Monday 4 December 2017

Nuclear Spring?

This week promises to be quite interesting on the nukes front.  We are promised announcements (belated) on the government's Small Modular Reactor programme, and things have been looking up a bit on the Big Nukes front, too. 

We've looked at SMRs before.  The potential is certainly there, on paper - before the prospect is dashed by the NIMBY reaction, city by city, where they need to be installed in order to secure one of the primary benefits (= highly efficient district heating).  Still, Blair thought the British Public wouldn't stand for any type of nuclear revival back in 2005, and forbad any mention of it before the GE of that year.  Plenty of people, including hereabouts, bitterly resent the Hinkley deal - but mostly on economic grounds (and warm traditional feelings towards the French, of course).  It doesn't seem to be a vote-loser, though.  But that maybe because it is on a brownfield site in a remote Somerset field ...

Needless to say, the would-be developers just want public money to get started.  They'll probably get a bit, actually.

On that large-nuke front, the players who were making UK waves five years ago have more or less melted into the background (excepting EDF, of course) and, unsurprisingly, Centrica would like to be out altogether.  But the government seems to have found replacements for them - Chinese and Koreans - with revived interest in the Horizon and NuGen projects.  On paper (again) you could argue there is still 18 GW of capacity under consideration - that figure includes Hinkley, which is not actually being built yet, they are simply being rather flamboyant in their preliminary civil engineering (the photo they always show is just the concrete-mixing plant).

A week from now we may have a clearer picture.

ND 

13 comments:

CityUnslicker said...

I just cant see the future in Nukes when battery technology is moving at such a pace and we have the rapid decline in wind and solar costs to something, which whilst still heavily subsidised, is cheaper than Nukes with less of the decommissioning costs.

Nick Drew said...

Never said it made sense!

Anonymous said...

Battery technology isn't moving all that fast, and the cost of enough batteries to smooth out the intermittent power from wind and solar is very high. Think about powering London over a windless weekend in January.

And I'm not sure the decommissioning costs of sixty years supply of batteries is any lower than that of a nuclear fission plant producing the same energy.

James Higham said...

Tesla is going to dent electric as it becomes apparent that battery has constant issues.

Anonymous said...

"And I'm not sure the decommissioning costs of sixty years supply of batteries is any lower than that of a nuclear fission plant producing the same energy."

One is short term recycling and the other is very, very, very long term recycling.

BTN Nick love the idea of people "melting away" when it comes to nuclear power. Very apt.

Anonymous said...

Chinese and Korean. Bloody hell.

In 1959 we were running the world's first industrial-scale nuclear generator and building the next-generation AGR.

China was entering three years of famine, with tens of millions of deaths (between 15 and 45 million), caused by the Great Leap Forward.

The relative decline of the UK since 1960 has to be one of the greatest ever in a country that's not been defeated in (external) war. Still, we now have diversity.

Charlie said...

"The relative decline of the UK since 1960 has to be one of the greatest ever in a country that's not been defeated in (external) war."

This is an excellent point and worthy of a blog post.

Nick Drew said...

Charlie - great suggestion, we'll set that up, maybe for next weekend

Sebastian Weetabix said...

If HMG wants to meet it’s stated emissions targets without returning us to the Neolithic, then it has to be nuclear.

Of course what we should be doing is dumping the bloody stupid climate religion. Perhaps we could give people jobs digging coal up. Just a thought.

Anonymous said...

With regards to the decline of the UK, is it entirely a decline or is part of it a reversion to expectations?

We are a nation that's an island in the Atlantic and relatively resource poor, it's a testament to will and ingenuity that we ever even managed to even be a global power.

Close proximity to Europe and the North Atlantic conveyor are obviously boons - temperate weather and not too far to go to find somewhere to invade - as was the history of empire building in the region giving the concept of nation states an edge over tribal ones.

Without the resource of empire subsidizing us, a certain amount of contraction was always going to happen. Combined with attempting to maintain power projection abilities, and a civil service that was determined to silo skillsets - so removing the kind of overarching polymath ability that organisations need to be truly ingenious - a level of decline was inevitable.

It's really how much decline is down to hard reality, and how much is down to mismanagement.

And in some ways we parallel Rome - the Commonwealth being the Western Empire, control being lost, and a powerful offspring in the USA representing the Byzantine Empire.

Just so long as London doesn't end up being home of institutionally defended kiddie fiddlers like Rome has. Oh wait, the BBC... :D

andrew said...

Anon,
I can see solar / batteries replacing(*) most residential needs.

It is easy to forget that ~8% of the electricity produced by the power station is lost in the national grid,and I would suspect nearly the same again in the passage from substation to power socket.

Battery technology is improving, but there are other ways of storing solar/wind/wave - freeze the air and then let it defrost or split up water and then ignite or heat sand and then extract heat - and all are in testing at industrial scale.

Batteries do contain poisons, but the process of recycling batteries is well known and unlike nuke, a continuously improving commercial process that leaves something valuable behind, rather than something that needs storage for 500,000 years.

I am pretty sure the time will come in 20-30y when about 50% of the southern UK residential population are 'off grid' for electricity.

At that point two things come to mind

- who pays to maintain the grid
- what happens when another winter of 62/63 happens.


(*)
There are limitations
You need enough room in the house / flat for a battery (say) the size of a washing machine.
Apartment blocks do not have much roof
A lot of scotland


Anonymous said...

" a continuously improving commercial process that leaves something valuable behind, rather than something that needs storage for 500,000 years."

The fuel from current generation nuclear power stations will be re-used by future models. We have enough energy in store to provide Britain's electricity for a couple of centuries -- this is one of Britain's biggest assets.

Used fuel rods do not need to be stored for half a million years, but only until we build better power stations.

Sebastian Weetabix said...

For a nation which is “resource poor” we seem to have a shit load of oil, gas, shale, coal, fish, iron ore, tin, phosphates etc.