Interesting gamble the government is taking here. Unusually the environmentalists are right to be cautious, SMRs have been designed since the 90s and not a one of them has ever come to anything.
Also not completely sure why we’d need it. By the governments own plans we can expect our wind power to jump from 10gw to 50gw by 2035, which would mean being 100% renewable powered for months at a time.
Which will make it very very expensive, the research I’ve seen recently says nations that manage that transition can expect electric price falls of a quarter to a half, and that Hinckley plant is already going to be selling at over twice the unit price of any other source. I would expect SMR plans to collapse for that reason by itself.
Your understanding is incorrect.
Reactors always operate at maximum capacity. It’s the only way they are economic to run. Fuel isn’t the primary cost for running a reactor. It’s staffing and maintenance. These don’t become cheaper when you run lower outputs. They are constant. If your costs are constant, generating half the power makes that power cost twice as much per kWh.
Just look at any of the grid dashboards out there. Look at how little nuclear output changes. We only change the output when we power down whole reactors for refuelling or other maintenance.
This is also why partnering nuclear with highly variable source of power like wind doesn’t make any sense. Nuclear can’t realistically vary it’s output in response to what the weather is. Even if it could, it wouldn’t make economic sense to do so.
Well your comment is too, reactors do not always run at maximum capacity, that’s silly.
But they do have a lower SMRC than renewables.
I don’t think you’re an expert in the economics of nuclear reactors, and I know I’m not. I clearly made a mistake in the understanding of scaling them up. But, as ever on the internet, you have picked a side and therefore you’re not a reliable interlocutor. If and when I want to know more about this subject, I will get my information from a neutral source.
Maybe the terms I used were too absolute, but they always aim to run at their highest sustainable output for the reasons I gave.
I’m not an expert in nuclear economics, but this is knowledge accumulated from reading articles over the years by people who are. Apart from the economics, I’m pretty pro-nuclear, but the economic (and the related time-scale) arguments kill it for me.
I think with the situation we’re in, we’re much better going all in on technologies that replace fossil fuels today, but in smaller chunks that add up to big numbers over time. Nuclear will take bigger bites out of fossil fuels, but those step changes will take 10-15 years and we’re stuck on fossil fuels for all that time.
Fair play to you. I guess that this decision is the result of the nuclear lobby having a bigger say than they should. It’s an old story, where the facts are obfuscated by energy companies, for profit. I think the argument that nuclear has an important place in a robust energy grid is hard to debunk. But we should have started building decades ago.