| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 13 hours ago |
| > Back that up with nuclear providing the base load and you have reasonable energy security. So you’re saying that we should turn off the nuclear plant? What do we calculate? A generous 50% capacity factor? The new built nuclear power now costs ~40 cents/kWh. It just becomes ridiculously expensive when real world constraints are added. |
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| ▲ | trebligdivad 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yeh it probably is expensive - but we currently have no other way (other than gas) to cover the low-wind/sun periods; while there are times when the UK can almost run purely off wind, there are other periods where we get ~5% of that wind energy for a week or so; the battery storage is nowhere near useful for that. |
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| ▲ | rcxdude 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They're right, though. Doing both is dumb. The alternative to renewables + storage is nuclear + storage, with the nuclear + storage having the advantage of the storage capacity needed being more predictable and a bit smaller, but with the massive disadvantage of the nuclear being extremely expensive and slow to build. But building enough nuclear plants to do what you're proposing, and then turning them off most of the time to get energy from the renewable plants you're also building, and only drawing from them unpredictably, is objectively the worst option. | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hydrogen or low capex thermal. The UK has adequate salt formations for large scale storage of hydrogen. | | |
| ▲ | trebligdivad 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Looks like someone is trying to push for it:
https://ukenergystorage.co.uk/ Good if they can get it to work; there's also a hydrogen/ammonia storage scheme being planned;
https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2025/statkraft-shares-p... I think it's going to take a while, but certainly worth trying. | |
| ▲ | MagicMoonlight 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hydrogen is the worst possible fuel. It's the least dense material in existence so you need a ton of it. It has to be made from either cracking polluting materials, or using a huge amount of electricity. It is really difficult to store and really flammable. Nuclear is endless clean energy. Why do people like you keep ruining everything? If it wasn't for you, we'd have had full nuclear by 1980. No oil problems, no terrorist states, no dubai. | | |
| ▲ | lostlogin 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Nuclear is endless clean energy. The UK hasn’t had any nuclear waste problems? It might be the solution but pretending it’s perfect is how we got here. | |
| ▲ | pfdietz 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This would be green hydrogen. Sure, it has low density, but underground storage is pretty cheap at scale. Yes, it's flammable, but that can be handled, and is handled routinely -- the world currently produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen per year. The huge advantage of hydrogen here is that a gas turbine power plant might cost $600/kW, a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. So if you have a need for a backup plant whose cost will be dominated by amortization of its fixed cost, hydrogen beats nuclear. |
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| ▲ | matt-p 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's so funny every time we build a nuclear plant we say 'ooooh expensive' then by the time it's built it turns out it's ~ at the cost of gas. | | |
| ▲ | mikeyouse 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Running existing plants is about the cost of gas - building new ones is extraordinarily expensive and is something like 3x or 4x the cost of other options, even after adjusting for nuclear’s much better capacity factor. | |
| ▲ | croes 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, let‘s ignore that construction costs https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev03wer0p2o And the subsidies needed to keep the price "low". That’s why France had to raise the price because even with subsidies they couldn’t cover the costs | | |
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| ▲ | happymellon 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The current "real world constraint" is purchasing gas from Russia. Yeah, nuclear is better than that. |
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| ▲ | bauble12 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The thing Ive never quite understood is that the UK has no domestic supply of uranium. | |
| ▲ | ViewTrick1002 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost all of Europe has stopped buying Russian gas? The exception being nuclear powered France. [1] You also do know that we despite 19 sanctions packages still haven’t been able to sanction the Russian nuclear industry? We’re just too dependent on it. [1]: https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/eu-talks-tough-russian-lng-... | | |
| ▲ | realusername 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The French gas plants have been built to support renewables, France didn't have almost any gas plants prior 2010. There's no sanctions on the Russian nuclear industry because it's a rounding error financially compared to gas or petrol. |
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