No new nukes for UK

http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=132&storyCode=2040766

No new nukes for UK
07 December 2006

Clare Spottiswoode, deputy chairman of British Energy, has said that no new nuclear generation capacity can be expected in the UK or much of the the rest of Europe before 2020.

The comments came at a Platts energy security forum in New York where Spottiswoode was quoted as saying that, apart from France and Finland, it is "highly unlikely" that any plants will be built in the rest of Europe before 2020.

Spottiswoode added that the reason was that the rest of Europe would not undertake any new nuclear development until the UK does and it will take until at least 2020 for the UK government to put in place a proper planning regime and regulations for new construction.

With the UK’s current fleet of nuclear stations due to be all but decommissioned by then, a significant capacity crunch is looming.

> Spottiswoode added that the reason was that the rest of Europe would not undertake any new nuclear development until the UK does and it will take until at least 2020 for the UK government to put in place a proper planning regime and regulations for new construction.

Wonder why "the rest of Europe" are allowing the deadbeats in charge of
UK energy policy to hold them back?
:shrug:

...More CO₂! Hurray!

Two multi-million pound projects offering competing visions to secure Britain's future power demands were given a green light by the Government today.

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, has been granted the go-ahead to build a gigantic £400 million gas-fired plant at Langage, near Plymouth in Devon.

The 885-megawatt facility will be the UK's first major new power plant for five years when it opens in winter 2008, capable of powering the equivalent of a million homes.

Meanwhile in London, approval has been given - after 16 years of negotiation - for a £200m waste incinerator in Bexley, across the Thames from the old Dagenham Ford plant.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2229067,00.html

Can't believe how much of that stuff I get...

yeah, there's scope for a few KWh sitting in my mailbox, too... :D

And isn't that what really matters?
:eyes:

I'm amazed that Europe continues to build more gas-fired power plants while Russian price hikes have threatened to disrupt supplies for the past several years. Hell, they just averted a gas shortage days ago!

Are these people insane? Anyone who has been keeping an eye on the European NG situation should see this as the riskiest possible decision they could take. My guess is it's the only one that could muster the political backing, though. Oh well, in 10 years they'll be able to convert a barely used NG generating station to low-income housing or something...

The anti-nuclear meme has been extremely successful, and the opposition has a lot of inertia. I think the only thing that will change Western opinions on the subject is a truly catastrophic energy crisis. Then there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when we discover that it takes 15 years to get significant generating capacity on line, but we need the energy now.

Even as an informed Peak Oiler I was a devoted anti-nuke until quite recently. I bought James Lovelock's "Revenge of Gaia" early in the summer, and agreed with everything he said except his pro-nuclear stance. My subsequent investigation into the question of what our realistic options are in the face of climate change and oil depletion have caused me to do a 180 on the subject. Lovelock is right - if we don't use nuclear we will use coal. The more difficult we make it to use nuclear, the more likely we will be to use coal. That will be catastrophic for our civilization, and possibly for our species (not to mention the other species who share the planet).

As natural gas becomes too expensive, more and more home heating will be switched ad hoc to electrical resistance heating. This will pose a major risk to the grid stability if sufficient base load capacity is not available. Given the fact that most good hydro sites are already in use in the developed world, the only two remaining options for base load generation are nuclear and coal. Nuclear power in fact has a good safety profile (certainly relative to coal) and its waste problem is local, unlike the CO2 waste problem of coal which is global. IMO it's the only safe and sane choice if our global civilization (not just America) wants to maintain any semblance of Business As Usual.

CO2 sequestration is a chimera. Wind, solar, biomass and biofuels can't do the job in the time we have left, especially given the global political environment. IMO we have less than 5 years left to get our shit together before large disruptions hit, starting from the marginal nations and working their in towards Washington, DC.

I know nuclear power has a lot of problems, ranging from the threat of material theft and terrorist attacks to ground water pollution and all the coziness and corruption problems that come with large industrial endeavors. I just don't see any other safe option that can give us the power we need in the time we have left.

The UK just shut 2 nuclear stations and will retire more in the next 10 years.

The UK has no domestic uranium supplies and will have to compete with the rest of the world for dwindling uranium resources.

The UK will have to spend $112 billion to decommission and dispose existing reactors and spent fuel.

The UK deployed 630 MW of new wind capacity last year and has more than 2100 MW in development - the official estimate is 20% of UK electrical demand by 2020 (and this does not reflect the contribution of offshore wind)...

http://www.iesd.dmu.ac.uk/wind_energy/sustainable_dev/wcwind.html

Tidal power in the Severn Estuary (tidal turbines) alone could satisfy 10% of UK electrical demand. Total UK tidal power potential is ~ 10 GW...

http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/reports/ser/tide/tide.asp

A recent study by the Imperial College London concluded that photovoltaics could reasonably replace existing UK nuclear capacity by 2023...

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/P7522.htm

Biomass could provide 10-15% of the UK's total energy demand (not just electricity) by 2020...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3700887.stm

The UK's wave and wind power potentials exceed current UK demand several time over...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1651496.stm

Emerging energy efficiency technologies like LED street lighting can (and will) reduce UK electrical and other energy demands...

http://www.a2gov.org/PublicServices/SystemsPlanning/Energy/LEDLighting.html

Energy efficiency and renewables can (and will) supplant fossil and nuclear energy in the UK (and elsewhere) in the next 15 years.

Coal is NOT the only alternative to nuclear - not by a long shot.

Do you understand that the inherent intermittance of wind, PV and tidal mean they cannot supply base load? Neither can they supply peak load, due to the fact that they cannot be throttled off and on at will. They have a role for sure, but a recent study in the UK determined that wind can't supply more than 25% of the total capacity without destabilizing the grid.

There are two problems with most alternative energy sources - variable output and high energy input costs (low EROEI). The uncontrollable variability (as with wind) is what makes the source difficult to integrate in our current grid in anything but small quantities, regardless of how much energy may available overall. The higher input costs means that we not only need to replace the energy currently in use, but a delta on top of that to account for the increased energy of production.

Biomass has logistical and EROEI problems. It's very expensive to transport, so must be used close to its point of origin, requiring a very decentralized and thus capital-intensive generating capacity. It can be gasified at source and the gas transported, but you then lower the EROEI ratio, making it much less attractive as a large scale solution. Here's an interesting look at cellulosic ethanol and biomass gasification by a couple of thoughtful guys in the industry.

Conservation will be the main weapon against oil depletion for the next ten years or so. Beyond that, if we (speaking globally here) want to switch to an electrical economy, the requirement for additional invariable base load generating capacity is going to have the world looking at its traditional sources - coal, hydro and nuclear. Hydro is my first choice, but most of the suitable locations are already in use. I believe that for expanding our base load we really only have have two options. Renewables will play a large role, but we need to be realistic about their potential contributions due to their various inherent constraints. For peak load we have only one: natural gas. God help us if we start to run out of that..

Here it is (at least I think it was the one you wanted to post):
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/10/cellulosic-ethanol-vs-biomass.html

I especially liked the section about the Personal Cellulosic Biomass Reactor, though he did neglect to mention that 1) his process generates, as a fortuitous by-product, a biogenic matrix of material that has astounding light-absorbing characteristics and contains large amounts of Buckminsterfullerenes (useful for keywords in journal citations), which has 2) potential lucrative industrial applications in steel manufacture, printing, as semiconductor dopants, and in minstrelsy; and 3) the initial "seeds" are factories for Von Neumann machines that intelligently re-combine low atomic-weight transposable nano-informatic elements in a 4^n + x helical matrix. And better still, the "seed" code is an efficiently and elegantly optimized example of genetic programming -- and Open Source.

(I love the smell of bullshit in the morning!)

--p!
Burpee is now owned by ITT.
For real.

Only a true energy geek could laugh as hard as I just did at that.

Thanks for fixing the url.

For instance, you can build nuclear to support peak load. Off-peak you can use the heat generated by those reactors to drive other industrial proceses. Such as synthetic fuel generation. I'm sure there are lots of others.

And I fully disagree with the statement that renewable power systems cannot produce firm, stable and dispatchable power for 21st Century electrical grids.

Biogas and biomass power plants can be used intermittently to produce electricity at night (or cloudy days) or during periods of light winds to balance and manage loads from large scale solar and wind power systems. They can be used for peaking power as well.

Tidal power production is also highly predictable - filling the "gaps" in tidal power production at slack tides with intermittent power from biomass plants is not rocket science.

The above does not require exotic storage technologies.

Humans are primarily diurnal in nature. Solar power systems provide electricity to human societies when they are most active. They can also shave diurnal peaks in power demand.

Biomass power can be produced by small (<5 MW) CHP power plants using local biomass fuel sources throughout the UK. A thousand 5 MW biomass plants can produce the same amount of power as five 1000 MW nuclear plants. The power can be distributed by the grid - no fuel transport problems required.

Multi-MW (up to 20 MW) flywheel storage systems are in operation throughout the world today. Coupling these systems with wind farms can be used to buffer and manage power output from these facilities.

Vanadium flow batteries can be used storage and grid management as well.

Multi-MW fuel cell systems are in use today. Hydrogen produced by electrolysis and stored during periods of "excess" renewable power production can be used to manage renewable power systems as well.

All these systems can be deployed far more rapidly than nuclear power plants.

And - they don't require the UK to import uranium or spend another 70 billion pounds to dispose of decommissioned reactors and spent reactor fuel.

Because as much as I like nuclear power technically, there isn't a chance that enough new plants could come on-line fast enough to make a damn bit of difference anyway. The world has 5 to 10 years to put mitigation strategies in place before the situation with oil and NG gets serious enough to constrain global industrial capability. I also don't think a government like China will choose a complex system of renewables over a bunch of nice simple coal plants...

One thing I wonder when I read about complex distributed proposals like yours is what impact they will have on the resilience of our global socio-economic system. It strikes me that a highly complex, highly interconnected solution can only reduce the system's resilience. What I don't have a feel for is whether the distributed nature of the solution would restore the resilience to some degree, offsetting the complexity-driven loss. I know it would if the system were less interconnected, and the failure of one generating node couldn't impact its neigbours, but with all elements tied to the grid I start to worry. It's something to keep in mind - decreasing the interconnections by making the electrical system a set of isolated generating islands might make the whole system more robust, but it would also increases the difficulty of load management due to the smaller scale of each island. I don't have the knowledge yet to analyze the tradeoff.

It's certain that increasing the complexity of the generating system by incorporating a large number of different small-scale technologies will lower the overall EROEI and make both the electrical system and the socio-economic system that depends on it less resilient. That's probably just one of the costs of doing business at this stage, though.

And of course none of this addresses the transportation fuel problem.

Thanks. It's a good discussion of "cellulosic ethanol." In a related topic, biodiesel is also being produced using high temp catalytic processes rather than transesterification.

As for natural gas, there seems to be sort of a cargo cult mentality developing about that... build the LNG terminal, and the gas will come. Nobody has quite explained where the gas will come from, especially as the weather gets rougher and sea levels rise.

I'm perfectly OK and really, really, really, really cool.

If on the other hand "by 2020" and I am talking about nuclear power, I am saying that "nuclear power is not an option."

Moreover, I'm hearing this "by 2020" talk from a member of the same crowd who not so long ago were telling us all about how nuclear power was not an option for the future because of issues like "waste," "economics," "safety," and so on.

Here is a list of European countries that have had "nuclear phaseouts" that have died rather inglorious deaths: Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy..." (Italy still has a NIMBY attitude: They're paying to have nuclear plants built in France.)

The UK will build nuclear plants in the next decade. Everybody will because reality has a way of negating fantasy. People are rapidly realizing what, exactly, their options are. They will probably be too little too late, but they will be built, and they will come on line before 2020.