h/t Jo Nova; In the wake of Britain’s recent catastrophic wind drought, the Boris Johnson administration appears set to embrace nuclear power as their main strategy for achieving net zero.
U.K. Net Zero Emission Plan to Focus on Nuclear Power, FT Says
By Sherry Su 16 October 2021, 20:35 GMT+10
…
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is to unveil an overarching “Net Zero Strategy” paper as soon as Monday, along with a “Heat and Building Strategy” and a Treasury assessment of the cost of reaching the 2050 goal, the report said.
The main strategy will have a heavy focus on Britain’s nuclear power program. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was expected to give the go-ahead to the documents on Friday, according to the report.
The creation of a “regulated asset base” model will be key to delivering future large atomic-power stations. Under the plan, households will be charged for the cost of a plant via an energy levy long before it begins generating electricity, the report said.
…
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-16/u-k-net-zero-emission-plan-to-focus-on-nuclear-power-ft-says
A pivot to nuclear power is marginally less insane than a 50 degree north nation trying to stay warm in winter using solar power, but the new proposal still sounds very expensive.
The “regulated asset base” prepayment for new nuclear plants will drive up the cost of energy for Britons who are already reeling from having to pay for the British Government’s energy market tinkering.
In addition, a commitment to future nuclear power does nothing to solve Britain’s current energy woes. A new generator which is planned to come online in 15 years or whatever does not help keep the lights and heating on today.
When France transitioned to affordable nuclear power in the 1970s, there was bipartisan support for the move. Continued reliance on oil and fossil fuel was seen as a major national security risk. The mass produced nuclear plants were deployed with minimal red tape, and have continued supplying France with affordable, reliable nuclear power ever since.
But a similar will to act decisively does not yet appear to exist in Britain.
It is the rush, the government attempts to impose energy policy, which I believe is making everything so expensive. Nobody will invest in nuclear in Britain without government financial support, because the political risk is too great. Building nuclear plants is affordable, until you add the red tape and the risk the next administration might shut you down.
The best thing the Boris Johnson administration could do, in my opinion, is to lay off the power sector, stop funnelling ordinary people’s utility bill cash to special interest groups through sweetheart deals and guaranteed purchase contracts, and allow the free market to restore reliability and affordability to Britain’s energy network.
Right now Britain’s energy market is a mess, everyone has their hand out. All of these demands for special consideration to achieve non-commercial government energy policy objectives are being subsidised by ordinary people, who are suffering unprecedented energy bills and fuel poverty.
BoJo’s administration has got to stop tinkering, they have to stop trying to kid themselves that they can somehow outsmart the smooth operators who run Britain’s energy industry, the smart boys who are doing very well out of this shambles, at the expense of the British People.
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A Wall Street Journal editorial claimed :
“In the long run, greens hope, demand for fossil fuels will dry up, leaving producer countries stuck with stranded assets.”
Greenpeace and the Sierra club have successfully demonized nuclear.
This insures that fossil fuels will be providing most of the baseload and dispatchable electrical power for decades.
No need to go nuclear. Hydrogen will be our salvation.
‘We want to be the Qatar of hydrogen – I think Qatar may already be the Qatar of hydrogen, but we want to be with you.’
– Boris Johnson speaking at the Global Investment Summit ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow next month
He has gone mad. There can be no question now. The difference is that Qatar has large oil reserves. The UK has no hydrogen reserves and no way of making the stuff. And if it could overcome these obstacles, it then would have to replace all gas powered appliances, and also replace the transmission pipe network to make it hydrogen safe.
This is another of those classic ‘don’t bother me with implementation detail, I am saving the planet’ stories.
It cannot be done. And if it were to be done, it would have zero effect on the climate.
Notice by the way China and Russia are not going. No-one outside of few lunatics in government and academia in the West believes any of this stuff.
Holy cow, will someone shoot his wife and shut him up?
We have but one chance, and that is to use the massive installed engineering base to create small modular reactors cheaper and better than anyone else can.
Leo, I’m betting on NuScale’s 77 MWe unit to be the first western-nation SMR design to be installed in an operating commercial nuclear power plant.
A 462 MWe NuScale plant comprised of six 77 MWe modular units is scheduled to go online in eastern Idaho in late 2029. It will be owned by UAMPS, will be constructed by Fluor, and will be operated by Energy Northwest..
Here are the reasons why I think the NuScale design will be the first out of the gate:
— Their SMR design is a light water reactor derivative which uses half height conventional fuel rods and which integrates the reactor vessel and the steam generator into a single module which can be produced in a factory.
— The NuScale design delivers a very large portion of an SMR’s theoretical operational advantages but at the least overall technical and financial risk for the power plant’s constructors and owners.
— The NuScale project team is taking the time and effort needed to create a fully NRC compliant industrial infrastructure which can cost effectively support the manufacture and installation of their 77 MWe SMR design
— The NuScale project team works very closely with the NRC to ensure that no regulatory surprises or regulatory bottlenecks will occur while their SMR manufacturing industrial infrastructure is being developed and optimized.
— The NuScale SMR design will not go into production until its design is reasonably complete and stable, and until the manufacturing infrastructure needed to produce their design cost effectively has been reasonably well optimized.
— UAMPS and the NuScale team are being completely realistic concerning the slim possibility that a centralized spent fuel repository will go into operation in the US during the operational life of their plant. Their Idaho plant site will have enough spent fuel capacity to handle 60 years worth of output stored in NRC-compliant dry casks.
As far as the technical and the financial risk of a new-build nuclear project are concerned, a nuclear power plant’s technical design, and the manufacturing and construction processes used to produce and install that technical design, are all One Thing — and must be managed as such.
Nuclear power demands a highly professional and disciplined approach to doing business at all phases of a new-build nuclear project — starting from the initial technical concept and then on through system design, regulatory approval, component manufacture, and site installation.
If history is any guide, any weaknesses present anywhere along the line in any of those phases will result in significant cost overruns and project delays.
Why would a “free market” function when there remains “the risk the next administration might shut you down”?
Well, exactly. Banks and capital sources will not put money into long term projects where there exists a risk of political shutdown and no guarantees of ROI if it happens.
RWE and, IIRC, EON sued Merkel’s government over that.
The problem is that the whole EU business model has become ‘legislate for it, we will build it, and the plebs will pay double for it’. Such shameless underwriting of industry has become the norm – less pork barrel, more Bay of Pigs – that no one is prepared to take an un-guaranteed risk any more!
The only way to get Hinkley Point built was to guarantee a sale price for its electricity. EDF have a signed contract from the guvmint.
Great. Maybe my brother can get a job over there since we’re still shutting nuclear power down in the States. Then again, they will probably prioritize hiring Iranians.
How does one fix a government generated crisis? Three guesses: Government, Government, Government!
“The creation of a “regulated asset base” model”
Pay attention to that idea. Not just for nuclear power, but for everything. It’s called a new way to justify spending, raise taxes and go further into debt.
Boris Johnson on climate change, from 2013. “It is time to consult once again the learned astrophysicist, Piers Corbyn.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20190109234953/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/9814618/Its-snowing-and-it-really-feels-like-the-start-of-a-mini-ice-age.html
Just announced: The UK Taxpayer is to stump up another £620 million so government can fund Electric Vehicles for the wealthy to virtue signal with.
Britain decides to makeup to unreliable renewables by going nuclear.
This is obviously part of the conspiracy by the Nuclear Industry to get Greens to embrace nuclear energy by having them experience the many failures of renewables.
/snark
There is already blood on the floor and the fools in government want to squeeze the stone for more, not having learned a thing after the many failures of their central planning and eco religious zealotry based on nothing factual.
IWD’s (intermittent weather dependents) are more of a risk to human health than the status quo. The only sane intermediary source of energy is nuclear.
If the UK built just 27 Palo-Verde scale nukes at $12 billion/plant ($324 billion total) they could run 24/7/365 on 100% nuclear power with basically “zero” CO2 emissions.
Pretty cheap compared to 100% wind/solar plants + 1 week battery backup system which would cost around $14 trillion..
I’m not saying any county should go 100% nuke, but this is just to show how crazy and delusional Leftists are about wind/solar…
Oh, and nuclear power costs around $0.12/kWh vs. $0.40/kWh for wind/solar…
Boris assures us that his plans will not be compulsory:
“So while we’re going to have to make some pretty major changes to the way we heat our homes, the Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/16460774/boris-johnson-reassures-sun-readers-climate-change/
No, you can keep your efficient gas boiler. You can’t afford the gas to burn in it after the government enforced price rises though. The government is slowly closing off the alternatives. House coal can no longer be sold in England. Only kiln-dried firewood can be sold in England which has increased the price of firewood. Briquettes certification has increased the price of the same briquettes by almost 25%. Similarly, they are likely to eliminate petrol vehicles not by banning them, but by making the fuel unaffordable.
A pivot to nuclear power is marginally less insane
WUWT’s antinuclear politburo letting it’s prejudice show through.
The best thing the Boris Johnson administration could do, in my opinion, is to lay off the power sector, stop funnelling ordinary people’s utility bill cash to special interest groups through sweetheart deals and guaranteed purchase contracts, and allow the free market
“Free market” is as big a myth as perfect communism. What it means is freedom to be bullied into buying American gas. Thanks but no thanks.
The current gas and energy price spike is perfect evidence of the failure of the “free market” for energy.
Government intervention is a perfect example of “free market”?
Allowing people to run their own lives instead of having government tell them what to do, is just bullying?
The current failure in Europe is due to Govt intervention.
But so is the high cost of nuclear, entirely a function of over regulation
Until there is another Nuclear boogie man hitting the evening news, then its turn on a dime back to coal for what coal plants still remain functional. Yes Nuclear could be great, but its human emotional weakness for running for the exit every time there’s a new Nuclear horror movie or TV News Show nuclear drama. So, Nuclear sadly is DOA only after getting a plant or two built if that.
Small Modular Nuclear reactors which are safer and easier to build the today’s nuclear plants are the wave of the future. DOE has funded 3 companies to build these Gen 3/4 nuclear plants and develop the manufacturing and supply chains needed for relatively quick build (from a nuke plant perspective).
For example, Nuscale (SMR developer backed by Flour Corp.) is working with companies in UK, Czeck Republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania on building SMR nuclear plants for power generation after they’ve got their first plant up and running in the US by 2029.
Yes, it’s still a long way off, but the reality is that we have plenty of time, despite the “10 year window until doomsday” predictions from alarmists that come out every year since James Hanson’s 1988 Congressional testimony.
I can’t believe that our incompetent UK government has actually agreed to embrace nuclear power ?!! They are against anything which works well and are determined to send the UK into the dark ages of breezes and heat !! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha !!! If they ever DO get off their backsides and develop nuclear it will be a miracle !
Rolls Royce, a British company, have already developed a modular reactor. It’s not that small, at about 200 MW. But it is modular. It makes perfect sense for the U.K. to use a British made modular reactor which is the future of nuclear power, and in fact power generation in general.
France have just announced their own SMR program along with their captive market in the EU.
That is the story from politicians this week.
If the left had simply embraced Nuclear to begin with it would have made it so skeptics like myself would have merely shrugged our shoulders and said – you want to move away from coal to nukes? Sure that is fairly sound.
Instead they have insisted on a FANTASY of ‘CLEAN ENERGY’ coming from IRRATIONAL sources that when you do SIMPLE MATH, show themselves to be untenable.
Solar makes sense if you are OFFGRID, or change your roof shingles over to it for 25 – 30 years at a small increase in cost of replacing your roof, and then only to offset the peek summer months you would use electricity.
If this was the USA plan – to invest 3.5 TRILLION in building Nukes which will be reliable, and last a VERY long time… I would feel much, much better.
Rolls Royce, a British company, have already developed a modular reactor. It’s not that small, at about 200 MW. But it is modular. It makes perfect sense for the U.K. to use a British made modular reactor which is the future of nuclear power, and in fact power generation in general.
France have just announced their own SMR program along with their captive market in the EU.
There has to be a sea change in attitudes on the crazed enviro-left.
If they really believe CO2 is a problem then they need to back off the endless litigation and piling on of regulations regarding nuclear.
It can be built affordably but only in a non-insane policy environment.
Without that we continue of the path to maximum stupidity.
And
One of my dearest wishes is to see the left admit that their anti-nuclear activities has led to far more CO2 emissions than otherwise would have happened so Jane Fonda can go to her grave knowing she was responsible for the “climate emergency”.
Maybe she has a conscience and this knowledge ends up ki!!ing her.
Britain’s built by China nuclear power program?
They’re so deep in the swamp, the crocodiles are chewing their ears and noses.
My name is Boris. I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.
Right now Britain’s energy market is a mess, everyone has their hand out.
Well stop listening to paleoclimastrologists sitting at computer desks and ring a plumber instead boofheads-
ROGER BISBY: Heat pumps are one of the biggest con I’ve seen (msn.com)