Hinkley Point C
It’s going to be the most expensive power station in existence.
It will power 7% of the country.
It is going to have guaranteed pricing for 35 years to effectively subsidise the power plant.
It has a lifespan of 60 years.
Previous projects like it have gone billions over budget and taken years longer to complete than planned. When we finally do see Hinkley generating energy, it will force prices up and be so far into the future that it won’t matter anymore.
I really hope someone in Parliament wakes up and realises what an astonishing mistake this project is.
Why not spend this money on a large solar station? Guaranteed power for at least 20-30 years, no risk of environmental disaster, no waste to clean up, everybody’s happy.
Except the guys mining uranium, I guess.
Colin Fox the money could easily be invested in solar, wind, tidal and storage technologies.
Yet nuclear is the answer? only in greed, taxation waste and 10,000 year life of deadly radiation pollution waste.
Alan Stainer Plus those solar power station arrays and storage technology systems are easily up-gradable as clean safe technology advances and becomes more powerful.
Exactly Daise Flowers
$18 billion is the same cost as three Trident nuclear submarines, and Hinkley is not half as much fun. Of course, the Tridents come with 24 nuclear missiles and a lot of other neat technology.
Well the EDF board have approved the plans, but the UK government have kicked the final decision to the autumn. So we’re still going to be in limbo for some time to come.
We probably do need some nuclear power to replace the old coal and nuclear stations being de-commissioned and closed. It could even be at Hinkley on the same site. But the Hinkley EPR is absolutely not the design to go with. There are cheaper, simpler, proven designs that would be quicker to build that make far more sense. It’s really a mystery why EDF and the French, UK and China govs keep pushing down this current path.
And yes, of course we should be building on and off shore wind and solar and the grid interconnections to go with them as well. And subsiding them at least as much as the nuclear and fossil fuel industries. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. Again, it’s a complete mystery why the UK Tory gov wants to cut subsidies to renewables while simultaneously increasing them elsewhere and making onshore wind planning harder.
Julian Bond Why not go pure renewables? Why should we continue to use dangerous and polluting sources of energy? With enough solar, wind, wave, geothermal etc, we could cover 100% of any nation’s energy needs. You can literally just keep adding these systems until you have enough power. And they will magically keep generating power, without damaging the environment.
Any nuclear solution may have a low carbon footprint, but… it will still require long term storage of highly dangerous materials and decommissioning a nuclear power station is never easy either. It’s really quite costly.
Renewables don’t have any of these difficulties.
Yeah – I know that running a nuclear station doesn’t generate pollution while it’s running (unless you have another 3 mile island, chernobyl, fukashima… what happens if you have a solar panel accident? Oh yeah, nothing) but you do still have to deal with the waste, which has a half life of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Going that route is just pushing the problem down the road, it’s not solving it.
Colin Fox I’m not completely convinced that wind+solar+hydro+ a big grid and interconnects can provide 100% of the energy needs without some base load and some peaking gas plants. It’s really hard to find unbiased analyses of this that don’t have some axe to grind. And some realistic analysis of how much spare capacity and demand management is needed across the grid to make it work. I think we do need at least some base load to keep the lights running. And it probably shouldn’t be biomass. The problem is this is a balancing act while we make the transition to 100% renewable just at the same time as we close large amounts of capacity from the old obsolete coal and nuclear stations.
One possible way of dealing with this is to over supply considerably, and use the excess for processes that can be spun up/down quickly. Perhaps vehicle charging or ammonia production for fertiliser, or synfuel production. Also both wind and solar have the advantage that they can be turned down quickly. That can balance they’re disadvantage of being somewhat intermittent. However all of that means changing the financing approaches somewhat.
Wave, Tidal, Geothermal is still experimental. They’re not going to help in the next 10-30 years. We need answers now.
Julian Bond battery storage technology is going to play a big part in the near future. It won’t matter if wind, solar or whatever doesn’t generate electricity 100% of the time, because households will be able to store enough energy to cover the periods of shortfall.
Decentralised energy generation is the future.
Tesla’s answer of “battery packs” has huge promise for smoothing out the peak/trough spikes. There are other options as well, such as molten salt.
We also don’t have to turn all current stations off and turn on a bunch of solar and just hope for the best. We can do this gradually and measure the effect. This is happening right now in Germany and Portugal, to great success.
Also – this new nuclear station is brand new – so firing up a solar system instead of this would have zero negative impact on the grid, since the station currently doesn’t contribute to grid power, so no matter how much solar is produced, it will be better than zero.
Molten salt storage is still experimental. It’s also closely linked with CSP which is looking like a dead end given how fast Solar PV is dropping in price. Does battery tech scale sufficiently to handle grid scale storage? Yes it can help a little at the household level, but can it really help at an industrial level?
Yes, Hinkley C is new. And yes, we could deploy solar/wind faster as an alternative. But it’s not happening in isolation. We’re losing capacity at the same time. Both/And, not Either/Or.
The Nuclear waste problem is interesting. With short term storage to allow short life waste to decay, followed by re-processing of long term waste the problem is surprisingly tractable. And it’s an area where the UK has a lot of experience and expertise that can be sold to the rest of the world. But that’s just the fuel. The much bigger problem is power station de-commissioning and safe disposal of the active waste that results. Given we were leaders in early implementation, we should now be leaders in early de-commissioning.
Julian Bond You haven’t addressed the accident angle. We’re still (probably) experiencing some lingering effects from Fukashima, there was Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and probably others. Earthquakes, terrorist activities, industrial accidents all could lead to a serious problem with containment or even meltdown.
Solar & Wind face none of these. As for dealing with capacity, just keep adding cells until you’ve got enough. If you covered every rooftop in the UK, you’d easily have more than enough capacity. I’m sure that if you spent $18B on solar cells, you’d have plenty of power.
Colin Fox it’s more than $18B, it’s £18B! Although estimates are that it could cost upwards of £30B to the taxpayer in the long run.
Either way, that money would go a very long way to providing solar cells and household batteries to a lot of homes.
Alan Stainer
I agree. You could effectively turn the whole country green for that amount of money.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/29/hinkley-point-bad-business-theresa-may-david-cameron
In the lead photo, the whole site looks dangerously close to sea level. What’s going to happen when sea level rises?
Sea level should rise by 3 to 6 feet over the life of the plant. It is a concern.
Sent from my iPhone
Julian Bond You sound like my electrical engineer grandfather in the 1970’s, who BTW lost much investment money in a place called Three Mile Island, still the area is too dangerous to live. You must understand change is necessary; for current humanity and to set a better direction after us, which also drives advancements that otherwise would wait on the burner for another tragic accident to happen without any well thought out solutions. Nuclear power station and storage accidents only show the real price of nuclear technology and the damage to all humanity.
Liquid fluoride thorium reactors, anyone? No meltdown threat, can use current nuclear waste, and relies on fuel that is plentiful. I wonder why this hasn’t been tried in a production environment yet…
Clark Moore interesting, perhaps there’s not enough greedy wealth benefits to be gained…
This article from 2011 points out some of the problems with thorium and I don’t think much has changed in the last 5 years. Although I really hope I am wrong!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium
Clark Moore Thorium is a 30 years out technology.
Daise Flowers Condescending, much?
Julian Bond I hope you’re wrong about that – I did read that the Chinese have ramped up their R&D with the hopes of getting a thorium reactor up within 10 years, with the US DoE working with them.
As for Daise Flowers, it’s all good – although I think all that brewer’s yeast may be making you cranky (wink-wink). Seriously though, if we can pursue a technology that will create safe, plentiful energy (whether it’s nuclear, coal, solar, or whale farts assuming the whales don’t mind), then I think we should pursue it. Yes, greed can get out of hand (which is why government is there to keep a level and fair playing field), but it is a legitimate motivator and innumerable great things have come out of the “greed” of capitalists willing to take a risk. Whatever the motivation, safe plentiful energy would transform the planet in terms of quality of life, prosperity, etc. – and could prevent wars over scarce resources. We just need to figure out how to keep it from being weaponized – which is why thorium reactors could be a good thing since the byproducts are supposedly not able to be used for bombs.
Clark Moore You can’t weaponize Solar cells. And they’re safe. And will produce energy for decades.
There – energy problem solved.
Change will happen. Nuclear Utilities are not profitable when all the
direct and indirect costs are totaled. The same can be said for the Fossil
Carbon Energy Industrial Complex.
Yeah…solar cells are safe after they’re manufactured, but have you checked out how environmentally unfriendly they are to produce? Tons of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, hydroflouric acid, and silicon tetrachloride are dumped into the environment by producing those safe solar cells. Sure – a good deal of some of these byproducts COULD be recycled, but the Chinese (the biggest producer of solar cells) just dumps it back into the environment because of the prohibitive costs for the reclamation equipment. Additionally, you’re still mining the poo out of quartz to get a miniscule return in product. Add to that the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) for PV solar is pretty anemic compared to nuclear.
In short – you have to look at all types of impact, including the environmental and economic costs, of the forms of energy to determine the best choices. Choosing solar is just not that straight-forward.
Clark Moore This is the first I’ve heard of solar cells being toxic to produce. Got a link? I thought they were silicon, which is pretty easy to produce from common minerals and low temperature fire.
Colin Fox
There is some pollution from the manufacture of anything, but PV is less polluting than most other energy sources. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080225090826.htm
Clark Moore I’ve become convinced that the story “Solar PV is polluting during manufacture” is one of those lies spread by vested interests in other tech. Do please prove me wrong with citations.
EROEI is a much abused measure that generates a lot of debate about exactly what should be included. It’s nearly as bad as lifetime CO2 for disagreement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested#Low_carbon_power suggests a figure of ~6 for Solar PV vs ~10 for Nuclear. So broadly comparable to an order of magnitude. Except that is by just one measure or version of EROEI. Go and read other papers, especially by Nuclear energy proponents, and you get figures of <3 for solar PV and >75 for Nuclear. Or try this meta-analysis
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856
And EROEI ignores the decommissioning and storage costs of nuclear and the costs associated with Fossil Carbon Energy CO2 on climate. The EROEI trend for nuclear and unconventional (deep ocean, Arctic, shale, tar sands, etc.) Fossil Carbon energy is up, while the trend for PV (and other renewable technologies) is down.
Sad to see this going through. But UK is completely upside down on making life more Green and sustainable so I am not surprised.
Michael A Koontz I am still holding out hope that something sensible is decided. I am not holding out much hope though.
Alan Stainer
“Hope” is the goal tender on the US Olympic Women’s Soccer Team. :-)