Energy bills in UK used to subsidise nuclear submarines - Polidicks

Energy bills in the UK are inflated partly because households are subsidising nuclear submarines, MPs have been told. Experts think one government motive for backing civilian nuclear power is to cross-subsidise the defence industry. They say nuclear power is so expensive that it should be scrapped in favour of much cheaper renewable energy. Others argue that nuclear still plays a key role in keeping on the lights, so the military aspect is not significant. But in evidence to MPs on the Business Select Committee, researchers from the University of Sussex said the government should be frank about the inter-dependence of the civilian nuclear programme and the nuclear defence industry. ... The government has declined to comment on the research, but a committee source told BBC News the researchers' evidence appeared persuasive and well-researched. ... The debate has taken on greater significance as the true costs of nuclear power have been revealed https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48509942

They say nuclear power is so expensive that it should be scrapped in favour of much cheaper renewable energy. Comparing the most bloated nuclear power plant design in history to renewables without backup or storage. Totally fair comparison. The headline is a bit sensationalist. There's no way the government is going to duplicate infrastructure just so they're a sharp line between civilian nuclear power and submarine reactors. They're not going to build two sets of enrichment plants, two sets of fuel fabrication facilities, two different sets of nuclear inspectors etc. It would be moronic.

Obviously they won't duplicate it, that's missing the point though. The point is that they may only be supporting it as a favour to defence contractors, and perhaps won't be making the best decisions for civilian power generation.

Yeah, poors, we'll put money in the NHS. N uclear H eckin' S ubmarines

In order to maintain the technical proficiency needed to run submarine nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons it's also a good idea to have a strong civilian nuclear industry so that people have an incentive to actually join the submarine force Not much news here

where in the study is that to be found ?

Because intermittent electricity is completely different from fully dispatchable power? Would you prefer you home to have power and your factory to run at the will of the weather, or would you prefer to flick a switch at any hour of the day and have power?

This is a very loaded question and I would like you to re-think it before I answer please.

Hahah. No. I don't owe you squat.

thats very british aswell the polite heck instead of the rude hell

All right.

It's not really loaded though. It just points out the massive differences between nuclear and (most) renewables when it comes to providing electricity. Nuclear power can be generated on demand. It is much more independent from environmental parameters such as wind, sunlight and water flow compared to renewable energy (a notable exception being during heat waves, if the NPP's cold source ie a river/the sea becomes too hot to release back into the environment without breaking regulations). Electricity demand varies greatly depending on the hour of the day, the day of the week, the month, the season. And unless we want blackouts, the exact same amount of electricity needs to be provided by various energy sources and satisfy demand at any point in time. But not every source is equally flexible. While you can adjust outputs from gas power plants or nuclear power plants at will, you can't do the same for wind or solar. You can't summon extra wind when you're short on power, nor can you get any juice out of solar power plants at night. Which is problematic, considering that electricity demand is typically significantly higher during the night. This is why most renewables are called "fatal" energy sources, since we have no way of manipulating the elements to get the results we want whenever we want. For an electrical grid to remain stable, you need to limit the share of fatal sources in your overall energy mix, otherwise you'll fall short of demand during peaks. For a large electrical grid (eg Europe), you shouldn't go over 30%. This means to get over 30% of your power to come from renewable energy sources, you need to find ways to stabilise the grid. To do this, you need energy storage solutions, either through storage dams (fairly limited capacity depending on your country's topology), hydrogen (fairly inefficient, you lose a lot of energy in the process), or chemical batteries (which use rare metals). All of those cost money, and they all have a significant impact on the environment. To get renewable energy to do the same job as nuclear currently does, ie provide massive amounts of energy constantly, you need massive energy storage capacity, and thus to pump a lot more CO2 into the air to get costlier electricity. Which is why the comparison is completely unfair, renewable energy on its own can't serve the purpose that nuclear is supposed to. For the comparison to be fair, they'd need to include the CO2 and financial costs of the required energy storage solutions. Such a comparison would lean massively in favour of nuclear, on both counts.

Axel's post does a pretty good job of covering a lot of the issues, as does the video below, but I want to add a few things. One of the key things that people forget about grids is frequency. Not only do you have to provide enough power to maintain the voltages, you also have to keep the frequency and phase maintained. Traditional grids are very good at this because they are made of many steam turbines all spinning in sync, and when power draw momentarily changes, the kinetic energy in these turbines can be used to smooth them out and keep the grid stable. This can happen on timescales small enough that not even batteries can respond fast enough to maintain stability. Solar and wind power don't provide this functionality, so as the grid switches towards these types of energy, it can become more unstable. This problem is exacerbated by large dc loads which can add significant inductance if done on a large scale, for instance a switch to people using electric cars. DC grids avoid this problem and are becoming more viable, but also would require that everyone replaced the power supplies on every electricity demanding device in their home, which would be incredibly expensive and unpopular. The second is the idea of using batteries in devices and cars as storage, rather than building large storage facilities, is also impractical and won't save much on cost. Charging and discharging all of those batteries won't be free; it will wear them out and this comes with a cost to the owner of the battery. They will therefore want compensation, which means you effectively still pay for all of the batteries you're using, and also have to deal with the admin nightmare of making small payments to millions of people rather than a big one to a single provider. If you don't compensate then either people won't plug their car into your smart grid, or if they're forced to then it makes electric cars far less appealing. Additionally, this only works for short term storage - one big problem for solar is the drop-off in winter, which either means you need massive oversupply in summer, or long term storage for winter which starts getting into astronomical scales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY

It's not though, Germany are world leaders in renewable energies, but are one of the most polluting countries in Europe after getting rid of their nuclear plants due to renewables not being reliable and instead having to supplement them with coal. Renewables are nice supplements to the existing power grid, but absolutely not a replacement for standard steam turbine power generation.

Some wind farms are being used to provide true frequency control in some places now, along with virtual inertia which battery storage can be good at providing. A good mix of generation and storage technologies is required for a low / neutral carbon grid, and shutting down nuclear without any significant safety concerns is pretty dumb. Almost all the cost of nuclear is upfront in the construction of the plant, and changes very little based on generation. So you really want energy storage to let you run your nuclear plants at as high utilisation as you can rather than trying to get them to slowly ramp up and down and essentially having the same cost for a lower output. If we went to a grid without anything but renewables and nuclear with zero storage, it might work but the price of nuclear power would be pushed up even further. Nuclear is a good technology to have, but I'd rather that we wasn't unnecessarily spending money on it just to please some shitty expensive defence contractor. If we are going to spend that much money on nuclear it should be scrutinized heavily to see what's best for the consumer rather than Rolls Royce.

We have had tons of news how storage can control fequency. Additionally, a decenztalized net does not need netwide frequency control.