Should New Zealand invest in nuclear power plants?

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#3228863 10-May-2024 19:35

Tiwai Point off again on again is partly an obstacle to planning.

If Government commits to a large expenditure for generation expansion,
if Tiwai Point is off again suddenly its an unnecessary expense.

Private enterprise also has to consider this, so we may get smaller schemes but nothing too risky?

Handle9

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#3228864 10-May-2024 19:45

ezbee:

Tiwai Point off again on again is partly an obstacle to planning.

If Government commits to a large expenditure for generation expansion,
if Tiwai Point is off again suddenly its an unnecessary expense.

Private enterprise also has to consider this, so we may get smaller schemes but nothing too risky?

Aluminium is at USD$2500 a ton. Rio won't be closing while it makes money but they'll threaten it of course.

Edit: US$2500 a ton is a high price for aluminium btw. In 2019 during the last pricing round they were getting aroun USD$1700 a ton.

hsvhel

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#3228866 10-May-2024 19:46

Handle9:

ezbee:

Tiwai Point off again on again is partly an obstacle to planning.

If Government commits to a large expenditure for generation expansion,
if Tiwai Point is off again suddenly its an unnecessary expense.

Private enterprise also has to consider this, so we may get smaller schemes but nothing too risky?

Aluminium is at USD$2500 a ton. Rio won't be closing while it makes money but they'll threaten it of course.

Seems they do it all the time!

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sir1963

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#3228869 10-May-2024 20:20

hsvhel:

Seems they do it all the time!

Should tell them "We will accept your next offer to leave. Please make sure you clean your pollution up, pay your bills" with a CLEAR understanding this is now no longer negotiable.

deepred

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#3228870 10-May-2024 20:27

Handle9:

mattwnz:

I just wonder who is to blame for the situation that NZ is heading towards?

The National government of the 1990s. Max Bradford if you want a name but it was part of a very idealogicaly driven reform of electricity supply in New Zealand.

If ECNZ absolutely had to be split up, it should have been like Telecom where infrastructure was vertically separated from retail, instead of horizontally like we have now.

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MadEngineer

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#3228871 10-May-2024 20:32

My answer is still no.

Or has something changed since the last few times this was discussed?

https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=48&topicid=289205&singlepage=yes

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

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#3228890 10-May-2024 23:01

MikeB4:
@johno1234 When(not if) the subduction zone slips it expected to generate a earthquake(s)It will probably cause other faults to fire. at magnitude 8 plus. GNS science has lots of data.

Maybe. Data is not knowledge nor understanding. You’re still posting your own assertions and not actual citations to support them.

Fukushima was the victim of a tsunami not directly an earthquake. Should not have been built on the coast.

All our hydro plants are still in place a hundred years later for some. And they aren’t in the low risk zone.

SaltyNZ

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#3228893 10-May-2024 23:20

networkn:

SaltyNZ:

There are already retailers who buy at very close to retail rates. For us the difference between the sell rate and the buy rate is about 3c/kWh. Makes it not worth the cost of a home battery.

Who are you with? Our buy back rate was around 3c per KW and my FIL is getting around 4.5c.

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#3228895 10-May-2024 23:41

johno1234: Should not have been built on the coast.

Thats where they are normally built due to the vast amount of water they require for cooling. Large nuclear plants can consume tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water per minute for cooling purposes. The greens in NZ will never let it happen.

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#3228897 10-May-2024 23:49

mattwnz:

I just wonder who is to blame for the situation that NZ is heading towards? Surely the PM should be calling in the heads for a please explain. We shouldn't be in the situation where demand peaks in Autumn could result in supply problems. It isn't even winter yet. The fact that they are also trying to move people off gas for water heating and other heating, onto heatpumps and electric HWC is also only going to increase demand

I think you are overblowing the situation.

The situation was that there was a risk we could drop under N - 1 redundancy. Suspect that didn't actually happen (wholesale prices didn't spike this morning).

The fact that we are in an unseasonal cold snap is a key driver of the situation. Substantial amounts of generation are offline (It's public info on transpower website if you want to look it up) for maintenance at the moment. These were likely deliberately timed to be before the winter.

The last time we shed households was in August 2021. A number of things stacked up that day which caused that event:

Risk only identified a few hours prior, A large thermal plant was available, but this was insufficient time for it to startup.
Storm caused the coldest day of the year
Same storm caused lake weed to be stirred up which blocked the intake of a 240MW hydro power station, taking it offline.
Right at peak time the storm related winds dropped (not forecast), resulting in a further loss of capacity.
Transpower made a calculation error, overstating the amount of load that needed to be shed. (resulting in 20,000 houses being blacked out, where other load reduction like hot water cylinder ripple control would have been sufficient).

In order not to spend excessively and overbuild, it is acceptable to carry some risk.

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If you really want to lay blame you need to look back to the privatization of our electricity network.

We were one of the worlds most efficient electricity producers, and we tried to improve this via privatization. Ultimately didn't work out.

Focus moved to profit maximization, instead of providing adequate reliability at minimum cost.

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It is also easy to assign blame to the Electricity market design. In short, it pays the same to existing power plants as new ones, where it should be set up to benefit new generation. Also it doesn't adequately compensate infrequently used generation (dry year reserve generation & rarely used short duration peaking plants)

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On increasing demand. Yes, a variety of factors are pointing to this. Given we have had 10 - 15 years of stagnant demand, the industry is facing some challenges transitioning back into growth mode. Current bottleneck is the Transpower new connection application queue, but if that was resolved (and we should resolve it), there would be another bottle neck. But overall the industry really does need to spin up resources to re-enter growth mode.

Should note electric HWC's are generally able to be shed via ripple control or similar, so aren't a big issue for short periods of supply tightness like this one.

mattwnz

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#3228898 11-May-2024 00:00

One factor is also the price to decommission a nuclear reactor at the end of its life. In the UK I read that is about 12 billion NZD per reactor. UK are in the process of decommissioning their current ones. Who would end up paying for that. It does feel a bit like false economy.

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#3228899 11-May-2024 00:05

@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, 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, those are all good points. What you're likely to get instead is a proven 1960s design revised in 1970 something with minor revisions and materials improvements in 1980 something and 1990 something. All built by Ginormus Corp with long experience in reactor design and implementation with promise of jobs for benefit great country of New Zealand.

gzt

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#3228900 11-May-2024 00:26

If it's a choice between telling Comalco to invest somewhere else or go nuclear I think it is logical to choose the non-nuclear option and do some extra wiring. They'll probably try to game us on the cleanup but that's another story.

gzt

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#3228902 11-May-2024 00:37

California in this somewhat puffy piece turning market crisis and California's longstanding energy issues into opportunity with batteries:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/07/climate/battery-electricity-solar-california-texas.html

Batteries used to store energy off-peak, then sell at peak rates, even into neighbouring states. Similar write-up for Texas.

Handle9

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#3228903 11-May-2024 00:40

gzt: If it's a choice between telling Comalco to invest somewhere else or go nuclear I think it is logical to choose the non-nuclear option and do some extra wiring. They'll probably try to game us on the cleanup but that's another story.

Might be a bit hard to tell Comalco to do anything. It’s been Rio Tinto since 2006.

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