How much is too much investment in nuclear energy?
Sizewell C, budgeted in 2020 at £20bn has now been costed at £38bn (a near doubling in cost) in five years.
Given much of this will be funded via loans underwritten by income from energy bill-payers, we might well ask if that money might be better spent on other forms of energy (and the necessary storage capacity for renewables).
If you think that is it for cost increases, experience tells us it wont be!
@ChrisMayLA6 The costs and risk are hardly a surprise. Piquemal resigned in 2016 because he thought Hinkleyl was too big a risk for EDF and things have not improved in the nuclear space whilst battery prices are down 25%+ in 12 months and Gartner (who normally underestimate badly on renewables) are saying it'll have halved again by 2030.
Meanwhile China built the worlds largest solar farm (about 5GW at this point) for about 1/10th of the new Sizewell budget.
It’s quite interesting that nobody in this threads seems to realise - or maybe simply are in denial - that #China has also built over 10 GW in #nuclear power over the last decade, also at 1/10 cost of whatever is done in the UK. The same also applies to renewable (wind and solar) projects between China and UK. Yet nobody seems to be reflecting on these simple factors that are directly impacting the price of construction in both countries:
You can’t have a cake and eat a cake. You need to decide whether you want UK to return to the times when it was a truly global mining and industrial power, that is in 19-20th century, with all the consequences such as police dispersing mining unions or environmental protests, or you want UK to be a pink unicorn that only has nice green hills and clean air while all the dirty processing is cheaply done by prisoners in China. You can’t have both.
By the way, #China is just starting construction of the largest hydro power plant in #Tiber worth 170 billions USD. Meanwhile in the UK:
Protesters voice fears over waterfall electricity project in north Wales. Plan for Rhaeadr y Cwm receives 1,000 objections, with many worried about impact on habitats and natural beauty
So, please kindly make your mind - either you want new large-scale public infrastructure projects, or you don’t 🤷
Much the same point was made about large scale infrastructure projects & the UK planning system in the FT this morning - on the energy side, I think the answer is the debate has been skewed by a very effective pro-nuclear lobby.
But your ones about how China is progressing their energy agenda is well taken - behind the greens are some very unsavoury issues
Well, the “pro-nuclear lobby” has good arguments behind them - high capacity factor, low emissions - and you could literally count IPCC, UNECE as part of the “lobby” because both say nuclear is critical for securing low-carbon dispatchable power output.
The only currently semi-valid argument against nuclear is that in the UK the projects are facing delays and budget overruns, but this is a problem with the UK, not with nuclear. In the same way many other large projects were and are failing - HS2, large PV farms… and the water utilities. Yet, somehow only for nuclear this argument is singled out as the problem with the technology, not with the UK model of funding such projects…
@kravietz @ChrisMayLA6 There are multiple arguments against nuclear including what happens when it goes wrong and longer term whether it can compete with storage and large scale geothermal. A lot of people in the UK remember Windscale and how close we came to doing a Chernobyl junior.
Your comment that large UK PV farms are failing also seems peculiar. Right now they are doing very nicely and are extremely profitable - but PV is a very different beast financially.
For such occasions I have this fantastic example of solar and nuclear scare combined in a truly fascinating nonsense produced by environmental activists who were also opposed to PV:
Lithium-based batteries are filled with a highly flammable electrolyte which, if it catches fire, can ignite combustible material nearby. These fires have “an explosive energy equivalent to a small nuclear bomb and the potential to spread lethal gases”, the Save Graveney Marshes campaign website claims.
including what happens when it goes wrong
It can “go wrong” with any technology, as demonstrated above. And it actually does - you know what happened in Oxfordshire when a large PV farm caught fire in 2017? The whole area was filled with toxic smoke carrying cadmium, lead etc.
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/25320043.fire-south-oxfordshire-farm-overnight-smoke-area/
@kravietz @ChrisMayLA6 And a month afterwards it was mostly cleaned up and gone. Chernobyl (and nearly Windscale) are still uninhabitable.
You can post all the life cycle assessments you like but Windscale still haunts the UK nuclear story. Likewise the fact the UK is really bad at giant state projects is harder to fix than replacing most of them with smaller projects which is why stuff like home solar and batteries will make a huge difference here - it scales outside of the planning problems.
Yes, and Thames Water teaches us that UK should abandon public water utilities 🤷
As it comes to Chernobyl, it’s very much inhabitable - the wildlife is thriving there thanks to absence of humans. And in general using anything designed by Soviets is a very bad metric for reasonable assessment - as a reminder, another Soviet projects of changing direction of rivers in Central Asia resulted in drying up of Aral Sea, which is an environmental disaster that lasts till today. Did you know about that one? I bet you didn’t.
Yet, does anyone say Aral Sea is “haunting hydro power projects”? No, nobody cares about Aral Sea, just like nobody cares about 1976 Banquiao dam collapse in China which killed 50’000-250’000 people.
We simply do safer engineering than Soviets or Maoists did… which is one reason why things in UK and EU are more expensive than in China.
Therefore, to eliminate such media bias and compare environmental impacts against objective criteria, there are studies such as UNECE 2021 which compares overall environmental impact across different technologies calculated per kWh of electricity produced:
https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options
Yes, whatever one might think of nuclear its also clear that it is subject to the same failing as other large UK infrastructure projects....
@kravietz @ChrisMayLA6 Not sure you can describe Rhaedr y Cwm as large scale public infrastructure given it's a tiny tiny little thing and an entirely private project 8)
But in general yes - the UK has serious issues even compared to much of the EU. Lots of poor planning policies, short termism and abysmal project management.
The desire to hide all the debt in private businesses also has a huge impact simply because a lot of big infrastructure boils down to "how cheaply can you borrow money"
Yes, once again, when you scratch the surface, the UK's bad management & the financialisation of the economy are revealed....
Well, I would say the problem starts with the “hiding of the debt” semantics and the fact that you’re using exactly this term is a good indicator how much this narrative had been internalised by all sides of political debate in the UK and US.
It’s quite ironic that it was UK and US environmental economists who invented modern methodologies such as CBA (cost & benefit analysis) and terms such as “externalities”, which capture both external costs but also external benefits of any project. Both of these externalities tend to massively change the overall financial balance of any such project when looked in the scope of the whole society. China, manu EU countries or even Russia seem to perfectly get it and subsidise such projects, removing the factor of for-profit private lending.
Yet it’s expert communities in exactly these countries - UK and US - that seem to be organically unable to capture even for such an obvious examples as water utilities and obsessively stick to the direct financial balances of such projects, which obviously are not viable economically, just as curing terminal cancer is generally not “viable economically” if we apply such a limited perspective.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
The Penguin of Evil
kravietz 🦇