With the ever-ongoing ‘progress’ of the proposed UK nuclear power plants, I wonder if this is the best course of action (not just in the UK, but across other nations also)?

Wind and solar. Pop up, pop down. Nuclear needs entrenched infrastructure. The future is always renewables.

Yet, it seems like there’s always this massive push in the UK to build more nuclear plants, so where (and why) does that idea come from? Is it about quick, cheap energy?

I guess saying both is out?

I’m more wondering, is one better than the other? Is it practical for them to co-exist?

To answer your question directly: I don’t know, depends on if it can work ig. But also: we have finite resources, so where should those resources be spent/focused?

Private equity attempting to capture profits. Much harder to do with renewables.

I think diversity is redundancy. Keep in mind the necessary evil than none of those "green" energy sources can be created without us still leaning on fossil fuels some. So rather than claiming a single type, why not minimize what we can of the worst with all the better choices?

Some places simply can't do wind and/or solar. Some places should be doing it all the time because it's so consistent.

I see, so you believe it’s regional dependent, and we should be focussed on the least harmful methods/plan?

Yes, and again, with redundancy, so that does mean probably a nuclear plant connected to tap into any part of the grid, even if it's not normally used. Same with wind and solar, they should help with reducing nuclear power use in nearby grids if they're overproducing past their typical storage plan. An example of what happens when you try to run a separate grid without that capacity is Texas.

And continued work to reduce the impact of all of these. Better nuclear designs (some places have thorium in the works, and of course there's always fusion in the future), also improving wind and solar in their materials and construction, something often not talked about. They need to be far more "renewable" recyclable than they are, and less toxic to create. One reason solar is so cheap is because its outsourced to places that don't have strict rules on where to dump byproducts of their production, and of course cheaper labor. That needs to get better.

You get a lot more energy for little resources, ignoring the upfront cost. Also the other comment

Wind, solar and geothermal. Nuclear is far too expensive per kilowatt to even compare. Geothermal is the best idea given newer drilling technology and simplicity. That said nuclear is always brought up when corporations can make taxpayers “contribute” via tax dollars with no real savings to those taxed. Corporations love those deals and politicians love the campaign contributions.

Nuclear is great for investors, data centers, and the military. The amount of energy it produces allows for more energy intensive operations and research, gives a lot more energy for everyone to play with, but they can also now import nuclear material for "energy" reasons.

Best course of action if you believe these things are good. Bad if you think people should be able to produce their own energy, and don't need that much energy to prosper.

It depends on a lot of factors, which is part of why the question is divisive. To oversimplify:

On one hand, when done optimally, nuclear provides huge amounts of power extremely cleanly and safely - even compared to renewables. There is also a number of options that could allow for significantly reduced costs and significantly increased flexibility such as SMRs, or other reactor technologies. On the other hand, nuclear has a mountain of roadblocks in front of it including antinuclear sentiment, policy blocks (particularly stemming from that sentient), and a lack of know-how increasing cost and slowing both building of reactors and development of new technologies. This means it could be amazing in the long term, particularly in regions that are suboptimal for renewables, and for industries requiring large amounts of power 24/7, but it can't do much in the short-term.

Renewables meanwhile, are cheap, fast and easy to build and easy to expand to the point where until ideal conditions, even individuals can afford to install and run their own electrical infrastructure. As such, its amazing to quickly reduce prices, reduce emissions, and reduce dependence on governments. On the other hand, most renewable options lack flexibility. Solar only runs half the day, and the further you are from the equator, the lower the efficacy. Wind takes up huge amounts of space. Hydro requires damable rivers and space to avoid destroying ecosystems. There's lots of options, but they also have large limits. As technology improves these will limits will be reduced (such as improving battery technology) but they are still present.

Ultimately, this means that where available, renewables are nearly always best in the short term. Long term, it gets messier, since it depends on what we invest in now, which technologies end up going somewhere versus being dead ends, and how the world changes in general. Most predict a mixed approach would be best, both to address the variety of global needs, and to spread risk. All that said, global warming is, at this point, a short-term problem. We can't afford to focus on the long-term anymore, which is why there is so much focus on renewables. We need to be replacing and expanding infrastructure yesterday so we don't have time to wait for nuclear, and debatably, can't afford to be investing in an energy technology that won't pay off for decades when that could be further invested in renewables.

Wind, solar and geothermal. Nuclear is far too expensive per kilowatt to even compare

Don’t suppose you have the statistics to back that one up, do you?

I have lots of love for CANDU reactors. Lived by a few of them just outside of Toronto for a bit.

They do have the big advantage of having all waste handled on site vs the hazardous disposal of solar panels and wind turbine fiberglass every couple decades plus the ability to start up a failed grid.
Big downside is the slow build process and the long downtime during refurbishment if you only have one reactor on site.

Solar also isn't great up here with the winters killing solar production half the year when we require more power for heating but it is fabulous for balcony and roof solar installations.

Wind is only viable at scale but otherwise a pretty great source of power in windy areas.

Solar and wind also aren't able to start a grid that as failed although investing in battery storage (chemical or gravity based) could fix this.

Hydro power would be perfect if it didn't require the flooding of a huge area but otherwise it is a great source of constant power that can often be used to kickstart a grid. It is also cheap power if you have the rivers for it.

If tidal power wasn't so incredibly harsh on equipment it could have been a fantastic power source as well but if Nova Scotia/NB can't make it work then it probably isn't worth doing anywhere else.

I don't know much about geothermal but I assume it is pretty great if you're somewhere geologically active. It does seem awfully similar to fracking for natural gas when getting built so idk the environnement impacts of that.

Ideally you'd get the bulk of your power from solar, wind and small scale hydro alongside battery storage and then have nuclear plants available to pick up the slack when one of these isn't running and during peak use times.

That gravity batteries are so simple it's hilarious: pump water up hill into a tank and it generates electricity on its way back down.

Just in case anyone thinks this is hyperadvanced technology...

My problem, honestly, is that I'm watching society collapse around me and I absolutely do not trust government regulators to do their job TODAY, much less in the Max Max Headroom future.

Radioactive nuclear waste

China has long term planning so they were happy to give the UK cheap loan deals to build nuclear plants to create work for the Chinese nuclear industry. Then the US started doing an Iron Curtain against China, so to suck up to both the US and China the UK had to buy out all the planned Chinese-partnered nuclear plants. To avoid looking like losers UK politicians insist on trying to go through with building them without China at crippling expense while trying to pretend like it's not a disaster.

Its to bad we did not go nuclear as much as possible before the millenium. Some blame protestors but I blame a lack of standardization. I think france basically showed how it should be done. Given that Im glad my state has a lot of nuclear power now. However wind and solar are just plain old faster to build out and utilize asap and storage is not the issue it was yester years. Thed multi decade length of a standard nuclear plant makes them kinda a no go and we never really solved waste storage decently. Now maybe the mini reactors or such may make sense. By that I mean nuclear is not going away I think we will just use it differently.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/AEO2025_LCOE_report.pdf

Wind & solar for sure. Nuclear fission is great right now, but fissile material is a finite resource. It will, like oil, eventually become too expensive to extract.

Nuclear was probably the best choice in the 1970’s; France made the best choice. But we’ve seen over and over again the problems are getting worse rather than better. Paperwork and process ever more unwieldy. Construction taking longer and longer. Radioactive waste building up with no permanent disposal. By far the highest cost power generation, and the difference is getting wider.

Much of the posts about how great it will be this time is just astroturfing by those trying to profit. No, “small modular reactors”, didn’t solve the cost, construction, or process issues, but only raised the cost of generation. No, thorium isn’t the silver bullet and really doesn’t exist yet.

It depends on your definition of "long term". If we're talking centuries, millenia, then wind and solar seems the clear winner with current and predicted available technology for the simple fact that they produce no waste.

Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste. Currently, our best/only plan to dispose of that waste is to bury it in a hole and hope nobody ever finds it or a natural disaster ever disturbs it.

Wind and solar.... don't. So, barring some unforeseen technological breakthrough that allows us to reuse or recycle nuclear waste, probably wind and solar.

It seems like battery+solar is the cheapest worldwide as of recently.

I am not familiar with UK conditions. Scandinavian winters remain a problem for solar.

For fuck's sake! It's both, you can't rely on a single one.
Guess which one it is being used and will be used for decades to come while everyone is distracted arguing which one is better?

Wind, solar, and big batteries is the least costly by far

Even cheaper is if you can convince the general population to buy batteries and be in virtual power plants

There is currently an absolutely massive buildout of offshore wind atm, (dogger bank a/b , Sofia, east Anglia 3, inch cape, hornsea 3) and solar to a lessor degree. Its just the right media like nuclear as a solution so its talked about more than action taken

If the area has good and reliable access to the sun or strong winds, solar and wind will be cheaper.

If it doesn't, nuclear is there to have your back.

Also, you can put a nuclear power plant on a ship (like Russia and China do) and deliver nuclear power to coastal areas while the proper infrastructure is (re-)built.

There is no universal best way to produce power, you need to mix and match to make a good grid.

Where I live it's solar, hydro and wind. No fossil or nuclear required. I don't get why people like nuclear. It's expensive, slow to build, produces waste and keeps countries hostage with its radium requirements.

Thats just false.

Per MWh a windmill (on land) costa about 30℅ more concrete and rare earth metals than a nuclear power plant. It's almost double for windmills at sea (although it is mostly a whole lot more concrete)

For windmills you need to build out 3 times the required capacity for any baseload usage, due to how wind power works.

The Netherlands spend 12± billion euro a year for the past 15 years in to wind and solar energy.

And we're only just now matching the Windmill energy production of 1 nuclear power plant.

The Netherlands couldve build at least 10 nuclear power plants for the same money and then we would have most of our base load covered by non greenhouse gas producing methods.

But the Netherlands is now reliant on Norway and the US for its power production.

Solar energy is fucking amazing btw, but without storage best used as a load reducer.

Greenpeace did more harm to our planet than they did good.

Both are needed for a healthy power structure.

Wind, solar even with batteries have low innertia (actually no innertia at all by themselves). If you want to resist turbulences on the power network without free innertia resistance by turbines (nuclear, gas, hydro), you need expensive equipment to generate that innertia other ways, and it can get quite expensive.

Hydro would be great but it's highly seasonal.

Nuclear is fewer each year globally, so there's that.

It takes days to erect a wind turbine. It takes more than a decade for anyone outside China to get power out of a reactor.

Wind turbine waste is a problem, the blades are fibreglass. They take up a fair bit of space and they're hard to use for order stuff

Nuclear plants produce radioactive waste throughout their lives and then are themselves radioactive waste when they go out of service

Wind turbines are not a terrorism target unlike nuclear plants

And every analysis I have read says nuclear is far more expensive than renewables

(I didn't down vote you)

It s practically unlikely that you can make renewable work without being depending on china and in the end it will pollute a lot. While in some place they can make sens having them as "the" solution for everything is dumb.

Germany that did the bet of renewable end up being the biggest polluters of the eu cause they are intermittent and they end up being using coal when needed which is all time

By not building nuclear power plants since the 80s, barring France and China. And continue to rather build fossile fuel power than nuclear.

We polluted this planet with so much radioactive waste we couldve powered our civilization with dirty nuclear power for a 1000 years.

And we humans solved the nuclear power waste. The majority of that waste loses its radiation within decades and that last bit we can store under the earth, rather than putting it our atmosphere.

Wind power has its benefits of course, but like solar, it cant power our civilization without storage and when you throw storage in the mix, it favours nuclear power in every measurement.

IMO, GB needs to lean into its nuclear strategy. A decade out of Brexit, they have the speed of sovereignty but will come crawling back to the EU and get terrible terms for readmission if they don't do something productive. The endless debate of "which is best" will ruin the country.

GB signed a contract will Rolls Royce to build SMRs, they need to deliver on time and on budget. Once those factories and workers are turning, GB would be in a great position to buy more SMRs and plug em into the grid and export power to the EU, export SMRs to the EU (esp France, they love nukes), and export energy intensive commodities to the EU (like steel or cement)

Wind and solar are great, no question there. However, the endless debate of this burns oil, gas, coal, and public sentiment.

Not every country can have hydro. In your case, hydro fills the role that nuclear would fill. When nuclear is not an option and hydro is not available that role is being filled by gas and coal.

Ok wait what's the plan for a cold still day? You need a base load supplier like nuclear for renewables to work

I don't think anyone would ever describe nuclear energy as cheap nor quick

True in terms of set-up, but afterwards, maybe?

Hey, I'm in the biz. "Either or" isn't a thing. We need a completely diversified grid. Mostly nuclear would be ideal with a big chunk coming from solar/wind/hydro. Even fossil fuels have a place in certain applications.

May I ask what you do if you don’t mind me asking?

Mechanical engineer on the operations side of a large Co-Generation power plant. Partially qualified to operate in a nuke plant too, they just don't exist in my area.

Interesting. What kind of energy sources does your co-generation use? Part renewables, part fossil fuels I presume?

No, all natural gas with number 2 oil (diesel) as a backup. The co part comes from the fact the Brayton and Rankine cycles are working together. The former being how a gas turbine works and the latter being how a steam system works. I can go into more depth but it's boring. I like renewables, just not as a blanket one size fits all solution. People tend to form an oppinion about this kind of thing based on vibes not reality, experience or math. I've worked at hydro plants before and like I said am mostly qualified legally to work in nuclear.

Ah, fair enough.

Hinkley Point C plant will cost out at $64B.

But it is tunable for grid power, regardless of time of day or weather.

Nuclear has a problem. Right now, there is an estimated 90 years of potential uranium supply, which will be cut in half when Chinese reactors get on line. Uranium is not abundant.

And don't flame me with thorium bullshit or uranium from seawater bullshit. Science fiction.

Hydro would be great but it’s highly seasonal.

how is hydro seasonal? Even coldest Quebec uses hydro year around.