Excellent.
Can we have some proper nuclear fission plants now please, until we can get fusion properly organised?
Minister blows away plans for more turbines
It looks as though the wind energy boom is over. UK energy minister Greg Barker has hinted at a significant change in government strategy - cutting subsidies for the deployment and operation of environmentalists’ favoured technologies. The climate change minister hinted that R&D handouts would continue, but for the wind lobby …
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 09:44 GMT John Hughes
20 years?
Why? In 1974 France decided to go nuclear, the first plant was comissioned on December 1, 1980. 56 plants were built in all.
Six years to build the first plant.
Britain would take 20 years to do what France could do in six?
Come to think of it you're probably right. Glad I got out of that defeatist shithole.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:56 GMT Thought About IT
Re: Excellent.
Professor Stephen Thomas, Director of Research at the UK’s University of Greenwich’s Business School, believes the writing is on the wall for nuclear power in Europe. “Fukushima could be the final straw for light water reactors (LWRs)”, he told The Energy Industry Times. “After 60 years of development, real costs have only ever gone one way. Has any other technology had similar experience and still been pursued? Economic LWRs that can survive loss-of-coolant and loss-of-power accidents are an impossible dream."
“The promise of simpler, safer and cheap nuclear power at $1000/kW was either self-delusion or deception. Most recent cost estimates are more than $6000/kW."
http://millicentmedia.com/2012/03/29/a-two-speed-nuclear-world/
Still think nuclear power is excellent?
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Monday 16th April 2012 22:08 GMT Shadowmanx2009
Re: Excellent.
In a word, yes!
Unless of course you believe the next level of progress should be towards mud huts and unsanitory conditions?
The technological products that people use today depend on power i.e. electric cars, as does the more mundane but necessary lights, power for research, industries etc.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 08:09 GMT HMB
Re: Excellent.
You're right that Nuclear isn't as cost effective as coal. Trouble is that for some reason there's a problem burning coal. Nuclear Vs Wind power for price? Nuclear wins every time. Nuclear even edges out clean coal. Nuclear has fuel that could last for millenia, coal does not.
Now, you tell me, what's sustainable?
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:05 GMT xyz
*ugger...it was a good wheeze....
...you got money for doing jack and they were really difficult to rustle (no pun).
I was even just about to train up my first wind-dog to herd the turbines. Well I figured I had to do something that looked like farming whilst stuffing all that cash into my back hipper.
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:06 GMT PlacidCasual
Praise be common sense has prevailed.
This uncommon example of Government coomon sense hasn't come a minute too soon. Wind farms have been great for harvesting subsidies but not much cop at producing electricity when we need it. Until a workable form of mas electricity storage is invented this technology should be shelved in favour of something we can actually afford.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 09:16 GMT Aldous
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
i really hate the "use electric cars as power soaks" idea. i sometimes have an urgent need to travel on short notice so always have my bikes fuel tank full. even if they have a cap (10% of charge) you could be talking a serious issue given the recharge time (loosing 10 miles when power points aren't universal could leave you stranded) . The vice versa is also true if i plug it in at 6pm i want it to start charging then not at 11pm when all the soaps/celebrity come dance with me on ice has finished and power demand is reduced.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 11:20 GMT Audrey S. Thackeray
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
Okay so there's a couple of scenarios in which electric vehicles as power stores doesn't work so well but I don't think it would take too much effort to think of examples where it would work better and no one is saying you in particular have to adopt electric vehicles, just that it is possible (they say) to use wind generated electricity to replace some current fossil fuel use.
If they are right it seems reasonable to give it some thought rather than just throwing up "it doesn't fit my needs" objections which give the impression that the objection comes first and the thinking follows.
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:57 GMT oddie
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
actually, the hard bit is making it cheap enough to be affordable enough for most (as in not having to chose between a car or a house to live in), and to manufacture it without needing to pollute more than you supposedly 'save'.
Once it makes sense economically and enviromentally you will find it will be easier to get people to buy into it.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:19 GMT nemo20000
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
“and to manufacture it without needing to pollute more than you supposedly 'save'”
That’s the usual oil industry rubbish repeated ad nauseam despite all scientific refutations. Please stop repeating that kind of nonsense. It is usually based on some study that showed that Chinese coal-fired power stations are more polluting than diesel VWs, or that an EV with batteries takes more emissions to manufacture than a petrol car with no fuel in. Yeah? No great surprises there, but no relevance either.
The only important point is that as energy generation decarbonises, the EV you’ve already bought gets less and less polluting. That doesn’t happen with oil.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/9183896
http://www.greenwisebusiness.co.uk/news/ev-production-not-so-green-2401.aspx
http://www.sierraclub.org/electric-vehicles/myths.aspx
Can we stop all the anti-EV lies now? They cost more to buy and don’t have the same range as oil powered cars... but they cost less to run and can be “filled up” anywhere. That’s it. Get over it.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 07:51 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
"....but they cost less to run and can be “filled up” anywhere...." Complete male bovine manure. You forgot to factor in battery replacement or leasing (not cheap). Batteries also become less efficient as they age, meaning the cost goes up the older the battery pack. You also forgot that a petrol-diesel-powered car can be filled up at stations all over the country in a matter of minutes, whilst an EV takes ages to charge even to half-full and then not everywhere has charging stations.
I also don't get this claim that EVs will act as storage for power - should they be bought in numbers, they are a massive additional drain on the grid. They are also not a store - you drive it to work in the morning, draining the battery, and hook it up to charge, at just the time (9am to 5pm) that the grid needs lots of power to run businesses. Then you drive it home, draining it again, and plug it in just as the grid is girding up for the evening peak. How the flying fudge is that storing? Complete nonsense.
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Monday 16th April 2012 16:08 GMT Lazy Gun
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
"It has been invented – the electric car and smart meter."
Electric cars are utter crap and smart meters are solely about allowing the power companies to remotely disconnect people to control demand - useful when your network has a lot of rubbish windmills.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:21 GMT Richard 12
Re: Workable form of mass electricity storage
No nemo, it hasn't, you can tell because almost nobody is buying it. That's the "workable" part, you see?
"Workable" means that it's feasible, economic to build and run, and consumers will accept it.
Electric cars at the required scale are none of the above.
Secondly, in this context, smart meters are only a method of remote disconnection at times of high demand. This is not a solution in the first place, and of course consumers will never accept it.
"At the end of EastEnders you will suffer a blackout to prevent you from making a cup of tea."
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Praise be common sense has prevailed.
One of the better strategies would be a proper pan-european high-voltage DC network. Then the UK could supply wind-generated energy to (say) factories in Germany and Italy, even when the wind does not blow.
The larger the net, the better. But I know, there is lots of inertia and anti-european sentiment, so I guess this will take a really, really long time to happen.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:19 GMT PyLETS
Workable form of mass electricity storage
It's called pumped storage. Originally designed for the ad break when everyone wants to boil the kettle at once: http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm . OK, to cover UK requirements in a 1000 mile wide winter calm for 5 days you'd need to have equivalent of 7 lakes of about 1km cubed with average drop between reservoirs about 1km. We haven't got enough of that kind of terrain in the UK. They have more in west Ireland and in Norway, where they are considering using salt water and the ocean as the lower reservoir, and that's partly why they are planning better undersea grid interconnectors between UK, Iceland, Norway and Ireland.. Another reason is this enables UK wind electricity when plentiful to be exported.
Some of the reservoirs we do have could also be dual purposed - that's called uprated hydro, where you have enough flow into the dam and can vary the electric output from it more.
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:07 GMT Ben 50
Laugh? I nearly cried.
"But the mandatory aspect of the programme, and relaxation of supplier obligations and removal of an independent complaints service, made it appear suspiciously like a producers' racket."
That'll be nuclear power then.
In the meantime, Fukushima has shown PWR's to be faulty by design (containment vessel unable to withstand the pressure of hydrogen buildup), Tokyo was more heavily contaminated than is being reported, and the greatest dangers of Fukushima are still to come (the fuel rod stores, one of which went critical, are still in an impossibly dangerous state).
http://fairewinds.com/updates
We need less power, and less consumption, with more efficient devices, and more intelligent energy storage (such as the proposed Icelandic hook-up reported here on elReg just a couple of weeks ago, which is all just a pale shadow of what Buckminster Fuller was proposing in the 60's with his global solar grid).
Bring on the tory downvotes.
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:51 GMT Andrew Orlowski
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
"We need less power, and less consumption"
Well, you're not going to get it I'm afraid. Unless you make a hobby of lost causes, you probably need to rethink your politics from the ground up. Praying for lower consumption is like hoping monochrome comes back to replace colour screens.
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:07 GMT Ben 50
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
If you take the axioms of the current paradigm as immutable - continual economic expansion based on the exploitation of limited natural resources... then your point of view makes sense.
On the otherhand, if you see humanity as having experienced a series of (often sudden) fundamental paradigm shifts, where all the old assumptions go out of the window - and accept that what we accept as given now is just part of the paradigm in which we were born... then you might have a slightly broader perspective on the options that are available to us as a species.
Your analogy just shows that you can't see an alternative way to progress, which is why you see more ecologically sensible alternatives as a form of regression.
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:29 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
It's all in the negawatts: the cheapest power plants are ones you don't build.
Note, less consumption usually means greater energy efficiency - better insulation, lower stand-by draw, higher yield lighting, ARM instead of x86, etc. - rather than the return to a Luddite dark age.
Mine's the one with 9 W LED bulb in the pocket and the A+++ fridge.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:21 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
"It's all in the negawatts: the cheapest power plants are ones you don't build."
Er, no. It's all in the cooked books. Deprive an economy of cheap energy and watch that GDP nose-dive. Of course, if you are willing to ignore the GDP loss, not doing anything at all, let alone getting out of bed and building a reactor, starts to look like a smart plan.
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:51 GMT Graham Dawson
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
PWRs are also more than 30 years old and have been superceded by several generations of much safre passively cooled reactors that require action to maintain the reaction rather than actiion to prevent it.
fukushima is an old reactor that should have been shut down years ago but wasn't because of people like you screaming about the idea of new replacement reactors being built.
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:08 GMT Ben 50
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
You'd love to believe that cosy propaganda wouldn't you.
Care to read an alternative take on the wonders of the most modern passively cooled reactor design in the world (the Westinghouse AP1000)? http://fairewinds.com/content/fukushima-and-its-impact-upon-westinghouse-toshiba-designed-ap1000-atomic-power-plant
What about the alternatives? Those wonderful thorium reactors? They sounded like a good idea to me, until my brother and his wife (both research chemists engaged in research for the nuclear establishment, specifically in the fields of corrosion and containment) scared the living bejesus out of me about the toxicity of the waste byproducts.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:21 GMT GitMeMyShootinIrons
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
Waste products? What about the toxic slurry in lakes in Mongolia because of treehuggers demanding wind power? Those rare earth minerals used in the magnets don't just spontaneously appear you know.
Oh, and let's not forget the massive amounts of concrete needed to keep a single turbine from blowing over - all deeply planted in some of the most scenic places.
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Monday 16th April 2012 19:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
I want to see the reactor design of a real reactor which can passively dissipate heat immediately after SCRAM.
The focus must be on protecting and making redundant the cooling system. A couple of man-mobile fire engines are enough if evaporation cooling is used. But that must be planned for in advance.
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Monday 16th April 2012 14:54 GMT That Steve Guy
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
A 40 year old Nuclear power station gets hit by both an Earthquake and a Tsunami beyond the range at which it was designed and the contamination was minimal.
I'd say that is a resounding endorsement of Nuclear power safety.
Of course lets apply the same arguments to the UK as we are so likely to be hit by both an Earthquake and a Tsunami of that magnitude... oh damn if only we lived on a fault line!
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:10 GMT Ben 50
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
Ever heard of the Black Swan?
I was raised down the road from Hinkley Point (nuclear power plant). There have been tsunamis in recorded history, in S.W. England, that were well beyond the design spec of Hinkley Point.
Think that's stupid? Watch this and see how well design assumptions for U.S. reactors hold up.
http://fairewinds.com/content/why-fukushima-can-happen-here-what-nrc-and-nuclear-industry-dont-want-you-know
As for minimal contamination... you're misinformed, both about the nature of the contamination, its quantity, and its range.
http://fairewinds.com/node/186
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:56 GMT Ben 50
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
@Symon
Have you read anywhere in my comments that I'm anti-nuclear? or anti-science?
1) The reactors we have now are not safe - their risk assumptions are inadequate, so are their designs, so is their regulatory oversight, so is the responsibility of their operators.
2) The reactors we are about to build are only marginally better.
3) Providing more, and cheaper power for people to make more wasteful things, with any incentive to optimise on energy efficiency removed, is stupidly short-sighted.
The true costs of Nuclear, and doing it right, are astronomical. If that's the only option we have in the short - mid term, then we should bear those costs and do it correctly.
However, it isn't the only choice. Ze Germans will be at 35% energy from renewables by 2020 on current forecasts, while its labs and universities are cranking out fantastic improvements in fundamental and applied technologies at a cracking rate - because their government has the foresight to realise that this is another market in which their industry can become a world leader from day one!
More than that, the really HUGE scientific and industrial movement which is beginning to gather pace is the hydrogen economy. With those little solar panels on your roof, you can split rain-water into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel your house, your car, your computer, whatever you like. This is the real shift that so many people aren't seeing, and the reason why solar is so much more than just pushing subsidised energy back into the grid. (It's also very IT by the way, I was talking to a researcher last week working on nano-fuel cells for powering mobile devices... interesting stuff).
The British were the world leaders in the seventies. I doubt very much, if every last program hadn't been gutted both in the U.S. and the U.K. by the Regan/Thatcher axis, that we'd even need this discussion now.
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Monday 16th April 2012 22:01 GMT Ben 50
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
@Symon
Thanks for the headsup at any rate. I don't know enough about IFR to hold an opinion, so I've written to ask a few people who'll know better. It's been a long time since I trusted anything that comes out of Monbiot's mouth.
As for risk assessment, I'm specifically talking about the risk assessments used to derive "worst case" scenarios, which if exceeded, lead to meltdown.
As for the impacts of nuclear disasters, there's shockingly little information out there about the scale of long-term civilian deaths caused by particulate contamination. The biggest scandal of all is that there have been no (that I or anybody I have ever spoken to am aware of) systematic and major studies into the impacts of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale (which was a dramatically larger event than made public at the time) and even now... Fukushima. Most of the hard data I've seen is coming from amateurs in Japan collecting and analysing the radioactive content of things like car air filters.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 07:51 GMT Matt Bryant
Re: Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
"....With those little solar panels on your roof, you can split rain-water into hydrogen..." Great, so your solution is two very explosive gases stored in my roof? Oh, and what happens when we have those drought thingummies, which, IIRC, happen a darn sight more often than those tsunamis you lot are pretending are a daily occurence in the UK. Fail, fail, fail.
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Monday 16th April 2012 15:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
What caused the Fukushima disaster was a catastrophic power failure, that's all. They lost power for days and therefore couldn't cool the reactors once they had shut down. There are many possible screnarios that could cause such a thing here, if were were at war for example. Not to mention the fact that nuclear reactors would be a target in such an instance.
We were all duped by the idea that nuclear reactors are supposed to be fail-safe. Fukushima has proven that assumption wrong, and that’s why some European countries have already canned their nuclear projects.
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Monday 16th April 2012 16:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.
'What caused the Fukushima disaster was a catastrophic power failure, that's all. They lost power for days and therefore couldn't cool the reactors once they had shut down. There are many possible screnarios that could cause such a thing here, if were were at war for example. Not to mention the fact that nuclear reactors would be a target in such an instance.'
You seem to be ignoring the fact that modernish plants don't need any power for cooling when scrammed.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
