The nuclear option

The Fukushima incident has again focused attention on the safety and future of nuclear power worldwide, but when the era of peak oil is rapidly approaching, questions over future energy sources must be asked. Currently, 80% of our energy requirements are met through fossil fuel imports, and while great strides are being made in renewable energy sources like wind, wave, solar, with potential also in geothermal and biomass, even these will only make up 40% of the total by 2020. Certainly, nuclear power should only be considered as a last resort, after all green energy ideas have been exhausted, and after feasibility and safety studies have been conducted, but should we consider the option?

I think it definitely should be considered, but not as anything more than a stopgap measure. It's a lot better than fossil fuels, for sure, but there's always the possibility that something bad will happen (I've been giving out about locating nuclear plants in earthquake zones for years), and there are the problems of nuclear proliferation and waste disposal. I mean, who is allowed have nuclear power? Obviously we can't trust clearly crazy people like the Taliban, and Kim Jong-Il, but any country can be taken over by a crazy person or group of people, and even if the reactors aren't able to produce weapons-grade material, the prospect of a "dirty bomb" using nuclear waste is still not a nice one.

We need to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but the ultimate goal should always be to power things using renewables. Europe, for example, could conceivably be powered by massive wave and wind farms up the coast from Portugal, Galicia, France, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Norway, and large solar installations in Spain, Greece, and sites on long-term lease in North Africa. With high-voltage DC technology developing at pace, problems with long-distance transmission of power will be greatly reduced. The problem of variability in renewable resources can be solved by stockpiles of biomass, like fast-growing elephant grass and willow trees, as well as with pumped storage hydroelectric power.

The oil is going to run out some time, and the countries with the knowledge and skills to cope are going to be leading the world into the post-oil age.

No, no, no. The arguments for nuclear are always "safe" and "clean". It's neither.

We have a country surrounded by water and wind. We don't need nuclear, we just need to start ignoring NIMBYs.

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Originally Posted by dahamsta

No, no, no. The arguments for nuclear are always "safe" and "clean". It's neither.

We have a country surrounded by water and wind. We don't need nuclear, we just need to start ignoring NIMBYs.

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Compared to fossil fuels, it is safe and clean. More people are killed every year getting coal out of the ground than have ever been killed by the nuclear power industry. Piper Alpha killed twice as many people directly than Chernobyl (although I acknowledge that the attribution of total deaths due to Chernobyl is pretty much an impossible task). As for radioactivity, the small amounts of radioactive material contained in coal mean that coal burning power plants actually release more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants (in an average year, obviously 1986 and 2011 will be exceptions).

That's not to say that I support nuclear power, especially not for Ireland. For me, any country that can mess up electronic voting so badly is completely unqualfied even to draw a picture of a nuclear power plant. It's just if people are so passionately against nuclear power, they should by rights be just as passionately against fossil fuels, which take a far greater toll on our planet and its population.

Nuclear energy is, currently, safer than fossil, but that doesn't make it safe. And long term, it won't be cleaner than fossil, unless we start shooting the waste into space (which is just plain bad manners, if you happen to believe that there are other lifeforms out there.) And being against nuclear power doesn't make someone for fossil fuels. It doesn't even vaguely imply it.

I take your points peadar, but those were awful ways to put them. Ben Goldacre'd ream you if he saw them. :)

I have the same reaction as Dahamsta to nuclear energy, and NIMBYs. Maybe making windmills that are less visually jarring to the environment might help overcome some of objections, although personally I quite like the starkness of their current design.

Peadar, I'd add the Dublin port tunnel to your list of disqualifiers for an Irish nuclear industry.

I heard somewhere recently that India is experimenting with thorium as a safer alternative to uranium in nuclear energy, but it could take 20 years to complete the research. Anybody know anything about that? Is it feasible or pie in the sky?

The old plan to stick a nuclear power station down in Wexford was barely pushed aside, despite vested interests, when the whole foundation (literally) proved to be wrong. Can anyone imagine what would be the situation now if we had a nuclear power plant in Ireland built in the 1970's? I am completely against nuclear power in any shape or form, it's not dangerous, it's epoch ending. In Ireland there are so many alternatives that we just have to take oil and gas out of the equation for a day in order to get it sorted (again vested interests will try to ruin it). From heat exchange, to better insulation in homes, to solar energy, tidal power, wind farms, or another Turlough Hill, there are better options.

Nuclear is not safe, no matter what the statistics say, and it's not the generation of the energy, it's the waste. Look around nuclear waste plants and you'll find cancer clusters, our east coast has been seriously affected not just by Sellafield but by the closer plant in Wales (whose name escapes me).

Maybe we can strap on some sort of devices to LOI fans, the energy and hot air alone would be enough to look after the country for 20-30 years.

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Originally Posted by dahamsta

Nuclear energy is, currently, safer than fossil, but that doesn't make it safe. And long term, it won't be cleaner than fossil, unless we start shooting the waste into space (which is just plain bad manners, if you happen to believe that there are other lifeforms out there.)

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Which is why I only approve of the use of nuclear as a stop-gap until renewable energy sources are commercially viable.

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And being against nuclear power doesn't make someone for fossil fuels. It doesn't even vaguely imply it.

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It's the people who are against nuclear power, while not even bothering to do the research on fossil fuels who annoy me (not grouping you into this by the way, you're invariably well-informed)

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I have the same reaction as Dahamsta to nuclear energy, and NIMBYs. Maybe making windmills that are less visually jarring to the environment might help overcome some of objections, although personally I quite like the starkness of their current design.

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Put simply, the current design of wind turbines are the best we're ever likely to see. You can get single bladed and two bladed turbines, which are noisier, less efficient, and more prone to fatigue, and turbines with more blades, but that's more expensive, and requires more material. Vertical axis turbines like the Darrieus Rotor (http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...AJ-3KuZaaQF725) are even worse for fatigue, and less efficient still. Current wind turbines are approaching the maximum theoretical limit for efficiency anyway, so any further advancements will be in increasing the bandwidth of power extraction, and reducing the cost.

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I heard somewhere recently that India is experimenting with thorium as a safer alternative to uranium in nuclear energy, but it could take 20 years to complete the research. Anybody know anything about that? Is it feasible or pie in the sky?

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Thorium is very feasible, but not really any safer than uranium, as far as I know. It's just four times as abundant. I think most current plans for reactors are Uranium 233 reactors, into which a "charge" of Thorium is inserted. The thorium eventually changes to U-233 as well, can can be used to fuel more reactors. It's similar to the way in which Plutonium is produced from U-238 by present-day breeder reactors fuelled by U-235.

The designs of, and noise generated by, turbines don't need to be an issue -- we're surrounded by water, we don't need to see or hear them. And before the storage issue comes into question, we already have storage in Turlough Hill, our problem is that we haven't built more of them.

There's no such thing as a stop-gap solution in Ireland. Once it's built, the genie is out of the bottle. We have to put our foot down in Ireland and just say 'no'. If we need a stop-gap, we have the interconnector. I don't even like having that, it encourages the idiots that okayed and built Windscale.

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Originally Posted by dahamsta

The designs of, and noise generated by, turbines don't need to be an issue -- we're surrounded by water, we don't need to see or hear them. And before the storage issue comes into question, we already have storage in Turlough Hill, our problem is that we haven't built more of them.

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Plus, we can have our existing combined cycle gas turbines like the one in Poolbeg on spinning reserve. Once the generating capacity of renewables is large enough, Ardnacrusha can also be used to smooth out their power output.

We went on a college field trip to Turlough Hill in Final Year. It's an amazing place, like a Bond Villain's layer. One of the more amazing facts we heard was that, despite being a net energy sink, it's actually saved some ludicrous amount of money, because it allows the big coal and peat burning power plants to run constantly at the most efficient level, while Turlough Hill ramps up and down its output or consumption to match supply to demand. We need more visionaries calling the shots, like the people who built Ardnacrusha and Turlough Hill, which both attracted much derision when they were first announced.

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There's no such thing as a stop-gap solution in Ireland. Once it's built, the genie is out of the bottle. We have to put our foot down in Ireland and just say 'no'. If we need a stop-gap, we have the interconnector. I don't even like having that, it encourages the idiots that okayed and built Windscale.

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Fair enough. As I said, I have never supported it for Ireland, just on a global scale. I do trust the French, Germans and Americans to be able to run a number of nuclear plants for the next 60 years without major mishap. Mind you, before a few weeks ago, I would have had the Japanese on that list too, as much as I griped in the past about the idiocy of building a nuclear plant on a fault line, one the coast, in a tsunami zone. Especially one which relies on active external cooling.

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Originally Posted by dahamsta

There's no such thing as a stop-gap solution in Ireland. Once it's built, the genie is out of the bottle. We have to put our foot down in Ireland and just say 'no'. If we need a stop-gap, we have the interconnector. I don't even like having that, it encourages the idiots that okayed and built Windscale.

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This is correct. Nuclear power in Ireland would have to be baseload, so we'd need to commit to it 100% with renewable energy and fossil fuels supplementing that. It's doubtful we'd even be able to build a nuclear plant in the time before Moneypoint expires anyway. For one thing, we don't have any nuclear engineers. We'd be better off hoping the UK throws its weight behind nuclear and piggy-backing on that (unless you're entirely opposed to nuclear, as dahamsta seems to be).

Furthermore, a country like ours with such a richness of renewable energy sources would be foolish not to find ways to maximise those sources. Wind and wave will probably never fully power Ireland, but they can make us a lot less dependent on the outside world for our power.

It all boils down to this - who is making money from the current energy situation? Non-renewable resources providers. These are the companies who load tax revenue into the state coffers, therefore they and their friends in government are not going to slit their own throats. Tokenism will continue as there will be no concerted effort to take advantage of (as CD rightly points out) renewable resources that will short term provide large scale employment and long term provide tax revenue that is not held in thrall to Russian/US/UK backed regimes aroud the world. It would be a brilliant step forward to begin using tidal power on a large scale, this is something we can do well.

Ireland could well be powered fully by wind and wave energy, the resources for offshore wind are phenomenal, we are the Saudi Arabia of wind. The gird needs a fair bit of work to cope with it though which is probably the biggest issue needing to be tackled, apart of course from the vested interests Spudulika is referring to. And yes I agree that tidal power is one area in need of development, it's as regular as clockwork and would go a long way towards ironing out any intermittancy problems from wind,solar etc.

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Originally Posted by punkrocket

Ireland could well be powered fully by wind and wave energy, the resources for offshore wind are phenomenal, we are the Saudi Arabia of wind. The gird needs a fair bit of work to cope with it though which is probably the biggest issue needing to be tackled, apart of course from the vested interests Spudulika is referring to. And yes I agree that tidal power is one area in need of development, it's as regular as clockwork and would go a long way towards ironing out any intermittancy problems from wind,solar etc.

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The problem is with intermittency and storage. Wind power seems cheap enough when you've got enough readily-dispatchable power from things like hydro and gas turbines, but as soon as you start getting lots of wind power onto the grid, you have to back it up with pumped storage, or else burn fuel keeping other power stations in reserve to take up the slack, and when that cost is factored in, wind doesn't look so rosy.

Tides will never be a major part of the energy mix in Ireland, because we simply don't have the tidal range, or proper coastal features to get any really good energy out of it. Strangford Lough is alright, as is Killary Harbour, and you'd get a few MW out of the Arklow Bank, but most of our coastline is either too stormy, too deep, or doesn't have a decent tidal stream (I did a project on it a few years ago, but it was lost when my computer died)

I think biomass is something we really should be looking into though. EU subsidies for farming and leaving land fallow are ending this year, if I remember rightly, so what better way to use that extra land?

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Originally Posted by peadar1987

The problem is with intermittency and storage. Wind power seems cheap enough when you've got enough readily-dispatchable power from things like hydro and gas turbines, but as soon as you start getting lots of wind power onto the grid, you have to back it up with pumped storage, or else burn fuel keeping other power stations in reserve to take up the slack, and when that cost is factored in, wind doesn't look so rosy.

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I thought there were also issues with the "format" of the output from wind power, which also means the grid has limited capacity. In theory, pumped storage shouldn't be an issue in Ireland, however, we're in very different times to when people could be thrown off their land to make way for reservoirs. There's no shortage of suitable valleys.

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Originally Posted by peadar1987

I think biomass is something we really should be looking into though. EU subsidies for farming and leaving land fallow are ending this year, if I remember rightly, so what better way to use that extra land?

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I agree, especially for things like homeheating. But the quality would want to come up, and we should be looking for native solutions (or even related to native plants) such as willows. Also the suppliers tied the price so much to Oil and Gas prices that it actually didn't look cost effective (when we were building anyway)

Just on Nuclear - we are nuclear, as we have the interconnector. Like other things, we're happy to rely on the Brits to supply a service we're not prepared to do ourselves*. And there are also nuclear plants a lot closer than Windscale/ Sellafield.

*Do I have a correct recollection of a Green Minister once claiming that the electricity coming through the interconnector wouldn't be nuclear, as if it could somehow be separated?

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Originally Posted by Macy

*Do I have a correct recollection of a Green Minister once claiming that the electricity coming through the interconnector wouldn't be nuclear, as if it could somehow be separated?

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I have a similar memory. Doesn't airtricity claim their electricity is green too?

They do, which is rubbish because they're reselling the same electricity as everyone else. If they weren't such a bunch of lying, incompetent scumbags, they'd be marketing themselves as a green company, which would be fair enough.

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Originally Posted by Macy

I thought there were also issues with the "format" of the output from wind power, which also means the grid has limited capacity. In theory, pumped storage shouldn't be an issue in Ireland, however, we're in very different times to when people could be thrown off their land to make way for reservoirs. There's no shortage of suitable valleys.

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Yeah, when energy-head like me say non-dispatchable, it you can't really control the output. You can get a big chunk of your energy from wind power, but you'll always need other sources of power, or else the mother of all storage networks, whose output you can change rapidly, in order to match supply and demand at any given time.

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I agree, especially for things like homeheating. But the quality would want to come up, and we should be looking for native solutions (or even related to native plants) such as willows. Also the suppliers tied the price so much to Oil and Gas prices that it actually didn't look cost effective (when we were building anyway)

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There's a big push up North to get people to start develping willow plantations, actually. A company called Rural Generation are behind it. They give lots of energy, grow quickly, and grow well in Ireland. And you can farm bioenergy crops a lot more intensively, or with less fertiliser than food crops, because you can just dump the ash back on the land, and it still has most of the essential nutrients left in it.

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Just on Nuclear - we are nuclear, as we have the interconnector. Like other things, we're happy to rely on the Brits to supply a service we're not prepared to do ourselves*. And there are also nuclear plants a lot closer than Windscale/ Sellafield.

*Do I have a correct recollection of a Green Minister once claiming that the electricity coming through the interconnector wouldn't be nuclear, as if it could somehow be separated?

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Yup, he was asked about the interconnector, and he said the Brits had promised him the nuclear energy would be taken out before it went through the interconnector. Says a lot not only about our politicians, but about their reputation in the rest of Europe.

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Originally Posted by peadar1987

There's a big push up North to get people to start develping willow plantations, actually. A company called Rural Generation are behind it. They give lots of energy, grow quickly, and grow well in Ireland. And you can farm bioenergy crops a lot more intensively, or with less fertiliser than food crops, because you can just dump the ash back on the land, and it still has most of the essential nutrients left in it.

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With a wood chip (rather than wood pellet) system, there's great potential for people to be self sufficient for home heating using willow - iirc you don't need a whole lot of land to harvest a 3rd of it a year in rotation. The push was always for pellets though - not sure there were technical reasons or a lobby that pushed for it (not wanting people with a wood chipper to be able to DIY).

Apart from the serious concerns, there is a poor economic argument for the nuclear option, even if it was built, operated and disposed of, to current standards of best practice.
The kwh cost over a lifeline of a nuclear station, includes construction, maintainance, waste disposal and decommissioning, is estimated to be 30 cents/kWh according to this nuclear costs study.
Electricity in the US retails at 6 cents/kWh to 15 cents/kWh.