Should New Zealand invest in nuclear power plants?

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#3228600 10-May-2024 11:20

t0ny:

The government should subsidize installation of solar panels in houses and encourage that new builds should have solar panels. This will take pressure out of the system and would probably cost them less over time. Yes, Banks are trying to give out low interest rates to make it happen but you need a much bigger push to actually get it to happen.

there is some big technical issues to doing that, as they found out the hard way.

first problem is subsidy favors the sellers not the buyers, the price goes up to capture the subsidy.

2nd is to many homes exporting solar to the grid increases the voltage of the grid which can go over spec. they had to stop installing solar in some places due to that. then there is the issue that most home solar requires the grid to be on to supply. if there is a fault and power is cut (or voltage/freq is reduced to much), you also loose the solar generation as well. eg what happened in usa was a power station failed, which dropped the power to the solar farms which shut off, which compounded the problem and caused a blackout as there wasn't enough spare generation to cover both failing at the same time. the solar can't send any power to the grid until the power station powers back up.

nz really needs trim power storage. eg battery banks like what aussie and usa are using. not sure if onslow would react fast enough.

sir1963

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#3228601 10-May-2024 11:21

noroad:

t0ny:

The government should subsidise installation of solar panels in houses and encourage that new builds should have solar panels. This will take pressure out of the system and would probably cost them less over time. Yes, Banks are trying to give out low interest rates to make it happen but you need a much bigger push to actually get it to happen.

Solar pannels are useless without storage and storage is expensive, short lifed and produces a huge amount of polution to produce. Not to mention solar pannels themselves don't actually last very long. Solar hot water can be useful in some situations though.

Solar panels are good for 20+ years , they need to be maintained (cleaned)

Other countries are installing massive (multi gigawatt ) battery systems to help solve peak demand, Australia has one that has been very successful . California is looking at them too but as a distributed system for each house.

tweake

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#3228605 10-May-2024 11:27

noroad:

Well, to be fair that plan was for storage not generation. With the hydro plan you also need to add massive amounts of wind/solar to make it of any use.

not quite. part of the issue is they where dumping water from the lakes instead of providing generation. the idea of storage is to be able to run those hydro's to the max instead of spilling water. eg in winter when dams are overflowing, run generation to the max and use store that power for use when dam levels are low. the catch is that it kinda the opposite to what any company wants for making profit. companies want a restricted supply to boost the price of power up. thats why they opposed onslow so heavily.

tweake

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#3228607 10-May-2024 11:32

freitasm:

When creating this thread, I think the idea was to discuss if it was an option we should consider and the pros/cons. So here it goes:

@SaltyNZ:

Anti-nuclear feelings aside.

So why anti-nuclear? Is it anti-nuclear power or anti-nuclear weapons?

We have nuclear material being used in medicine (imaging and treatment) around the country. How do you reconcile that with "anti-nuclear feelings"?

because people are sheep.

they do not think and jump onto a cause no matter how dumb it is. all the sheeples will be rounded up and used against it (even tho they claim they don't use sheeples).

wellygary

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#3228610 10-May-2024 11:48

rb99:

UK has a 7500 pound subsidy for heat pumps, why not us.

Because they are trying to de carbonise the 22 million houses that have a gas boiler to run their central heating

Part of the problem is that thanks to the North Sea, Gas is really cheap, like 6p/Kwh, while electricity is 24p/Kwh,

Hence there is very little incentive to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump....so they need to sweeten the deal lots....

noroad

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#3228613 10-May-2024 11:52

Here's a funny thing, I remember seeing plans my father had (as an electrical engineer who worked for NZED) for a nuclear power plant in Te Atatu South. Huntly was built instead thankfully as having that generation of plant there would have been a massive liability now. He was not a fan of the idea. Obviously a new generation plant in a more suitable site would be a very different situation.

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SnoopyDo

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#3228615 10-May-2024 11:55

Im a yes for nuclear power. But small and distributed. Apparently the Virginia-class submarine costs 4.5B USD with a 210MW output, if the power plant is half that cost then we could have 3-4 scattered around the country for the cost on the onslow storage?

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#3228617 10-May-2024 12:01

SnoopyDo:

Im a yes for nuclear power. But small and distributed. Apparently the Virginia-class submarine costs 4.5B USD with a 210MW output, if the power plant is half that cost then we could have 3-4 scattered around the country for the cost on the onslow storage?

Ooooh Greymouth could have its own cruise missiles to deter those useless suits in Wellington from making any more unworkable regulations!

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tweake

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#3228619 10-May-2024 12:13

don't forget earthquakes. don't want another Fukushima. the lowest risk place to put one would be northland. maybe replace the marsden power station.

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#3228622 10-May-2024 12:17

Last time I started a thread like this I was shouted down by all the people who seem unable to differentiate between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and/or saying that it would never work because of the geological make up of NZ and it's it's various earthquake fault lines and other things.

I was very enthusiastic about it after seeing a Ted talk about a guy comparing the ecological and impact to wildlife of both Solar and Wind, and comparing how much of that you would need to compete with one of the 'new' mini reactors which are cooled by sand rather than water.

Yes a Nuclear disaster would be terrible, and yes, we have seen some go really badly, but the power even a tiny one can produce is amazing. Even a small one in each Island would change the way energy works in NZ.

I am not a geologist, nor a nuclear science, but it seems to be there would be a safe place to put one on each island somewhere

tweake

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#3228641 10-May-2024 12:24

sir1963:

we should also go back to hot water cylinders but with passive thermal panels to heat the water, again reducing the need for power.

we should be subsiding solar panels to put on housing

we should also be investing in battery storage (the new Sodium batteries look good ).

We also need to improve home insulation.

Those things could mostly eliminate housing as an energy consumer.

And dare I say it, but heating larger buildings by burning scrap wood and forest slash ( NOT adding additional CO2 into the atmosphere, it is actually recycling)

yes.

well apart from subsiding solar.

reducing the need for power is something that is being done a lot over seas. usa has its home energy use programs, its also increasing its insulation and air sealing requirements. uk i understand is going through the process of increasing its standards. i see passive house is working on standards for retrofits on old homes. unfortunately nz is way behind. with our cost of power you would have thought we would be world leaders in efficient homes. the problem is the more spent on insulation etc, means less money being spent on big companies building products. kiwis want cheap homes they can flick for profit, which is why low standards have existed for so long.

the sodium batteries are possibly a good thing for home storage. but flow batteries might be better. wait and see what makes it out to the market.

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johno1234

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#3228642 10-May-2024 12:26

Jase2985:

SaltyNZ:

Anti-nuclear feelings aside, the NAFT government cancelled Lake Onslow (before the engineering feasibility study was complete) nominally because they were concerned about the cost. I can't see a nuclear power plant being cheaper than Lake Onslow, even were we willing to risk building any of the unproven 4th generation designs for immediate commercial service.

When i looked yesterday the estimate for Lake Onslow was $15 Billion, but by the time they go to build it, and over the build timeframe, 7-9 years, it would likely double.

About $30 billion USD would get you 2 reactors generating about, 2100MW of power. That is about 50% of our current hydro capacity.

Plus Onslow is in the wrong place to deal with the shortage in the North Island.

On the other had, nukes look a bit too expensive for the time being...

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#3228643 10-May-2024 12:27

networkn:

Last time I started a thread like this I was shouted down by all the people who seem unable to differentiate between nuclear weapons and nuclear power,

Probably plenty of them in the general population but I wouldn't expect many in the GZ community.

and/or saying that it would never work because of the geological make up of NZ and it's it's various earthquake fault lines and other things.

That's a much more legitimate concern. Of the two biggest catastrophes, one was caused by an earthquake.

As far as the new generation reactors go, costs to build and run them are even less well pinned down than the cost to build and operate Lake Onslow. Nobody has ever built any of them for real. You only have to look at the cost blowouts for construction of new reactors of well proven, operating designs (e.g. new Westinghouse AP1000s for Georgia) to know what the risks would look like to build and operate a complete unknown.

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wellygary

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#3228645 10-May-2024 12:27

noroad:

Here's a funny thing, I remember seeing plans my father had (as an electrical engineer who worked for NZED) for a nuclear power plant in Te Atatu South. Huntly was built instead thankfully as having that generation of plant there would have been a massive liability now. He was not a fan of the idea. Obviously a new generation plant in a more suitable site would be a very different situation.

The first one was proposed for Kaipara

Plan for a nuclear power plant on Kaipara Harbour by Archives New Zealand, on Flickr

"This plan for a nuclear power plant on Kaipara Harbour is from an Auckland Ministry of Works file. In the 1960s it was felt that nuclear power generation would be needed to supply increasing demands for electricity, especially in the Auckland region. In 1966 the Minister of Labour was quoted as saying that the first nuclear power station would be north of Auckland, probably in Kaipara, then a second south of Auckland, which could serve both Auckland and Hamilton. The third station would probably be in central Auckland “from developments overseas we believe that the construction of [nuclear power] stations in the centre of cities within 15 years or so will be acceptable.”

When a site had been selected by the Siting Sub-committee of the New Zealand Atomic Energy Committee, the timetable was: call for tenders in 1970, order the plant in 1971, start building in 1972 and start generating in 1977. [BBAO 1054/505/c]

However, the site investigation work at Kaipara was closed down in 1971, and New Zealand remained nuclear free.

BlargHonk

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#3228694 10-May-2024 12:32

How long would it take to build a Nuclear Reactor in NZ and build up the Nuclear Industry and regulations to support it? When they were talking about it in Australia recently the estimates were 10-15 years at a minimum.

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