The movement against nuclear energy waits anxiously. Given Ed Davey’s apparent enthusiasm for new nuclear, it is more than a little alarming to learn that a proposal to support nuclear new build has been put forward as part of the Green Growth and Green Jobs debate at Glasgow. Are Lib Dem’s really willing to abandon one of the party’s unique selling points?
The proposal (Option B 4.3.3) asserts that nuclear power could play a limited role in achieving a zero carbon Britain – provided that concerns about safety, disposal of radioactive waste and cost, including decommissioning, can be adequately addressed. If we could turn the optimism behind this motion into energy, we’d be able to keep the lights on forever.
How would it ever be possible to address these issues adequately? The nuclear industry has had 60 years to prove it is environmentally and economically sustainable and it has failed. The second clause of the motion states that for nuclear to be acceptable, the industry must fully finance new nuclear and concludes, “We will not allow any public subsidy for new nuclear build.” So how would the Lib Dems deal with the backdoor subsidies currently being brokered between DECC and EDF Energy?
Contracts for difference will fix the wholesale price for nuclear-generated electricity over a 30-40 year period. This deal alone is enough to raise blood pressure. Last summer Professor Stephen Thomas calculated that the total cost to British businesses and householders over 30 years could be around £155 billion. And this will sting us through our taxes and our electricity bills.
So what are the alternatives to new nuclear? We could do a lot worse than look at Germany’s Energy Turnaround. Not only is the German government phasing out its entire nuclear capacity by 2022 but it has created a roadmap for a safe, affordable energy future. The Energiewende demonstrates that the decentralisation and re-democratisation of energy systems is possible. It shows vision and courage – something severely lacking in the UK’s corridors of power.
Nationally, it would be entirely possible to replace the capacity earmarked for new nuclear with a combined heat and power (CHP) and district heating model. The CHP option probably wouldn’t be as effective at reducing carbon emissions as new nuclear. But bearing in mind that it takes 7-10 years to build and commission an EPR reactor, the CHP model could be up and running in far less time and would act as a carbon reduction bridge while investment is ramped up to make renewables truly fit for purpose in the 21st century.
Pie in the sky? A group of anti-nuclear academics who visited Chris Huhne while he was still at DECC was told that the CHP model was on the table and could be implemented if the public found the nuclear option unacceptable. Clearly, it’s time for the UK to kick the nuclear habit. New nuclear is the fluff-covered sweet at the bottom of the pocket of possibilities. I would urge delegates taking part in the zero carbon debate at conference to boot new nuclear into the long grass and ‘just say no’ once and for all.
A comprehensive overview of new nuclear subsidies can be found here.
* Camilla Berens is a founder member of Kick Nuclear which is part of the Stop New Nuclear Alliance
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33 Comments
I’ll stick with nukes as a useful provider of base-load supply, thanks. 🙂
This would be the German move that has _raised_ its pollution level because shutting down Nuclear has made them ever more reliant on coal?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-28/merkel-s-green-shift-backfires-as-german-pollution-jumps.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/30/germanys_clean_energy_plan_backfired/
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130724/why-germanys-greenest-city-building-coal-fired-power-plant
The major advantage of nuclear is that it has a low carbon footprint. The failure of nuclear to deal with its issues seems to me to suggest an improved regulatory process. There were people concerned about the design of Fukushima but they were not listened to.
Do you agree Camilla?
We *have* no new nuclear and won’t have until the backdoor subsidies get big enough to convince EDF. Then we can take their plan, add two or three years and two or three billion and wait, and wait to get back to a depressing normal.
Look, I’m against nuclear as well. But environmentalists needs to wake up and smell the coffee. You cant argue against new nuclear, and then also argue against major alternate streams of energy, like Severn Barrages, fracking, and hydro dams. Right now the environmental movement is against every kind of power generation except wind and solar. This is not real-world thinking. There are bullets out there and you need to start biting them, otherwise the nuclear industry is just sitting there waiting until you have no options left and then they’ll get what they want.
I haven’t looked at this policy motion yet. But I hope it gives consideration to next-generation fail-safe nuclear technologies such as pebble-bed reactors, and also to Thorium-based reactor cycles.
A new generation of safer, cheaper nuclear power stations which we could then sell to other countries would help us capture a relatively specialist market in the early days.
Thorium reactors will take longer to get to supplying energy to houses than a high-voltage energy grid from N Africa supplying Saharan solar. Almost as long as fusion power, in fact.
So far as environmental sustainability goes, what would be your criteria? What would nuclear have to do to demonstrate that is was?
As for economic sustainability, why do you (or anyone else for that matter) think that we, human beings, the most consistently rapacious users of energy in the known universe, are in a position to not use any source of energy that we can practically harness?
@Voter:
The major advantage of nuclear is that it has a low carbon footprint.”
This is simply not true.
The nuclear industry is a massive consumer of hydrocarbons in every aspect from fuel mining through plant manufacture to underground disposal. Its principal promoters through the years have lied through their teeth about virtual every aspect (motivation, economics, contamination, safety) and have by and large got away with it because governments of all colours have backed it as a way of spreading costs of (and sanitising) the nuclear weapons industry .
It’s clear that the “CFD” is just a subsidy under another name. So nuclear with CFD as I understand it is contrary to existing party policy. The looming shutdown of power plants under the Large Carbon Plant Directive has been looming for at least a decade, but it’s far easier to leave it than make a hard decision.
If (and only if) we are not concerned about CO2 emissions, the best and cheapest option is to build some brand new coal fired 2.2 GW base load stations, and throw in some peaking gas stations as needed.
However, it’s likely that peak coal and gas are not that far off, so we really need something sustainable longer term.
Carbon capture and storage is equivalent to “powered by pixie dust”. It’s been around for long enough to prove itself if it were going to. It uses 1/3 of the energy generated to cool and pump the exhaust gas, and for it to be effective, the liquefied CO2 has to remain in storage for 1,000 years plus. It’s worse than nuclear waste for that.
So what’s possible? Onshore wind is reasonably cheap, but like all wind, you need a lot of area to make any reasonable amount of power. For the equivalent of a 2.2GW power station, you would need around 1,000 7MW turbines – roughly divide by 3 for the effective total output. Solar photovoltaic works best in the daytime in the summer. Tidal – for example the Severn Barrage and other tidal stream turbines can compensate for the availability of wind and solar to some extent – but we get into the problem with the wading birds (of course, if sealevel rises, those mudflats are gone anyway). Wave is unproven, and again will use large areas to generate a reasonable amount of power.
Concentrated solar – using mirrors and boilers with salt as a working fluid – in hot sunny places like North Africa has the potential to generate the quantities of energy we need – and it can be transmitted via long haul HVDC lines to where it’s needed. The downside is it’s expensive, roughly twice the wholesale cost of coal generated electricity, and North Africa is not politically stable.
So the real choices are Nuclear, Coal, or Concentrated Solar. No. I don’t really like any of them either. But I think we’ll like camping in our houses with no electricity or water even less.
Nuclear and private don’t mix. There’s a simple reason. You’re in business to make money. You look at the upside and the downside. With most goods, the upside is you can sell ’em for a bit more than you paid, the downside is that possibly you can’t. With nuclear, the upside is the same. But the downside is that when you’ve spent a mint of money building the things, someone like Merkel or Fukushima comes along and says you’ve got to shut them all down. So you risk losing a fortune.
If you’re EDF, you scratch your head and scratch it again, because you really don’t want to be out of the game. And then you realise what to do. You have to make the upside match the downside. You have to tell the government that you need a ginormous, earth-shattering state subsidy. Then the risk might just about be worth it.
I’m not knocking EDF. It’s the only sensible thing for them to do.
The sensible thing for the state to do is to say – If we want nuclear, we must build it ourselves. Then we don’t have to pay anybody else to cover themselves against the risk that we will change our minds.
But that would be unthinkable, it would almost be communism back, wouldn’t it? Ideologically impossible in a free-market ideological world.
The fundamental dishonesty of the nuclear industry worldwide is endemic.
Red this. 🙁
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1298945/fukushima-inspectors-careless-japan-agency-says-nuclear-crisis-grows
This is perhaps more poignant. Unfortunately, the regulatory regime in the UK has equally severe problems. Investigations following the famous 1997 head end plant fire problem at Windscale showed problems of contamination (stopping sale of lambs from thousands of acres of pasture) associated NOT with the fire but with previous unreported continuous leakage over many years. In Dounreay, the Nuclear industry were allowed to just dump masses of contaminated waste down a shaft for many years without detection.
http://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/News/Dounreay-dump-just-perfect-for-the-birds-29092011.htm
If you are going to give us figurs for the cost of the guaranteed prices for nuclear will you do the same for renewables ?
I apologise for prattling on about local responsibility but until legislation is passed ensuring local communities save and/or generate a proportion of their everyday energy, the NIMBY’s will continue to dominate this debate. It is unacceptable that the NIMBY’s block every local alternative to large scale (and distant) generation methods.
Legally binding local votes should be held across the country asking residents if they prefer LOCAL wind, solar, wave, tidal, hot rock, gas, coal or nuclear generation – as most appropriate for their location and natural resources. Democratic responsibility should rest with each community. Opposing everything is entirely selfish and not remotely sustainable.
We have heard the suggestion that those having wind farms in their locale should be paid compensation in the form of reduced bills, local investment etc. Well how about those households choosing to oppose all forms of local energy generation having to pay a clearly visible surcharge to those communities who, as a direct consequence of such selfish behaviour elsewhere, have large scale generation forced upon them mainly because nuclear/coal/gas powered stations have historically been located in their area?
The NIMBY’s must be confronted on this matter. If they are not we will indeed end up with subsidised nuclear because that is the only thing left standing and which is happily accepted in areas which have come to depend upon the industry for direct and indirect employment. And we can brush issues such as nuclear accidents, the long term storage of waste and the immense cost of the subsidies involved being swept under the carpet.
Is this what we Lib Dems have come to stand for? I for one would rather promote localism, sustainable growth, sound stewardship of the planet and responsibility towards future generations?
Why on earth should we penalise low-carbon wind farms by requiring them to pay compensation to local residents, while subsidising high-carbon fracking through tax breaks and (presumably) dealing with local opposition by strong-arm tactics?
Working towards some clear thinking on this, maybe not there yet …
Wind farms do alter the landscape in two dramatic ways, first by the presence the mills in large numbers, and second by their motion – which can be unsettling. While some think of them as elegant or even beautiful, even serene, they’re clearly not natural – an industrial intrusion that does not have the excuse of local brick. And of course there are the associated underground electricity power lines. The landscape really is a valuable resource, even if it is mainly the country folk who derive the most benefit from it.
Fracking takes place underground and alters the landscape hardly at all. At most there would be one vertical object instead of many. Sure there are worries, and maybe the government pushed too fast, but these might be addressed by persuasion. Quite a lot of the opposition at Balcombe was seemingly not local. Given that the oil or gas is there in the ground, some people seem to suggest that it’s going to be extracted sometime – if not now, then later – the price might be higher then, but we’d be more desperate too.
@clearthinker “Given that the oil or gas is there in the ground, some people seem to suggest that it’s going to be extracted sometime – if not now, then later – the price might be higher then, but we’d be more desperate too.”
If you don’t care about CO2, coal is the answer. If you do, then you need to be aware that there are more fossil fuel reserves already identified than we can safely extract and burn. So finding some more is not really a priority, although the oil & gas companies might disagree.
PS. CCS takes 25% of the energy, not 33%. I was thinking about the fact that you need 1/3 more power stations to get the output you require. Apologies.
@Stephen Hesketh. Solar in this relatively cool, cloudy country is niche, no more. Serious solar has to be where it’s hot and sunny, and that means North Africa or just possibly the south of Europe – Southern Greece/Italy/Spain. All those areas could do with the jobs, I guess.
Generation costs – Exxon figures converted to pence by me at 1.5 USD/£
Coal 4p
Oops here’s the rest of it.
Coal 4p
Gas 4.5p
Nuclear 5p
Onshore Wind 4.7p
Offshore wind 7p
Coal CCS 8p
Gas CCS 6p
Geo thermal 8p
Solar photovoltaic 11.5 p
Concentrated Solar 8.5p
Of course, the unabated fossil fuel is being subsidised by not paying its externalities. At £40/tonne for emitted CO2
Coal 8p (notice it’s the same as Coal CCS )
Gas 6p
So the necessary subsidy is going to be the difference between the wholesale cost of whatever it is, and the cheapest you allow on the grid, I would think.
The renewables that are both scalable and avoid too much Nimbyism are Offshore wind and Concentrated Solar, both at about the same price as Coal CCS – and as Coal CCS doesn’t actually work…
@Jenny Barnes “solar … is niche”? Speaking as someone with practical experience of solar PV in that I have it on my northern England roof, I can say that it works fine here to such an extent that a 3kW array has generated significantly more electricity in the past year than our house has used. OK, negligible in December and January in particular but that is likely to be when wind and wave are at their peak. If solar PV and solar thermal were subsidised to enable a significant proportion of the suitable properties to be covered, we would require far less of other forms of generation – certainly mid March to mid October. It is surely a question of ensuring the right mix and managing this in conjunction with other compatible technologies. In the winter months wind and wave would certainly help top up roof top microgeneration but the bullet we need to bite is that on/off gas powered generation is probably better suited to balancing sustainable forms of generation than most of the present alternatives. The key is that we cut our annual and long-term emissions rather than day to day or even month to month.
Also re the cost of geothermal (which incidently uses fracking technology) this looks like an average – it would be lower in areas with buried granites etc. The benefit of localism is that people would choose the best option for them locally. Hot rocks such as Cornwall, Aberdeen etc would likely be high on their lists.
Local energy saving and generation creates local jobs. Pound for pound, almost any form of generation creates more jobs than nuclear!
@David Allen – I totally agree re penalising wind farms – I was saying that we have heard the suggestion and then went on to put the case that opponents of any form of local generation should be the ones to pay a surcharge to those who were willing to accept it. In effect NIMBYs would pay not those investing in wind power! I would personally vote for a local wind farm and a Ribble barrage. Like our neighbours in Ireland etc, my local concern is not having the Irish Sea further polluted with radioactive isotopes.
Solar PV is niche – the typical output of a PV array is 10% of it’s peak, on average. A typical “house” uses 0.5 kw average.
So you need a 5kw peak array in typical conditions to create the energy used. It’s worse the farther north you go, of course. I have a 1.9 Kw peak array, which generates around 0.9 MWh per year against total electric consumption of 4MWh, which is typical. So your 3 kw array likely generates about 1.5 MWh/year. If that’s your total electricity demand it’s unusually low. With more typical figures, if every suitable roof was covered in PVs you might get 20% or so of the domestic electricity demand. Suppose there are 12 million such roofs (half the number of dwellings in the UK) then the output from 2kwp arrays on all of them would be around 2.4GW average. Roughly equivalent to 1 baseload power station, or 2/3 of the capacity of one of the nuclear stations proposed with a 3.6 GW capacity.
Ok, it’s worth having, but it’s nowhere near enough – we need 40 GW capacity. If you want electric cars, you need a lot more.
To be fair, it hasn’t tried. The nuclear industry has had 60 years of winning the argument that it shouldn’t need to bother. We’ve got technologies that can solve these problems – but they haven’t been developed, and now we’re running out of time.
Combined Heat and Power (CHP) can be a useful small scale technology. It becomes more difficult when you try to scale it up. The idea is that the “waste heat” from thermal electricity generation can be used for district heating. But there are several problems. Firstly, there’s a confusion between heat and temperature. To run a thermal power station efficiently you want the cool end of your turbines as cool as possible. That’s what those rather elegant curved concrete towers do – cool the back end water with by spraying it through the air, sometimes generating a plume of condensation. But for district heating, you need the back end to be hotter than that, because 20 Deg C is not going to work in most central heating systems. How thermal engines work is by using the gradient between the hot end (say 600 C in a coal fired station) and the cold end (20C) to generate mechanical energy. The bigger the difference, the more you get out of it. (Carnot efficiency if you’re interested) Coal fired is around 40% efficient because of this – ie for 1 kW of heat energy in you get 400 watts of electricity out. Good trade, if electricity is what you want. You can’t get more than that without making the hot end hotter or the cold end colder. Same applies to gas, but higher front end temperature, so more efficient.
Now CHP will give you some low temp. heat at the cost of some of your electricity. If you go for around 50C backend temperature, that would do for underfloor concrete type heating. But not many houses have that installed, and retrofit is hugely expensive. So for CHP to replace a large fraction of our generating capacity we would need to build new houses with underfloor heating, distribution network of pipes around the new power station and of course the new power station – and somewhere to dump the heat in the summer when it’s not needed. That all sounds expensive to me. And would people really want to live right next to a large thermal power station?
@Jenny Barnes re “Solar PV is niche”
Jenny I genuinely must be missing something, Both my use and FIT meters are Landis and Gyr single phase watt hour meters apparently recording in kWh. On 29 October last year the electricity company, having noted our solar panels, quickly fitted a new digital meter. Since that date it has recorded a use of 1221 kWh. Since the same date the adjacent feed in (i.e. not generation) meter has clocked up 2496.3 kWh. Our house faces south west rather than the optimum south. Either I am making an embarrassing and fundamental miscalculation (I wouldn’t rule that out!) or it says something for solar PV, not leaving appliances on standby and for the general benefits of cutting energy wastage.
@Jenny Barnes, you are discounting the massive potential for solar PV arrays on commercial and industrial buildings which conveniently are also the buildings with the highest electricity usage (especially industrial buildings)
I am not arguing that solar PV is [b]the[/b] answer but it certainly should be a siginificant part of the answer along with other microgeneration and renewables such as tidal barrages (the Severn barrage should be a no brainer)
@stephen. Typical household electric consumption 3.3 MWh / year (ofgem) http://tinyurl.com/kps75c7
ditto Annual output per kWp of solar pv 0.85MWh http://tinyurl.com/ke9qe4h
For 3kWp that’s 2.5 MWh per year. My guess is that your 2.5 MWh is in fact what your array generated; and what you used over the year will be something less than 1.2 +2.5 – probably 2.4 or so if half your demand was supplied by your roof.
@ peter. I agree it’s worth having. But look at the numbers. We’re using 40GW now; we need a large supply as well as solar PV in this country. I like solar, but there isn’t enough here, and if solar is the answer you pick, we need to import it from somewhere hot and sunny. It feels like when it comes to renewable energy we are suddenly restricted to only this country. We import gas, coal, oil and electricity now, why not import solar energy too? Yes, and put PVs on all the roofs that work, too as long as it pays off. It’s 50% dearer than concentrated solar – so I preferthat.
A few points.
When I was a more active political campaigner, I came across someone – in the outback of East Devon, who was trying to be energy self-sufficient. He and his wife were making a really good effort, but there were quite a number of elements to it, and would be a lifestyle, on a piece of land which would not be either to everyone’s taste, or economically possible for everyone. However, with those caveats in mind, and also recognising they were still building their system at the time, and I haven’t seen it for about 10 years, they were proving some useful points. The key one, which stuck with me, was that wind and solar output DO usually complement one another, so it is useful to have both. A primary school in a nearby town was just opening a similar scheme, with a solar array, and a smallish turbine. Early results there were very encouraging.
No-one has mentioned the idea of geothermal, and for instance, import from Iceland. We are not properly recognising the need to save energy yet, and both public and private investment needs to be put in. The current Green Deal simply doesn’t have enough public money behind it to give much incentive for people to sign up. Ed Davey has simply caved in to the easy lobbying by energy giants of “if you don’t subsidise us, the lights will go off”. He seems unduly terrified of this, which, bearing in mind some of the worse scenarios if we stay on the current Osborne path, seems short sighted (I suppose you could argue that Ed Davey is likely to be around as a politician in 2015, but the likelihood of him being present in any political role in 2020 or so is pretty limited!
For me, nuclear is simply too dangerous – the current Fukushima situation, very unstable, massive leaks of highly radioactive liquids etc, could well occur any here with more and more extreme weather and rising sea level.
Well, that’s also the reason why it’s a niche thing: solar can provide a substantial proportion of domestic electricity demands, and even a some of the commercial ones, but it doesn’t come anywhere near the level of industrial and transportation energy usage, which between them make up about half the energy consumption in the UK.
Now, that’s not to say it’s not a useful niche – optimistically we might be able to get 10-20% of the UK’s energy demands supplied by solar power, and that’s worth doing. However, it’s not a wise investment at the moment, because half of the UK’s energy usage goes on heating and you get a much better return by spending the same money on improving the insulation of houses. If your house is already well-insulated then it might be worth thinking about solar power, but insulation across the UK isn’t very good.
This is why LDs in government have delivered the Green Deal, which provides affordable financing for people to get their houses properly insulated (and also for solar panels if they’re viable).
None of this addresses the elephant in the room which is that 30% of the UK’s energy consumption is burning petrol. We need to get that under control.
@andrew ” optimistically we might be able to get 10-20% of the UK’s energy demands supplied by solar power, and that’s worth doing”
I think it’s more niche than that. The Electricity only demand is 40GW, and my rough calculations say that you might , just possibly, get the equivalent of 4GW – which is 10% of the Electricity demand….Total UK energy demand is more difficult to get an estimate for, but 160 GW plus is somewhere in the region, so solar pv would only do 2 or 3% of that. Worth having, indeed, but still niche. And to be fair we were talking about nuclear in the context of electricity production.
Transport fuel – for people, public transport and cycling and gradually reengineering towns and cities to reduce travel demand is probably the right direction. Electric cars might help a little, but you’re still moving a ton of stuff to move a person. The bit you can’t easily get away from is heavy transport. 40 tonne trucks doing 100s of miles a day will not run on batteries, so diesel is going to continue to be essential. As is kerosene for aviation.
@Stephen Hesketh 23rd Aug ’13 – 9:58pm
So what is it you’re proposing for your backyard? or are you also a NIMBY, but is trying to hide it by shouting about everyone else?
@Jenny
I think Solar PV is very niche. Yes from an energy end consumer viewpoint, it has value – particularly given the current financial incentives. Putting aside the consumer investment case, I suggest that Solar PV is more about increasing the supply of energy to the end consumer without upgrading the supply and generating infrastructure.
I agree about your points concerning transport fuel, particularly those that require a transformation in both our thinking and the way we live. However, I suspect that much this will only come about when fuel costs dramatically increase in real terms and remain high.
One of the interesting things coming out from more detailed analysis of our consumption and our base load needs, is consideration for weekends, where much of industry is not consuming and hence we are likely to have base load going to waste. Hence we could see a situation where during the week usage is restricted and at weekends, we binge!
If you look at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ the second graph down on the left shows demand by day of the week. Interestingly, Sat/Sun & Mon are about 10 GW down on the other days.