EDF - Hinkley Point 'C'
Discussion
wombleh said:
This is an interesting commentary on the EPR vs AP1000 but I can't speak to it's accuracy. Indicates that the AP1000 is not quite the obvious cheap alternative that is made out.
Have Horizon indicated how much they're expecting to pay for the build of their ABWRs?
The design of the plant isn't that important they are all fundamentally the same thing.Have Horizon indicated how much they're expecting to pay for the build of their ABWRs?
Two things are important:
1: The design must be complete and fully defined in 3D CAD which is accessible to the whole supply chain. The EPR for example was mostly defined in 2D plans for the civil works.
2: You have to make a lot of the same type and capture the knowledge.
In the case of the AP1000 in China you had a Fukushima pause and check in the US you had the regulators change their minds on aircraft impact during the build plus the issues with the factory.
The ABWR plants have been built to a schedule and budget in Japan, it will be interesting to see what all the UK specific design changes will do to that and also the requirements for UK workers and content. We can do large projects here now so I'm hopeful.
Hitachi haven't asked for a strike price yet it will be lower than for the EPR, also hopefully it will be done a little better because under the current method the supplier takes all the risk they have essentially budgeted for failure, therefore most likely HPC will make a pile of money and a windfall tax will be needed.
What would be more sensible would be a strike price range with the lower margin being for a successful build but the price allowed to rise under certain circumstances like labour costs, commodity prices and weather.
The actual strike price would then be set once the plant has actually been built and the costs were known. The price would then be set for ten years making assumptions around the operational costs with a review set at the ten and twenty year marks to capture actual operational costs.
However the main thing we are getting wrong in the UK is that we are setting up to build a minimum of four different reactor types, this means four separate supply chains and limited opportunities for learning and standardisation.
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
100 on-shore windymills
What's a 'windymill'?
With the continuing suspicion of an obtuse angle here, I've started so I'll finish.
a) about £4m a pop
b) an expensive white elephant
c) an eyesore
d) a bird and bat mincer
e) all of the above
turbobloke said:
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
100 on-shore windymills
What's a 'windymill'?With the continuing suspicion of an obtuse angle here, I've started so I'll finish.
a) about £4m a pop
b) an expensive white elephant
c) an eyesore
d) a bird and bat mincer
e) all of the above
That doesn't look like an elephant or like it would cost £4m. And it looks quite nice, does it mill/mince birds and bats?
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
moleamol said:
turbobloke said:
100 on-shore windymills
What's a 'windymill'?With the continuing suspicion of an obtuse angle here, I've started so I'll finish.
a) about £4m a pop
b) an expensive white elephant
c) an eyesore
d) a bird and bat mincer
e) all of the above
That doesn't look like an elephant or like it would cost £4m. And it looks quite nice, does it mill/mince birds and bats?
vonuber said:
turbobloke said:
Apparently a petition with only 300,000 signatures has been handed in to Downing St urging the gov't to waste more money on renewables rather than give the go-ahead to Hinkley Point C. Only 300,000 signatures and this makes the news - I thought I'd read somewhere that the deluded Greens got over a million votes at the last GE, and there are quite a few Labour voters and Libdims who would want more madness.
It would be interesting to see the ROE for improving renewable technologies over the 30years of paying for Hinckley C - but then that won't fit your narrative.DONG's Barrow windfarm produces approx 305GWH a year from a site 10 square kilometers
The Adjacent Heysham 1 & 2 site produces approx 15,000GWH from a site 3 square kilometers
To replace Heysham 1 & 2 you would need approx 500 square kilometers of wind, to replace all the generating Nuclear stations in the UK would be approx 3000 to 4000 Sqkm to produce the same yearly energy output.
BOW cost £100M, Heysham 1 & 2 cost approx £20Bn (My estimate adjusted to todays cost, but its virtually impossible as the true costs were never really revealed, Heysham 2 was costed at £4Bn in 1988). You could build 4x the capacity in wind for the price of nuclear on these figures.
Wholesale price received for BOW electricity ~ £135/MWh, Heysham 1 & 2 ~£50/MWh. Electricity is ~2.5 times more expensive from offshore wind than the current nuclear fleet, HOWEVER, backend costs are not fully included due to historic liabilities agreement with the government in 2001.
The reason the Chinese want to get in with EDF, is to understand the relationship and requirements of the UK's regulator. Will make it easier to build their stations.
Remember when the AP1000 was examined as a reactor for the UK. The fact that it was all in imperial measurements would have been a massive headache to convert to Metric
(and we would have done it too, rather than have built it using imperial)vonuber said:
turbobloke said:
Apparently a petition with only 300,000 signatures has been handed in to Downing St urging the gov't to waste more money on renewables rather than give the go-ahead to Hinkley Point C. Only 300,000 signatures and this makes the news - I thought I'd read somewhere that the deluded Greens got over a million votes at the last GE, and there are quite a few Labour voters and Libdims who would want more madness.
It would be interesting to see the ROE for improving renewable technologies over the 30years of paying for Hinckley C - but then that won't fit your narrative.Engineers and Scientists Pointing Out That Renewable Energy ‘Simply Won’t Work’:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
Engineers: "Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
As you can read at the link (for the first time, or again) these engineers considered 'exotic innovations barely on the drawing board' such as self erecting wind turbines and using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result was unchanged, total failure, even with exotic pipedreams (more fairytales) renewables couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.
Wind installations never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction and maintenance. Forget decommissioning.e veryone else does. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants, an obvious practical absurdity.
Wind farms, an obvious practical absurdity as at this stage of the daydream the self-erections and robotic tech are part of the imaginary solution to a non-problem.
Nuclear power is part of the solution. Ask an engineer...oh.
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