Welcome to The Hydrofiles, the HR Wallingford podcast. I'm Sally Jackson, and I'm joined by Mike Case. And we're going to be continuing our series of looking into the future for energy, and how we're going to meet future demand. Today we're going to be discussing nuclear, the future of nuclear energy, and how that affects water. So Hi, Mike.
Hi, Sally.
So first of all, tell us a little bit becasue nuclear has been a bit contentious, you know. So that's, that's kind of dig into that a little bit and discuss what the current situation for nuclear is and how it's being developed for the future.
I'll talk about the UK first. So the UK we've currently got about 15% of our power comes from nuclear, but a number of our older stations are coming offline. So in the next few years, they're all going to come offline with the exception of Hinkley C, which is currently being built. After Hinkley, C, we've then got sizewell B, which is basically a carbon copy of of Hinkley C, being built by EDF. And then after that, really there's a few other projects, which are potentially in the
offing. But that's it really. And it's a big challenge, because as we want to reach net zero, we need to electrify our system. So we need to switch, you know, electrify heating, for example, domestic heating a lot of our industrial uses, also transport, we need to electrify. And in order to do that, we need to double our power generation capacity by 2050. One of the ways of doing that is by increasing, and one of the things we are doing, is increasing the amount of
renewables. So offshore wind, floating offshore wind, solar, etc, that we have on the grid. As you increase the amount of renewables on the grid, the grid becomes much harder to manage, because obviously, they're intermittent. And you have issues, particularly in the winter, in the UK, where we have, for example, these kinds of Atlantic high pressures over the UK, or over the whole of Europe, really where you might have a week or even longer where
there's very little wind. And that's a big, big problem for a grid, which is dependent on 70%, of its power, it's coming from wind. What do you do for those few weeks, where you don't have the wind? Or what do you do where you have a dip in the wind? Or what do you do for solar, what you do at night? So one of the things the grid really needs to balance is what's called firm power used to be called baseload, it's more commonly called firm power now.
And one of the only real ways of producing low-carbon firm power is nuclear. So as you increase the amount of renewables on the grid, you also need to increase the amount of dispatchable firm power you have on the grid. And the only technology for doing that, at the moment is nuclear. Expansion of renewables has to go hand in hand with expansion of firm power, low carbon firm power, and really the only way of doing that is by nuclear.
So there are countries that are doing that on there. So I think France is a good example, isn't it?
France is an odd example, because they went for nuclear very early on in a big way. And they've been trying to diversify over the past two decades, they've been trying to diversify and move more into renewables. So they've got very much I think, over 80% of their power comes from nuclear. And they've been trying to diversify. But now they've also realized that there's a big potential for nuclear going
forward. So they're planning on six new plants, large sort of gigawatt scale plants in France, Poland is an interesting one, Poland is very interesting, because they're trying to decarbonise, their power is very much based on coal, particularly dirty coal, dirty sorts of brown coal. And they're moving away from that. And the way they're doing that is both by developing onshore wind, but also nuclear at the same time. So they've got big plans for nuclear as well.
So what you're saying is that nuclear at this time is a necessity to keep the consistency of power to grids in many, many countries.
Yeah, in order to balance balanced demand with supply. It's obviously a tricky job by the grid operators to continually do that. And nuclear is a really important part of that puzzle, along with storage and along with, you know, obviously along with renewables.
So how does that intersect with the world of water? You know, what we do? I mean, you don't naturally come to the idea that this is all about water.
No, but if you if you look at where nuclear power stations tend to be located, they tend to be located on the coast. And the reason for that is cooling water. So all nuclear power needs large amounts of cooling water to cool the reactors. So so that's where our specialty comes in. And HR Wallingford specialises in in looking at cooling water from a number of different aspects, from looking at how the thermal plume, how the other hot water is dispersed into the sea or
into a river. What the resource of the water is because you do have some some nuclear plants based on rivers. But also looking at the protection of the site as well. So for protection either from from the coast, or from fluvial and pluvial water.
So I imagine that climate change is going to play into that quite a bit. If you're looking at sea level rise and more flooding.
Yeah, for nuclear, it's more complicated in terms of climate change than say, offshore wind, because the lifespan of offshore wind is typically around 20 years for an offshore wind project, or offshore wind turbines, whereas nuclear is three times that really. We're looking at about 60 years productive life of a nuclear power station, and then you have the decommissioning
phase afterwards. So you're looking at much longer timescales, in terms of the climate change adaptation, if you like, so you do have to factor in sea level rise, you do have to factor in increase in rainfall, increased runoff and so on. So, we have to think about those things as we're building nuclear power stations. You have to look a lot further out an engineer for those now.
We're talking now about, you know, large scale nuclear plants. But there's also small modular reactors that are sort of coming online now as well, aren't there? Could you explain about those?
Yeah, so there's a lot of work been done over the past, over the past few years, past 10 years, really, there's been a huge push for what are called small modular reactors. And they vary greatly from reactors, which are kind of, you know, 50 gigawatts sort of scale, through to the Rolls Royce design in the UK, which is more like 600 megawatts.
And what does that look like in reality? So you know we've talked about the gigawatts it produces, but actually, how big is that? Is that building? Is that a car?
Yeah, so on the larger end of the of the SMRs. I mean, there's some debate whether you can call the Rolls Royce and SMR really, but it's more of an MMR I suppose. That's really looking at a similar sort of size to, I think the market they're looking at his ex coal fired sites, where there was a coal fired power station, coastal sites, and coal fired power stations. So where you've got similar sized grid capacity already there. So you can replace like-for-like,
basically. You take a coal plant, you know, a 600 megawatt coal plant offline, and you put him in its place, you know, an SMR. So they cover a reasonably large area, a large building, a few football pitches, down to the much smaller reactors, which would be, you know, housed in a few small buildings. So the sorts of new scale, they're
around 70 megawatt reactors. So they're a much, much smaller scale, and kind of, they're looking at different markets, I suppose, like more remote community kind of scale market.
So it could power a whole community?
Power of a remote community where you don't have access to grid, or where you're having to... small island communities as an example, where you're having to import diesel for diesel generators. So a lot of a lot of small island communities run off diesel gensets. And the idea is to have a replacement for those.
And I assume they still need cooling water?
Yeah, they still need cooling water. I think maybe the smaller ones can be air cooled, but certainly the larger end of the SMRs will need cooling water. So you're looking at either coastal or riverine sites.
So do have do they have exactly the same challenges as the larger nuclear plants? Or are they different?
Very similar challenges, really, because I suppose the maybe the lifespan isn't quite so large, and they can be dismantled quicker. But you've got very, very similar challenges in terms of they will probably last a lot longer than than renewables in terms of lifespan of a single project. So you have to look at the duration of impact for climate change, and also water availability, and so on.
And scanning into the future, where do you see this going? You know, we're already moving into new technology. What's coming?
So SMRs, it's a bit up and down at the moment. So there was a large project in the US, one of the first projects for the US was cancelled recently because of cost overruns. And that's going to be the main challenge really, for SMRs is keeping the cost down. The idea of SMRs says really is, rather than these very large gigawatt scale nuclear plants, like Hinkley Point C, which are absolutely massive engineering projects, the idea of SMRs is is really these are factory built.
So they're built in a factory, everything's built in a controlled environment, you limit the amount that's actually having to be done on site. So everything's built in a factory containerised or loaded on trucks and delivered to the site. So you have a kind of factory production line of SMRs and that massively reduces the complexity and also the cost.
But it's very early days really and of course early days, you know that's that's going to be the they're going to hit some engineering challenges of how they achieve that really. And nuclear in a way doesn't lend itself to innovation because it's so safety conscious, and the whole industry is very safety conscious. It's very hard to innovate in nuclear because because of the length of time, you have to go through licensing and so on to change anything on
the nuclear project. So, it is a challenge.
Can you ever imagine these small modular reactors, or much smaller modular reactors in our homes powering individual houses?
No, I don't think that's gonna happen. I think it's more likely you could have, as I said, smaller island communities or remote communities could have an SMR. And I think where they're basically their power, then they run for their entire lifespan, and then they've dismantled and taken away and then a new one put in so I think maybe, maybe for that kind of situation, you can you can see them, but but on a smaller scale than that, then the cost would be too prohibitive.
That's really interesting. Okay, well, thanks for joining us for that one. This is a part of a series of podcasts that Mike's doing on the future of energy in the UK and around the world. The other ones are on, as I said at the beginning on carbon capture and storage on industrialisation and floating wind and solar in the Sahara. So do drop into listen to those ones and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Mike.
Thank you