[XAP]Bob wrote:And build some more flipping nukes.....
My worry in the UK about that direction is the way we seem to want to build them. Select a totally unproven technology with such capacity that we are very dependent on it working and being commissioned on schedule. Or rather tha "unproven" maybe that it has been proven to have loads of problems and issues such that no plants have yet been completed and working and all such designs are massively behind schedule.
And then we seem to be keen on passing future stations to the Chinese and I don't have much confidence in our political masters enforcing suitable safety and monitoring regimes when profit is on the line. These days it seems far to easy for a company to mess-up and then just walk away from the wreckage washing their hands of liability and leaving it for others to pay for and pick-up the pieces. We've already seen this with Hinckley where it has emerged that the UK taxpayer has underwritten the decommissioning waste disposal/storage costs "should it prove too expensive for EDF" or if we close the plant before 2060.
People complain about how much renewables are subsidised (ignoring the subsidies hydrocarbons get) and then ignore how much e.g. Hinckley is in effect being subsidised (or rather how much extra we will be paying so that the private operators will be guaranteed good profits).
I agree it, as a technology, might be least bad of the non-renewables options, but the way the UK is pursuing it makes it rather bad.
Also the UK needs to look more at the nature of it's demand as it is far more complex than totalling up generating megawatts to demand megawatts. A significant consideration is how our generating capacity can respond to demands on supply - and nuclear is not very good at that. For example, a Government report says how the equivalent of 4 Hinkleys could be added to the grid through just having smarter generation and storage. We've added a third of a Hinkley to the grid since 2010 just through interconnections to the continent to allow us to buy in cheaper electricity (though this could become a bit unreliable as France has to close down a lot of it''s nuclear generation capacity soon due to safety concerns (for tests) ... oh dear, EDF again ...).
And we keep overlooking (or cutting) energy efficiency measures. Take the reduction in electricity demand since 2010 and project forward and by the time Hinkley starts generating (assuming EDF ever get the design to work) then demand will have dropped by another 6 Hinkleys. And that's with the current government cutting back on their investment in energy efficiency.
Ian