, especially on the pricing mechanism to prevent future price shocks, but the worst is (probably) over. And, the consensus of all involved, is that a return to nuclear wouldn't significantly reduce power prices, not least because of the staggering capital costs.
Are you suggesting that renewables are more expensive, or that france has already dealt with the capital investment.
Maybe you're just not aware of how energy pricing actually works - I don't know what the french market looks like, but EDF is a state supplier, so it's pretty different from over here.
One major challenge in the UK is that we have a single, nationwide, price for electricity.
There's also a single, nationwide, price for electricity in France for people with a 'regulated price' contract with Enedis
Now the historical EDF has been split in 3 parts : EDF [produces elecrtricty], RTE [transport electricity nationwde] and Enedis [sells electricity]
Each company is independant, and Enedis is not the only choice to buy electricity from ( There's Engie, ENI, Total, ... ), the only difference in using another company beside Enedis is that the price is tied to the whole EU Electricty Market, which is strangely tied to the gas price.
As John Robson notes, you need to consider the capital costs involved. The marginal cost per kWh for renewables started to undercut nuclear several years ago, as demonstrated by the buildout in places such as Texas, not known for its green credentials.
But, if you mention France, you might want to look up blackouts in the summer as it is forced to reduce generation at is nuclear plants. You can even get cheaper electricity as long as you're prepared to live with reduced supply or cutoffs. Luckily, it can usally import cheap electrictiy from Germany at such times.
Even including capital costs wind undercut nuclear ages ago...
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be using nuclear - we should.
I'd particularly like to see the hyperscale AI groupies be forced to build their own power generation, and for that to be required to be zero (operational) carbon. That would likely end up being a mix of wind and solar with both batteries* and load management to match supply and demand along with continuous generation like geothermal, and nuclear.
* Note that the batteries don't have to be Li-ion - they could be sodium, or iron/air, or flow batteries or they could be pumped hydro, or heat batteries, or flywheels, or electrolysis/fuel cell combinations. I suspect that they would inevitably have some LiIon/NaIon component at the front end of the system for high speed regulation, but backed by slower, cheaper battery technologies.
SMRs are a step in the right direction, I'd like to see micro reactors get to the point where we can deploy them at, for example, service stations.
"Note that the batteries don't have to be Li-ion"
I was doing some searches and found a company developing a gravity battery based on a heavy mass on an inclined track. I never liked the crane lifting concrete blocks as I could see to many failure modes and service issues. Pumped storage takes specific geography and water. It remains to be seen if the company can attract the investment it needs and can execute on their design scale up. Apparently the prototype worked. The company is called "Advanced Rail Energy Storage". Where I live there are many solar farms going in since the land is very flat and no suited for much being in a desert. There are 500m or so hills on either side of the valley that could be used for a gravity storage system that is charged from the solar PV below. It might even be more economic to not ship power during the day other than at premium spot prices but rather store it for use in the evening and morning when other solar farms aren't producing.
There's been no blackout so far, despite the fact that two years ago about half of the nuke plants were offline for maintenance during summer and we had to cut a few more due to the water in the rivers being too hot, or too low.
Now most of our plants are online and contingency planning has been put in place to avoid the situation again.
There's also an interesting twist that comes with all our nukes... We tend to sell our production surplus :
( Electricity import/export by day )
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres
"Due to the rivers they draw cooling water from becoming too warm to use."
The water levels can become too low to be able to draw enough from the source. Rivers would have to become quite warm to make much of a difference due to inlet temps. If the levels are low, the water downstream of the plant could become too warm for fish and also allow pathogens to flourish causing health emergencies.
Isn't it fun to trot out the German case, without details, as evidence of bad policy?
Luckily the Germans invented a 1-word explainer-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
In the renewable energy sector, a dunkelflaute (German: [ˈdʊŋkəlˌflaʊtə] ⓘ, lit. 'dark doldrums' or 'dark wind lull', plural dunkelflauten) is a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power, because there is neither wind nor sunlight.
Which also has been Germany's case for most of the last 3 weeks. Meanwhile, over in Baku, 66,000 assorted troughers, including 470 ministers and officials are promising to waste even more money on wind & solar. Not sure how many Germany has sent, or how many will have jobs in a few weeks given their government is in the process of collapsing, largely thanks to their Greens.
I know all about the Dunkelflaute and it is a serious issue, especially as the proposed solution for heating, heat pumps require more electricity at a time when production is low. But it is not insurmountable, and doesn't detract from the baseload argument that Germany is already producing more than 50% of its electricity for most of the year from renewables. Nuclear simply doesn't make sense for the few months when there is a shortfall.
We need more market-based solutions on what to do with the massive overgeneration in the summer, as the current subsidies are not only cripplingly expensive at estimated € 30bn this year alone, but they also remove the incentive to develop efficient solutions. Again, if successive governments hadn't deliberately limited the buildout of windpower and made electricity more expensive where it was installed (this is changing now), there would have been more time to work on complementary strategies.
their government is in the process of collapsing, largely thanks to their Greens.
This is untrue. The collapse was deliberately provoked by the FDP who were going back on the coalition agreement, but most policy disagreements were actually with the SPD.
But it is not insurmountable, and doesn't detract from the baseload argument that Germany is already producing more than 50% of its electricity for most of the year from renewables. Nuclear simply doesn't make sense for the few months when there is a shortfall.
But it's those few months that matter, and why German companies like VAG and BASF are closing plants. The baseload argument is also very simple given wind & solar simply cannot deliver that reliably or affordably. Nuclear can, and for less cost than 'renewables'. Even gas is cheaper-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/updated-ccgt-costs-confirmed-as-much-cheaper-than-renewables/
I asked DESNZ to send me their workings for the Levelised Generations Costs published last year. At the time, they put a cost of £114/MWh on CCGT, or £54/MWh excluding the irrelevant Carbon Cost).
Especially as the UK can produce a lot of it's own gas. Well, if the neo-luddites weren't using judicial reviews to try and prevent exploration and production. And then to add insult to injury, add another £22bn to try and bury CO2 in a hole in the ground. But for every GW of wind, or solar, you need another GW of stand-by capacity for those Dunkelflaute moments. Batteries don't scale and are extremely expensive, and the cost of CCGT back-up is artificially inflated by relegating those to stand-by, and the £60/MWh carbon tax.
We need more market-based solutions on what to do with the massive overgeneration in the summer, as the current subsidies are not only cripplingly expensive at estimated € 30bn this year alone, but they also remove the incentive to develop efficient solutions.
Agreed, but it's those 'market-based solutions' that have lead to this problem. They're currently perverse given they incentivise inefficient solutions. Given the amount of subsidies wind & solar generate, it's unsuprising speculators rushed in to trouser those. Too bad it's lead to the UK having the most expensive electricity in Europe, if not the world. The 'massive overgeneration' in summer is simply a consequence of those perverse incentives, and why the UK has inflation and a cost of living crisis. Plus any solution to the problems 'renewables' have created will just increase costs even further. What can you do with this 'surplus', when your business would be seasonal, and your input costs would be very high?
"excluding the irrelevant Carbon Cost"
So it's cheaper if you ignore the costs...
"Especially as the UK can produce a lot of it's own gas."
No we can't - we can extract some gas to put on the open international market, but we don't extract gas for UK usage.
And noone produces gas, they just extract it.
So it's cheaper if you ignore the costs...
They're just policy costs imposed by government to try and make 'renewables' appear more favorable. Government could decide not to add the carbon tax to gas generation. But then people might start asking pointed questions, like why, if CCGT costs less than half the cost of windmills, we're building windmills.
No we can't - we can extract some gas to put on the open international market, but we don't extract gas for UK usage.
Err.. right. So there are no gas piplines from production rigs landing in the UK? Gas from on- or off-shore wells magically teleports to Patagonia and elsewhere in the 'international market' at the click of an oil traders button? Or just go back and look at how the US worked, prior to the US lifting their ban on exporting oil & gas.
And noone produces gas, they just extract it.
Typical Greens. I suppose you think we don't produce potatoes either.
We *grow* potatoes.
But we don't produce gas... that's taken a very long time.
Some of that gas will be used in the UK, but it's not earmarked - it's an international company digging up resources and selling them without a care for where they are sold.
And there are real costs to carbon production... they're called externalities, and they will bite us, and alot harder than you seem to think.
But don't worry - I've seen your red hat, and the Drill Bby Drill tshirt.
There are no facts that can penetrate that kind of front.
And there are real costs to carbon production... they're called externalities, and they will bite us, and alot harder than you seem to think.
Jolly good. Please quantify them. So one externality would be excess winter mortality, ie people freezing to death over winter because they can't afford high energy costs. Of course this isn't anything to trouble Starmer, Millibrain or any of the 450 official UK attendees who've jetted off to Baku for the COP shindig. Or there's the $100bn a year the UN wants per the Paris COP deal. In Baku, they of course want even more money.
So Starmer unilaterally decided to cut carbon by 81%! And he seemed very proud that he'd made up this number all on his own. So assuming he can actually do this, how much will it lower a) observable atmospheric CO2 levels over the UK and b) territory? And I say observable because it would be impossible to actually measure the success. It is far easier to measure the effect of these policies by counting those excess deaths, or just measuring the rate of inflation.
But don't worry - I've seen your red hat, and the Drill Bby Drill tshirt.There are no facts that can penetrate that kind of front.
Likewise there are no facts that can penetrate what passes for brains amongst the useful idiots in Green. It's long been a basis of economics that if you increase supply, prices fall. So drill baby, drill does this. The US had an economic boom when it did this with shale gas, then it had Bidenflation when Joe came along and stopped pipeline projects. The UK has gone much further and is inverting standard economics by reducing supply and at the same time, increasing demand. A cynic might suggest proposals to legalise euthanasia are Labour's Final Solution to both poverty and pension crises. Can't afford to heat your home this winter? Just ask your GP to kill you!
JE Knows this already.They cannot (or will not?) understand it.
More projection from someone stuck with tradition, and doesn't understand that the main perk of government is being able to change the rules. People wibble about the 'global' or 'international' price for oil & gas, not understanding that that is just a benchmark. Traders can buy, sell & settle contracts at whatever price they negotiate. That doesn't have to be via ICE, although traders and speculators can play that casino if they want. Neither the UK nor US is a member of OPEC, so isn't bound by their pricing or production rules.
One obvious example would be Germany and Russia's gas contracts. Those were agreed between Germany and Gazprom. People then wibbled about Germany getting 'cheap Russian gas'. How could this be, if there is this mythical fixed 'global' price? After Germany (ok, the EU) decided to sanction itself and stop buying that cheap gas, Germany's gas consumers then had to find alternative suppliers, pay more and are deindustrialising. The benefits of cheap gas are obvious.
You also wibble about licences. Governments can change those. Governments decide what is legal and what isn't. And it probably wouldn't have to. So given the benefits of cheap energy, it could decide to make gas consumed inside the UK duty-free, and only charge duties on exports. It has levers it could play with, if it wanted to reduce UK energy costs and inflation. Instead, we have economic terrorists pulling stunts like this-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce89er3ekn0o
Billions at stake in court battle over North Sea oil
...Operated by Norwegian state energy giant Equinor and Aberdeen-based Ithaca Energy, it is believed to be the largest untapped field in UK waters and its oil is to be taken off by tanker and sold on the international market, with some gas being piped to Shetland.
How could this be, when you're insisting that all oil & gas is sold on the 'international market', at some hypothetical 'global price'? Which would be unfortunate, if true given it would make neo-luddites dreams of a Hydrogen economy even more expensive, if they have to overpay for CH4 to crack.
Oh, and of course due to sanctions, there has been a huge incentive to create trading systems that aren't vulnerable to the sanctions hammer. So BRICS is busily creating their own financial and commodity exchanges, which is bad news for companies like Intercontinental Exchange, Inc who currently make $10bn from running a commodity casino, and will lose some of that, if commodities are traded on alternate exchanges.. Which is too bad for London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and their host nations who have bet the farm on financial services, not developing industry or energy security.
But I'm sure 'AI' and building bit-barns to host chatbots will make up for those losses, and the massive costs and challenges we'll face in keeping those fed & watered.
"But then people might start asking pointed questions, like why, if CCGT costs less than half the cost of windmills, we're building windmills."
Fuel. The supply of gas isn't infinite nor is there any guarantee that it can be locally produced for a given length of time. The fuel for a wind turbine is infinite, just not steady, reliable and there are other cost considerations to take into account. There's also no way somebody can "shut off" the wind for political reasons or even just a billing dispute.
Fuel. The supply of gas isn't infinite nor is there any guarantee that it can be locally produced for a given length of time.
Ah, well.. it kind of is, as we've known about for a long time-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
The Sabatier reaction or Sabatier process produces methane and water from a reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide at elevated temperatures (optimally 300–400 °C) and pressures (perhaps 3 MPa ) in the presence of a nickel catalyst. It was discovered by the French chemists Paul Sabatier and Jean-Baptiste Senderens in 1897
Which gets kinda fun given proposals to spend £22bn dumping CO2 into previous gas fields. And a strange fascination with creating a 'hydrogen economy' to make a very expensive subsitute for CH4. But that's also the downside to the Sabatier reaction, ie the energy cost. Plus maybe some geopolitical challenges, like supply security of nickel or ruthenium for catalysts, especially when Russia is a major producer of both and is threatening to restrict the supply of nickel. Ah, politics.
But that's also one of those 'big picture' policy things. Assorted lobbyists and chancers are all angling for subsidies to use 'surplus' wind to produce <something>. But wind surpluses are vague and random, so maintaining temperature and pressure for a Sabatier reactor (or just 'green' hydrogen) also become unreliable. Alternatively, there's nuclear, which is also a handy source of heat. So if there's ever a surplus (hah!) of nuclear electricity, depending on financial engineering, that could also generate 'free' CH4.
And then of course there's the Holy Grail of creating an economically viable fusion reactor. Then in theory there'll be abundant cheap electricity, and thanks to the magic of chemistry, we can make synth gas or fuel. Another reason why cheap energy should be the policy objective, not chasing collosally expensive unicorns like 'Net Zero'.
"Alternatively, there's nuclear, which is also a handy source of heat."
There really needs to be thought about using that heat which there hasn't been to date. Iceland has done a much better job of using waste heat from geothermal power generation for lots of things. Of course, it doesn't get really cold in Iceland so it would be pointless to use geothermally produced electricity to heat homes and businesses.
Of course, it doesn't get really cold in Iceland so it would be pointless to use geothermally produced electricity to heat homes and businesses.
Iceland is subarctic and can get pretty cold, but that's kind of relative, ie it's colder than say, Florida or California. Except the bits of Cali that have glaciers. Iceland also does use geothermal heating pretty extensively, which leads to some disconcerting warnings in showers to be careful with the temperatures because the water's heated by volcano. Which has also lead to the occasional death when the water has got too hot.
It's a nice place to visit, and due to their volcanic nature, a great place for geothermal. Their government has been trying to attract datacentres and bitbarns have been built at some of their old cold war airbases. Connectivity has been improved thanks to new subsea fibres*, and being positioned kinda mid-Atlantic, can be a sensible place to run datacentres sitting between US and Europe. Plus it has a well educated population who are also somewhat crazy & fun. Downside is tech companies are still sometimes over fixated on latency even when they don't need to be, and overlook the advantages of cheap space & power.
*Perks of the job. Getting 'free' trips to visit places like Iceland. It's one of those countries I've always been tempted to move to, and if you like the outdoors, has some spectacular scenery. Downside is sometimes that erupts..
@John Robson
"So it's cheaper if you ignore the costs..."
Carbon fantasy nonsense isnt a real cost. Yet I note when counting the cost of unreliables (e.g. wind and solar) they forget to include the cost of gas power to back it up, battery power as a backup and the infrastructure upgrades to get power from where it generates to where its needed.
"No we can't - we can extract some gas to put on the open international market, but we don't extract gas for UK usage."
Except any surplus would be local and drive down the price.
@John Robson
"That's not how it works."
Are you suggesting the companies would prefer to store at their own cost the surplus instead of selling it on locally? And by selling it locally you dont get the costs of transport as if it was bought from say half way around the world. So it reduces the local costs if production is above what can be exported.
I know this. You know this.. JE and Codejunky know this.
But they refuse to accept that IRL these companies sell their gas and oil (as their license allows them to do) on the international market.
That is not to say those licenses (or rather future licenses, as the companies involved have the legal muscle to make retrospective changes to their license very costly) couldn't be changed but AFAIK no government has planned (or is planning) to do so.
IOW it's in their heads, much like the benefits of Brexit* they both vigorously championed.
*Which in IMHO only the greedy, the gullible and the delusional (most of who seemed to have provided the money) voted for.
"Germany is already producing more than 50% of its electricity for most of the year from renewables."
Averages are a wonderful thing! Yes on average its 'more than 50%' but in reality it varies quite wildly from zero to more than they need and on a reasonably fast timescale requiring careful management of the grid.
Over a given time period you can achieve a 50% average by being at a constant 50%, 100% for half the period, 200% for 1/4 the period, 1000% for 1/20th... A 1Hz square wave and a 1GHz square wave have the same average on time.
"are promising to waste even more money on wind & solar. "
Wind and solar aren't a waste, but trying to shift from one source to another quickly can lead to problems especially if what's being shifted to isn't well developed or there isn't enough of it yet to shut down the old method.
More and more homes in my city are having rooftop solar installed. At least for the people that can afford the fees the city charges. That likely doesn't even moderate the increases from growth so it's not time for the electric company to shut down a generating facility. Those installations can slow down how quickly the electrical grid has to be upgraded and that work is often very expensive with a very long return on investment. Looking at Puerto Rico and how their patchwork power grid was knocked out and the giant problems there's been to rebuild it to more modern and consistent spec, it's easy to see how serious the total investment is to date at today's costs.
My focus was particularly on energy security rather than pricing / costs.
Every sovereign nation should ensure (if at all possible) that there is no or little dependence on other countries in terms of some of the essentials - energy, food and defense in particular. This is a policy rather than economic decision.
There are positive economic consequences in the medium to long term, however, if that independence is achieved (you mentioned price shocks earlier), as was brought into rude focus through geopolitical changes.
".... that renewables compete with nuclear for base load is still broadly true –" Hardly!!
Nuclear is generally available 24/7/365, whereas renewables are very 'un'reliably linked to sun & wind weather variations - see last 2 weeks of Dunkleflaut effect on solar & wind production.
It matters not how much more solar & wind installation we build, if its not available when needed then its not effective. These sources should hsve always been required to provide baseload (& other functions such as frequency control, backup, inertia), but of course that inflates their costs way beyond CCGT plants & hence never contracted - another example of uncosted Net Zero !planning.
The economics are against this. Depending on geography, you only need to supplement renewables for a couple of months a year for electricity production, which would make the marginal cost per kWh of nuclear astronomic for new power stations. Heating, is a separate and for domestic consumers are a far bigger problem.
you only need to supplement renewables for a couple of months a year for electricity production, which would make the marginal cost per kWh of nuclear astronomic for new power stations
I imagine you didn't intend to completely undermine your own argument like that.
Reality is that with renewables, for "a couple of months of the year" people have to switch off/factories have to shut down/people die from hypothermia - or you have an alternative. The cheapest alternative is gas, which is made very much more expensive by only having a low duty cycle, and emits CO2 which of course we are trying to stop emitting. The obvious option is nuclear which is as close to reliable low carbon energy as we are going to get to, and then turn them down a bit along with turning off some of the renewables when there's too much lecky. But, due to the way the contracts have been done, we actually have to pay renewable operators to turn off instead of them just having to suck up a lower rate of return like other operators have to.
Longer term, it would be good if we could get to a point where there is a surplus of zero-carbon lecky - and then use electrolysis to make hydrogen which has many uses (such as reacting it with CO2 to make hydrocarbons such as synthetic liquid fuels and hence decarbonise applications where liquid hydrocarbon fuels really are the most logical energy supply).
"and then use electrolysis to make hydrogen which has many uses (such as reacting it with CO2 to make hydrocarbons such as synthetic liquid fuels and hence decarbonise applications where liquid hydrocarbon fuels really are the most logical energy supply)."
It would be better to make Ammonia rather than H2. It can be a feedstock for producing synthetic fuels, it's used in all sorts of industries and it's easier to store. It might even be more efficient to produce but I haven't researched that so I could be wrong. The real metric would be production AND storage.
Paying anybody to not do something is wasteful.
"This not only buggered up planning, but it also saddled German taxpayers with around € 11 bn in compensation payouts thanks to contracts hastily drawn up, against the advice of the responsible minister at the time"
They really needed a minister with some experience in project management that could have charted all of the moving pieces and could have given better advice on how bad of an impact there would be for a given change. I see politicians will often only do a first order analysis if they analyze a complex problem at all before acting. "Who killed the electric car" is a good example of stupid politics. California puts into law that a certain number of new cars sold (or offered for sale) must be zero emissions vehicles, which was only electric at that point, without taking into account that no manufacturer had anything at all for sale in that category and the typical lead time for a new model was 5-7 years from sketch to production. And, that was for an ICEV that was just a riff on an existing design/platform and not an entirely new power plant. Sir Pratchett might have said it "wasn't time to railroad".
I'd place a bet I will be gone before any SMR is in commercial service as another 25 years isn't likely in my portfolio. If China finishes development of LFTR or another molten salt design that works well, that would obsolete the SMR in a big hurry or at least convert the idea from PWR to MSR internals.
The idea is to have more than one reactor at a site.
The two key factors with SMRs are the "small" (as in, can be made in a factory and transported to site) and "modular". So, some civils will be different for each site, but once the base is designed, the actual module housings etc. will be "build, step, repeat, ... move to new site, build, step, repeat, ...) - and then the reactor modules can be brought from the factory and "dropped in" a bit like popping a new PP3 battery into your radio.
Given that there will need to be "significant" costs (such as security) which will be nearly the same whether you have one reactor or ten, it will make sense to put multiple modules on one site.
Given that there will need to be "significant" costs (such as security) which will be nearly the same whether you have one reactor or ten, it will make sense to put multiple modules on one site.
This is where SMR economics will get interesting, ie at what point does X SMRs cost more than a full-sized reactor? But SMRs should still have the advantage of modularity, and short-cutting some of the approvals time & cost. It's rather fascinating, ie a 1GW full-fat kettle also needs all the ancillary parts like turbines and transformers, and those tend to be massive, and expensive or disruptive to move to sites.
But by comparison an 'SMR' and support kit all fits inside some unknown percentage of an Astute attack submarine. So how much time and money could be saved if say, all the components needed to get a 300MW RR SMR can more easily be shipped by road/rail/sea to create another 300MW increment. The idea of single SMRs collocated with datacentres seems a bit far fetched given the costs you mention, but a site suitable for say, 5 or 10 SMRs would make a lot more sense.
Dunno why you've got a downvote for that.
As you say, an entire small reactor and everything else fits within a submarine, which should give some idea of the scale of things involved.
The other factor is that if you build (say) 1off 1.2GW reactor and it has a problem, then you lose 1.2GW - possibly permanently, and al the investment that went with it. If you have (say) 4off 300MW reactors and one develops a problem, well you still have 900MW and can pull the faulty one out and swap it for a new/refurbed one from the factory. You can also start with one module, and ramp up by adding modules over time - as long as you planned the civils and ancillaries right. But overall the costs should be much lower - the reactor modules should be standard, the civils should be standard*, so a lot of bespoke design work won't be needed, and there should be economies of scale to spread the cost of things like getting safety approvals through the regulators.
That "what if" part of the economics is significant. The cost of building massive plants is such that effectively only government level investment can make it happen. We've seen how trying to get commercial partnerships to do it has failed - where one by one planned projects have failed (such as the 3off 1.3GW scheme that was planned for just up the road from me).
* In principle, while there will need to be a custom design for each site of some sort of base foundations, once that's in, the rest of the civils should be of a standard design. We have a poor track history in this country of building a small fleet of reactors, then deciding to start all over again with a new design for a small number, then doing the same madness again.
Dunno why you've got a downvote for that.
I have a fan club. One of which went as far as making a script to downvote every post I've ever made. Plus 'controversial' subjects tend to attract downvotes from the peanut gallery who just hate progress, and would rather we continued to tilt at windmills. But there's a lot of money in windmills-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/another-windfarm-surpasses-1-billion-in-subsidy-payments/
The Beatrice Offshore Windfarm has become the fourth windfarm to have received more than £1 billion in subsidy payments. The landmark was reached in just its seventh year of operation, suggesting that it could reach £2 billion over the course of its subsidy agreement.
Beatrice, situated in the Moray Firth, cost £2.2 billion to construct. Thus consumer levies will pay for almost the entire cost of the windfarm. The profits are ultimately shared by SSE plc and the Danish investment house, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
You would think that SSE's customers might be enjoying some of that windfall via lower electricity prices, especially as they're the ones forced to pay those subsidies. But of course this isn't how the UK energy market is rigged.
You can also start with one module, and ramp up by adding modules over time - as long as you planned the civils and ancillaries right. But overall the costs should be much lower - the reactor modules should be standard, the civils should be standard*, so a lot of bespoke design work won't be needed, and there should be economies of scale to spread the cost of things like getting safety approvals through the regulators.
Oddly enough, I'm running simulations on just this. Well, ok, playing Factorio and designing my nuclear power system. Fuel processiing and recycling done, space allocated for enough reactors (I hope) and I guess Greenpeace followers are the real-world equivalent of biters & spitters. But I like that game because it forces thinking about supply chains, logistics etc. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I agree that this is a big benefit. Presentations I've seen all stress the modularity, ie build a hall capable of containing X reactors, and add them as needed. May mean a higher initial cost, but incremental costs of adding new SMRs becomes a lot lower.
Which I guess could also get interesting wrt non-PWR designs, ie if they're molten salt or metal, could you shut down a unit over summer, where energy demand tends to be lower? Or just keep it ticking over and generating enough heat to keep the fluids liquid? One of those interesting challenges that also feeds into energy reliability, ie if you've got a chemical or even food processing plant that relies on keeping things moving, an unexpected power cut might mean a lot of pipework or channels to unblock.
Unfortunately not.
Poor coal boilers, like the ones that make up most of the US FPP fleet, run about 530-540c. SoA (like those in China, Europe and Asia) Ultra Supercritical run 600-630c.
PWR/BWR run about 312-320c max.
All water moderated reactors produce very poor quality steam, not just by modern FPP standards but by the standards of the late 50's.
Which is a shame as the basic materials set (which remember is already accepted by nuclear regulators anywhere a PWR/BWR/CANDU has been built) is capable of much higher temperature operation, and hence much higher efficiency. There are safety videos on YT showing CANDU fuel bundles in air undamaged at 1000c, simulating a loss of coolant accident in a fuel tube.
The real challenge is to find an architecture that can leverage them to deliver this. I think of it as an "Apollo 13 moment."
The real challenge is to find an architecture that can leverage them to deliver this. I think of it as an "Apollo 13 moment."
Or the real challenge is stil energy affordability and security. On which point, a couple of interesting things happened recently-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
The BREST reactor is a Russian conceptual design for a lead-cooled fast reactor based on a generation IV reactor. Two designs are planned, the BREST-300 (300 MWe) and the BREST-1200 (1200 MWe). The main characteristics of the BREST reactor are passive safety and a closed fuel cycle.
The reactor uses nitride uranium-plutonium fuel, is a breeder reactor and can burn long-term radioactive waste. Lead is chosen as a coolant for being high-boiling, radiation-resistant, low-activated and at atmospheric pressure.
along with some other announcements regarding making closed cycle designs work. And this-
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/we-dont-have-enough-russia-temporarily-limits-exports-enriched-uranium-us
In news that will act as a headwind for the U.S.'s re-emerging nuclear industry, it was reported last week that Russia is temporarily restricting enriched uranium exports to the U.S., raising supply concerns for reactors that produce nearly 20% of the nation's electricity.
Which might be another example of self-sanctions, or counter-sanctions. Go ahead, start a nuclear resurgence. Need fuel? Too bad you can't produce enough for current consumption, let alone future. Which in theory shouldn't be so bad given the amount of 'radioactive waste' we have stockpiled thanks to using once-through designs that could be recycled and reprocessed.. If we had the capacity to do that.
"All water moderated reactors produce very poor quality steam, not just by modern FPP standards but by the standards of the late 50's."
If you optimize for one parameter, you wind up with inefficiencies somewhere else. The trade off can also be safety or financial.
To run a water moderated reactor hotter would require much higher pressures to keep the water liquid and that fight gets expensive very quickly. This is why MSR is so enticing, there is no water to keep liquid and while steam can be used to drive a turbine, the first stage can use supercritical CO2 or another gas as the working fluid for even better efficiency.
The parameter in question for PWR's being the ability to drive a submarine propeller at slow speed, and fail safe by dumping it's combined moderator/coolant into the surrounding ocean.
On land that would involved dumping 10's of tonnes of water into the containment building. And by "Water" I mean a boric acid (with 10B at $10/gram) solution highly contaminated with Tritium.
"and that fight gets expensive very quickly."
Because the 8 inch thick 850t reactor pressure vessel, along with it's 150t lid (and associated crane to move the lid), which can be made by (maybe) 7 forges world wide (None in the UK,and IIRC none in the US either) is sooo cheap, right?
"MSR is so enticing"
Enticing, yes. Practical?
I liked them too, till I looked a little deeper.
They all mandate 7Li (not 100%, just 99.99%) that's not going to be cheap. Using Beryllium in the salt mix (common) is very nasty (Be Alloys are used in the F35. An aerospace course listed the rough OOM price difference to Al alloys at 200x). The early concepts were what are now called HALEU, or 5-20% U235 rather than <5% of PWRs and lastly (but definitely no means least) the original project never built an actual heat exchanger design, which is kind of critical. sCO2 is another research project that has to be spun up.
BTW Anyone the pedigree of Nitride and Carbide based fuel is maybe 5% of the operating history of U oxide, and probably substantially less than metal fuels, like that in EBR II.
Fun fact, when people talk about nitride fuels they normally mean 15N, to avoid transmuting 14N -->14C. 15N is 0.4% of N2 in the atmosphere (or anywhere else). IOW < the concentration of U235 in natural uranium. The E.Germans built a big plant to extract it from the air (never really understood why??) but that shut down decades ago.
It's true both C&N based fuels have maybe 10x the thermal conductivity of UO2, but they are pretty unstable in water (which ruled them out for the "Silent service" under Rickover) and IIRC Nitride is unstable in air as well. Not really stuff you'd want in a commercial operation.
"SMRs are good tor replacing old smaller coal power plants - all the lines and transformers are already there."
More research would have to be done since there are different site requirements for coal/gas and nuclear. Reuse of the lines and transformers is a bonus but that site could also be repurposed as a substation with high power lines being brought in from a generating facility elsewhere for distribution.
"Investment in nuclear energy is absolutely vital to ensure the UK's energy security."
Proper investment, not just spending money willy nilly.
I'm not convinced that SMR's are the best path forward. The only issue they resolve is redundancy in the network. For a smaller amount of power, they are still going to require the same sort of staffing levels, the lengthy legal process to get planning permission as any other nuclear plant and if they are also the same old PWR designs, they don't take advantage of any improvements in overall designs since the 1960's or perhaps earlier.
A quick check reveals they are all some kind of reduced size PWR.
Every one of them is a PWR. The Rolls Royce one is over 450MW(e), while the IAEA definition of an SMR is < 350MW(e).
IOW. All have high pressures (177bar/2567psi) and low temperatures (312c), needing made-to-order steam turbines (because the "steam" hitting the first stage blades has erosion causing water drops it in it and those get worse as the steam cools) and delivering a thermal efficiency that wouldn't match a coal fired station of the 1950's.
This is the sort of take-no-risk circle-jerk thinking that British governments are known for.
Stunningly underwhelming given the steel can alone can run to 350c, the Zirconium alloy to 1800c and the fuel to 2500c.
Much better is possible with the same basic materials. Pity the British taxpayers won't see it.
It depends why you're looking at SMRs in the first place. The problems with nuclear are build time and risk (primarily of defects which cause delay) which tends to result in high costs. If the SMRs can be delivered more quickly with lower likelihood of defects (Eg faulty welds, bad concrete pours, etc), then thermal efficiency is potentially a reasonable tradeoff vs a multi-year delayed EPR.
PWR vs "advanced" designs likely follows similar logic. Known technology is likely to deploy quicker with fewer risks
Britsh Nuclear Fuels Limited (which bought and sold Westinghouse at various points) just makes the stuff in the reactors.
ONR OTOH actually does design assessments and H&S stuff.
ONR required Sizewell to have about 1/3 more concrete and rebar than the default Westinghouse design.
Yet the UK has been spaffing large amounts of money on our glorious energy generation that would be ridiculously cheap (after the idea of 'free' was exposed as a lie) and is still throwing money at energy generation of the unreliable kind. So why is there concern of how long it will take to build nuclear reactors? Surely after all this 'investment' we should have a glorious power supply which is an envy to the world and second only to Germany.
codejunky,
We stopped investing in nuclear power in the 90s. Expertise and capacity to do new things was lost - and the only area where we seem to have kept up at least some investment was on how to decommission all the old nuclear stuff. We started decommissioning the first nuclear submarine this month - nobody else has tried this yet - as far as I can tell the best anyone's tried so far is to cut out sealed reactor compartment and dump it at sea.
But you don't get new designs by stopping R&D and sacking all your design staff. And once you've also lost all your trained construction staff - it's not even that easy to restart construction with foreign designs. Hence government started playing with the idea in about 2005 - but not much concrete was done for another ten years - and then we embarked on the new program we've got going now. Which will give us a few new (rather expensive) reactors and the ramped-up capacity to build more if we so choose - and we could either build the same design again at reduced cost, or try to design something new that's hopefully better - and have to go through all the first-build teething troubles again.
Nothing like this is easy. But it would have been a lot easier and cheaper if we'd done it in the 90s, when we were generating 25% of our power via nuclear and still had a full nuclear fuel-cycle in operation.
One thing to remember is that nuclear has always been more highly (and expensively) regualated than any other power source. And nuclear has tended to bear its own costs - making it always the expensive option. If coal had to cover the costs of all the people it killed by air-pollution (even ignoring the effects of climate change) - it wouldn't have been financially viable for nearly a century. Wind and solar are also claimed to be absurdly cheap, by just talking about spot-prices. Without mentioning that being intermittent they also have to pay for the costs of their back-up power stations and (particularly in the case of wind) the massive expansions of the grid infrastructure required to connect them.
Gas might still be the cheapest and safest generation method if you took into account all the other costs - but it's going to run out eventually and climate change is a thing. In other climates solar is going to be a whole lot better than the UK - although we should be using a great deal more solar-thermal and ground-source heat pumps. The problem with those is they're at their most efficitent if installed on new-builds - and become a lot less financially viable when you try to retro-fit them. I don't think the UK has much more hydro capacity. Wave and tidal power have a lot of moving parts in contact with salt water that's moving rapidly - which suggests to me there's a reason not much seems to have come from all the research into it - a mix of maintenance problems and damage to sea life.
Which leaves what? Fusion or intermittent renewables that require grid-scale storage that doesn't currently exist. Or something new that might come along. If we're lucky. Or nuclear that's unpopular and expensive but would have been a lot cheaper if people had done it earlier and kept doing it. I talk to enviromentalists that don't like nuclear. They tell me "the planet is dying" and this is the most important issue in the world. But they have no solutions but build more wind and solar and hope for the best. Which is a shit plan. And their objection to nuclear is cost and safety fears (much of which is made up).
it certainly helps but is not necessary.
The US systems running in played out oil wells use low boiling point organic liquids like pentane for the working fluid. That's where my figure for a couple of MW/well came from.
They are specialised systems (compared to a COTS steam turbine running in the roughly 7700 FPP plants world wide) but the fluid is relatively benign as long as it's kept away from air.
The stuff you're talking about is actually high temperature brine and is often loaded with multiple salts, not just the stuff you sprinkle on your food. If you've ever seen a kettle in a "Hard" water area that hasn't been descaled for a while the conditions are like that in the kettle when it boils, all the time.
It's chemically very aggressive.
The US systems running in played out oil wells use low boiling point organic liquids like pentane for the working fluid. That's where my figure for a couple of MW/well came from.
But pentane is highly flammable, explosive, a health and environmental hazard. Oh, and produced by distilling petroleum, which the neo-luddites are determined to ban..
The stuff you're talking about is actually high temperature brine and is often loaded with multiple salts, not just the stuff you sprinkle on your food. If you've ever seen a kettle in a "Hard" water area that hasn't been descaled for a while the conditions are like that in the kettle when it boils, all the time.
But it doesn't explode if it leaks. Plus it's 'recycled' brine given it's created by the salts in the ground. But geothermal has other hazards, like causing earthquakes. It's one of those fun 'green' technologies where the proponents tie themselves in knots. Fracking is bad, unless it's fracking for geothermal, in which case it's not really fracking. The Eden Project's 'green' geothermal project was great for this because it very definitely fracked, plus because it's using good'ol Cornish granite, their working fluid is radioactive waste. But geothermal is much higher risk than fracking for gas because the working fluid is constantly recirculated, becoming ever more contaminated and toxic.
You mean like the several 1000s sunk into the North Sea for oil wells? Possibly generating a couple of MW on each oil rig location?
For the next million years.
And yes, in case you're wondering, down-hole heat exchangers are a thing for some sites in the US, and for power generation on spent oil fields in the US.
Sandia Labs did a lot of work for this in the 70's and 80's *
*including developing a down hole 50Hp compressed air motor to drive the drill bit for a new well without needing a drill string driven by a table at the top.
There's also geothermal
I've seen Dr Who, and various other documentaries. You dig deep holes towards the centre of the Earth and you either get dimensional portals to nightmare realities - underground killer aliens or people go insane and try to develop earthquake weapons. Or you get maniac scientists whose faces are burned away by lava - turning them into evil supervillians.
I'd rather take the risk of irradiated mega-fauna with superpowers.
I can't help but notice that all the big stuff that's currently in operation (nukes, pumped storage) was done before privatisation. Since then, well why would private companies take on the risk when CCGTs are proven tech? Leaving things to the market is not going to get us out of this hole.
The key problem with privately funding a large infrastructure problem is cost of borrowing and risk. We're paying a huge amount of money for the Hinkley Point reactors because the government wants to take zero risk with the project, it's pseudo privately funded (EDF being owned by the French state), and the cost of that finance reflects the very real risk that the reactor will be delivered late and over budget. It takes a long time and a lot of interest payments before a nuclear reactor will produce any usable energy.
Back when we did the large generation of UK nuclear reactors (AGRs in the 70s, Sizewell B in the 80s), the government took the risk and borrowed at a relatively low cost. Some reactors were massively late (Dungeness B in particular, was a shitshow of epic proportions), some only somewhat late. But the government got the reactors in the end, and the cost to finance was overall much lower.
The main issues of Hinkley Point, like the Finnish reactor and Flamanville in France are :
- that they are the first examples of a new model of PWR reactor : the EPR.
- that they are being bul after a looooong period withut any new reactor being built : 30ish plus years.
So people working on them have to relearn how to build nuclear power plants while learning to build a new type of reactor.
Leaving things to the market is not going to get us out of this hole.
Leaving things to the market could be used to get us out of this hole. If for example we actually left things to the market. But we don't. If we set up a system where you taxed carbon use and paid for leccy - then we'd actually have a market. But at the moment we've got a government-controlled spot market - which rewards wind generation for the power it can generate by doesn't charge it for the time its offline and so someone else has to cover that demand at much higher cost.
I'm not sure its rational to trust a private company to run a nuclear power station that's going to have to be left in mothballs for 20 years before being expensively decommissioned - far after it can generate any revenue. Although a private company heavily regulated by government just to run nuclear might be an answer. But it does seem to make sense for the government to run the nuclear industry - it's just that it's also not particularly rational to trust the government not to use its power of secrecy to cover up inconvenient safety failures - something governments the world over have a history of doing.
I don't really care how its done. As far as I can see, the only rational choice to climate change was to build nuclear fission plants while researching alternatives to replace them. None of those alternatives are yet mature, or even workable in most cases - and so I'd argue that nuclear is still the only rational solution to the problem. With a mix of wind, solar and gas. When we come up with a better solution we'll have wasted some money on building the latest generation of nuclear plants - but who knows when that day will come and we've wasted time and emitted a lot of CO2 because we've let our nuclear generation share more than halve over the last 3 decades.
The pricing model is Europe wide. Carbon taxes in theory work but in practice always seem to be abused for profit without any meaningful reduction in emissions. Hedge funds seem to get their grubby fingers into everything...
Carbon taxes also usually impact the poor the most and then the govt has to give money back to people with rebates or subsidies and it all gets complex and mired in red tape. Trudeau has been claiming that households will get back more from the govt they pay in carbon tax... how does that work??
The pricing model is Europe wide. Carbon taxes in theory work but in practice always seem to be abused for profit without any meaningful reduction in emissions.
blackcat,
The EU doesn't have a carbon tax. It has carbon credits and carbon offset. So when the scheme was first brought in, loads of EU companies were given vast numbers of credits and so the system basically created a completely fake trading scheme where the state printed money and companies traded for the pieces of paper.
A carbon tax would just say, "you emitted 1,000 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere - so you pay €1,000. The Stern report recommended a rate of $25-$30 per tonne.
We might want to issue carbon credits. We might want to subsidise certain industries. But I don't see the economic usefulness of subsidising paper companies to plant trees they were going to be planting already. The point about a carbon tax is that it should hurt - because that incentivises people to find alternatives.
The correct way to offset the pain isn't to issue credits to government favourites and distort the whole economy - while also expanding the bureaucracy to manage it all. It's to lower other taxes to match the funds raised from the carbon tax.
"EU doesn't have a carbon tax"
I am aware of that and didn't imply that it did. I was referring to the bonkers energy pricing model the UK and EU uses.
The EU has a strange carbon boarder tax as well as a trading system. France has a local carbon tax as do some other EU nations and the UK. Not that they do much.
"The point about a carbon tax is that it should hurt - because that incentivises people to find alternatives"
Indeed but usually what happens is the cost is passed on to the consumer and the consumer has zero alternatives other than to pay. So when the Canadians complained Trudeau said there would be rebates so that the consumers would not pay more than before the carbon tax. So how does this actually help?
Indeed but usually what happens is the cost is passed on to the consumer and the consumer has zero alternatives other than to pay. So when the Canadians complained Trudeau said there would be rebates so that the consumers would not pay more than before the carbon tax. So how does this actually help?
blackcat,
Firstly businesses don't pay tax, because they're just a notional concept. In the end tax is paid by people. It could be the owners of the business making less profit, the employees getting paid less or the consumers paying higher prices.
In an ideal world (which we don't live in) we'd match our carbon tax raised against peoples' taxes so that nobody was particularly financially affected by it. Obviously prices would go up - but as things use different amounts of carbon, some prices would rise more than others. So foreign holidays would become more expensive in comparison to UK holidays - meaning that some people would switch, thus lowering carbon emissions and encouraging the aviation industry to find ways to cut its emissions.
Of course this comes up against many other problems, such as the aviation industry being internationally regulated and carbon pricing being very hard to do when Johnny Foreigner isn't also doing it. But if it could be done then the idea is to make things that are lower carbon more financially attractive in comoparison to things that aren't.
It's also using the market for what it's actually good for. Allocating resources. We know we can't massively reduce carbon emissions overnight - but by bringing in this system we're trying to get people to prioritise which high emission things they most want to do, which they'll pay for, and which are less important - which they might substitute away from to lower carbon, cheaper, alternatives.
The problem with the trading scheme is that you're playhing favourites between industries and the EU one (at least at first) was giving out way too many credits to make the scheme effective.
"businesses don't pay tax"
Yes they do. They pay lots of taxes and people complain at great length about how mega corps do fun accounting to avoid paying anything other than the bare minimum.
"So foreign holidays would become more expensive in comparison to UK holidays"
They already are. I assume what you mean is that they'd become even MORE costly thus pricing average people out of the market.
You keep contradicting yourself. You say carbon taxes are supposed to hurt but then say it would be offset "so that nobody was particularly financially affected by it". A carbon tax is a disincentive to move you away from thing A to thing B. If there is no thing B or C to Z then you're stuck. There are many things the world relies on that are carbon intensive and have no alternative. Steel and concrete for example.
"businesses don't pay tax"Yes they do. They pay lots of taxes and people complain at great length about how mega corps do fun accounting to avoid paying anything other than the bare minimum.
Google doesn't pay taxes, because Google isn't a person. If Google has payroll taxes, those are paid by its employees. A company decides what it's going to pay its staff and pays that cash - soem gets diverted to government, because payroll taxes on companies aren't as noticable to voters as the income taxes they pay.
Corporation taxes reduce profit - profit which would otherwise go to shareholders. Or stay in the company and be reflected in the share price going up, because the company is holding a boatload of cash. Which value is owned by the shareholders (and can be monetised when they sell the shares).
This is basic tax-incidence. Who actually pays the tax.
Corporate "personhood" is a convenient legal device to allow the legal system to work - it doesn't actually confer anything. As Google is wholly owned by its collective shareholders, and reduction of Google's value is ultimately paid by them - any diversion to the government of money it was aleady going to spend is paid by the people who'd have received that money.
I believe the debate in economics is about whether payroll taxes are mostly incident on employees or shareholders. I think it's considered to be mostly shareholders.
You keep contradicting yourself. You say carbon taxes are supposed to hurt but then say it would be offset "so that nobody was particularly financially affected by it". A carbon tax is a disincentive to move you away from thing A to thing B. If there is no thing B or C to Z then you're stuck. There are many things the world relies on that are carbon intensive and have no alternative. Steel and concrete for example.
I'm not contradicting myself at all. Carbon taxes are suggested as a way to utilise markets for the thing they are actually good at. Allocating scarce resources in the most efficient way we currently know. In this case efficiency means maximising the value to consumers of the resources we spend.
You are correct, there are some things without substitutes. And we want to keep doing those, even though they damage the atmosphere, while vastly reducing the the damage done by things that are less important to us.
Government is often quite bad at working this out - it tends to prioritise what it thinks people should want, not what they actually want.
Obviously I've got to eat. But I could easily live without fruit and veg flown in from Africa out of season - which is pretty carbon intensive. Eating seasonally, and more locally, could become cheaper - and thus encourage people to do it more. Or I might decide that this is very important to me, and give up on foreign holidays instead.
Also lots of goods are non-obvious substitutes. I have a certain amount of money in my salary left over from taxes, the mortgage, utilities, basic clothing and food. The rest is a bunch of non-obvious choices, in order to maximise my utility from the budget I have remaining.
For example clothes. I'm terribly unfashionable, so just buy clothes to last. But there's a market where lots of people buy lots more clothes than they need in order gain pleasure from having cool threads. I can't emphasize enough how this doesn't include me... But the price of cheap fast-fashion would go up. For some people they'll still want to do it. Fashion has been important to a large slice of society throughout history. Others though might get equal pleasure from a different hobby.
I really enjoy a meal out with friends. I'd prioritise spending on that, over films or TV production. Possibly both equally good at raising carbon emissions. I'd also prioritise reading a book over film/telly - which is definitely better for the environment. Especially if ebooks become vastly cheaper than paper books (well I guess they already have). But for leisure time the substitutes are completely non-obvious. I could go to the cinema 3 times a week, or take up knitting or kung fu. All are leisure activities, all have different carbon inputs. If we could successfully price carbon that would make it easy for us all to budget in a way that improves the environment.
Of course, if you're rich, you can just spend more on still doing all the things you want and hang the consequences. Markets are only so good, because everyone's access to cash isn't equal. But by doing that, you're voluntarily increasing your carbon tax paid.
Effectively think of carbon tax like VAT. Companies put it on their invoices, but only the end-consumer actually pays it. The more you consume, the more you pay. And we can shift our taxation from taxing people for earning money (or just existing) to taxing people for using carbon. If you're poor, and all the things you like are high carbon, you'll suffer. You won't get as much as you get now. If you're poor and like a bunch of stuff roughly equally you should be able to get more of the low-carbon things you like - and you'lll pay less tax than you used to. While Mark Zuckerberg will be paying much more tax from his billionaire's lifestyle.
> Which leaves what? Fusion or intermittent renewables that require grid-scale storage that doesn't currently exist.
Agree with you except this bit. Having spent a fair bit of my career in both Fusion and battery storage, I can tell you that neither are coming to save us any time soon. "doesn't currently" should read "won't in any of our lifetimes" .
Batteries can cover between a half and a couple hour's worth of load, which is great for plugging a gap while the gas turbines start up, but not anywhere near enough to cover 'dunkelflaute' periods. We are already rapaciously destroying the environment to produce batteries as fast as possible, we couldn't possibly mine enough materials and pollute enough lakes to support a 100-fold increase in battery production that would be required to get rid of gas.
And no, the chemistry won't improve either. Solid state batteries are nowhere near feasible for the power and cycle-life required (and require lots and lots of lithium), and Sodium batteries just suck. (Both gravimetric and volumetric power and energy densities are low compared to Lithium, and mineral requirements other than Sodium, such as Copper and Graphite, are more per kWh than Lithium)
As for Fusion, it's going nowhere either. Contrary to many people's beliefs, Fusion produces a LOT more radiation than Fission does. In fact all of its energy is transferred by "radiation" (mostly neutrons, which have a propensity to transmute elements such as Cobalt and make them radioactive) across a vacuum. There would be a lot MORE and hotter radwaste from a fusion power plant than a fission one, it's just that it goes cold after a few decades instead of millenia.
So Fusion would have the same regulatory burdens as Fission has, with the added issue of being almost completely infeasible technically.
I agree though, the solution is to stop worrying and love the bo^H^Hreactor. If people weren't so scared of nuclear, then it could be incredibly cheap to do, as it was in the 50s.
In the meantime though, gas is the cleanest reliable power source we've got. We need to build nuclear (fission) plants before it runs out.
cyberdemon,
I agree with you on batteries. But I did say storage. Which at grid scale might be something like molten salt or giant fuel cells maybe? There's the pumped storage at Dinorweg - I don't know how many sites would be suitable to build more in the UK. But I've seen suggestions about pumping water up and down in disused mines (though that sounds like a recipe for massive pollution). Or even storage by compressing and releasing gas.
I suppose the other alternative would be the Matrix? If we put all the people of, say Milton Keynes, in storage and hooked them up to a massive power generation system combined with an artificially generated computer environment - how much power could we get?
Good pumped storage sites are hard to find, although there are a number of new projects (Drax are looking to double the output from Cruachan, although not necessarily storage capacity. Projects for Loch Ness). Pumped and Lithium are *great* at dealing with a dinner time peak, but we've just had a couple of weeks of Dunkelflaute and it's unlikely we can store anything like enough to deal with that, even with expansion of pumped storage, compressed gas and soforth.
There are some arguments for hydrogen for winter storage. As we stop putting ethanol into petrol maybe that's a winter storage option. But gas is very, very convenient as backup for intermittent renewables
Pity that the UK is one of 2 countries (the other is Portugal) whose gas distribution and storage network is entirely privately owned.
It also has storage measured in days whereas other parts of Europe have it in months
And the gas pricing model is essentially cost plus. They know users (IE energy companies) will pay what is more-or-less the spot price (because they will pass it on if possible and hedge it if not).
IOW high gas prices are guaranteed by the structure of the UK market, not the actual state of gas supply, or the ability of non-fossil fuels to meet all of the moment-to-moment UK electricity needs (about 72-72Gw, although it's been a while since I checked this figure).
What UK bulk gas prices would look like if Centrica were appropriately "incentivised" to create more storage is a completely different question.
@John Smith 19
"What UK bulk gas prices would look like if Centrica were appropriately "incentivised" to create more storage is a completely different question."
The UK was disincentivised to build and maintain storage. The government was dictating the end of fossil fuels and pushing the net zero insanity. So why would anyone build storage when the product will be outlawed by nutters in charge?
The amusement being that the unreliable power generation that is being built relies upon gas generation to ramp up and down as needed but also to provide the very power when the wind isnt blowing and sun isnt shining.
The "UK"
Are you f**king kidding me? Centrica was "disincentivised" to build any new storage, and AFAIK it inherited all its storage from the company that was privitised first as part of British Gas in 1986 then split off and sold off in 1997. Now it looks like Centrica owns BG. Funny how that works, is it not?
As a (nominally) British company Centrica operates under British rules and those rules can be changed.
Let me say it once again. The volume of fossil fuels the UK produces has made no difference to the world price of oil or gas. If the UK doubled capacity it would still make no difference (and all the proposals coming on stream together won't do that).
OTOH the tax rebates that the Treasury will pay those companies will be paid now against nominal profits they will make in years to come. BP or Shell can spend £1 and get about 92p of back this year which the Treasury may get back in 3-10 years. For companies making 10s of £Bn profit already
Or Rachel Reeves could just scrap this BS and keep the roughly £5Bn the Treasury hands out to these companies and use on something that the UK actually need
Here's the thing. When a country grants a company an oil or gas license that means whatever the company finds is the property of the company not the country and they are free to sell it to the highest bidder IE the International fossil fuel market.
Sure the UK (or indeed any sovereign nation) could re-write those rules so (for example) any gas found is the property of HMG, or purchased from the company at a fixed price or indeed any other variation of a contract you care to devise. And how would HMG dish out that gas to the UK energy suppliers, and how would it ensure that customer bills went down rather than the profit margins just go up?
But as it stands the problem is not "There isn't enough gas in the world." It is a)The UK system has too little storage to smooth out gas prices to customers and AFAIK no incentive to expand this storage to do so. b)A high world market price.
The UK could improve a) quite a bit but b) will be an ongoing PITA while Dobbie is still in charge of Russia and uses closing the gas taps to the west as an easy choke point.
@John Smith 19
"Are you f**king kidding me? Centrica was "disincentivised" to build any new storage"
Yes. Its in my comment. Government dictating the end of fossil fuels is coming at the same time as wanting this storage that takes decades to make a return. For the rest of your comment you seem to have decided to talk about something else unrelated. Why would a company build and maintain gas storage when governments of both tie colours have decided the end is coming for fossil fuels and if the market wont just do it the gov will dictate it?
As a (nominally) British company Centrica operates under British rules and those rules can be changed.Let me say it once again. The volume of fossil fuels the UK produces has made no difference to the world price of oil or gas. If the UK doubled capacity it would still make no difference (and all the proposals coming on stream together won't do that).
You've provided your own answer. The 'world price' of oil & gas is an artificial and mostly irrational construct. People still use 'Brent Crude' as a price benchmark, even though the Brent field stopped producing a few years ago. Why is there a 'world price' for a product that doesn't exist outside of traders and speculators screens?
But as you say, the rules could be changed. There could be a UK price based on UK cost of production, and if producers still want to trade physical product outside of the UK, they could, with or without tariffs to incentivise UK domestic production and consumption. Energy security and all that. Instead successive governments have created perverse policies that discincentivise energy security via mechanisms like higher corporation tax, royalties, duties and most recently 'windfall taxes'. The UK has a cost of living and inflation crisis, and our 'leaders' solution is to keep making energy ever more expensive.
...will be an ongoing PITA while Dobbie is still in charge of Russia and uses closing the gas taps to the west as an easy choke point.
Except that didn't happen and the choke point is in Brussels. The EU closed the gas taps, not Russia. Plus the minor detail of who exactly blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in the biggest act of economic sabotage in history. One still remains, and as Putin pointed out to Germany's most incompetent Chancellor in history, Germany could get gas any time it agrees on contracts. Instead there's a bizarre situation where Germany's demanding 'compensation' from Russia for an entirely self-inflicted injury.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
What I've described is the situation as it is. The fact you don't like it means exactly nothing.
IRL you could try that plan and the producers would a)Lobby like bu**ery to avoid it getting on the statute books b)Say "we cannot make a profit at these prices, shut down production and lay off the staff, while queuing up for tax concessions on the costs of rig decommissioning)
Then what you going to do?
"The EU closed the gas taps, not Russia. "
And there it is. To a quitter it's always the EU's fault. Nothing to do with Russia's invasion of a sovereign nation (the largest European invasion since WWII). Or that trying to have a conventional business relationship with a country run by psychopath. It's the EU's fault.
IRL you could try that plan and the producers would a)Lobby like bu**ery to avoid it getting on the statute books b)Say "we cannot make a profit at these prices, shut down production and lay off the staff, while queuing up for tax concessions on the costs of rig decommissioning)
Congratulations. You've just described what the 'renewables' lobby did, and especially with the last round of CfDs. On the one hand, the 'renewables' lobby tells the public that windmillls are the cheapest evah! On the other, they tell the government that strike prices are too low, and they need a lot more subsidies.
If there is effective regulation, scumbags like the 'renewables' lobby wouldn't be allowed to pull stunts like this, energy costs would fall, as would inflation.
To a quitter it's always the EU's fault. Nothing to do with Russia's invasion of a sovereign nation (the largest European invasion since WWII).
To a Remnant, you seem to be divorced from reality. The US invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and bombed Libya back to the stone age. It also invaded Syria and annexed that sovereign nations oil fields. The UK and EU supported and participated in those invasions. Oh, and of course there was Yugoslavia, which was invaded and wiped off the map. Millions dead and displaced, and a refugee crisis that the EU has been trying to deal with ever since.
So Ok, Russia invaded Ukraine. The EU decided in their infinite wisdom to impose 'shock and awe' sanctions against Russia banning the import of oil, gas, billions of other products EU consumers needed.. and Russia just went 'Ok, we'll sell the stuff you need to someone else'. Russia's economy has been growing, the EU & UK has been contracting and slipping merrily into recession, with Germany in the process of de-industrialising. This is objective reality, and the sanctions have backfired badly, and our 'leaders' seem to have no clue how to get out of the mess they've created and create peace.
And on the nuclear front, the Ukrainians have been muttering about going nuclear, with claims they can produce one of more nuclear devices in a matter of weeks.. Which if true, raises the question of 'how?' given it doesn't officially reprocess uranium, and so should not have any weapons-grade material to make a bomb. But then Zelensky said at a Munich 'Security'' conference just prior to the SMO that Ukraine might become a nuclear power. Russia said 'FAFO' and the rest is becoming history.
I'm not sure about the Matrix, but we could put all the people of Milton Keynes into an Anaerobic Digester.. I wonder what that would be in terms of GWh
Molten Salt (thermal) storage would need to be utterly enormous, quite hard to maintain, and pretty dangerous. It would be like trying to get useful power out of a molten salt nuclear reactor without any nuclear reaction. Try doing the numbers on how big it would need to be to store 100GWh(thermal) energy i.e. a couple days worth of a 1GW(e) nuke plant, bearing in mind that the salt can't ever cool so much that it solidifies, otherwise it stops circulating and becomes hard to warm up again..
As the other poster said, pumped hydro requires an existing suitable geological feature such as a fjord or a flat-topped mountain, bit it is indeed probably the best option that we have.
Compressed air? I dread to think what the destruction would be like from the sudden failure of even a 1GWh compressed air storage tank.. It would make welding a nuclear pressure vessel look like an easy job i would think. It's also not very efficient.
Hydrogen is also an option, but again inefficient and mineral resource intensive (copper, platinum etc.) And H2 tends to leak even through solid steel.
Best option: nuclear. Second best: pumped hydro + wind. Third: gas.
Funny you should say that.
This is exactly the system used by concentrated solar "Power tower" systems. They use a lot of insulation and what's called "Trace heating" under that to keep the salt molten.
And it's also the plan Natrium (The Roman name for Sodium) fast reactor is going to use.
The trade off's on that design are dubious at best. The higher thermal efficiency (Newsflash. It's difficult to design a reactor which has the poor thermal efficiency of any water moderated reactor once you dump water as your moderator) is likely to be offset by the fuel cost of near-bomb grade enriched U, along with the higher wall damage due to the unmoderated neutrons battering it. And it will likely need a 2nd sodium loop due to the MeV gamma emissions from irradiated Sodium. And of course there is the little matter of a Sodium/salt mix heat exchanger. Salt/water heat exchangers to drive the turbines OTOH already exist from power tower practice.
and of course 100GWh(t) is about 4 days.
"the sudden failure of even a 1GWh compressed air storage tank"
AFAIK most of the folks looking at this are talking caverns not tank at that scale. The actual challenge is offsetting the massive temperature drop as the compressed air expands. so the reservoir acts as a huge heat sink to the surrounding environment.
If it's a cavern, then er, how do they know it won't blow-out somewhere unexpected, or cause the cavern itself to collapse after repeated pressure cycling
I suspect these folks you talk of are just collecting subsidies for "green" tech research and don't actually believe that it will ever work in practice
> and of course 100GWh(t) is about 4 days.
4 days of 1GW(t) is 2 days of 1GW(e) given thermal conversion efficiency of about 50%
No.
The US Navy looked at such systems under the "SolChem" programme in the late 70's/early 80's. The OPEC driven oil price rise of of $3 ->$12/barrel was going to seriously limit their capacity for globally putting boot-to-backside on behalf of Uncle Sam.
They were looking at using whole salt deposits which were dehydrated and packed into large beer cans, distributing the volume change from solid --> liquid into small pieces, and of course limiting the damage of any leaks. As I noted molten salt storage is a real thing already with solar power tower systems, several of which were built in the US and Spain.
BTW the benefits of vacuum insulation are often under appreciated. Another USN project looked at it for allowing thermal batteries to run for 2 hrs to power sonobuoys. Using stacks of reflector/spacers in a vacuum envelope was (IIRC) 2x more efficient than SoA conventional insulation. Most convection heat transfer ends at a pressure of 10 mTorr, or 1 x 10^3 mm of Hg. Applied to sintering furnace this cut energy usage from 4Kw to 800W.
All this ended when Regan got in and the oil price dropped quite a lot, when various Gulf states released more oil and the Iranians released the US Embassy hostages. What a fortuitous set of events for the Great cowboy Communicator.
Alas none! The first and second Laws of Thermodynamics are real bitches!
And I live there, and I have a chainsaw. I guess we could use our concrete cows as weights in one of those 'gravity powah' scams.. I mean schemes. Except I think the museum has them now to stop students abusing them.
Yes actually flow batteries are fairly promising! Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries (VRFB) seem the most promising.
Although quite power limited (mostly kW-scale so far, copper and graphite requirements scale with power, vanadium requirement scales with energy, obviously), and the reagent is both expensive and pretty nasty (with different levels of nasty depending on its ionisation state i guess), personally i'd much prefer living downstream of a NPP or even a waste reprocessing site, than contemplate what would happen if a grid-scale VRFB leaked into my local watercourse.
Let's look at what batteries have been doing here
Batteries are not a panacea but properly deployed in the technology mix can definitely help a lot. Consider every business and industrial park roof (along with their parking spaces) in the UK as a possible solar site. Then consider what happens to that power at the weekend, when most of that space will be empty.
The key benefit is that a lot of applications use batteries, so there is a lot of incentive for continuous improvement.
At one time no one would consider using batteries for pumping propellant into a rocket engine until Rocket Lab did it. Engineering such a system leverages all the power electronics skills developed for EV's, whereas building a small turbo-pump system is a very niche engineering skill set.
Investment was being wound down as far back as the '60s. They started haemorrhaging talent way back. Just as the AGR design had pretty much got to where they needed it and they could recoup the investment costs by building the dozens planned, Thatcher canned it completely. JET has been underfunded since the outset which is why it's perpetually 10 years in the future. Unfortunately so much UK tech is like this: wonderful ideas canned just as they're about to really take off and the technology is given to someone else to sell back to us.
Without mentioning that being intermittent they also have to pay for the costs of their back-up power stations
Err, a correction there. The intermittent generators don't pay for the externalities such as backup capacity - WE pay for that, along with giving the intermittent generators rather poor contracts that mean they get paid even when they aren't needed.
"Without mentioning that being intermittent they also have to pay for the costs of their back-up power stations and (particularly in the case of wind) the massive expansions of the grid infrastructure required to connect them."
One also has to consider that modern grids have been designed and constructed to use a few discrete inputs that are routed to numerous end points. Dotting a bunch of intermittent inputs here and there can lead to a highly unbalanced network that South Australia found out about catastrophically when just the wrong set of circumstances came to sit on them.
Given all the major cloud providers are struggling to expand capacity at the rate their customers want, this is going to be key. Designating DCs as CNI will hopefully make planning for SMR deployment to power DCs easier given at the moment it is not clearly defined how a private enterprise could leverage SMRs to power DCs as MS/Amazon/Google all want.
There's probably a revenue stream for the UK Gov by providing SMRs as a service to private enterprise in scenarios like this.
Another problem with DCs is water. I believe Thames Water are about to restrict DC water use in their area - the rumour in the water industry is that it's going to be very hard to get permission to link new ones to the water supply. Although moving DCs up North might make things easier there. Thames cover the South East with the highest population density and the least rainfall.
I know Iceland are popular for having lots of cheap electricity and passive cooling outside Summer. I've been involved in the water-system design of passively cooled DCs planned for Scandinavia. But I don't know how practical that is in the more temperate climate of the UK. We don't have much air-con - so Summer electricity demand is lower than Winter - meaning I'm not sure how much power is a problem in the UK - if we've the capacity for Winter needs then powering the DCs in Summer is less of an issue.
They apparently have to have competitive tendering. This means dragging other companies into the design / build process and pissing a load of time and money on the wall.
Then they go with the lowest bidder, which makes no difference as the project will come in waaayyyyy over budget anyway like all public-sector crap.
It'd probably work out cheaper and quicker to just pick some mob who chuck a decent bribe or whose CEO's kids go to school with the minister's and give them the job.
I note the article doesn't mention that the cost per MWh of electricity produced was included as a (key) part of the detailed assessment. If not, why not?
Surely affordable green energy is something sorely missing from the priorities attached to going green.
Being affordable is surely a major requirement in any green energy pla, and surely an area where modern SMRs should score well, particularly when considering the lower infrastructure costs, for example cabling to handle the (rare) peak power output of offshore wind farms to customers.
Maybe an SMR sighted close to each group of 250kW EV superchargers?
So, which round is it decided which politician gets the brown envelopes ?
I guess we could have thorium-salt reactors but hey, you can't make bombs from what they use, can you? and after all, they clean up their own shit so no tasty expensive decommissioning needed.
Lets face it, the only things that ever go ahead in terms of Government projects, are not always what are needed, its what the politicans get a kickback for.
Go on, flex your muscles and vote me down, then feel pleased with yourself as your little dopamine splat slowly declines.
"British Rail was sold off lock, stock and barrel by the Thatcher government to a collection of scoundrels and one useless balloonist. They're to blame."
There are people in the US that are critical of Amtrak (the national passenger rail system) not making a profit. What they don't understand is that it doesn't need to. A city won't earn a profit from building and maintaining roads, but it does facilitate commerce which brings in tax revenue. I love taking the train and they are often fairly full with sleeping compartments selling out much of the time. The problem is the routes and schedules are very limited so it's a cart and horse problem.
Oddly, Amtrak used to have a contract with the post office for moving mail and doesn't anymore. I'd think that the pairing makes all sorts of sense with both being quasi-government operations and the incremental cost to hook a dedicated mail car or 3 to a passenger train shouldn't be that much. With an aircraft cargo container, it should be quick and easy to drop off and pick up shipments across the passenger network.
... that we no longer have an industrial society capable of producing this nuclear dream. I spent the greater part of my life in production Engineering. The factory where I learnt my trade is now the site of a Morrisons supermarket and car park. The next factory which built the diesel engines which the company invented. And it was not Diesel. is now a field. All the engineering enterprises that we were so proud of, have all gone, never to return.
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