.

Truly awful looking things.

IMHO each and every one of them wants a demolition charge around it's base.

Nick

Ah! But nuclear keeps generating even when the wind drops! Something these clever renewable people conveniently forget.

Andrew,

.

That's because the electricity was a by-product of the main process, which was the production of Plutonium.

… We are now seeing the 'peace-time' price of nuclear-generated electricity.

MichaelG.

Think of all that lovely cheap neodynium we could get to play with

Edited By Robin on 11/09/2017 09:50:08

Indeed, and the energy potential of nuclear materials is greater than anything else by an order of magnitudes vs any gas, petrol or other raw material. The future is still very much a nuclear one and the UK gov knows it.

Michael W

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Granted.

But they blight just one area not vast swathes of coastline, fields and hills.

Nick

Bad news Robin, we did the sums in another thread recently and showed that you ain't gonna beat big electricity on price with internal combustion at home.

I think it was Martin Kyte who highlighted the need to factor in all the costs before jumping to conclusions. That can be very hard to do. In the case of Nuclear, the fuel is dirt cheap and so is electricity generated from it. Until, that is you add in safety and decommissioning costs. The sad thing is that Nuclear is widely perceived to be worse than burning carbon. Not so. Although the effects are less in-yer-face, dumping large quantities of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere is not cheap in the long run. Health issues apart, the cost of Climate Change will be colossal, the only good news being that most of us old farts will be dead before the bill is presented!

Talking of old farts (and I speak as a fully qualified member of the club), we always have to remember that everything is continually changing. Our experiences and understandings may not still be valid. For example, listening to a chap talking about electric cars the other day, I suddenly realised that my ideas about battery reliability and cost are 30 years out-of-date. Modern batteries are much better than the carp of my youth, but somehow I don't quite believe it. It made me wonder if other forum members have similar problems with their world view? Anyway, the expert explained that industry direction and government policy are both based on battery technology in development for mass production ten years hence, not what's available off the shelf today. Throughout history pretty much all new technology starts off by being unreliable and expensive. Ten or twenty years later it's suddenly much cheaper and much more reliable. Wind power is just another example of the economics coming good in due time. So despite the mistakes of the past, there's still good reason to be optimistic about the future. It will be different though!

Dave

I hear pro nuclear arguments all the time ,usually from people who work there ,but you have a different perspective when you live near one of the biggest moneypits in the Uk, Sellafield .Which is stuck on the edge of one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

I somewhat agree, although I wouldn't want one in my garden!

Some of them, where a degree of conscious design has gone into it do look very attractive. The ones that look like someone has put a garden shed atop a pole are less attractive. I'm sure they could be made to look even more beautiful if some effort was made.

One of the reasons new nuclear is so expensive is that the government wants to put all the financial risk on the generators for the next 30 years. As we have no real knowledge of what the situation will be so far into the future, the generators want a very high price now just to be sure they are not going to lose out long term. With large capital intensive projects such as this, it makes a lot more sense to me for the government to borrow the money and take on the financial risk. This is how the main electricity infrastructure was built in the 50's and 60's. Governments can borrow more cheaply than private companies, and if it costs less in the long term to generate we win.

The present idea of building a design which has never been built successfully before seems particularly odd. We have long experience of AGRs, we own the design, we have long experience of operating them, and we have an up to date safety case. They are more thermally efficient than PWRs, and have higher fuel burnup. Why not just build some more? At least when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing we can still have some power. Yes battery storage might solve all problems, but it might not. As Baden Powell put it, Be Prepared!

Last year wind was only generating for 36% of the time (according to the BBC news article). So something has to fill the gap. We don't have the ability to store renewable energy at any scale yet either. There is also going to a a significant change in electricity usage given the targetted move away from IC transport. All these electric cars will need charging. Nuclear has served this country well over the last 50 years or so, but alas we have lost all the knowledge and skills in our own industry where we were once world leaders. The legacy of Nuclear is very expensive, but it is a reliable source . There are no easy answers here.