> As the cost of Hinkley Point has increased, the backers have had to provide more funding. The souring of relations between Britain and China saw CGN stop providing any more money, leaving EDF to fund the shortfall. EDF has called upon the UK government to help out with the escalating cost but it has refused. EDF was fully nationalised in 2023, leaving the French taxpayer to pick up the tab for the cost overruns.
That paragraph might be the high point of the article.
It's about time our national infrastructure benefitted from foreign taxpayer money, considering how often it's been the other way around! Especially with the railways.
OTOH if I understand it right the French "taxpayer", i.e. govt, will be the beneficiary of the above-market price for electricity produced by the plant that the UK has guaranteed, presumably for the lifespan of the plant, which is 60 years. So I presume that will be a net gain for France, otherwise there would be no sense in continuing with the project.
The Hinkley Point C CfD provides a Strike Price for the developer of £92.50/MWh (2012 prices), reducing to £89.50/MWh (2012 prices) if EDF take a FID on their proposed Sizewell C project, for a 35 year term from the date of commissioning.
> I presume that will be a net gain for France
I think the project has a certain momentum to it. Also failing to complete the project would rather call into question their competence for the EPR2 build-out in France.
Absolutely. Thanks for the highlighting! Edit: It's a two-in-one good news afaiac: China withdrawing funding(/influence) and some sort of accountability applied to mega projects rather than just throwing (and eventually devaluing) more and more money at things.
I'm glad the article talks about the positive impact this will have on Sizewell C. The UK completely disregards the long term impact of skills and experience lost when debating whether we should do this kind of project.
Of course, EDF is trying to push the Sizewell C Final Investment Decision over the line, but equally a skilled workforce is being trained for these most complex of projects.
Yes, Hinkley and Sizewell may be expensive - but they're unlikely to be that much more expensive than wind/PV plus enough storage to provide reliable 24/7/365 power. In the end, I'd much rather have some diversity in the system. If the choice was 100% nuclear vs 100% wind/PV, the answer would probably be different, but for 15% of the UK's capacity to come from a reliable (but expensive) source that is uncorrelated with wind or PV downtime, that extra cost seems to be a good investment to me.
The problem is that you can't use nuclear to compensate for low wind/PV supply.
The cost of nuclear energy is dominated by the need to pay back the massive construction loan. Nobody is willing to take that risk on an open electricity market, so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand. If the price on the open market is less than the "strike price" the government will pay for the difference, and if the plant wants to supply power to the grid but the grid doesn't want it due to technical reasons the government will pay them for every kWh it could have supplied.
This in turn means nuclear power plants operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time - minus forced maintenance downtime. It can be used to supply a base load, but not to handle peak load. When there's an excess of supply, the grid is forced to turn off cheap wind/PV capacity to make space for expensive nuclear capacity.
I agree that it would indeed be nice if we could use nuclear to fill in the gaps left by a renewable grid, but the economics simply doesn't allow for it.
In an open market nuclear (and wind/solar) would still operate 100% of the time. That is because the marginal cost of one extra unit of energy is trivial. They would sell energy even if it was not enough to cover the capital costs. Because that is more revenue than turning the piywer station off.
We have strike prices so that generators can cover the capital costs. But it will also hold prices down when the wholesale cost exceeds the strike price.
I agree that Hinckley may increase peaks and excess generation. But that will be a feature of the grid anyway. We will need storage/interconnector exports either way. And it will also help a lot with the valleys in production. That is less electricity that needs to be stored or generated using gas and diesel. Adding a couple extra GW's is useful.
> so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand
Matt Levine writes about a gas contract where the gas supplier was obliged to deliver gas at a fixed price. However the contract required that the plant be completed. The spot price has been above the fixed price so the plant owners have been selling gas on the open market and the owners have not technically "completed" the plant on purpose (perhaps by not painting one last rivet).
Why hold wind to a higher standard than a nuclear plant? A nuclear plant typically has 95% uptime. Wind/PV/storage can hit 95% or 99% or 99.9% a lot cheaper than Hinkley can hit 95%.
Very good to hear about upskilling taking place but also immensely sobering numbers (i.e. 1300 apprentices is seen a big uplift) for a country the size of the UK.
118,770 apprenticeships achieved in the UK last year. We're not that big on practical education, with a preference for getting degrees so we can sit behind a desk moving (electronic) paper.
Tragedy is that something like 50% of people don't complete their apprenticeships
Provision seem to be very mixed - we know some teenagers who've had good ones and others who've had awful ones and these were in practical skills
Best one I know of was a degree apprenticeship for one of the big accountancy firms. Person started work at 18, had a degree in their early twenties while being paid all the way through, and no student debt at the end
I would also just say that a half of these 118,770 were over 25 Years old when they started, and only 44% of the total are for "advanced" level starts.
They are often not very high quality, sometimes it will be things like the person who puts bread in the oven at a supermarket getting a level 2 in kitchen skills and so on.
1,300 high quality apprenticeships is noticeable (which is nuts).
That's one of the reasons. Others include, but are not limited to:
1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design
All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds.
Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite that pronounced, but it's there.
2. No nuclear industry/workforce
I think the article goes into this, but a lot of the cost of HPC, Olkiluoto and Flamanville (as well as Vogtle-3/4) is simply for rebuilding nuclear expertise both in industry and in the workforce.
China also buit both EPRs and AP-1000s, and they did it quite a bit more quickly and cheaply, because they have an experienced workforce and industry at hand. They current have 20+ reactors under construction. That makes a huge difference as we know from experience. Just in Germany, the difference between one-off reactors and the Konvois that were built at the same time in series was around 2x.
However, even in China the EPR took longer than other reactors. Partly due to it being a FOAK design, but also for the third reason:
3. The EPR is too complicated
For various reasons, the EPR is far too complicated, and in the end not a good design. Which is one of the things you find out in FOAK builds (see point 1).
That's not me saying this, it's the manufacturer, EDF. They have abandoned the EPR design, all new French reactors will be the vastly simplified EPR2. I haven't been able to find out whether Sizewell C and subsequent will also be EPR2 or whether the UK will stick with its heavily modified EPR.
One example is that the EPR has quadruple independent cooling systems. This is in order to maintain triple redundancy while doing maintenance on the cooling system, so being able to do that maintenance without having to take the reactor offline. Considering the German PWRs were above 90% capacity factor with "just" triple redundancy, this seems to be gold-plating. Nice-to-have if you can pull it off, but it appears they couldn't pull it off.
Also, all those cooling systems have to be active in order to comply with German nuclear regulations. The somewhat silly reason is that German regulators both (a) had no experience with passive cooling systems and (b) had a prescriptive approach to regulation, rather than a requirements-based approach. So "you must build a cooling system like this" rather than "your cooling system must be able to do this".
It's is also obviously a bit redundant considering that Germany no longer operates nuclear power plants and isn't exactly currently in the market for an EPR.
The Westinghouse AP-1000 uses at least some passive cooling, which is not only more reliable but also simpler, smaller and cheaper and makes the total plant a lot smaller.
Once you've built one, the EPR is apparently a great reactor (the Fins are very happy with theirs), and should last a long time, but it's just a pain to build.
Nuclear is doomed to fail, because people's lifespans are too short. You can build a nuclear power plant, then do nothing for 50 years and have no workforce left to build new ones. This leads to nuclear power being excessively expensive and slow to construct.
If you decide to go the SMR route so that you continuously build nuclear reactors every year to sidestep this problem, then you run into the problem that the containment building needs to be airstrike proof. These high fixed costs are unrelated to the reactor technology and cannot be avoided by building a newer generation power plant.
If you decide to build the old designs, then you run into another issue: The savings obtained through building a larger scale plant, such as same number of staff, bigger diameter pipes and less material at the same fixed cost to obtain higher total power output per power plant, must be paid dearly by a cooling solution that scales with that increased power output. Placing a nuclear power plant near a river sounds intelligent, until you realize that climate change causes rivers to dry out or reduce their flow rate, shutting your nuclear power plant down, making your large scale power plant work against you. Meanwhile placing a nuclear power plant near the ocean has resulted in the Fukushima incident, so future power plants also need to be tsunami proof.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Before the failure of NuScale, I was confident that the problems with large scale nuclear power plants could be solved by SMRs, but the truth is that you simply can't operate nuclear power plants with the same lack of care you can operate a wind farm or a coal plant. If the coal/gas plant burns down or explodes, who gives a damn? Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
It's a common mistake to price up renewables delivering flat nuclear shaped energy in an effort to inflate the price.
It's as silly as demanding that a nuclear plant must emulate the delivery profile of solarn and install batteries capable of shifting night time power to the day. With a similar effect on prices.
Demand is not flat. It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets which is why initial solar deployments have a high "capture rate" (i.e. they are delivering when the demand and price is high).
Thats a very good comparison-- to be fair though, 3.2GW nuclear are comparable to pretty much the whole Dogger Bank (including Sofia/South) at ~8GW (nameplate power), because offshore capacity factor is about ~40% in the UK.
Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!).
It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35billion is still competitive, cost-wise, with the offshore wind farm.
Each phase will have an installed generation capacity of 1.2GW and represents a multi-billion pound investment. Combined, they will have an installed capacity of 3.6GW and will be capable of powering up to 6 million homes annually.
It will produce annually, about as much electricity as UK produces now from solar. Which is installed at a much faster clip than these two sad reactors are built, even if UK is one of the worst countries for solar in the civilised world due to expensive land and terrible weather.
What's even the point? Maybe this reactor is a live testament to the observation that "any new nuclear starting construction today will be obsolete before it's completed, due to competition from renewables"? It's been started almost 10 years ago and it seems to be already there.
There is storage for that, which is now finally, available, inexpensive and safe. Plus, it's long since proven that with moderate losses, renewable electricity system that combines solar, wind, and hydro, does not need any storage at all, or very moderate amounts of storage to achieve no or almost no losses.
there are several problems here:
1 - this nuc plant in uk is a 'customized' one because uk has different laws compared to france. As result when you want something custom for the first time - it's both expensive and time consuming.
2- solar/wind can be scaled faster leading to faster decarbonization but makes the grid more unstable, just like the prices. Some tell you can use batteries for this but battery tech isn't there yet, you need absolutely huge amounts of them to cover the deficit reliably,especially for uk. Transmission&balancing costs are huge too. Right now uk's strategy is gas + more imports, usually from france. Afaik there aren't any countries globally(without big hydro resources) with a clear plan to ditch gas and reduce imports from nonfossil neighbors to cover own needs with renewables, be that California or Germany. Even green hydrogen plans are still a pipedream. It's ironical that even Norway with huge hydro resources is considering kickstarting some new nuclear plants
The pro nuclear types hate these observations because they’re painfully true. Battery storage is already doing a lot in the UK (4.6GW/5.9GWh) and the huge solar build out is a no brainer.
Output of the discussed nuclear facility is 3.6GW, which means weekly production of 604.8 GWh, or around 100x as much as currently installed storage capacity.
And going into only one type of electricity production especially with the unpredictability of renewables is never wise.
Readit News
---
Additional reading if you haven't read it before, "Nothing like this will be built again" about Torness: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...?
Previously posted several times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That paragraph might be the high point of the article.
Do other countries benefit from UK railways?
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hinkley-point-c
> I presume that will be a net gain for FranceI think the project has a certain momentum to it. Also failing to complete the project would rather call into question their competence for the EPR2 build-out in France.
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/nuclear-new-build-projects/...
It takes time to find and develop good people, so hopefully Sizewell C plus Rolls Royce SMR will gain momentum to allow their retention.
The cost of nuclear energy is dominated by the need to pay back the massive construction loan. Nobody is willing to take that risk on an open electricity market, so they've signed a contract with the government to guarantee price and demand. If the price on the open market is less than the "strike price" the government will pay for the difference, and if the plant wants to supply power to the grid but the grid doesn't want it due to technical reasons the government will pay them for every kWh it could have supplied.
This in turn means nuclear power plants operate at 100% capacity 100% of the time - minus forced maintenance downtime. It can be used to supply a base load, but not to handle peak load. When there's an excess of supply, the grid is forced to turn off cheap wind/PV capacity to make space for expensive nuclear capacity.
I agree that it would indeed be nice if we could use nuclear to fill in the gaps left by a renewable grid, but the economics simply doesn't allow for it.
We have strike prices so that generators can cover the capital costs. But it will also hold prices down when the wholesale cost exceeds the strike price.
I agree that Hinckley may increase peaks and excess generation. But that will be a feature of the grid anyway. We will need storage/interconnector exports either way. And it will also help a lot with the valleys in production. That is less electricity that needs to be stored or generated using gas and diesel. Adding a couple extra GW's is useful.
Matt Levine writes about a gas contract where the gas supplier was obliged to deliver gas at a fixed price. However the contract required that the plant be completed. The spot price has been above the fixed price so the plant owners have been selling gas on the open market and the owners have not technically "completed" the plant on purpose (perhaps by not painting one last rivet).
I think the geography of the UK helps with offshore wind getting good capacity factors, but the general averages aren't great, often peaking at ~40%:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, I can see in real-time how wind goes up and down, while nuclear just keeps chugging along:
* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply
And nuclear is cheaper (CA$0.101/kWh) than wind ($0.147) or solar ($0.474); see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
Of course our infrastructure and/or geography may not be as well-suited for wind.
118,770 apprenticeships achieved in the UK last year. We're not that big on practical education, with a preference for getting degrees so we can sit behind a desk moving (electronic) paper.
Provision seem to be very mixed - we know some teenagers who've had good ones and others who've had awful ones and these were in practical skills
Best one I know of was a degree apprenticeship for one of the big accountancy firms. Person started work at 18, had a degree in their early twenties while being paid all the way through, and no student debt at the end
They are often not very high quality, sometimes it will be things like the person who puts bread in the oven at a supermarket getting a level 2 in kitchen skills and so on.
1,300 high quality apprenticeships is noticeable (which is nuts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kin...
1. The EPR is a FOAK build of a new design
All of the EPR instances were started before any other instances were completed. FOAK (First of a Kind) builds are notoriously more difficult, costly and risky than NOAK (Nth of a Kind) builds.
Think how much more a prototype of car costs than one you get off the assembly line. The difference is not quite that pronounced, but it's there.
2. No nuclear industry/workforce
I think the article goes into this, but a lot of the cost of HPC, Olkiluoto and Flamanville (as well as Vogtle-3/4) is simply for rebuilding nuclear expertise both in industry and in the workforce.
China also buit both EPRs and AP-1000s, and they did it quite a bit more quickly and cheaply, because they have an experienced workforce and industry at hand. They current have 20+ reactors under construction. That makes a huge difference as we know from experience. Just in Germany, the difference between one-off reactors and the Konvois that were built at the same time in series was around 2x.
However, even in China the EPR took longer than other reactors. Partly due to it being a FOAK design, but also for the third reason:
3. The EPR is too complicated
For various reasons, the EPR is far too complicated, and in the end not a good design. Which is one of the things you find out in FOAK builds (see point 1).
That's not me saying this, it's the manufacturer, EDF. They have abandoned the EPR design, all new French reactors will be the vastly simplified EPR2. I haven't been able to find out whether Sizewell C and subsequent will also be EPR2 or whether the UK will stick with its heavily modified EPR.
One example is that the EPR has quadruple independent cooling systems. This is in order to maintain triple redundancy while doing maintenance on the cooling system, so being able to do that maintenance without having to take the reactor offline. Considering the German PWRs were above 90% capacity factor with "just" triple redundancy, this seems to be gold-plating. Nice-to-have if you can pull it off, but it appears they couldn't pull it off.
Also, all those cooling systems have to be active in order to comply with German nuclear regulations. The somewhat silly reason is that German regulators both (a) had no experience with passive cooling systems and (b) had a prescriptive approach to regulation, rather than a requirements-based approach. So "you must build a cooling system like this" rather than "your cooling system must be able to do this".
It's is also obviously a bit redundant considering that Germany no longer operates nuclear power plants and isn't exactly currently in the market for an EPR.
The Westinghouse AP-1000 uses at least some passive cooling, which is not only more reliable but also simpler, smaller and cheaper and makes the total plant a lot smaller.
Once you've built one, the EPR is apparently a great reactor (the Fins are very happy with theirs), and should last a long time, but it's just a pain to build.
https://youtu.be/6fM2k1xEHGg?feature=shared&t=2137 with World Nuclear Association's China lead Francois Morin
> I haven't been able to find out whether Sizewell C and subsequent will also be EPR2 or whether the UK will stick with its heavily modified EPR.Sticking to the UK EPR. There is no point in building another FOAK for marginal benefit.
If you decide to go the SMR route so that you continuously build nuclear reactors every year to sidestep this problem, then you run into the problem that the containment building needs to be airstrike proof. These high fixed costs are unrelated to the reactor technology and cannot be avoided by building a newer generation power plant.
If you decide to build the old designs, then you run into another issue: The savings obtained through building a larger scale plant, such as same number of staff, bigger diameter pipes and less material at the same fixed cost to obtain higher total power output per power plant, must be paid dearly by a cooling solution that scales with that increased power output. Placing a nuclear power plant near a river sounds intelligent, until you realize that climate change causes rivers to dry out or reduce their flow rate, shutting your nuclear power plant down, making your large scale power plant work against you. Meanwhile placing a nuclear power plant near the ocean has resulted in the Fukushima incident, so future power plants also need to be tsunami proof.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Before the failure of NuScale, I was confident that the problems with large scale nuclear power plants could be solved by SMRs, but the truth is that you simply can't operate nuclear power plants with the same lack of care you can operate a wind farm or a coal plant. If the coal/gas plant burns down or explodes, who gives a damn? Meanwhile Putin seems keen on bombing nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
These probably also apply to Vogtle 3 in the US; IIRC, Vogtle 4 was less expensive.
Economies of scale applies to large nuclear plants as much as it does to small widgets: the more you build the easier it becomes to build them.
> which gives Hinkley Point C a total output of over 3.2GW.
at least 3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 50 weeks a year (allowing for some step down in output for maintainance, etc) for some 30+ (?) years.
It's as silly as demanding that a nuclear plant must emulate the delivery profile of solarn and install batteries capable of shifting night time power to the day. With a similar effect on prices.
Demand is not flat. It's actually a bit more solar shaped on many markets which is why initial solar deployments have a high "capture rate" (i.e. they are delivering when the demand and price is high).
3 GW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 34 weeks a year.
or
3 GW 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Total cost for the wind farm is probably around 20-ish billion $, but the lifetime is likely shorter than the reactor (possibly less than half!).
It's surprising to me that the reactor at $35billion is still competitive, cost-wise, with the offshore wind farm.
Sounds about right in scale .. how many homes in the UK in total?
What's even the point? Maybe this reactor is a live testament to the observation that "any new nuclear starting construction today will be obsolete before it's completed, due to competition from renewables"? It's been started almost 10 years ago and it seems to be already there.
This is in no small part the reason why the countries with nuclear powered navies are most eager to build new nuclear power reactors.
Nuclear power is a dead end technology
And going into only one type of electricity production especially with the unpredictability of renewables is never wise.