This bears a look at.
The lies about nuclear power economics that only came out when they were appraised for privatisation.
Nuclear power has a whole history of lies about it's true costs. And have seen the end of this by a long chalk.
"The CEGB conducted a detailed economic appraisal of the competing designs and concluded that the AGR proposed for Dungeness B would generate the cheapest electricity, cheaper than any of the rival designs and the best coal-fired stations".
Except, of course, that the CEGB was told by its masters which answer to chose. It was public knowledge *at the time* that calcs had to be presented to the third decimal place before the "edge" over PWR was apparent. No engineer would claim that such figures were "real". And of course the commercial AGR was a very large extrapolation from the Windscale prototype.
CEGB chairman Arthur (megawatts) Hawkins said later of Dungeness B words to the effect that "This was a mistake we must never make again".
What matters at the end of the day is not the forecasts and the rhetoric, but the out-turn costs.
Magnox was never expected to be commercially competitive, but it turned out to be very much so, in part because inflation discounted the capital costs, and partly because of the long lives achieved.
I have not seen an equivalent calculation for the AGRs, but the people running EDF are not stupid (and no longer under UK government dictat), they are investing significantly in life extension safety cases because they are confident of making money out of current and future generation.
Going back to privatisation, potential investors in National Power played hardball with the government over nuclear because they were not just greedy, they were *very* greedy. The last CEGB chairman, Gil Blackman, said that Cecil Parkinson and the civil servants ran rings around the CEGB. Well, the bankers ran rings around the Tories.
And, of course, admittedly after a lot of hard work by Nuclear Electric, the AGR fleet *was* privatised.
....
:-)
Harry is classic doublethink. On the one hand he denies that nuclear can ever be built better or cheaper, and on the other he insists that his hopelessly uncompetitive solar panels and windmills can be....
I think the condition is incurable.
Well harry, if we didn't have the nukes there would have been a lot more CO2 released by burning coal, etc. This according to you would have cost the earth. So whatever the nukes cost must make sense to you as they have already saved the planet.
We need tidal projects. Every estuary in the UK. And links to Europe.
This, as you very well know, has been dealt with in previous threads. There is nowhere near enough tidal power available to supply the UK's needs on e.g. 55+GW on a cold winter's evening when there's no wind or sun.
La Rance, in Brittany, until recently the largest tidal scheme in the world, located on an estuary with one of the highest tidal ranges in the world (that's why it's where it is) can only manage an average of
60MW. To keep the UK going on that winter's evening you'd need nearly 1000 such tidal schemes around the country, and that's assuming they'd each produce as much power as La Rance, which they wouldn't. There are only a handful of places with decent tidal ranges around the UK, and the majority of them don't get near that at La Rance.Tidal streaming isn't any better. The Pentland Firth is about the best bet in UK waters, and if we get 1GW out of it in total we'll be doing well.
And none of that takes into account intermittency.
As for links to Europe, what makes you think they'd have surplus electricity to sell? When the wind isn't blowing in the UK in all probability it won't be blowing in Europe either, and they'd be wanting all the electricity they can generate for themselves. We already have 2GW link to France, a 1GW link to Holland, and there's a
1.4GW link in progress to Norway, with the possibility of a 1GW link to Iceland at some indefinite time in the future. Total 5.4 GW. We need ten times that capacity. And that doesn't take into account down-time for these sub-sea links, which can be significant.What does surprise me about you, Harry, is that you claim to have had some fairly senior position in the NHS to do with heating, energy etc. yet you are unable to grasp the simplest of technical arguments. Still, I suppose that's the NHS for you. Either that, or you've grossly exaggerated your position and responsibilities, and in reality were the maintenance chap who looked after the boiler in some little local cottage hospital.
We don't want anything to do with an area that is going to implode, we can't rely on getting any energy to import or getting paid if we export.
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