Nuclear profits sustain Bulgaria in gas crisis

[NNadir]

Nuclear profits sustain Bulgaria in gas crisis

Profits from Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant are being redirected to provide subsidies of BGN110 (USD65) per MWh to industry. Some 630,000 industrial consumers will receive the benefit to protect them from power prices driven by gas.

The measures were announced on 21 October by Prime Minister Stefan Yanev in a national address. He said the subsidy "will benefit over 630,000 non-residential end consumers" with the grant distributed automatically thanks to a contract between the government and the retail electricity suppliers, including the suppliers of last resort that have stepped in after other energy firms went bust.

The benefit will be backdated from 1 October and will last until 30 November, at an estimated cost of BGN450 million. Yanev said, "The funds will be provided from the state budget at the expense of the presentation of grants amounting to BGN450 million from Kozloduy nuclear power plant." He added, "In the next reporting year, the dividend due to be paid by [Kozloduy's owner] Bulgarian Energy Holding will be reduced by the indicated amount."

The upgraded subsidy improves on measures Yanev discussed on 19 October when speaking on TV1, which would have covered 250,000 businesses with a BGN30 per MWh payment. At the time, Yanev said subsidies would "support the economically weaker companies, which are also the largest employer in the country..."

...Facing the need to phase out coal - which provides 40% of electricity - while also maintaining energy security, Bulgarian policymakers would like to expand nuclear capacity either at Kozloduy or at Belene, a new site also on the Danube. However, in a recent interview with Trud newspaper the chaiman of the Bulgarian Atomic Forum, Bogomil Manchev, said: "There is no longer an option for either one project or the other. The 'or' has disappeared."

Bulgaria is keen for the European Commission to decide positively that nuclear power can be included in its taxonomy of sustainable investments and is a member of the ten-nation 'Nuclear Alliance' of EU countries calling for this. Yanev raised the issue with the Vice President of the European Commission, Franz Timmermans, who visited Bulgaria earlier this month...

The reliance on dangerous natural gas to cover up for the lack of reliability of so called "renewable energy," has reached its limit. The requirement for redundant systems to do what one system can do is not only extremely wasteful, but it is also extremely expensive. The dependence on dangerous natural gas is not anymore sustainable than are the solar and wind industries, since all three industries rely on unsustainable mining activities.

As always, the most economically disadvantaged people pay the price for the delusional affectations of the bourgeoisie.

[hunter]

1. Bulgaria is a net exporter of natural gas and electricity...

... and a transit country for Russian natural gas to Turkey, Greece and Macedonia.

The article you posted describes a political mechanism meant to insulate Bulgarian energy users from the recent extremes in gas prices beyond its border.

Residential and small business electricity consumers in Germany are shit out of luck however. Their electricity rates are approaching forty cents a kilowatt hour.

In France they pay less than half that rate and their electricity is largely "carbon neutral" in comparison.

Hmmm....

In Finland their most recent nuclear plants have been plagued by cost overruns but I suspect as time goes on the people there will be quite pleased with these plants in light of the current chaos in natural gas markets.

[NNadir]

2. The Finnish plants faced effectively "First of a Kind Engineering" FOAKE costs, because...

Last edited Fri Oct 29, 2021, 09:17 AM - Edit history (1)

...much of the world - and for a brief while even France was considering this - embraced the nonsensical idea that a reactionary idea that humanity could live on so called "renewable energy" and that "we didn't need nuclear."

If the French had been building reactors at the same rate they did when they eliminated coal power in their country, almost 30 years ago, those FOAKE costs would not have been realized.

The result is that we still need dangerous fossil fuels which are literally killing the planet while we all wait for one or two people to die as a result of radiation at Fukushima. (We don't give a rat's ass about how many people died from seawater in the same event, approximately 20,000 people.)

In any case, for many years, I was a big reactor kind of guy, believing, as surely is the case, that the EPRs in Finland are gifts to future generations. They will be reaching the end of their lives in the 22nd century, long after all the wind turbines now in Europe are landfill.

The 21st century costs won't matter.

But it now occurs to me that our inventory of used nuclear fuel is such that we can make small printed reactors ensconced in heat networks, given now that we have the plutonium to do it. I will not live to see these ideas realized, but I am making sure to inculcate these ideas in my son as he enters into a graduate nuclear engineering program.

That stuff we have been trained in a Pavlovian fashion, to call "nuclear waste" is the key to saving what is left to be save and perhaps restoring what can be restored.