UKC

Why do we want Chinese money and French Technology to build and run this? Why can't we raise the money within the UK with Share offers? And don't we have the home grown expertise to make it work?

In reply to Trangia:
Why can't we use the disgusting amount of money on sustainable energy rather than nuclear?

In reply to Trangia:

because we got rid of all our local expertise years back.
That said judging from the EDF's recent track history they dont have much either.

In reply to ianstevens:

Nuclear energy is sustainable

In reply to KevinD:

It's Areva doing the design.

In reply to GrahamD:

Technically, it's not as we will run out of Uranium eventually and we can't make any more in a feasible timescale. In practice, there is enough that we're very unlikely to ever run out. However... solar/wind/tidal are all estimated to be cheaper than a new Hinckley point. Plus it removes the issue of nuclear waste disposal. I really don't understand why this thing was ever being considered.

In reply to ianstevens:

I'd like to know where you've seen that because every report I've read on that topic seems to suggest the opposite.

In reply to Trangia:


Because when he was chancellor, George Osborne decided he wanted to be China's best friend and bent over backwards to do deals with them.


Good question, given their current track record of budget and time over-runs.


Who would buy shares in something that won't give a return for at least 10 years and whose cost will almost certainly double between now and completion?

In reply to tony:

>

Pension funds?

and the price will reflect your second point.

When looking at your questions you have to ask why the Chinese are so keen despite them?

In reply to Trangia:


Why would pension funds want shares in something that won't generate any income for at least a decade? The future of British nuclear power is bucket of shambolic uncertainty. No-one knows how much it will cost, or when it will be finished, or even what the future decommissioning costs might be.

In reply to RomTheBear:

I take it back as more recent estimates seem to suggest that onshore wind and solar would have a slightly lower levelised cost. Not tidal though.

In reply to tony:


Which, as I've said, begs the question, why are the Chinese so keen for a stake?

In reply to Trangia:


Perhaps they're not locked into the same need for short-term returns and are more interested in longer-term influence. In political terms, they'll wield a big stick with which to beat the UK if they're holding the UK to ransom for a significant chunk of our electricity generation.

In reply to Trangia:

Because part of the deal is the next nuclear reactor is a Chinese one?

In reply to ianstevens:


I think you are rather oversimplifying the cost and environmental impact of 'renewables' ! To try to go to renewables would (a) cover the country in wind generators (b) need to pretty much rebuild the grid as intelligent grid, capable of responding to changes in load and generating capacity.

In reply to tony:

All the more reason for our Government to find a way of funding it ourselves. There are investors who will take a long term view, and Pension funds are amongst them.

I'm not trying to pick a fight just curious to try and understand why we (Britain) are not trying to find a way of going this alone in view of some of the pitfalls you have rightly exposed.....?

In reply to Trangia:


What China is saying at the moment doesn't quite sound like the peaceable start to a harmonious partnership. I think Teresa May is probably right to be wary. A relative spoke to Chinese people in China recently when he went over there, and they thought that Osbourne and Cameron were being rather naive, given their knowledge of their government.

In reply to ianstevens:

Because there's not enough room on this island for all the wind turbines we'd need.
Plus they don't provide any electricity when it's either not windy enough or too windy.

And have you seen the amount of energy required to make a wind turbine, plus the cabling, plus the pylons, plus the access road for erection and maintenance, not only of the turbines, but also the pylons.

Renewables are not all positive.
Of course if they started putting wind turbines all over the home counties and in our major conurbations (where all the electricity is used) then you wouldn't need such long access roads, or so many pylons.
However the great and the good who live in the home counties/conurbations seem to think that such turbines should be everywhere else except next to them.

In reply to RomTheBear:

Wave is expensive, tidal less so (although there are many unkowns - see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510006440). Offshore wind is also a bit more costly than nuclear at present, but can easily be evolved with technology wheras nuclear cannot.

In reply to fred99:



Handy we're surrounded by sea and have several techniques for storing energy, such as pumped hydro.


Have you seen the amount of energy required to make a nucelar power plant, plus the cabling, plus the pylons, plus the access road for maintenance, not only of the reactors, but also the waste, turbines, pylons and other infrastructure.


No, they're not. But they're a lesser evil than most options.



On average, generally arseholes down there. Not all of course. Glad I moved away.

In reply to Trangia:

I agree, in the grand scheme of things £19b (or whatever it is) isnt actually *that* much. Considering the countries energy security is at stake, its interesting that self funding it never seemed to be an option, where as trident, being twice as expensive, is in the budget.
but, as others have said, why o why are we doing this now? when renewables are getting/ have got to a point where they out perform nuclear. We are 30 years behind. Nuclear was for the 80s/90s.

Why don't we buy/ lease 1Billion square metres of the Sahara desert and build a shit-tonne of solar? nobody lives there. its a way of supporting africa without direct aid, pretty much unlimited supply of energy....

In reply to La benya:


They'd just get blown up by Islamic terrorists. The cost of the interconnect would be interesting.

In reply to GrahamD:


(a) cover the country in wind generators

(b) need to pretty much rebuild the grid as intelligent grid, capable of responding to changes in load and generating capacity. -

In reply to Lusk:

Likely that all too true. I believe Morocco has built a whopper of a solar field, fingers crossed its a raving success and security issues aren't an issue. This kind of solar project gives me a little hope about potential future energy crisis'.

In reply to Lusk:

i would have thought it would be extremely difficult to blow up a significant proportion of anything that size. and besides, if we didnt need to invade them every few years, middle eastern countries might pump out fewer mentalists.

we connect continents with cables for the internet, we connect countries for power supplies, africa isnt that far away from spain and their infrastructure, would be 'easy' enough to join to france, and the rest of europe/ us.
what does the capital outlay matter if the fuel costs are 0? £19b for a nuclear plant + £100b (massive guess) over its lifetime/ decommisioning. Or £100b upfront for a solar array and cabling to support many, many more people.

obviously its just blue sky thinging, but i costantly amazed at how limited governments forawrd planning always seems to be. take 'smart motorways'/ increasing lanes for example. in 20 years self drive cars will be dominant, driving inches from each other, all interconnected and safe... why would we need more lanes and fancy road signs? invest that money earlier in the proper technologies and they will come about quicker (space-race methodology).

In reply to Lusk:


I think you might have cross-posted this from the Daily Mail comments section by accident.
jk

In reply to Lusk:


I've always wondered the same about Dyson Spheres...

In reply to Timmd:


I read somewhere that that direct foreign investment/ownership of power stations and other critical infrastructure is severely restricted or banned in China.

If that is the case, its a bit sanctimonious of the Chinese state to question the governments decision to review.

In reply to GrahamD:

a) not really, b) why not?

CB

In reply to tony:


Judging by the deal he got, some might suggest that he bent over forwards for them -- but seeing as he went to our 'finest' public school , that sort of thing probably comes naturally to him.

In reply to Lord of Starkness:

Or perhaps more accurately still, that he bent the UK taxpayer over forwards for them..

In reply to La benya:


You must have a very different definition of "easy" to me. It's very important to understand that current power grids such as the UK grid (including interconnect to France and Holland) are about balancing excess supply and demand over short/local scales. Most power in the UK does not travel very far. If you look at the USA they have separate "east coast" and "west coast" grids because the losses involved in linking the two make doing so essentially pointless. (They also have a separate "Texas" grid because they're even worse at strategic thinking than the UK.)

Where-as all the power from a Saharan solar plant would travel all the way to the UK. None of the current grids in-between have anything like the capacity needed. I believe that the biggest pylons and cables in the UK can transmit ~ 0.5 GW to 3 Gw . Current demand is ~ 30 GW so to meet that you would need between 10 and 60 lines of mega pylons running all the way from the Sahara to the UK, except where there's water where you'd need a similar number of HVDC interconnects. Losses would also be significantly higher with the longer distance.

Then we have to think about the quantity of storage that such a scheme would need.... Hint - more than anyone has any clue how to provide...

Edit: Using data from Table 1 and Table 2 in this report - http://www.northwestcoastconnections.com/docs/140812_NWCC_App_4_Tech_Cost_R... - I'd estimate somewhere in the region of £60 Bn for the cabling, ignoring issues like mountains, oceans, people not wanting to live by a line of 10-30 parallel super-pylons, and the need to replace them every few decades.

In reply to wintertree:


Long term if we are to harvest really significant and reliable solar power for Europe (uk included) quite a bit of it is going to come from the arid southern bits and north Africa. Significant upgrade and rationalisation of electricity distribution will have to happen. In the meantime it can probably happen piecemeal with new interconnects going in and improved fan-out lines either end. An alternative is to harvest and physically move the stored energy somehow, perhaps in the form of something we currently produce energy intensively domestically (steel and haber process fertiliser spring to mind), perhaps as synthetic fuel through a pipelines or by ship. As with most things the reality is likely to be a messy poorly planned mix that's cobbled together and made to just about work albeit expensively and sub optimally.


There are various solar thermal power plant designs intended to even out diurnal variation using molten salt or even simple water filled ponds heated directly by the sun and insulated by a halocline. Not trivial and not a complete solution but not as bad as a simple photovoltaic array. It's a major challenge but it's one we're going to have to face up to, nuclear is not a complete solution.
jk

In reply to wintertree:

£60b doesnt sound like a ludicrous amount of money to me...? comparable to a nuclear plant in each of the countries.
And 'easy' is in comparison to creating a nuclear reactor, running it safely and then decommissioning it. Running a load of cable, no matter how thick/ expensive etc will be alot easier than that.
all the isues you raised apply to nuclear, and indeed every other technology based on adapting current infrastructure, rather than revolution. brings me back to my -short-sighted-planning argument.

In reply to cb294:


How many wind turbines do YOU think will be required to generate the other 80% of the energy renewable currently don't supply ? and how much extra pump storage is needed to smooth out supply and demand ? in fact can we actually accomodate that much pump storage (if we can its a long, very inefficient distance to where the load power is actually required).

b) why not?

Evolution of the grid to a smart grid will happen but it takes time - much longer than the comissioning a few extra baseload nuclear power stations.

In reply to jkarran:


Perhaps. If every roof top - regardless of inclination and direction - in the country was solar PV and the storage problem magically solved itself we'd be close to sufficiency with that and significant off shore wind. A lot of ifs and buts in there but it doesn't seem to be a forgone conclusion that we'll be pulling energy from Africa. If all of France and Spain went heavily rooftop solar-PV as well we'd pull from them and they'd pull from Africa and the losses throughout would be a lot less. This needs a lot less infrastructure than getting our PV from Africa, although it needs a unified energy policy across a large number of politically distinct nations - difficult even before we decided to leave the EU...


Yes, a lot of interconnect building is happening isn't it. Nowhere near enough though for most of the energy to come from Africa. It's approaching enough for larger physical scale load balancing if every country on the route is heavily Solar-PV as well.


If I was very rich I'd be building a big solar-PV powered methane production and liquefaction plant in north Africa. The infrastructure exists to transport it, to convert it to electricity in the UK, and to store it. We already have a very large methane storage capacity and the UK is a big player in liquid methane.


Indeed.


I've seen these but I think solar concentration systems are going to go the way of the dodo. The recent decreasing in solar-PV cost is at the point where nobody is going to build concentrators.

I don't know what the costs are on actively cooled superconducting interconnect but I know its starting to appear; it may be that there are economies of scale that could take this below conventional HV stuff?

In reply to Phil79:

I hope Teresa May takes China being vaguely threatening as a sign it's not worth going through with it.

In reply to Trangia:

I know very little about the technicalities of these things, but is there a reason why the government don't pass a law stating that all new houses must be built with solar panels on the roofs? If we moved towards every house hosting a solar panel, surely we would soon have plenty of energy most of the time, topped up with wind farms etc?

In reply to La benya:


Yes, although I think I estimated significantly on the low side and that £300b is closer to the mark, and that £60b or £300b is not generating a single unit of power, just allowing you to ship it form Africa to the UK.


I disagree. You're talking about a civil engineering project spanning a strip of land 5 km wide by 3000 km long. It's not just running the load of cable, it's building the 30,000 transmission towers along with all the access roads and infrastructure needed. More people will almost certainly die constructing it than as a result of all civil nuclear power in the UK to date, just like with wind and solar-PV industry.

No, they really don't apply to nuclear. How many places have you seen in the UK with a 5 km wide strip of land containing 10-15 parallel strings of transmission towers? None. The transmission system needed to supply electricity on a national scale from Africa to the UK is an entire massive new civil engineering project that is required by no other technology based on adapting current infrastructure. I also add that new nuclear is not an addition but a "slot-in" replacement to old capacity going off line.

These transmission lines will be needed all the way between North Africa and the UK if we go African solar. Add another 10-15 for France and 5-8 for Spain and the south of Spain is going to change a little bit...

In reply to wintertree:

I came across a plan which was talked about, for Iceland to provide renewable energy to the UK a week or 2 ago.

In reply to GrahamD:

Current onshore and offshore wind turbines are typically rated up to 5MW, however the next generation that are due to be trialled not far off the British coast in deeper water are likely to have a capacity of up to 10MW ( with blades approaching 200 diameter!)

You would need 3000 of them to produce 30GW ( i.e a Hinkley size Nuclear Plant) - but only when the wind is blowing at its optimum speed.

The trial is going to consist of 15 turbines - and the base structures alone are massive. (I'm involved in building them)

Personally I'd like to see projects similar to the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon which will produce 350MW for 14 hours a day - however its cost approaches £2Bn - and produces energy no more cheaply than a Nuclear Plant -- however its great benefit is that as long as the structure is maintained, and turbines replaced at sensible intervals, it has an almost unlimited lifespan with no nasty cleanup costs.

In reply to GrahamD:

Germany generates already roughly one third of her electricity using renewables (mainly wind, some solar, little hydrodynamic) despite decommissioning existing nuclear plants. In consequence there are plenty of wind farms, especially in the North German plains, but nothing that I would say would be excessive.

Obviously there is a price for making our energy supply sustainable, but continuing unchanged will have an even bigger price! Even with existing farms, that percentage can easily be increased by replacing older turbines with more modern versions, pushing this value to maybe 50%.

Grid reorganization is indeed the main problem that makes generating even more electricity from renewables, but the required investments will never happen (as the grid infrastructure as such does not generate money!) unless made necessary. Building new nuclear plants takes that healthy pressure off (unless directly coupled to turning off other baseline plants, which I would be happy with). The same applies to any storage solution, whether this is centralized, e.g. pump stations, or local, e.g. household level battery solutions. The success (so far...) of converting German energy generation to sustainable sources would have never happened but for combining subsidies for renewable energy generation with a strict schedule for phasing out existing baseline power plants that made grid modernization essential.

The real disaster is not prioritizing shutting coal plants down and retaining the nuclear plants as baseline supply. Clearly, CO2 is IMO the bigger and much more acute problem than, say, doubling the eventual need for nuclear waste disposal over the next few decades. Operating nuclear plants over the last few decades has already generated that problem, increasing the capacity of the eventual depository will be a minor problem compared to finding a solution in the first place.


CB

In reply to cb294; Germany sets an excellent example but is not perfect. There have been a few days, notably a couple of sunny Sunday afternoons when solar is very high and demand very low that they are close to 100% on renewables. There are however winter evenings when this is a long, long way from the case and this is where the siht hits the fan.

The problem is the pricing model paid for (now) coal based power. It is very difficult to make money given the pricing model, but the power is absolutely vital at this point in time. Ergo german power companies are very unwilling to invest as he return is so uncertain and everything is always for sale. The consequence of this unwillingness to invest, upgrade, is that germany has at points in time been awfully close to brown outs and aviding these is far from a given in the coming winter

Also UK consumers would scream at the cost of power in Germany. The german model is good, but not perfect.

FWIW I work in oil/gas but think the future will be a mixed energy supply, and think the current government attitude to renewables bizarre, but symptomatic of the lack of an actual energy strategy. I would also comment that I worked on a project that cost 13Bn USD to bring to first oil so 19Bn for Hinckley is not horrible. Some of the other cost estimates on here seem very conservative tho'

In reply to wbo:

I know that the German model has huge room for improvement, to my great regret. When the transition towards renewables was set in motion we had the Greens in government with the Social Democrats. As soon as Merkel came to power with the Liberals (i.e got rid of the coalition with the Social Democrats who were unwilling to go back on their own laws), she cancelled the nuclear exit, only to make another U turn a few weeks later following Fukushima. Much of the trouble we have today stems from the fact that the coordinated transition of grid, production, and improved energy efficieny was screwed up by this political posturing.

I think the key lesson for other countries is that you can be much more ambitious with your renewables goals, even if you run a modern economy, even if you are not swamped in hydroelectric or geothermal energy like, say, Iceland.

The specific mix may well differ between countries, and is probably not really critical as long as coal generated baseline power is phased out over a reasonably short time frame. We simply cannot afford producing that much CO2.

CB

In reply to Trangia:

Previous governments sold off what technology we had. We can't build a modern reactor. Might seem crazy, but the UK only needs a few, China needs a few hundred. Better others pay more of the development costs.

In reply to Philip:
What will China want/get in return? That's the crux of things for me, with how grumpy they're sounding about it possibly not happening. It seems like a first rule of business to not try and threaten somebody into coming to an agreement.

In reply to cb294: I really don't see why you wouldn't be ambitious with those targets. Politics and dogma

In reply to Philip:


Neither can the French. The EPR is a flawed design, complex safety systems layered on complex safety systems. The various models of AP1000 have at least gone down the passive safety route.

In reply to Timmd:


A first Chinese design station built in the UK no doubt with a proportion of Chinese steel , and the oppertunity to build more stations around Europe and around the world, and then sell even more steel .

Everything China does, there is a side deal, look at the deal with Boeing for planes, there is a side deal to have a manufacturing facility in China, the thin edge of the wedge of a technology transfer, you only sell a few of whatever they need until they can build them for themselves.

In reply to Philip:

Trident has a modern reactor in it. All that IP sitting in Rolls Royce...

In reply to Jim C:



I suspect the chance to have a Chinese reactor design signed off by the ONR is also very tempting, as would probably lead to greater chance to sell/build reactors in other foreign markets.

In reply to itsThere:


Plans for the UK to build a new improved design for the successor class as well.

I'm not clear as to why a battery of submarine PWRs can't be built on land - should be cheaper, simpler and easier than in subs, with some economies of scale that larger land based PWRs don't benefit from. Then again I know almost nothing about naval reactor design and there is not much meaty information available to read.

In reply to wintertree:


I guess there would be some security concerns for starters having the heart of our most powerful weapon exposed to a civilian build/certification process and workforce.
jk

In reply to wintertree:



I should imagine they are not that efficient or not that cheap as they would be designed to purpose (powering a sub.) and other factors given secondary import.

In reply to wintertree:

Submarine reactors use extremely enriched fuel, not the sort of stuff you want distributed around the country.

There are certainly ongoing projects ongoing with the idea for small modular reactors. Rather than have them distributed I think the current plan is to have a larger number of smaller reactors rather than one or two big reactors on a single site.

In reply to jkarran:

Actually , that was a counter proposal to Hinckley if you check the news. Hundreds of RR nuclear reactors. Problem is, each needs protecting and support staff. That costs scales with the number, so it may be more expensive than a few large ones.

In reply to jkarran:


I've always imagined the secret sauce to the naval reactors are the pumps and convection systems that allow them to run almost silently, and that these would all be replaced with bog standard stuff for a civilian version. I can't imagine there's much use in classifying things around the fission process itself.

I might well be talking crap however. The other aspect of this - we don't just have the reactors, we have the people and tools to design and build reactors.

In reply to Philip:


Or alternatively, put lots of small ones in the same place - maybe on the same site as the existing plants, so all the grid connections are already in place.

In reply to Ridge:

I spent the afternoon in my office today with people from an excellent UK company interviewing for 5 posts on a PWR SMR project which is receiving substantial funding

In reply to paul_in_cumbria:

There's certainly a lot of money for collaborative R&D in this area with the DEC/NDA/Innovate joint competitions. Would be nice for the UK to develop our own, but when you think how much Areva have wasted on ideas abandoned due to scale -up challenges.

In reply to Trangia:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/11/scotland-completely-pow...

In reply to La benya:

Have you seen the carbon footprint for solar? It's multiple times that of nuclear. Incredibly environmentally unfriendly.

In reply to Philip:


I think a lot of the thinking behind SMRs is there isn't the issue of scaling up to a huge pressure vessel that no one has the expertise to build, (like the EPR). We have a lot of expertise in submarine units, and many of the new designs are pretty much deterministically safe with no need for complex engineered safety systems like on the larger reactors.