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In reply to the discussion: Scotland temporarily ran entirely on wind power as turbines generated over 200 percent of national electricity demand. [View all]
Emrys
(9,128 posts)I'll focus again on Hinkley Point C.
To save me a lot of summarizing and typing to a possibly impervious audience, you can read its history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station
Its development was granted a licence in 2012. Today, after many years, it still isn't built. It's slated to come online by 2030. Anyone who wants to place a bet on that happening needs to read that history.
As preparations ground on, in 2016 it was supposed to cost £18 billion and be activated by 2025. Currently, it's predicted by EDF, its prime investor, to come partially online in 2030, for a cost of £48 billion at current prices.
EDF is a French company, with the Chinese CGN an earlier partner that has backpedalled its involvement considerably since the scheme was first floated.
You might assume, since France has long put pretty much all its eggs in one basket, with about 57 operating reactors accounting for some 70% of its energy generation, that they know what they're doing. Well.
One thing about nuclear power plants as we know them is that they require access to large bodies of water for cooling and steam generation. Hence many of them are located on the coast, as is the case with Hinkley.
And what is predicted to happen to sea levels in the mid- to long-term future? If you want to bet that sufficient account has been taken of this, given the "unforeseen" problems that have beset this development over the years, be my guest. There's also the issue of storms, which are widely predicted to become more ferocious and frequent as the century wears on.
Given the number of nuclear plants in France and the country's size, EDF couldn't site all of them on the coast. Many were sited near rivers to provide the water supply needed.
Maybe the assumption was that these would always flow and provide sufficiently cool water for operations.
That assumption has begun to unravel in recent years:
Declining water levels in French rivers have revealed a key weakness in relying on nuclear power to supply clean energy in a climate emergency—nuclear reactors need to cut output when climate change lowers water levels and raises water temperatures, even as energy demand rises.
“While a lot of the nuclear public relations relates to nuclear as a sort of saviour of climate change, unfortunately, the reverse is true,” Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a senior academic at the University of Sussex, told Ankara, Türkiye-based Anadolu Ajansi.
“Nuclear will be a significant and early climate casualty.”
The interplay of climate change, water, and nuclear power is fairly straightforward. Climate change increases the occurrence of both heat waves and droughts, which lower water levels and raise demand for energy to power cooling appliances. Nuclear power plants rely on access to freshwater to cool reactors. If there is not enough freshwater for cooling, or that water is too warm, the nuclear plant needs to scale back, even as consumers crank up their air conditioners.
Several nuclear generating plants in Europe this year have already reduced output or shut down because water sources are too shallow or too hot, including nearly all of France’s 18 nuclear facilities, says Anadolu Ajansi.
https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-force-french-nuclear-plants-to-cut-output-despite-rising-demand/
I'm not about to try to teach a DUer about irony, but there it is.
This raises again what I posted about earlier - about the opportunity cost. Hinkley has been very expensive and has taken up a lot of time and engineering and political energy, but has yet to produce a glimmer of electricity. And its carbon footprint has been vast.
In that time, how many renewable research projects and actual installations could have been fielded for that outlay?
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