Estimated cost of Hinkley Point C nuclear plant rises to £37bn - Polidicks

[QUOTE]The total lifetime cost of the planned Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant could be as high as £37bn, according to an assessment published by the UK government. The figure was described as shocking by critics of the scheme, who said it showed just how volatile and uncertain the project had become, given that the same energy department’s estimate 12 months earlier had been £14bn. The latest prediction comes amid increasing speculation about the future of the controversial project in Somerset, whose existence has been put in further doubt by post-Brexit financial jitters. [/QUOTE] [URL="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/07/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-plant-costs-up-to-37bn"]Source[/URL] This project just needs to die. As much as I want more nuclear power and other green options this thing is just dumb.

It would be cheaper to put solar panels on every house in England.

How can you miscalculate the figure by 150% ?

[QUOTE=Sims_doc;50680543]It would be cheaper to put solar panels on every house in England.[/QUOTE] Solar panels are for peak load energy demand. Nuclear energy is primarily for base load demand. You can't compare costs between the two resources only on cost per kWh.

[QUOTE=RIPBILLYMAYS;50680601]Solar panels are for peak load energy demand. Nuclear energy is primarily for base load demand. You can't compare costs between the two resources only on cost per kWh.[/QUOTE] Batteries.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50680716]Batteries.[/QUOTE] Energy storage isn't yet ready to play a significant role in base load demand globally, and as a Nuclear Engineering student I have looked at the prospects of nuclear and renewable energy sources in meeting future energy demands in detail. [video]https://youtu.be/1wr9_SIl4X8[/video]

[QUOTE=RIPBILLYMAYS;50680736]Energy storage isn't yet ready to play a significant role in base load demand globally, and as a Nuclear Engineering student I have looked at the prospects of nuclear and renewable energy sources in meeting future energy demands in detail. [video]https://youtu.be/1wr9_SIl4X8[/video][/QUOTE] All clean sources of energy need to play a part it's not only one thing that's going to do it. We need nuclear, solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power generation. The video is dumb, she tries to pin solar and wind on being a hippy thing and tries to put the point across of it being nuclear instead of solar or wind. She doesn't even touch on why storage solutions are bad. The reality is we need all of them. I'm 100% for nuclear, just not £37 billion for a plant that only outputs 3 GW of power, that's over £12 per watt of generating capacity. SolarCity are aiming for $0.55 per watt of generating capacity for solar soon.

You need a balanced portfolio of generating units to properly react to varying loads and baseline usages, I doubt they wouldn't have chosen nuclear if it wasn't going to be used properly as it's a considerable investment. I don't have anything similar to compare it to, to see if such a increase is typical or not, but it seems a tad on the unreasonable side. I wonder why that is.

[QUOTE=Teddypimm;50680895]You need a balanced portfolio of generating units to properly react to varying loads and baseline usages, I doubt they wouldn't have chosen nuclear if it wasn't going to be used properly as it's a considerable investment. I don't have anything similar to compare it to, to see if such a increase is typical or not, but it seems a tad on the unreasonable side. I wonder why that is.[/QUOTE] This is the role of energy storage. The base load charges them when demand is lowest, the batteries discharge during demand peaks so the demand on the grid stays fairly flat.

Is that sort of battery technology available for mass energy storage? From what I remember the only in use technology at the moment was using spare generating capacity to pump water into a reservoir for hydroelectric. I have limited knowledge however, only 1 year into a EEE degree.

Briefly looked up EPR reactors and they seem like engineering nightmares, but I can't quite tell. It would be nice to have a nuclear energy thread, if someone would be willing to make one. I feel like there's way less news about nuclear energy posted on facepunch than there should be. Would love to learn more about this and a thread would help.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50680716]Batteries.[/QUOTE] Batteries are at their absolute limit of practicality on the car level with the caveat that you pretty much never leave an urban area. There's no way in hell you're going to get a practical battery on the national power grid level if you can't even get the damned things practical for all car drivers.

[QUOTE=Teddypimm;50680987]Is that sort of battery technology available for mass energy storage? From what I remember the only in use technology at the moment was using spare generating capacity to pump water into a reservoir for hydroelectric. I have limited knowledge however, only 1 year into a EEE degree.[/QUOTE] You could do it with Lithium-ion batteries, though there's a lot of work being done on Sodium-ion batteries that might be better in the long run for this application. Li-ion batteries are energy dense enough that you can put a decent capacity at a lot of substations or even people's houses without them being in the way and looking ugly. They are also considerably more efficient than pumped hydro storage. [QUOTE=Humin;50680998]Briefly looked up EPR reactors and they seem like engineering nightmares, but I can't quite tell. It would be nice to have a nuclear energy thread, if someone would be willing to make one. I feel like there's way less news about nuclear energy posted on facepunch than there should be. Would love to learn more about this and a thread would help.[/QUOTE] Yeah that's the issue with it. It's really over complicated even if the idea of it is good. It makes it a nightmare to actually build the thing. [QUOTE=TestECull;50681035]Batteries are at their absolute limit of practicality on the car level with the caveat that you pretty much never leave an urban area. There's no way in hell you're going to get a practical battery on the national power grid level if you can't even get the damned things practical for all car drivers.[/QUOTE] EVs and grid storage are pretty unrelated. You use different battery chemistries for them. You optimize an EV battery for a high discharge and charge rates, you optimize grid storage for cycle count and efficiency. You could use an EV battery for grid storage if you wanted to but it would be a pretty bad idea. It would only ever be outputting power at a few percent of the rate it's capable of doing, and you would be shortening its lifespan considerably. Maybe it would be useful in emergency situations.

[QUOTE=AntonioR;50680567]How can you miscalculate the figure by 150% ?[/QUOTE] Easily - your currency becomes 50% less valuable after calculating.

[QUOTE=Grenadiac;50681182]Easily - your currency becomes 50% less valuable after calculating.[/QUOTE] This estimate is actually from pre brexit levels.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50681241]This estimate is actually from pre brexit levels.[/QUOTE] Which means it'll rise thanks to the devaluation of our currency because of brexit. Importing the materials needed will go up in price, and I expect the contractors building it weren't on a fixed contract and so that'll go up in price too.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50680830]All clean sources of energy need to play a part it's not only one thing that's going to do it. We need nuclear, solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power generation. The video is dumb, she tries to pin solar and wind on being a hippy thing and tries to put the point across of it being nuclear instead of solar or wind. She doesn't even touch on why storage solutions are bad. The reality is we need all of them. I'm 100% for nuclear, just not £37 billion for a plant that only outputs 3 GW of power, that's over £12 per watt of generating capacity. SolarCity are aiming for $0.55 per watt of generating capacity for solar soon.[/QUOTE] At no point does she dismiss solar and wind and say we should ditch them for nuclear. What she said was that the idea of solar/wind vs nuclear was ridiculous, when solar and wind will always need nuclear/coal/gas and therefore the point is that in fact it's gas vs coal vs nuclear, in conjunction with the useful but less reliable sources. Her point on energy storage isn't that it doesn't have a place, just that right now building enough storage to support an entirely solar/wind grid would be impossibly impractical. The cost of this plant comes down to the mismanagement and the desire of the government to buddy up to the Chinese.

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;50681750]At no point does she dismiss solar and wind and say we should ditch them for nuclear. What she said was that the idea of solar/wind vs nuclear was ridiculous, when solar and wind will always need nuclear/coal/gas and therefore the point is that in fact it's gas vs coal vs nuclear, in conjunction with the useful but less reliable sources. Her point on energy storage isn't that it doesn't have a place, just that right now building enough storage to support an entirely solar/wind grid would be impossibly impractical. The cost of this plant comes down to the mismanagement and the desire of the government to buddy up to the Chinese.[/QUOTE] She spends the whole thing pitching various technologies against each other as if we can only do one. She also conveniently leaves out the fact that if you have no storage on the grid then you still need gas on the grid. Nuclear plants cost a ton of money to build, but the fuel is relatively cheap, so you want to run them near full capacity the whole time to get the most out of that investment. They also take a long time to ramp up / down so they can't respond to changes in demand, which creates a requirement for fast acting OCGTs or other fast acting generators. The peak power demand can be double the power requirement for the lowest period of the day sometimes. The only way to get gas off the grid completely is with storage solutions, be it batteries or pumped hydro plants.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50681103]You could do it with Lithium-ion batteries, though there's a lot of work being done on Sodium-ion batteries that might be better in the long run for this application. Li-ion batteries are energy dense enough that you can put a decent capacity at a lot of substations or even people's houses without them being in the way and looking ugly. They are also considerably more efficient than pumped hydro storage.[/QUOTE] Sources? The wikipedia page for Grid energy storage puts pumped hydroelectric and battery at similar efficiency ranges. I'm treading into knowledge I'm not familiar with, but batteries seem like they might have capacity and lifespan concerns. I know hydro can hold a lot of energy, and anything grid related needs to last.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50680830]All clean sources of energy need to play a part it's not only one thing that's going to do it. We need nuclear, solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power generation. The video is dumb, she tries to pin solar and wind on being a hippy thing and tries to put the point across of it being nuclear instead of solar or wind. She doesn't even touch on why storage solutions are bad. The reality is we need all of them. I'm 100% for nuclear, just not £37 billion for a plant that only outputs 3 GW of power, that's over £12 per watt of generating capacity. SolarCity are aiming for $0.55 per watt of generating capacity for solar soon.[/QUOTE] Isn't the 37 Billion figure a bit misleading because that is the lifetime cost of the plant (i.e. a 20/30+ year estimate)? Anybody have comparable "lifetime cost" figures for coal/gas plants?

[QUOTE=RIPBILLYMAYS;50680601]Snip-O[/QUOTE] Battery Backups for each house in England? I've got a basic system even if its raining everyday and you never see the sun the panels still charge the battery.

[QUOTE=Teddypimm;50681888]Sources? The wikipedia page for Grid energy storage puts pumped hydroelectric and battery at similar efficiency ranges. I'm treading into knowledge I'm not familiar with, but batteries seem like they might have capacity and lifespan concerns. I know hydro can hold a lot of energy, and anything grid related needs to last.[/QUOTE] I expect the wikipedia page is based on lead acid batteries (but I haven't checked). Tesla claim a 92.5% round trip efficiency on their stationary batteries, take off a bit for inverter inefficiencies. Pumped storage is generally only around 75% efficient, it's also hard to build due to geographic requirements. If you use Li-ion batteries then you can put them closer to where the power is being consumed, almost eliminating transportation losses. [video=youtube;yKORsrlN-2k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k[/video]

[QUOTE=Morgen;50681867]She spends the whole thing pitching various technologies against each other as if we can only do one. She also conveniently leaves out the fact that if you have no storage on the grid then you still need gas on the grid. Nuclear plants cost a ton of money to build, but the fuel is relatively cheap, so you want to run them near full capacity the whole time to get the most out of that investment. They also take a long time to ramp up / down so they can't respond to changes in demand, which creates a requirement for fast acting OCGTs or other fast acting generators. The peak power demand can be double the power requirement for the lowest period of the day sometimes. The only way to get gas off the grid completely is with storage solutions, be it batteries or pumped hydro plants.[/QUOTE] I'd recommend you watch it again, because you seem to have misunderstood her argument. She puts forwards the pros and cons of various sources, and the key limitations, and is arguing that any green future must include nuclear because solar and wind alone can't do it. The key thing you seem to be missing is her saying that "[renewables] have their place, when applied properly". She isn't "pitching various technologies against each other as if we can only do one", rather she's arguing that excluding nuclear isn't an option. Her first point is that solar isn't efficient enough to cover a whole grid, i.e. the area and cost of solar panels per MW is pretty high, and once you factor in the costs of storage for a whole grid of solar, the cost is astronomical (you're welcome to contest this, although I'd be interested if the $0.55/MW includes land cost). Then she talks about wind, where the basic jist is that wind can't ever reliably produce enough power for the country. This is not saying it's useless, instead she is arguing that the environmentalist idea of ignoring anything which isn't solar/wind/geothermal is not practical and it's not a case of just 'engineer better'. Her point on storage solutions isn't that they don't exist or that they don't work to some degree, it's that they aren't good enough to support a grid where suddenly power intake drops for a whole day because it's cloudy. That's fine when solar is a small percentage but if we are using it for far more significant proportions, it isn't going to work with current technology. This isn't an endorsement for "no storage on the grid", it's a statement that storage is inefficient and not developed to the level required to [i]not have base-load sources[/i] which is her entire point. We use nuclear, storage solutions and renewable sources.

[QUOTE=Morgen;50680830]All clean sources of energy need to play a part it's not only one thing that's going to do it. We need nuclear, solar, wind, hydro and geothermal power generation. The video is dumb, she tries to pin solar and wind on being a hippy thing and tries to put the point across of it being nuclear instead of solar or wind. She doesn't even touch on why storage solutions are bad. The reality is we need all of them. I'm 100% for nuclear, just not £37 billion for a plant that only outputs 3 GW of power, that's over £12 per watt of generating capacity. SolarCity are aiming for $0.55 per watt of generating capacity for solar soon.[/QUOTE] You do realize the lifetime of the plant will probably be 45-55 years do you not?

[QUOTE=Humin;50680998]Briefly looked up EPR reactors and they seem like engineering nightmares, but I can't quite tell. It would be nice to have a nuclear energy thread, if someone would be willing to make one. I feel like there's way less news about nuclear energy posted on facepunch than there should be. Would love to learn more about this and a thread would help.[/QUOTE] It's been a while since I've looked at the EPR but I remember the manufacturer boasting about how their reactor has 6 to 7 times thicker walls than other Gen 3+ designs. I had to shake my head at the stupidity. [editline]10th July 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=ChristopherB;50681894]Isn't the 37 Billion figure a bit misleading because that is the lifetime cost of the plant (i.e. a 20/30+ year estimate)? Anybody have comparable "lifetime cost" figures for coal/gas plants?[/QUOTE] It's not a lifetime costs, it's the capital costs.

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;50682041]...snip...[/QUOTE] There's a pretty interesting article where the author pins up solar vs wind vs nuclear including storage and what not, but part of the equation that he takes into consideration is not what land is going to cost, but the sheer amount of land you're actually going to need: [url]http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/[/url] Not to mention the CO2 footprint of actually creating the materials that solar and wind are to be built of.

[QUOTE=NeonpieDFTBA;50682041]I'd recommend you watch it again, because you seem to have misunderstood her argument. She puts forwards the pros and cons of various sources, and the key limitations, and is arguing that any green future must include nuclear because solar and wind alone can't do it. The key thing you seem to be missing is her saying that "[renewables] have their place, when applied properly". She isn't "pitching various technologies against each other as if we can only do one", rather she's arguing that excluding nuclear isn't an option. Her first point is that solar isn't efficient enough to cover a whole grid, i.e. the area and cost of solar panels per MW is pretty high, and once you factor in the costs of storage for a whole grid of solar, the cost is astronomical (you're welcome to contest this, although I'd be interested if the $0.55/MW includes land cost). Then she talks about wind, where the basic jist is that wind can't ever reliably produce enough power for the country. This is not saying it's useless, instead she is arguing that the environmentalist idea of ignoring anything which isn't solar/wind/geothermal is not practical and it's not a case of just 'engineer better'. Her point on storage solutions isn't that they don't exist or that they don't work to some degree, it's that they aren't good enough to support a grid where suddenly power intake drops for a whole day because it's cloudy. That's fine when solar is a small percentage but if we are using it for far more significant proportions, it isn't going to work with current technology. This isn't an endorsement for "no storage on the grid", it's a statement that storage is inefficient and not developed to the level required to [i]not have base-load sources[i] which is her entire point. We use nuclear, storage solutions and renewable sources.[/QUOTE] At best she's pitching that renewables should have a diminished role in [I]California[/I]. California is a pretty good place for solar, you would 100% be better off utilizing that land for solar and putting nuclear plants further up north. You can transport the power back down when it's needed. The cost per megawatt hour is already astronomical from this nuclear plant. The government have guaranteed them £92.50 per mWh. The current price is about £35. I'm not even sure how you can get anything from her point on storage solutions, she literally says one sentence on it with zero details. Current storage solutions can already improve the efficiency of the grid even without renewables mixed in so clearly they aren't that inefficient. This woman cites no supporting evidence except "I studied thermal engineering so I'm qualified". [QUOTE=SpaceGhost;50683599]You do realize the lifetime of the plant will probably be 45-55 years do you not?[/QUOTE] The useful lifetime of SolarCity's panels should be 35 years, so what's your point? We have far cheaper nuclear options than Hinkley Point C, I'd rather we got more power out of our £37 billion.

[QUOTE=ksenior;50683611] It's not a lifetime costs, it's the capital costs.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE] [B]The total lifetime cost[/B] of the planned Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant could be as high as £37bn, according to an assessment published by the UK government. The figure was described as shocking by critics of the scheme, who said it showed just how volatile and uncertain the project had become, given that the same energy department’s estimate 12 months earlier had been £14bn. The latest prediction comes amid increasing speculation about the future of the controversial project in Somerset, whose existence has been put in further doubt by post-Brexit financial jitters.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Morgen;50684272]At best she's pitching that renewables should have a diminished role in [I]California[/I]. California is a pretty good place for solar, you would 100% be better off utilizing that land for solar and putting nuclear plants further up north. You can transport the power back down when it's needed. The cost per megawatt hour is already astronomical from this nuclear plant. The government have guaranteed them £92.50 per mWh. The current price is about £35. I'm not even sure how you can get anything from her point on storage solutions, she literally says one sentence on it with zero details. Current storage solutions can already improve the efficiency of the grid even without renewables mixed in so clearly they aren't that inefficient. This woman cites no supporting evidence except "I studied thermal engineering so I'm qualified". The useful lifetime of SolarCity's panels should be 35 years, so what's your point? We have far cheaper nuclear options than Hinkley Point C, I'd rather we got more power out of our £37 billion.[/QUOTE] Environmentalists are often anti nuclear. Her explicit argument is that nuclear must play a role in any green future because the storage solutions and renewable technology we have now could not produce a reliable grid off purely renewables. She's arguing there that the base load should be provided by nuclear, and this increase in nuclear would replace coal, oil and gas, not renewables. Her argument against renewables is that they should not be used for base load. Also, his point is that you are comparing building cost/watt with lifetime cost per watt. Also, the cost of this has little to do with nuclear power and much more to do with the government giving the Chinese a ridiculously good deal to try to buddy up to them.

[QUOTE=OfficerLamarr;50684319][/QUOTE] That's very strange, you don't normally count continuing costs upfront in an item that has a revenue stream.