Atomic Madeleines
I've mentioned in the past that, as a child of the Chernobyl cloud, arguments over the safety and desirability of nuclear power have a very Proustian feel to them for me. And with the British government's decision to commission an unprecedented and wildly uneconomic program of nuclear power stations, I haul "Nukes and Nukemen" from my archives …
Just a couple more points:
1. One of the points made in the review is that North Sea Oil is running out. Which is true, but on the other hand, I don't actually recall us striking North Sea Uranium. The raw material for nuclear fuel is under the ground in a lot of places which are in general, a little bit more politically unstable than the places where oil is found. If this power station building program goes ahead, I can be pretty confident that some time around 2015, we will discover that the government of South Africa is completely unacceptable and violates the norms of civilised society in a dreadful way and some such.
2. Nuclear power stations were whizzy modern things when the nukemen started up their dog and pony show, but they aren't any more. They're basically 1950s technology. Although there is an awful lot of difficult science which goes into making a nuclear reactor, once the reactor is up and running, the rest of the station is the same "jolly big kettle blowing steam into a windmill" that has been the basis of industrial power since James Watt.[1] Nearly all the efficiency improvements in the nuclear industry over the last fifty years consist of either a) improvements in the efficiency of turbines, etc, which are not specific to nuclear, or b) more efficient ways of solving safety and reliability problems particular to the nuclear industry. It is very hard to see where big cost-efficiency improvements come from in nuclear[2].
3. On the other hand, a hell of a lot of money is being put into renewables research and development at the moment. If the choice between nuclear and renewables is even close at present, it is going to massively favour renewables by the time the nuclear power plants come on stream. We appear to be locking ourselves into an obsolete path.
(edit) 4. The nuke lobbyist I saw on Newsnight last night had pulled out yet another of those half-truths that have had the nuclear industry wondering for fifty years why nobody trusts them. Apparently the trouble with wind-power is that "you can't just turn it on and off you know, it's not flexible and it can't be made to respond to demand". Which is true so far as it goes, but this is also true of every other method of generating electricity except gas. The need for storage is particularly pronounced for nuke stations - some significant proportion of the electricity produced by the nuclear plants in North Wales was used in pumping water from Llyn Padarn to Marchlyn Mawr, 500 metres vertically upward through tunnels dug into Elidir Fawr, so it could fall back down through the Dinorwig pump storage scheme.
Nuclear power is just basically the answer to a question that nobody asked. It is zero-carbon in operation, but that's about the only good thing you can say about it, and it rather points out how bad a criterion for judging anything CO2/kW is rather than anything else. This is one case in which the free market's verdict is correct.
[1] Actually Heronas of Alexandria, of course, and yes I do know that Watt actually invented the reciprocating piston engine and thus doesn't have much to do with turbines, but somehow the sentence looked nicer that way.
[2] Vitrification of nuclear waste on an industrial scale would make the disposal problem a lot cheaper, but since you have to basically assume this problem out of existence in order to get any nuke scheme through a laugh test anyway, I don't want to double-count this.
"The raw material for nuclear fuel is under the ground in a lot of places which are in general, a little bit more politically unstable than the places where oil is found"
ReplyDelete...and also Australia, which isn't (and is a much more significant uranium supplier than, say, Norway as a gas supplier)
"It is very hard to see where big cost-efficiency improvements come from in nuclear"
Isn't the idea that if EdF and Areva build the things, then our nuclear power plants will only cost about as much to build as the ones that EdF and Areva build in France? I agree it's not an off-the-peg process, but it doesn't seem completely insane to assume that if they treat their new plant as EdF/Areva PWR #55, it will cost about as much as EdF/Areva PWR #54 in Nantes.
Obviously, if the UK government are assuming ours will cost less per GW than EdF and Areva are currently achieving in France, then they're clowns and should be nailed to furniture.
[note: in the spirit of this blog, all data above is made up and no facts are checked]
Your most famous post ever applies here in spades - good ideas do not need a lot of lies told about them, fibber's forecasts are worthless, and audit is your friend. (I note the NAO has had some very trenchantly rude things to say about the various aspects of the nuke industry it's been allowed to look at).
ReplyDeleteAll three point clearly to avoiding this as a project pursued by morons.
John - we don't get the full details till Thursday (and frankly, those hoofbeats you hear are the sound of "slim chance of me reading them" riding out of town) but the current spin is that the thing's going to be done on a no-subsidies basis, so somebody somewhere is making an unrealistic assumption.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure about the level of subsidy in French nuclear power, but remember that France is a *lot* better supplied with locations not near population centres and in general has lower land costs.
I tend to agree with Mike (and with this excellent CT comment) - we can't really sensibly talk about nuclear power until we have an entirely new nuclear industry, with all of the current nukemen out of it.
MM refers indeed.
ReplyDeleteI don't know enough about French nukes to say much more (I might look into them if I get the chance, although this is a book-review-type promise) - but again, if we let EDF and Areva do the work they will certainly be reluctant to employ the clueless lying idiots who've run the UK industry, and on the basis of my limited understanding I don't think EDF and Areva are not especially clueless or lying in their own right.
[note: this may be complete nonsense based on either the UK government's lies, the French government's lies, EDF and Areva's lies, or the Economist. Sorry.]
bleh. "I don't think EDF and Areva *are* especially clueless..."
ReplyDelete(this is why i prefer commenting on my own blogs, that way I can edit the comments when I make moronic mistakes without anyone realising. Of course, that's also because nobody reads them.)
Can't we just ask (and/or pay) the French to build a few more of them, in France?
ReplyDeletetell me more about this "international trade" idea of yours, I find it strangely compelling ...
ReplyDelete(seriously, this was another subject of the Newsnight panel discussion - the idea that there was something inherently awful about buying electricity from France)
If you lived in Sussex/Kent you'd likely be more inclined towards building nuclear power stations in Cumbria and Scotland than the Loire Valley area.
ReplyDeleteThe French are involved in building the new, next generation, "totally safe" nuclear reactor in Finland. Reports that I've heard from people who understand the nuclear industry, but are pretty biased against nuclear power, suggest that its following the usual British model (cover ups, cost overruns, lying, etc).
ReplyDelete"Isn't the idea that if EdF and Areva build the things, then our nuclear power plants will only cost about as much to build as the ones that EdF and Areva build in France?"
Well only if a significant part of their costs in France were in R&D, rather than standard civil engineering costs. Which given accounting on these kinds of secretive government projects is unlikely.
"Well only if a significant part of their costs in France were in R&D, rather than standard civil engineering costs."
ReplyDeletepresumably the thing which costs all the money in nuclear power is the nuclear stuff - i.e. EDF can get British contractors to build the parts of the site that don't require picometre tolerances etc [i.e. most of them, but the cheapest bits], but then fly over a whole load of Frenchmen working for whichever contractors manage to do it in France to build the parts that we evidently can't [i.e. the expensive, nuclear-y bits in the middle].
The Finnish story is v interesting. How freedom-of-information-y is their gov't on nukey matters?
Here's an interesting article about Finland from the International herald Times, not the most anti-business company in the world ...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/05/bloomberg/bxnuke.php
It rather support DDs comments about the ease with which large civil engineering projects can go wrong, which is always overlooked by the pro-nuclear idealists.
That should be "anti-business newspaper", of course.
ReplyDeleteHey, have you seen that the National Journal (very respected in the U.S.) just did a major hatchet job on the Lancet studies? It's the cover story this week:
ReplyDeletehttp://nationaljournal.com/njcover.htm
yes, the author of the piece wrote to me about it. To be honest there doesn't appear to be much new material there - I think Tim Lambert is having a go, but I really can't be bothered. It's like evolution or something, where everyone with a brain in their head has been convinced, and I can leave the job of arguing with people who are pretending not to understand on purpose, to folk more tireless than myself.
ReplyDeleteAh, if you're serious about nukes what you want is a Canadian one...
ReplyDeleteMy brother is a policy wonk in the energy field, and if you said "nuclear power is zero carbon" anywhere near him he would leap at you and tear out your throat. It's low-carbon, but not zero, once you take into account things like mining the U, refining it, processing it, building the stations and handling the waste.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget, incidentally, that we did more or less find North Sea Uranium in the 60s, at Yesnaby - but mining it is politically impossible and will probably lead to more Peter Maxwell Davies.
I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility of advances in reactor technology either, to be honest; there's a lot more happening in the Gen IV field than just better turbines.
The politically-unstable reserves field's been dealt with, but it's worth noting that the top 10 U reserves are in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, SA, Brazil, Namibia, Uzbekistan, the US, Niger and Russia. Compare that list to the top 10 oil nations and I think U comes out ahead.
will probably lead to more Peter Maxwell Davies
ReplyDeleteAnd if you thought it were possible to have too much Dylan...
"[i.e. most of them, but the cheapest bits], but then fly over a whole load of Frenchmen working for whichever contractors manage to do it in France to build the parts that we evidently can't [i.e. the expensive, nuclear-y bits in the middle]."
ReplyDeleteYeah, but you're not going to get significant reductions on any of that stuff - there's no economies of scale, and while experienced workers will improve things somewhat, not enough to greatly reduce the cost (though it should greatly reduce the risk of catastrophic price overruns, because it is proven technology, at least in theory).
"Curve of Binding Energy" Interesting read as it gives a blow by blow on how to build a plutonium bomb.
ReplyDeleteIf you go to a nuke power economy the tons of very interesting materials passing through the system means that technology to count atoms within plus of minus 2 per ton will have to be developed.
I don't think I want to go there.