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It will produce annually, about as much electricity as UK produces now from solar. Which is installed at a much faster clip than these two sad reactors are built, even if UK is one of the worst countries for solar in the civilised world due to expensive land and terrible weather.

What's even the point? Maybe this reactor is a live testament to the observation that "any new nuclear starting construction today will be obsolete before it's completed, due to competition from renewables"? It's been started almost 10 years ago and it seems to be already there.

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That the energy is produced during night, winter and heavily overcast times...

There is storage for that, which is now finally, available, inexpensive and safe. Plus, it's long since proven that with moderate losses, renewable electricity system that combines solar, wind, and hydro, does not need any storage at all, or very moderate amounts of storage to achieve no or almost no losses.

Is there? What storage?

Batteries?

lol, look at California and how much it imports & used gas. And that's WITH a nuclear plant. Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten

I am not sure what your point is honestly. Batteries are a very viable option for storage, competing cost wise with pump storage which has been in use for decades.

> Same is valid for Germany which is in a worse position due to dunkelflauten

Even existing storage solutions in Germany are already sufficient for the present day electricity network and build-out is progressing rapidly. The time for a nuclear build out was 20 years ago. We missed that window, now other technologies will prevail.

How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours? The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?

> How are these sufficient when Germany still bumps coal, gas and imports in off peak hours?

Because they bump coal, gas and imports in peak hours.

> The question isn't if you can build them, the question is how much storage do you need and the cost. Like how much storage does Germany need for dunkelflauten? Are there any estimations?

I suppose you did not spend a lot of time researching this. That can be easily found by mere googling.

Um... No, Germany bumps them in offpeak hours https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE?lang=en You can also check their imports.

Sorry, I'm quite bad at googling, may you show me what you found regarding this topic? I mean how much energy storage does Germany need to not use fossils and to not import from neighbor states with fossil generation?

https://www.energy-storage.news/massive-growth-potential-con...

> The energy storage market in the UK is currently experiencing substantial growth, as evidenced by the current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh, projected to increase to 7.4GW/11.6GWh by the end of 2024.

"4.6GW" - that means that after 1h the 4.6GW are gone?

no, 5.9GWh, so after 1 hour at 4.6GW we could do another hour at 1.3 GW (or another 16 Mins at 4.6HW)

~76 mins at 4.6GW.

Too bad the nights a little bit more than 76 minutes.

Indeed. We can only have a small amount of solar, but wind keeps blowing at night, Nucular continues, biomas too. The gap we need to bridge most urgently is turning off gas generation. Take a look here, https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical the majority of "turning off gas" is daytime demand that needs to be covered.

> wind keeps blowing at night

But stops during anticyclones, which can last several weeks (that makes it completely unfeasible to use wind power with gas as a backup, because there's no way we can build several weeks worth of storage).

> Nucular continues

The problem is that nuclear plants cost is roughly the same no matter if they produce or not, so nuclear + solar is strictly costlier than just nuclear.

Solar in a country as cloudy and rainy as the UK, and one that is so far north it gets very long nights in winter, doesn't make make any sense whatsoever.

Most countries have the infrastructure to store several weeks worth of methane. That can be repurposed to store hydrogen.

It can theoretically be repurposed, but hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane and thus leaks in existing methane installations. Given that it is also much more dangerous when it leaks (it explodes much more easily than methane), that means reworking all the infrastructure around the storage site, which ain't free.

Also, producing hydrogen from electricity requires lots of investments in terms of conversion units, and the economics is already dubious even when they run 100% of the time, so using it just for absorbing excess production a fraction of the year really isn't economical. In addition, what are you going to do with the hydrogen? Burns too hot for existing gas turbines so you'd need new ones. Fuel cells? That's expensive too.

There's a reason why everyone is betting on batteries instead of hydrogen, the economics of hydrogen is just too difficult.

And you know what? Even if you want to go full hydrogen, Nuclear + hydrogen is also more efficient than Wind + hydrogen since the hydrogen production units are going to be used at capacity more often, because wind is intermittent.

Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big. And not everybody is betting (only) on batteries. A mix of storage technologies is most likely the cheapest solution.

> Nuclear+Hydrogen makes no sense economically. If you have the extra capacity to run electrolysis, your nuclear fleet is too big.

It's cheaper than running it on wind or solar, so no.

That’s a bold claim.

When you use an energy source with a 90% capacity factor instead of 40%, you can amortize the CAPEX twice as fast, and there's a lot of CAPEX involved in the business of making green hydrogen (that's most of the cost, actually since it assumes very little OPEX due to using excess (hence free) electricity).

You ignore the cost of overbuilding nuclear vs the cost of renewables. I doubt that you can make a convincing argument that fits in the HN comment box, since it's a rather complex topic.

I agree that this is a complex topic, and you definitely don't understand it as well as you think you do.

fyi all current hydrogen plants use either a mix with 50-70% gas or 100% hydrogen but are creating huge NOx as byproduct due to high temp burning. That's just one of the many hydrogen challenges, another one is H2 handling is harder, another one is the more renewables you get, the more your H2 plants would cost since in some periods you use them extensively, in others - very little and to compensate such infra cost&maintenance the plant owners will jack up the prices or seek govt price compensation. That's why many say hydrogen plants/energy is somewhat of a pipedream

Nobody claimed that the current battery capacity is sufficient to last a night. The interesting part is the growth curve of available storage.

Going from 76 minutes to a full British night (which can last up to 16 hours in winter!) is going to need a heck of a growth curve indeed.

Less than four doublings is not a lot. We’re at the beginning of the storage expansion. The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.

> The interesting question is not when we‘ll be able to cover a night, but when we’ll be able to cover a month.

The answer to this one is a pretty straightforward never. You have to realize that such a storage will sit duck most of the time, making it impossible to get any return on investment on it.

There are power plants today that are being paid for standing by idle, so clearly you can make money by just providing emergency backup even when it's never used.

We only have so many lochs/valleys, realistically we will need to rely on batteries after about 20GWH or so.

https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design

500MW/1GWh of batteries will cost 254M USD (in California Q2 2025). Assuming a 10% revenue per year, and cycling once a day implies a storage cost of 24500000/365/1000 = 67 USD/MWh.

And yet the energy prices are so high that they drive companies to cut production. Especially in countries which banked on renewables the most (along with gas).

> There is storage for that

There literally isn't, it doesn't exist.

In the same sense this reactor doesn't exist?

Yes, anybody speaking as though this reactor already exists is wrong.

Well HPC exists, it's not operational yet (and won't be before several years) but it does exist.

And equivalent storage doesn't exist not as a WIP, not even as a project.

Storage can go from planned to installed in a very short time, much shorter than a nuclear power plant, so that doesn't mean much. Storage prices are declining and installs are expanding with short time constants as well.

The whole skeptical approach here smells strongly of ignoring rapid exponential change, which is pretty remarkable for a SV associated forum like HN.

> Storage can go from planned to installed in a very short time,

No it cannot, when you start building large hazardous (because of fire risk) facilities, then you face the same kind of red tape that you face with any big projects. Storage also requires adapting the electric grid to allow the energy to flow from and to the storage facilities.

Believing storage is easy is just magical thinking.

Nuclear isn't different, it's just big by default. And the French example in the 80s shows that building mass nuclear from scratch is in fact tractable in under two decades.

https://www.energy-storage.news/massive-growth-potential-con...

> current operational capacity of 4.6GW/5.9GWh

Perhaps do some research before you speak of things you have no idea about

Which means it can give back 4.6GW for approximately an hour and 15 minutes. After that it is empty.

> 5.9GWh

In other words, energy storage to match what the nuke plant will be able to put out 24/7 literally doesn't exist.

Yeah, that's why California with >10GW of installed battery is not using gas/not importing at all in off peak hours... Oh wait

I know it is hard to grasp trends when you are dead set on seeing nuclear power as the only solution, but maybe look at the curves?

California has vastly reduced the fossil gas usage due to storage. It will only continue. Are they done? No, are we seeing massive change year by year? Yes.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

I do certainly see how batteries are extending the renewables supply. I also see that there's still a lot of work to do: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO

The UK has almost 7GW of shovel-ready pumped storage hydropower projects with over 135GWh storage capacity.

there are several problems here: 1 - this nuc plant in uk is a 'customized' one because uk has different laws compared to france. As result when you want something custom for the first time - it's both expensive and time consuming. 2- solar/wind can be scaled faster leading to faster decarbonization but makes the grid more unstable, just like the prices. Some tell you can use batteries for this but battery tech isn't there yet, you need absolutely huge amounts of them to cover the deficit reliably,especially for uk. Transmission&balancing costs are huge too. Right now uk's strategy is gas + more imports, usually from france. Afaik there aren't any countries globally(without big hydro resources) with a clear plan to ditch gas and reduce imports from nonfossil neighbors to cover own needs with renewables, be that California or Germany. Even green hydrogen plans are still a pipedream. It's ironical that even Norway with huge hydro resources is considering kickstarting some new nuclear plants

One of the points is that if you have a nuclear powered navy, there needs to be a career path for disembarking reactor-techs.

This is in no small part the reason why the countries with nuclear powered navies are most eager to build new nuclear power reactors.

„Sans nucléaire civil, pas de nucléaire militaire“ as the French say…

The pro nuclear types hate these observations because they’re painfully true. Battery storage is already doing a lot in the UK (4.6GW/5.9GWh) and the huge solar build out is a no brainer.

Nuclear power is a dead end technology

i mean you can look here https://app.electricitymaps.com/map how much batteries are doing for uk vs gas/imports...

Output of the discussed nuclear facility is 3.6GW, which means weekly production of 604.8 GWh, or around 100x as much as currently installed storage capacity.

And going into only one type of electricity production especially with the unpredictability of renewables is never wise.

Storage is almost useless at over 24 hours of daily peak capacity stored, and fulfils most of it's purpose at as little as 2-6 hours depending on the climate and solar/wind mix.

That's Hydro (and it's a bit more than that now).

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