Environmentalists and Nuclear Energy

[Simon]

I don't like nuclear, I don't trust people enough. We have seen time and time again how profits trump safety, the VW scandal being a good example. I am also sick of the private sector ruining stuff. I don't know how the whole nuclear generation cycle works but it cleaerly works badly if we are running out of storage.

While I don't disagree with those premises, I think the conclusion is unwarranted. The principal problem is that the conclusion ignores the manifest serious problems with the other technologies. Hence I think the reasoning is unbalanced.

Choose your poison.

Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear,

Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).

by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.

Well that's principally economics and politics, and nothing to do with technology and physics. Nobody has any idea what the price of electricity will be during the course of the reactor's life. Indeed electricity has already been twice that price for a short time.

I do chose my poison, or rather I chose the poison I really want to avoid and that is nuclear. If you plan badly for all the other technologies the consequence is that you won't have any electricity. If you plan badly for nuclear people end up dead very quickly. It is clear to me that costs will be put before common sense and even safety and they already have.

Nuclear could have so many side costs, the cost is nothing to do with the fuel cost, it's the general mess it makes that costs the most.

Yes we will always need some dependable generation solution to plug gaps but do you know that we already rely on wind ? at this time of year if wind power were to cease totally there would be power cuts, and yes it has happened before, the last time there was a shortage of capacity it was partly due to no wind output at all (that was national grids position) so it's not just a side project, it matters already.

I think prices of other generation methods will go down, they have so far. Our only main problem is storage.

[Red Squirrel]

I don't think nuclear is the end all source due to some draw backs such as the waste, and fact that it relies on nun renewable minerals, but it is a good transitional phase before we can make solar/wind more viable via better energy storage. Ex: if we can come up with a battery tech that could be used grid wide. 

There are also lot of political issues that could make nuclear better, such as allowing to use up the rods further, reducing the waste.

That said, I would rather have a nuclear plant go up in my back yard than a coal plant.

[tggzzz]

I don't like nuclear, I don't trust people enough. We have seen time and time again how profits trump safety, the VW scandal being a good example. I am also sick of the private sector ruining stuff. I don't know how the whole nuclear generation cycle works but it cleaerly works badly if we are running out of storage.

While I don't disagree with those premises, I think the conclusion is unwarranted. The principal problem is that the conclusion ignores the manifest serious problems with the other technologies. Hence I think the reasoning is unbalanced.

Choose your poison.

Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear,

Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).

by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.

Well that's principally economics and politics, and nothing to do with technology and physics. Nobody has any idea what the price of electricity will be during the course of the reactor's life. Indeed electricity has already been twice that price for a short time.

I do chose my poison, or rather I chose the poison I really want to avoid and that is nuclear. If you plan badly for all the other technologies the consequence is that you won't have any electricity. If you plan badly for nuclear people end up dead very quickly. It is clear to me that costs will be put before common sense and even safety and they already have.

Nuclear could have so many side costs, the cost is nothing to do with the fuel cost, it's the general mess it makes that costs the most.

Yes we will always need some dependable generation solution to plug gaps but do you know that we already rely on wind ? at this time of year if wind power were to cease totally there would be power cuts, and yes it has happened before, the last time there was a shortage of capacity it was partly due to no wind output at all (that was national grids position) so it's not just a side project, it matters already.

I think prices of other generation methods will go down, they have so far. Our only main problem is storage.

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

[tggzzz]

Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear, by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.

Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).

It depends which costs you externalise,

Just so. Most proponents of wind energy are disreputable in that they knowingly externalise and ignore the "dispatch costs" in order to make their preferred technology look good.

Responsible engineers don't do that.

the new build nuclear reactors are going ahead with an artificially inflated and guaranteed price for the electricity they produce. A huge incentive for them to continue and makes some alternatives non-viable as they are unable to compete with those heavily subsidised contracts.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Wind and solar are heavily subsidised with guaranteed prices.

But in a more open market where the price freely fluctuates adding wind capacity will offset other generators, already gas peaking and hydro are used as short dispatch generators from their stored energy before we get into storage of electricity. A mixture of gas and wind is where the money has been going in Australia as its more profitable than coal. If there is storage (of some sort, be it gas as above) and fast slewing capacity in the grid then renewables can keep adding in more generation capacity, even if they can't deliver the tops of the peaks or have lulls other generators will price themselves to the market. That encourages storage and discourages slow/conventional thermal plants. Incremental adding of intermittent renewables doesn't directly offset any conventional generation but it changes the market radically, and the incumbents with their long term investments don't like that idea.

Note that in the UK electricity prices have already been double the guaranteed strike price for the next generation of nuke electricity.

Any control engineer will tell you the limitations of using feedback to control a system. If you have a feedback system with a loop time of decades, then your system will completely fail to control fluctuations with a period of minutes/days/weeks.

The consequences of those fluctuations would not be tolerable to an advanced society. I know; I've seen the results in the UK when I was a kid and in India as an adult.

Your argument that adding renewables won't directly substitute for the existing conventional plants is again reducing the agreement to a boring and irrelevant point,

Boring? Maybe.
Irrelevant? Absolutely not.

a large conventional coal or nuclear plant can easily be replaced by some mixture of other plants that together have a lower impact on the population. Gas alone is a good option, but if the desire is to move away from non-renewable resources then intermittent renewables in combination with some fast slewing plants will make a start in that direction.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Neither easily nor safely.

Add enough intermittent renewables and the conventional plants will price themselves out of existence as they become less and less viable to operate. All the elements are there in the countries with effective energy markets, or if you want to take full control and dictate the entire system. But government taking these piecemeal approaches to energy policy are hampering the ability to transition away from the conventional plants.

Ah, so you knowingly ignore the externalised costs of some technologies but not others. That's not what a reputable engineer does.

[zapta]

..There are currently methods that will probably be safe for the lifetime of anyone alive today, but people don't even know what changes might occur over the next 50,000 years - crustal, environmental, political and economical.

Did you intentionally omitted scientific and technological changes?

Extrapolating from the scientific and technological progress in the last 50,000 years, it's naive to assume only our current waste management solutions.

Its also naive to assume that as we develop more advanced waste management technologies, we'll even be able to find all the stuff which need reprocessing.

It's the mistake of most of us born in the late 20th century to extrapolate the recent rapid pace of technological advancement indefinitely into the future.

Rapid? Read my post. I was extrapolating from the last 50K years. A century is a drop in the ocean of time.

You seem to have missed the major point of my post (most of which you omitted).

I'll try again:

The vast majority of human tecnological advancement has occurred over the past 200 years. Advancement prior to that was very slow, incremental, and erratic, with centuries of slow progress punctuated by long periods of regression and retrenchment.  So your "extrapolation of the last 50k years" does not make much sense and holds no predictive power.  Human progress is not a linear function. History has proven that during any future epoch, regression could just as well be the norm as progression. This is problematic when pondering long term management of nuclear waste.

The human race had great progress in the last 50k years even we exclude the last 200 years or last 1000 years.

[Simon]

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough. We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to. Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - that has losses, and be more efficient in transmission. If I am not home and I am generating 1KW I don't think it will be going far up the street before it gets used.

[tggzzz]

So, given three alternatives:

• technology currently injuring and killing millions
• technology that - arguably - might have killed a few thousand
• technology that, because it cannot be relied upon, would cause severe economic problems - and in the worst case severe societal problems

you choose 1 and 3 over 2! To me that's irrational.

I've witnessed the problems with option 3 in India as an adult, and in the UK when I was a child. Intermittent and unpredictable power cuts are an a killer - both personally and economically.

I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough.

The political reasons for that are inexcusable. The technical and economic reasons are less easily wished away. It is necessary to distinguish between those two categories.

We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to.

Just so.

Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - ...

That's both technically and economically contentious.

Technically: it is unproven and very difficult to control (and the critical problem is generation, not transmission!).  If you keep your eye out and attend relevant talks/conferences, you will see there are already significant problems with large-scale solar and wind in that respect. Start by going to some IET lectures/talks at a local university; see http://www.theiet.org/events/index.cfm

Economically: how do you know what price to pay for a 1kW resource tomorrow, if you don't know what will be online/offline or even what they are generating? While there are, of course, such problems with the existing situation, small scale distributed generation exacerbates them.

[Kleinstein]

...
I know we are in a deadlock situation because we have no been willing to progress fast enough. We should never have gotten to this point and the time to build this glorious new station is long. We are already in trouble right now. This year they anounced that through the winter we will be running on less margin than we may wish to. Small scale distributed generation is going to be key in the future. It will greatly unburden the distribution network - that has losses, and be more efficient in transmission. If I am not home and I am generating 1KW I don't think it will be going far up the street before it gets used.

At least in more dense populated countries the grid loss is still rather low (e.g. 3-5% range, with about 1/3-1/2 of this due to the distribution transformers). Small scale generation will not change much of this. Especially the variable renewable sources put an extra burden on the grid. The grid is to a large extend an alternative to some of the storage requirements and compared to storage the grid is super high efficiency. Storage is usually rather low efficiency and alone for this reason makes the electricity more expensive.

Currently most countries are just starting with something like < 25% from PV and wind. This is still the easy part, as other sources can be used to compensate instead of having real storage.

While PV and wind have a problem in not producing 24/7, nuclear power has the opposite problem: it is producing best at 24/7 and not using them at night increases the cost even more. So 100% nuclear is also a problem and would need some storage and backup to.

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

[Simon]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

[tggzzz]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

[Kleinstein]

The safety of nuclear and and other high risk (possible large damage) facilities relies on the operators and those who control them to play by the rules. For the technical side it should be possible to bring the risk to an acceptable limit - but this does not help if the companies or governments stretch the rules all the way they think they can do it. If everything goes well, they get some extra money in one way or the other. If things turn out bad however they just can't compensate for the damage - so the state or maybe even other neighboring states have to pay for it. This is not limited to capitalism - we had a bad example in Chernobyl. As the USSR broke down and could not pay for the damages, it is now other countries that pay for it.

Things are a little different with planes: here the damage from a lost plane is large but usually the companies survive and they usually have insurance. The insurance somewhat is a big incentive for the airlines to play by the rules. Still things go wrong there too - like trying to safe by not carrying required fuel reserve. For nuclear there just is no real insurance - much is covered (more or less) by the states as a kind of subsidy.

With coal plants - governments should really stop building new ones and start to turn down the old ones. However building new nuclear as a replacement is not a good idea. Fist is that it takes too long to build them, they are rather expensive and still chances are the government will have pay for the waste or possible damages in the end. Especially in more corrupt states safety and the money laid back for final disposal can be a real problem - it is likely not there when needed. For the situation here in Germany it might be acceptable to shut down coal first and run nuclear a little longer. But politics decided the other way around - false claims from nuclear industries made this popular. It is more of a scandal the the US did not shut down (at least for upgrades) most of there plants just after Fukushima, as most US reactors are of similar design.

[Simon]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

I am afraid you are just putting words in my mouth. I take it you have no problem with the company that let this power station get into this state. This is why we in a capitalist society are not ready for nuclear. You have a government that has tied it's hands by letting private interests run public interests and when the private puts the public at risk the government has to just go along with it. Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

[julian1]

Good science and engineering does not exist in a vacuum. And unfortunately - politics, money and human-nature are unavoidable and cannot be factored out of the design process. When it all goes wrong - the result is environmental damage on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

[Simon]

Good science and engineering does not exist in a vacuum. And unfortunately - politics, money and human-nature are unavoidable and cannot be factored out of the design process. When it all goes wrong - the result is environmental damage on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Which is exactly why we should not have nuclear. It's not so much that there is a huge failing with the technology. But no technology can withstand being misused.

[tggzzz]

With nuclear you should still have a backup, as usually many reactors of the same type are used. From time to time safety issues are discovered that would ideally need all reactors of one type to be turned down for fixing it. However governments are usually not the strict and prefer reduced safety over financial upsets. This is one point where society is just not fit to operate a technology that requires priority to safety - too often money if preferred over risk reduction.

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

By your reasoning, conventional plant should be shut down immediately, since they kill (and disable) far more people than nukes.

By your reasoning, no aircraft should ever fly. In practice, it is absolutely normal for defective commercial air transport aircraft to take off. By statute (probably the ANO, but I haven't checked!) it is the individual pilot's responsibility to look at the defect list and decide whether or not to take off. Landing isn't optional, of course.

I am afraid you are just putting words in my mouth.

Not really. If there's a "motes vs beams in eyes" issue, then it should be highlighted. Alternatively, please simply regard it as an exploration of consequences of opinions, or an exploration of imbalance in opinions.

I take it you have no problem with the company that let this power station get into this state. This is why we in a capitalist society are not ready for nuclear. You have a government that has tied it's hands by letting private interests run public interests and when the private puts the public at risk the government has to just go along with it.

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

[Someone]

Our new made in china reactors won't be ready for years and already wind is cheaper than nuclear, by the time that power station is switched on we will all feel the shafting badly as it will be very expensive electricity that we have agreed to pay a price for years in advance and we could have spend the difference on developing storage technology.

Oh, that old canard.
Q: if you install X GW of wind generating plant then how much conventional plant can you remove?
A: 0 GW; nada, zilch.
You still have to have the equivalent conventional plant capacity available when wind power is unavailable, and that costs money. Self evidently, if you only have to use a plant for, say, 10% of the time, then the fixed costs make the cost per minute or GWh look extremely high. But what's the cost of not having it available when required? (Hint: much, much higher).

It depends which costs you externalise,

Just so. Most proponents of wind energy are disreputable in that they knowingly externalise and ignore the "dispatch costs" in order to make their preferred technology look good.

You're going to have to define "dispatch costs" as its not a common term that seems to match anything relevant here. The cost of energy of wind (levelled or not) is for the UK a close match to all other generators other than open cycle gas and coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_Kingdom
The grid is a market whether you like it or not (https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2015/09/wholesale_energy_markets_in_2015_final_0.pdf), you don't count the cost of storage for dispatch in with generators of any type, the marginal value of the energy produced is already counted in the levelled cost.

the new build nuclear reactors are going ahead with an artificially inflated and guaranteed price for the electricity they produce. A huge incentive for them to continue and makes some alternatives non-viable as they are unable to compete with those heavily subsidised contracts.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Wind and solar are heavily subsidised with guaranteed prices.

Try the numbers:
https://www.frontier-economics.com/documents/2015/03/lcp-frontier-economics-next-uk-auctions-renewable-contracts-difference.pdf
To encourage new low carbon electricity capacity in the UK subsidies are being distributed to the nuclear and renewable sectors, the subsidy per unit of energy delivered varies but for all projects getting subsidies they are averaging less than the subsidies for Hinkley Point C. And as noted the subsidies for renewables are for shorter periods, so are committing less investment over time.

But in a more open market where the price freely fluctuates adding wind capacity will offset other generators, already gas peaking and hydro are used as short dispatch generators from their stored energy before we get into storage of electricity. A mixture of gas and wind is where the money has been going in Australia as its more profitable than coal. If there is storage (of some sort, be it gas as above) and fast slewing capacity in the grid then renewables can keep adding in more generation capacity, even if they can't deliver the tops of the peaks or have lulls other generators will price themselves to the market. That encourages storage and discourages slow/conventional thermal plants. Incremental adding of intermittent renewables doesn't directly offset any conventional generation but it changes the market radically, and the incumbents with their long term investments don't like that idea.

Note that in the UK electricity prices have already been double the guaranteed strike price for the next generation of nuke electricity.

Seems like Hinkley Point C is still getting a strike price above the annual average:
http://www.energybrokers.co.uk/electricity/historic-price-data-graph.htm
The point of the contract for difference is to reduce risk for the investor, that the market has peaks above their price is a loss of opportunity for the investor having offloaded their risk to the cfd supplier who then profits (the government in this case).

a large conventional coal or nuclear plant can easily be replaced by some mixture of other plants that together have a lower impact on the population. Gas alone is a good option, but if the desire is to move away from non-renewable resources then intermittent renewables in combination with some fast slewing plants will make a start in that direction.

Er, that's being wilfully blind. Neither easily nor safely.

By which numbers? The publicised fatalities per unit of energy show that solar and wind combined with pumped hydro storage would be lower than the same energy produced by oil, gas, or coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
So they're actually safer, possibly more expensive, but safer and entirely possible. Nuclear would be safer again, so its a good option too.

[djos]

By which numbers? The publicised fatalities per unit of energy show that solar and wind combined with pumped hydro storage would be lower than the same energy produced by oil, gas, or coal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
So they're actually safer, possibly more expensive, but safer and entirely possible. Nuclear would be safer again, so its a good option too.

Even when you ignore incidents like the Hazelwood Coal Mine fire which likely contributed to an increased death rate in Morwell and surrounding areas, burning Coal absolutely contributes to health problems. I can recall visiting my Grandparents in Moe (Victoria) in the late 80's and suffering "asthma" attacks and respiratory problems in the 2 weeks I stayed there - i'd never had issues before or since. Not exactly scientific standard evidence I know, but it's the most likely culprit.

[Simon]

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

I never said any of the current alternatives are any good either but we have a failing plublic sector that is destroying public services and the government is still trying to hand more over to it's ministers mates.

We have a rail service that is falling to bits despite it's astronomical cost (I used to live in italy and there was a local private rail service that ran much cheaper than rail does here and it worked so it can be done). Our hospitals are busting at the seams and what you don't see is how much "NHS" work is done by private companies charging a fortune leaving the NHS starved of money along with government cuts, we have phone companies expecting the government to invest in fibre optic services that they will then charge us a fortune for after we funded the infrastructure and in this environment of chaos and dog eat dog and profits before service you want me to be happy to have a nuclear power station ? no way, never, ever, ever. Sorry we are not grown up enough for a nuclear power station. The people making the decisions are clearly only seeing the money and not the risks. And all we are seeing is a country run by corporations not government. When a government has to change a law to allow a dangerous nuclear plant to continue to run then we are being held to ransom by the private company running that power station. I am sorry but I just can't see a happy ending here.

I don't want power cuts either, perhaps in the national interest people could start to use less energy ? lets face it most people are totally inneficient because they are lazy and/or ignorant. You want your clever toys ? then you should know how to use them...... The complaints people make about a nanny state are in part not justified. If we lived in a grown up and educated society people would be able to look after themselves and work with the system for the benefit for all.

For example. I have just bought a shiny new laptop, it's a decent one. and after using it for a few weeks I can say that I am now happy to have it replace my desktop PC for vitually everything, so I am now running a machine that uses 45W (according to the charger) as oposed to one using 2-300W. All my lights at home are LED and not overpowered. As I mentioned before I try and help the system by producing some of my own energy (I make about 1/3 of what I use although I am sure that won't help a blackout at 5pm in the dead of winter). and I even replace 400W of incandescent lights at work with 44W of CFL when I replaced them in my own home for he LED's. Tell me how many other people can be "arsed" to think of things like this ? It's not rocket sience.

[tggzzz]

Capitalism is a complete red herring. Dysfunctional political decisions are just as prevalent in communist, socialist, meritocratic, oligarchic, and any other form of government.

Yes I'd rather be without power than have a nuclear accident thank you very much. You seem to rather accept the staus quo. I am afraid the state we are in is not acceptable.

And from that we can infer you have a limited experience of the world. In particular:

• you are too young to remember the 1970s in the UK. I had to revise for O levels and A levels by candlelight, sitting under a blanket, seeing a blacked out hospital through the window
• you haven't travelled to places where power cuts are frequent but irregular

If you had, you would be less sanguine about power cuts.

I never said any of the current alternatives are any good either but we have a failing plublic sector that is destroying public services and the government is still trying to hand more over to it's ministers mates.

We have a rail service that is falling to bits despite it's astronomical cost (I used to live in italy and there was a local private rail service that ran much cheaper than rail does here and it worked so it can be done). Our hospitals are busting at the seams and what you don't see is how much "NHS" work is done by private companies charging a fortune leaving the NHS starved of money along with government cuts, we have phone companies expecting the government to invest in fibre optic services that they will then charge us a fortune for after we funded the infrastructure and in this environment of chaos and dog eat dog and profits before service you want me to be happy to have a nuclear power station ? no way, never, ever, ever. Sorry we are not grown up enough for a nuclear power station. The people making the decisions are clearly only seeing the money and not the risks. And all we are seeing is a country run by corporations not government. When a government has to change a law to allow a dangerous nuclear plant to continue to run then we are being held to ransom by the private company running that power station. I am sorry but I just can't see a happy ending here.

I don't want power cuts either, perhaps in the national interest people could start to use less energy ? lets face it most people are totally inneficient because they are lazy and/or ignorant. You want your clever toys ? then you should know how to use them...... The complaints people make about a nanny state are in part not justified. If we lived in a grown up and educated society people would be able to look after themselves and work with the system for the benefit for all.

For example. I have just bought a shiny new laptop, it's a decent one. and after using it for a few weeks I can say that I am now happy to have it replace my desktop PC for vitually everything, so I am now running a machine that uses 45W (according to the charger) as oposed to one using 2-300W. All my lights at home are LED and not overpowered. As I mentioned before I try and help the system by producing some of my own energy (I make about 1/3 of what I use although I am sure that won't help a blackout at 5pm in the dead of winter). and I even replace 400W of incandescent lights at work with 44W of CFL when I replaced them in my own home for he LED's. Tell me how many other people can be "arsed" to think of things like this ? It's not rocket sience.

I agree with all those starting points, but I fail to see how they make conventional power plants more dangerous than nuclear plants. To go from rail/NHS/etc to nuclear power seems to me to be a incomprehensible complete non-sequiteur.

[Simon]

I think you meant less dangerous ?

What I am trying to explain is that we do not live in a society that wants to pay for anything and the government who usually would have our interests at heart and not profits are not running anything any more. As I said they changed the rules so that a nuke power station could stay in operation. This is profitiers holding the government and the public to ranson. You want your electricity, you have to risk a nuclear accident to have it because we won't invest and expect the givernment to bail us out.

[tggzzz]

I think you meant less dangerous ?

Duh! Yes. I inverted the sentence while writing it - or rather I inverted half the sentence.

What I am trying to explain is that we do not live in a society that wants to pay for anything and the government who usually would have our interests at heart and not profits are not running anything any more. As I said they changed the rules so that a nuke power station could stay in operation. This is profitiers holding the government and the public to ranson. You want your electricity, you have to risk a nuclear accident to have it because we won't invest and expect the givernment to bail us out.

Yes, that is the world we live in, and we should face up to all the realities while trying to improve it. Being able to store electricity from intermittent sources for short/medium terms would be a big help, but as yet the reality is that it can't be done.

Two current realities that cannot responsibly be avoided are:

• if electricity is turned off for whatever reason, many many people will die
• conventional plant kills more people than nuclear electricity

So, which set of people (other than easy targets like politicians, lawyers and estate agents) are you prepared to kill by not using nuclear electricity or by having long/short term power cuts.

Personally I prefer to keep people alive.

[zapta]

Two current realities that cannot responsibly be avoided are:

• if electricity is turned off for whatever reason, many many people will die

+1

Electricity could save for example these ~4M people that die every year from pollution, having to cook/heat with wood and dung.

http://www.who.int/indoorair/en/

[Simon]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning. We are not at the point where the lights are going out and the proposals to install more nuclear power plants are not going to solve any of our problems in the next 10 years. Generation capacity is not the problem with renewables but as you say storage is still a big problem. Again the government who should be looking after our interests is probably expecting the private sector to come up with the technology when instead the government could invest in the technology. As a country we are very poorly set up technologically, our ability to innovate has fallen drastically and we have become a country of traders. The main problem is that there is not yet the political or public will to accept that the way we are going is not the best way to go and we need to do something about it. We seem to take our technology for granted and expect it handed on a plate. I've not heard of the government explaining to people how to economise with power and be more efficient which if we were we could probably easily shave 20% of our national consumption and that would shore us up for quite some time with the necessary overhead in power supply.

Places like hospitals will have backups for short-term outages. No operating theatre would operate unless it had backup power because as you rightly point out a loss of power would mean in a hospital loss of life particularly as trying to book an appointment for an operation these days is like trying to get a train ticket. Obviously running on generators would be expensive but then what is the cost of our health?

There are quite a few rivers in this country for example why don't they have generators fitted? I would love to live near a small stream or rather have a small stream running through my property I would never pay for electricity again. There are lots of energy sources out there the problem is we haven't yet mastered the concept of microgeneration and distributed generation and storage which also comes with the need for an attitude that we are all in this together looking after each other and not every man for himself. Small scale generation with an amount of storage and grid tie inverter is could provide in my opinion a lot of resilience. It's only a pity our distribution network is not DC as that would make it much easier to pump power into the grid.

[zapta]

Correct. In this country we changed the law so that a reactor deemed dangerous could continue to operate...... We don't need nuclear, we are not ready for it. A capitalist society will never be ready for nuclear.

Simon, please keep in mind that the worst nuclear plant incident happened in a government owned plant in a socialist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

What nuclear technology needs is accountability, not ideology.

[tggzzz]

The problem is that a nuclear accident would kill a lot of people immediately with no warning.

The problem is that non-nuclear power is already killing a lot of people. Removing nuclear power will kill even more.

Which of your friends and relatives are you prepared to sacrifice for a ideology?

We are not at the point where the lights are going out

Actually we are very very close to that.  "Notices of insufficiency" (i.e. prepare to be cut off) have already been raised this winter - and this winter not stressing the energy industry. If the weather at this time in 2010 occurred now, some industries would be shut down.

If you don't believe me, go and talk to those in the generating industry. At the last IET talk I attended they asked the audience whether they expected "the lights to go out". Those in the industry raised their hands to say "yes".