Europe's Newest Nuclear Reactor Eases Finland's Power Problems

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-Newest-Nuclear-Reactor-Eases-Finlands-Power-Problems.html

by chewz • 4 years ago

94 210 4 years ago

oilprice.com

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

I wish Germany and Austria would have been on the same boat as Finland. We'd be in a much better situation today.

Gwypaas14• 4 years ago

You mean spending over 10 years importing 15 TWh a year extra because surely next year this reactor will be ready?

Also remember that it produces power at around €100/MWh if you include the loss Areva took. Any year but this year and that cost is laughably high.

hocuspocus4• 4 years ago

€100/MWh surely beats having to choose between recent gas spot prices or shutting down your economy.

samatman4• 4 years ago

Too bad it's this year instead of any other year.

Twenty years ago, if planners weren't accounting for geopolitical stability as a risk to petrochemical flows, they had holes in their heads.

Timshel3• 4 years ago

No idea where your Mwh price come from. On wikipedia the LCOE for just OL3 is estimated to be at 42e/MWh.

Schroedingersat5• 4 years ago

What, so they could have 20% of their energy in nuclear waiting for it to come online some time around 2027 rather than 40% in renewables right now?

doikor17• 4 years ago

Even before this new reactor Finland had lower gCO₂eq/kWh than Germany or Austria (with way harsher winters to boot). Once this thing starts Finland will get even further ahead.

In Europe basically only France and the other Nordic countries are ahead of Finland in the cleanliness of their energy production.

It really should not matter how the energy is produced the only thing that matters for clime change is how much CO₂ gets pumped into the atmosphere.

cpursley2• 4 years ago

It's a start!

But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy.

This is an emergency in both sovereignty and maintaining an industrialized, modern economy.

Gwypaas14• 4 years ago

Or get 3-4x as much bang for the buck building renewables.

Source:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Msw2422• 4 years ago

How are you going to deal with base load?

We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.

nicolaslem• 4 years ago

Why not both?

probablypower• 4 years ago

How do you define "bang for buck"?

Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability.

Mrdarknezz2• 4 years ago

You can't replace Nuclear with intermittent energy, they serve different function. So far the cheapest and the largest deployment of green energy has come from Nuclear and Hydro.

samatman4• 4 years ago

Renewables make grid reliability worse, especially wind, because the grid has to maintain a frequency, which is ultimately done with the inertia of huge rotating chunks of iron.

That's fine, as long as there are huge rotating chunks of iron. Nuclear can rotate the chunks, as can hydro and geothermal. Everything else emits carbon.

Europe is pretty tapped on hydro and geothermal, that leaves nuclear, or some very handwavey ideas of building a bunch of flywheels using resources which could be contributing to primary generation.

mrtksn5• 4 years ago

But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy.

Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years[0]. This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.

"Designing a car? Building a pharmaceuticals factory? Coding JavaScript? Stop that, we have more important things to do. Just drop whatever you do and start making 5nm Fabs and Nuclear Power plants"

Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs?

[0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/

jafo• 4 years ago

I like the "wartime like economy" analogy.

It took 6 years to defeat the bad guys during the second world war.

Most of the guys that defeated them had little to no military training at the onset of the conflict.

The NIMBYs in that scenario were marketed to with either assured oppression, or war with a "better" future. Same can be done today.

neuronic• 4 years ago

Also, there is the additional point of liability insurance which is often swept under the rug. It's horrifically expensive due to the potential compensation payments...

"It is important to remember that no matter what solution is adopted, some of the cost of a severe nuclear accident will inevitably fall upon the state," the report notes. "Fukushima's compensation payments to date amount to about EUR75 billion (USD91 billion). On top of this are the costs of site stabilisation and regional clean-up. These numbers are beyond the resources of most private enterprises and are even challenging for the global insurance markets.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Study-examines-n...

Turing_Machine3• 4 years ago

Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years[0].

What is the average time to build a grid-scale solar power plant?

maccard2• 4 years ago

Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years

The best time to build a NPP is 5-7 years ago. The second best time is now.

This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.

This analogy doesn't hold in two different ways;

it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing

That's not what people (like me) are saying. They're not saying "stop all the other programs", they're saying "heavily heavily prioritise over many other things, as this is critically important for a country's energy security, the continent/political bloc's security, and the planet's future". We're saying claw back some of the £16 billion lost on covid loans [0], or the £10 billion spend on useless PPE[1], or don't spend hundreds of millions to send 300 people a year to rwanda [2], and instead spend _that_ on building nuclear power plants.

and start building Fabs during the chip crisis.

There's a big difference between selling shovels in a gold rush and investing in power sources that are likely to be operational for decades even after the current crisis is resolved in whatever form it resolves in. If you build a bunch of fabs, they're useless once the pressure wears off. If we build a bunch of nuclear power stations, they're usable instead of the coal and natural gas that we're currently reliant on. Coal can stay where it is, or be used for industrial applications, and natural gas can be used as a heating source for the next 30 years until it's phased out.

Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs?

Educate them, show them the benefits, spend money on them, and the same as we do if they oppose to fossil fuel extraction - ignore them and do it anyway. Imagine if the UK had spent £100 billion on building 3 hinkley points for £75bn, and spent £10bn on shutting up NIMBY's over the last 20 years. We'd have 3 nuclear power plants, the ability to build more for cheaper, would have created dozens if not hundreds of high skilled jobs and thousands of jobs for manual workers, _and_ it would be cheaper than freezing the energy bills of the entire UK for 18 months [3]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/23/uk-lost-up-to-... [1] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun... [2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/only-300-migrants-face-be... [3] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-cost-of-l...

COGlory• 4 years ago

Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs?

ignore them

ibejoeb• 4 years ago

Sometimes I think all of this strife and posturing is just to force people to get behind nuclear.

It's truly absurd that, as just one example, California is simultaneously mandating electric-only vehicles and telling people that they're not allowed to charge them because there's not enough electricity.

pydry7• 4 years ago

It absolutely is. 100% not for environmental reasons, but because civilian nuclear power supports a nuclear military (by e.g. sharing costs, skills, industrial ecosystem).

In Finland's case the French state (Areva) provided the indirect €5 billion subsidy to get this plant built. Finland wasnt going to shoulder the full costs itself. It has no military nuclear interests. France does.

The Soviets built their other one.

The military is the underlying driver for nuclear power everywhere. Recent environmentalism is just moral cover for the real goal. It's always < 3/4 the cost of a combined solar, wind and pumped storage run grid.

The German green/anti nuclear coalition was a particular threat because it was (until the war) demonstrating a model that threatened to economically undermine civilian nuclear power globally.

me_me_me2• 4 years ago

the war in ukraine will be well over by the time those plants get finished,

you can plop down a nuclear plant like a house, for obvious reasons.

belorn5• 4 years ago

The Ukraine war will end in a few weeks, a couple of months at top. - HN comment in February.

unity1001• 4 years ago

But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy.

Leave aside wartime-like economy. Actual war, even the actual apocalypse are excellent opportunities to profit from, in capitalism. So such concepts like 'sovereignty', 'industrialization', less, 'the people' are irrelevant in its context.

spixy• 4 years ago

greetings from Slovakia which just finished one reactor (launches in december) and will finish another one in 2024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...

dividedbyzero• 4 years ago

Olkiluoto 3 is sitting at three times the planned cost and has a delay of over a decade, so hopefully they'll be able to take it online for good this time, the last attempt to do so didn't go so well.

soco• 4 years ago

I though when you build an existing model the costs and planning estimations would get a bit closer to reality...

hocuspocus4• 4 years ago

Taishan proved you can build EPRs near cost and time estimates. EDF has promised a simplified design for the EPR2 (after learning from 20 years of mistakes) but it's probably not going to fix the sad state of our nuclear industry in Europe, suffering from a lot of internal and external inefficiencies.

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

Nuclear is always late and over budget in the West because everyone who knows how to build reactors is long dead or retired.

Thats what get when you loose skilled workforce.

We are incompetent at building all kinds of infrastructure - UK completed crossrail almost 10 years late,and HS2 is 3x overbudget. This country invented railways!

California also can't build a railway apparently. I am not sure how a functional country continues on this trajectory

samatman4• 4 years ago

The lack of industrial capacity is almost purely due to regulatory cost disease.

When you look at industries allowed to be profitable, they go and build things like the Bakkan oil fields.

It's perverse that we regulate nuclear out of existence and build sprawling fracking infrastructure instead, and allow a dysfunctional political process to kill rail in California. But it's 100% about regulation.

US nuclear engineers are old? Great, Chinese ones aren't and we can pay them more. We hire them, problem solved.

afarrell• 4 years ago

It would be great if the US navy had floating nuclear power plants that they were willing to sail into Helsinki, Bremerhaven, or Portsmouth to provide additional power to our allies during this winter.

schnitzelstoat2• 4 years ago

Yeah, we are losing/have lost a lot of our engineering skillbase.

It's no surprise when you can make way more money getting people to click on ads at Facebook or working at Goldman Sachs etc. than you can in engineering.

throwawayffffas• 4 years ago

The skilled workforce and the know-how exists. It's all about perverse incentives. Why would a company deliver something in x years for y dollars when it can delivery it 10 years later for 3 times the money? The problem is delays are not penalized but rewarded due to the perverse way government contracting works. Do you think they would be late if the budget was fixed when they signed they contract?

doikor17• 4 years ago

the last attempt to do so didn't go so well.

It has been running for months now (doing tests). And for these latest delays we should mainly blame the Germans (Siemens) due to their faulty automation systems and steam turbine. Can't put all the blame on the French :(

Schroedingersat5• 4 years ago

Nuclear power for a mere 7 euros per watt (with unlimited publicly funded insurance) this time in a short short 17 years with only some unpaid immigrant labour.

Areva footed the bill for the overruns this time rather than foisting them on the taxpayer, so that's something at least.

ZeroGravitas13• 4 years ago

Areva paying for the overruns just means it's French taxpayers footing the bill.

gojomo4• 4 years ago

"unpaid immigrant labor"? Are you alleging slavery in European power-plant construction?

scrlk• 4 years ago

I assume it might be a reference to this:

In 2012 it was reported that one Bulgarian contracting firm is owned by the mafia, and that Bulgarian workers have been required to pay weekly protection fees to the mafia, wages have been unpaid, employees have been told not to join a union and that employers also reneged on social security payments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

simfoo2• 4 years ago

11 billion € for 1GW. Cost for wind energy is around 1.2m€/MW. Which means that the same amount of money could have been used to build over 3500 wind turbines in the 2-3 MW range, producing up to 8.7GW (and probably never less than 1GW).

Nuclear is nice on paper but totally bonkers once you look at the numbers. And they aren't even accounting for all costs, e.g. insurance and long term waste storage are heavily subsidized.

alexb_• 4 years ago

Wind turbines also are not 100% reliable and take up a gigantic amount of space.

locallost• 4 years ago

Are they unreliable? They break down unexpectedly and require a lot of maintenance? I don't think so. Furthermore, when they break the risk is spread out - a whole lot would need to go out at the same time to cause issues.

You probably meant their output is unpredictable. But even this is wrong, since weather forecasts allow for a very predictable output.

Nuclear is neither - it requires extensive maintenance (see France), and they can go out unpredictably, taking out a lot of capacity at an instant (see France).

And turbines also take a lot less space than say parking lots.

Timshel3• 4 years ago

From Finland pov they paid 5.5billion, the rest is on Areva since they had lost the knowledge/expertise on how to build.

Deploying such a high number of wind turbine might not be so easy since usually nobody wants them close by and even if Finland is vast not all space is probably suitable.

Nuclear is far from perfect but at least it’s low co2 and once built cost are usually stable (uranium price is negligeable).

ftth_finland10• 4 years ago

In addition, there are restrictions on the erection of wind turbines in the east due to defense reasons.

floucky• 4 years ago

Don't you think there will be a problem of place? They occupy lot of space, plus you can't place them where you want

rcxdude8• 4 years ago

Not really, wind power often occupies space which is otherwise unusued, and it also doesn't render the space unusable for other activities (e.g. offshore wind turbines are not displacing land used for other purposes, and onshore wind turbines on farmland have only a very small impact on the amount of space available for crops and the efficiency of farming).

doikor17• 4 years ago

up to 8.7GW (and probably never less than 1GW).

And then we would also would have had to build ~8GW of new gas/oil/coal plants or dam more rivers for hydro.

Electricity is used for heating in Finland. Not having enough electricity in the winter is not an option. We need ~9GW of constant production with peaking to around 13GW to survive winters.

edit: Or some absolutely insane amounts of storage to store a week or two of that ~8GW to handle the worst case scenarios.

eMSF2• 4 years ago

It only seems bonkers to you because you're so wildly off the mark. Finland currently has over 4GW of installed wind power capacity, but there have been not just hours but entire days where wind power production has been less than one hundredth of that -- last Thursday's problems were aggravated by such a situation. 9GW of installed capacity will absolutely not guarantee 1GW at all times -- not even close.

simfoo2• 4 years ago

few things that help here:

- interconnect with other regions (someone always has wind or sun or both)

- spread turbines across the entire country

- build as much PV as possible (there is plenty of space on roofs)

- combine renewables with hydro storage

- (in a few places) generate hydrogen and store for times where wind & sun are not enough. Doesn't have to be pure hydrogen, converting to methane or better yet ammonia)

jmyeet• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure I could write a bot that would accurately simulate any nuclear energy topic on HN.

The pro-nuclear people will argue any extreme incidents are just outliers that can be ignored, the high cost of construction is completely artificial and regulatory in nature, the high cost to build is just because we don't build enough of them, all the waste (from processing and from fuel) are solved problems, we need a base load in the grid and the time to build isn't an issue.

The anti-nuclear people will point out the devastating failure modes, no nuclear plant has been built without massive government support, in places like the US the costs of nuclear clean up in case of accidents is actually capped by legislation so the government is bearing these costs too, if base load is real hydro power is better, fuel waste needs can't just be locked in a cave (eg for years or decades it needs to be actively cooled because it generates heat), transport of fuel and waste introduces risk of accidents and mamlfeasance, humans are terrible at managing long-term and low-probability high-impact risk, nobody wants to live near a nuclear power plant and that the plummetting cost of renewables make nuclear increasingly uneconomic.

Rinse and repeat.

lbriner2• 4 years ago

This is true but what is more shocking is that the powers-that-be in each of the major countries haven't been able to sit down and say:

Nuclear option: Environment cost, land cost, resource cost, availability of materials etc. Renewables option: Requirement for the correct geography, unbalanced grid, storage options, increase of energy efficiency etc.

Then at least work out that currently in situations a, b and c, only Nuclear is viable, whereas in situations d, e and f, renewables make sense.

In almost all cases, it will need to be a mix and I'm unsure that anywhere has so many renewables that have a massive problem. Australia struggled with too much solar but their grid is still alive so in many countries, we could probably scale renewables more quickly for some capacity. Nuclear is longer term and might be needed where you don't have Norway's water or Iceland's geothermal, great.

Why does everyone have to be an extremist on these discussions?

Gwypaas14• 4 years ago

Sadly the problem is that HN is not up to date on current research and economics, nuclear proponents argue like it's 2005-10 and that nothing has changed. Similarly to how you are characterizing the arguments.

At that time starting up another wave of nuclear was the best choice we ever made, because renewables was too far flung out to be a certain solution. If Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer had been completed on time with amazing efficiency we would be running nuclear today.

The difference now, 10 years later, is that renewables have leapfrogged nuclear several times over and thus it does not make a sensible investment from either safety, economics or any other angle. Other than being a "known" choice because the grid has always been centralized and some people like the cool dangerous steam boiler technology of it.

So what we need to do today is to draw the learnings of those nuclear attempts and not pour another €X00 billion into pride projects.

rcxdude8• 4 years ago

Yup. If everyone had made 5x the investment in nuclear 10-15 years ago (which would have made nuclear cheaper per plant as well: a huge part of the massive costs and time overruns on plants is the fact that they're pretty much one-offs), we'd be in a much better place with regards to the climate, and it would have very likely been worth the super -high costs (though questionable if we'd had also 5x the number of nuclear disasters). But we'd still be having the huge shift to renewables we're having now, maybe just a little slower.

Turing_Machine3• 4 years ago

no nuclear plant has been built without massive government support

Can you give me an example of a grid-scale solar plant that was built without massive government support? I don't know of any, off-hand.

lbriner2• 4 years ago

I think a struggle in many other countries, including the UK, is that the housing stock is old and was not built for energy-efficiency. We have Extinction Rebellion going on about insulating all the houses in Britain but this is not practical, as much as I am a big believer (and purchaser!) of insulation.

We wonder how much we could reduce the need for something as unwanted as another nuclear power station (another reactor on an existing site is probably less bad).

Countries in the far north have had years to learn that they need good insulation and with a low population density, a relatively small amount of energy goes a long way. Compare to the UK, France, Germany, USA, Brasil etc. who have very large populations and either very hot or very cold weather and you have the problem with privately owned buildings who you cannot easily coerce into spending on their own energy efficiency but the gains would be entirely in the homeowners pocket so why should the taxpayer foot the bill?

There are really obvious things that should be emergency legislation by anyone without their head in the sand and that is 1) Changes to the requirements for new-builds including improving the standard of checks since a lot of it is easily gamed by the developers and 2) Getting rid of VAT and possibly subsidising insulation products so that a good number of people who could do it might be persuaded that they can now afford it. Insulating a loft in the UK could easily cost £300 DIY or £500+ if you paid someone, which for many households is a large amount of money. Once you add it the more difficult insulating, the costs would be enormous.

Turing_Machine3• 4 years ago

but the gains would be entirely in the homeowners pocket so why should the taxpayer foot the bill?

It's pretty common (though not universal) in the United States for renters to be responsible for utilities, such as heating, water, and electricity. In those cases, the owner neither cares about, nor benefits from, increased energy efficiency, while on the other side of the coin, the tenant has little incentive to make capital improvements on a property he or she may only be planning on occupying for a year or so. In this scenario, anything that doesn't have a payback period shorter than the length of expected tenancy is unlikely to get done.

dmos62• 4 years ago

unwanted as another nuclear power station

Call me an outsider, but I do want more nuclear reactors, since they provide clean energy and don't open up regions to geopolitical pressure, like what's happening during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Nuclear reactors have been expensive to build so far, but hopefully that's going to change.

brnt• 4 years ago

In the Netherlands there are tax breaks for home improvement such as this. Building codes have kept up though, I don't think I've seen new construction (or old) elsewhere with better insulation.

I wonder why so much housing stock is so old in Britain though. I guess we tear more stuff down.

jscipione• 4 years ago

Most of Europe will be in a state of open rebellion in a few months when there is no more energy to heat their homes and no more food to feed their family. This is due to the failure of European leaders to create policies of energy independence. Protests have already begun all over the continent. Finland’s nuclear reactor is too little to late to save Europe from total war.

darthrupert2• 4 years ago

Protests have already begun all over the continent

Have they, though?

total war

Only Ukraine is in a state of war.

I'd like to quote Zelensky because he hits the sentiment of most of Europe brilliantly:

"Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without water or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you.”

“Cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as scary and deadly for us as your ‘friendship and brotherhood,' But history will put everything in its place. And we will be with gas, light, water and food and WITHOUT you!”

_-david-_4• 4 years ago

Is Zelensky saying it would be better for Western Europe to freeze to death than have Ukraine taken over by Russia?

rcxdude8• 4 years ago

Europe will be fine over the winter, it'll just be expensive (European countries have been working together to move heaven and earth to make sure they do have enough fuel, it's quite an impressive achievement). Most of the complaints are about who's going to pay for it, considering a good chunk of the population cannot easily make that much room in their budget if the costs are passed on directly, as opposed to being taken up by the government.

rasz• 4 years ago

I was looking at https://euenergy.live today and wondering WTF just happened in Scandinavia, usually only 2 NO sectors have cheap power, but today its whole region.

Arnt2• 4 years ago

I'm puzzled by how many people confuse gas and electricity, enough to wonder whether I am the one who's wrong.

The country where I live historically used about 15% of its gas to produce electricity. (Most of the 85% were burned for heat at end-user sites, some were used as molecules in chemical plants.) I'd like to know two things. I can't find these on the web, but perhaps someone on HN knows.

1. Do any of the European countries that imported gas from Russia burn most of to produce electricity? I (perhaps mistakenly) assumed that most of it was burned in furnaces and other heating devices, like here.

2. Are there any countries with a sizable set of heating devices (furnaces, ovens, whatever) can can use either gas or electricity, depending on what's available at any given moment?

_ph_4• 4 years ago

No, you are not wrong. Gas is only a small part of German electricity production. It is a larger part in the US, but the US has a lot of gas available from fracking. Yes, if there were plentiful of cheap gas, it is much better to use that instead of coal and oil, but electricity production isn't the bottle neck. Switching home heating to heat pumps alone could reduce the gas consumption considerably.

doikor17• 4 years ago

The % of actual gas used does not matter much as the price is set by the most expensive form of production at that moment. Most of the time this is a peaker gas (or oil) plants if it is required to run one.

So if you normally need to run the last 1% of your production with peaker plants that used to cost X but now due to external reasons their costs are 10X then your electricity price for the moment they are on is 10 times more.

ZeroGravitas13• 4 years ago

The small amount of gas burned for electricity has an outsized impact on electricity prices.

The pricing mechanism was designed to reward efficient power plants and prevent price gouging and it mostly does that.

If just one gas plant tripled their prices, then the market would simply not call on them to deliver unless everything else was already in use.

That doesn't work when the gas itself has gone up in price as all the gas plants prices rise (though it's good that it'll still reward the efficient ones and prevent intentional price gouging by non gas suppliers trying to take advantage of the short supply of gas).

Since the European grid is interconnected, this impact is spread around to a degree so that Russia can't just bully Germany or Finland into doing stuff and to reduce overall costs. Similarly the gas can be transported so that price equalises across borders too.

Arnt2• 4 years ago

So maybe one can say:

Europe will indeed lack energy this winter, mostly gas. The article writer may not realise that the energy lacking is mostly gas, not so much electricity, but that doesn't prevent the article's conclusion from being right. Because the price of electricity is one of "Finland's power problems".

Cluelessly happening to be right.

Europe's Newest Nuclear Reactor Eases Finland's Power Problems

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