by David Turver
At the weekend I attended the Battle of Ideas Festival in London. It is a fascinating event, with interesting debates taking place across a wide variety of topics like free speech, culture wars, the economy, education and women’s freedom.
I was there primarily for the energy discussions. Unfortunately, I missed the book launch on nuclear power on the Saturday, but I did attend the two energy debates that took place in the scientific dilemmas section on Sunday.
First up was a lunchtime debate entitled “Is nuclear the future of energy… again?” Unfortunately, the speaker who was supposed to speak for this position had some sort of transportation nightmare and could not attend. I did not catch the name of the man who replaced her, but he did put up a valiant effort considering he was drafted in at the last minute. Speaking against the idea of a nuclear renaissance was Robert Reid, policy development officer for the Alba Party who was in mourning for the late Alec Salmond. We can therefore forgive him somewhat for advancing the hoary old chestnut that offshore wind is cheap: he claimed £41/MWh without citing any sources. Of course, the existing CfD funded offshore wind farms have cost us over £150/MWh so far this financial year and the new projects awarded in AR6 will cost us over £82/MWh in today’s money, more than twice Robert’s claim. Emma Bateman, who is an environmental campaigner and founding member of Together Against Sizewell C, unsurprisingly spoke against the idea of nuclear power and made some spurious claims about safety that if nuclear power were a person would have resulted in the libel lawyers being called on Monday morning. The gist of her substantive argument was that nuclear is too expensive and takes too long so we should therefore spend more on wind and solar.
In the ensuing debate, I managed to correct Robert Reid’s ‘facts’ and make the point that if your primary concern is the environment, then you should be an advocate of nuclear power because it has the smallest overall environmental footprint of all energy sources because it doesn’t take up much land and has very low mineral intensity. I also made the point about the chocolate teapot fallacy. Arguing for wind and solar in place of nuclear power is akin to arguing in favour of chocolate teapots because you cannot wait for a ceramic one. No matter how many chocolate teapots you buy, you can never make tea; just like no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels you install you can never run a modern economy on intermittent electricity.
The physics of nuclear power are far superior to any other energy source because of its extremely high energy return on energy invested, meaning we get far more energy out than we expend building the power plants, and the output is reliable. There are even designs on the drawing board and beginning to be built that will allow nuclear power plants to follow fluctuations in demand. The barriers to nuclear power are all political: the West over-regulates nuclear power and it is unsurprising that it takes so long because of all the paperwork that must be produced before a new reactor can be built. We can fix man-made political and regulatory problems, but mere mortals cannot change the faulty physics of intermittent renewables, just like you can never make tea in a chocolate teapot.
We would be far better off committing to a significant nuclear power programme so we can deliver reliable electricity. If we fix the regulations, invest in rebuilding the skills base and supply chains and choose the right reactor design, we can even have cheap, reliable energy with only a small impact on the environment. This is what the French did in the 1970s and 1980s and now they produce around 70% of their electricity from nuclear.
The next debate was on the “Great British Energy Crisis”. It was encouraging to see that three of the five panellists are subscribers to this Substack (you know who you are and thank you). Two of the speakers, James Woudhuysen and Lord David Frost both made eloquent attacks on Net Zero and its consequences. Professor Michaela Kendall who is the U.K. Hydrogen Champion for Mission Innovation suggested we needed more facts to inform the debate on energy, but managed to skirt around the fact that the Government agreed contracts for green hydrogen at £241/MWh, which is about seven times the current cost of U.K. natural gas, which in turn costs more than five times U.S. gas.
Dr. Shahrar Ali is a former spokesperson for the Green Party who has recently won a discrimination court case against the Greens because they sacked him for his gender critical beliefs. It is a shame Dr. Ali cannot apply his critical thinking skills to Net Zero. The gist of his argument was the world is warming, it is going to be a catastrophe, it is all our fault, so build more windmills.
I managed to take him to task in the ensuing debate by pointing out that even if you believe CO2 causes warming, then it is a big leap to conclude that building windmills will change the weather. This is the so-called mitigation strategy that can only work if 1) CO2 is the only climate control knob (we know this to be untrue from paleo-climate records) and 2) everyone else follows the strategy (you only need to look at charts of global greenhouse gas emissions to see this is also untrue). A far better strategy is one of adaptation which has the advantages of being cheaper and will work regardless of the actions of others and regardless of the causes of global warming. The mitigation strategy we are pursuing is one of unilateral economic impoverishment and the Net Zero “cure” is far worse than the alleged climate change “disease”.
It is encouraging that my intervention drew an enthusiastic round of applause which is testament to the growing scepticism about Net Zero among the general public. It appears to me that cracks are appearing in the cosy green consensus in Westminster and if we get our arguments right, we can win this debate.
All in all, the Battle of Ideas is a thoroughly enjoyable event and I highly recommend everyone to attend next year, whatever your beliefs. It is only through free and open debate that we can get to the truth.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack, where this article first appeared.
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I love the chocolate teapot fallacy.
If you broke up the chocolate teapot, and had a steel saucepan, and some extra milk…
… you could probably make a passable hot chocolate drink, though.
Just like if you get up early enough and rummage through the wind turbine field you can gather plenty of maybe tasty wild avian “roadkill”.
How about a new term for this: “bladekill”?
Bladekill is very good. Also, Millkill. It rhymes, so is sexy.
Had to go looking for origins…
“The expression was used in The Guardian of 17th July 1978 in an article titled “Barnsley bashers face the chop”, written by Michael Parkin:
Tourists that go to home games of Barnsley Town will hear some of the finest football wit and repartee in the land. Players are accused of being “as nimble as a stone trough” or “as much use as a chocolate teapot.””
I found onlyTurver using the phrase in energy generation context, though Google suppresses anything that slights alternative energy.
Cutting through Minister Bowen’s crap in Oz-
AEMO head shuts down Chris Bowen’s ‘explicit guarantee’ of lower power prices
Chris Uhlmann nails the big picture with ‘transitioning’ to fickles and you can see immediately why he could never last as a reporter for Aunty and their lefty undergrad shills. He had to get out of their echo chamber and be a real journo and reporter.
PS: The gravy train is getting worried about all their subsidized fickles-
‘Sheer stupidity’: Geologist questions Matt Kean’s stance on energy solutions
The Federal election will be about nukes vs fickles in that respect as the Conservative Opposition have already outlined they want to build 7 nuclear plants around the country.
After over 30 years of rising alarm
Meteorologists could be climate change heroes by relaying its urgency to the public https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/22/meteorologists-climate-change-hurricane-extreme-weather
Like Michael Fish.
“The mitigation strategy we are pursuing is one of unilateral economic impoverishment.”
Yes, exactly. Making ordinary people poor is the objective of all green politics.
You will have nothing and you will be happy. It is so ordered.
The rent-seekers creedo.
Nuclear for Britain has always been a no brainer and there lies the problem as our Governments seldom have any brains. Even Thatcher went oil and gas mad when nuclear was offering her long term energy security.
I spoke to an engineer involved in the grid in the Thatcher years.
He said “We were already to go nuclear, because coal was dying, but then the interest rates went through the roof and the cost of capital meant we couldn’t afford nuclear power especially with cheap natural gas just offshore’.
That was a reasonable decision, but the real culprit ultimately was Blair, who let Ed Miliband destroy the grid completely by ‘going green’ , and the ensuing liberal democrats in coalition who carried on with it. When interest rates were low enough to build.
And the subsequent Tories who simply let green lobbyists have their way.
They simply didn’t understand the problems and costs associated with intermittency, and they still don’t.
Unfortunately, the Tories are going learn the hard way.
Thatcher had promised one nuclear plant per year of office in her manifesto but only managed one start (in 1980) before more gas and oil fields were discovered. These North Sea fields offered huge export revenues, rather more attractive than repeating annual start up costs for nuclear. At one point it seemed likely she would go for both but somehow the EU saw differently perhaps because of French nuclear..
I have not heard of money or interest rates being involved in reneging upon her nuclear ‘promises’, but simply the attraction of increased British exports via gas and oil. Had Thatcher not been usurped in 1990 it would have been interesting to see what may have happened next..
“There are even designs on the drawing board and beginning to be built that will allow nuclear power plants to follow fluctuations in demand.” Why are we not using the existing designs that power the US aircraft carriers. They can go from idle to flat out in seconds.
Every power plant design is based upon what it is tasked to do. Ships and submarines have very different performance requirements than stationary electric power generating plants, so the designs of each type of reactor are optimized for their roles. A plant optimized to vary power is different than a plant optimized to operate continuously at full power.
I am not sure what they are referring to about the ability to vary power output with demand, but I suspect they are referring to small modular reactors (SMRs). With SMRs, each of the reactors continues to operate at its optimum, which is full power output … but as demand decreases, one or more of the SMRs can be taken offline while the others continue to operate at full power.
This is like those V-8 engines that actually shut off two or more of the cylinders under low power demands, so that those unneeded cylinders do not operate rather inefficiently when not needed … then they kick in when high power output is needed.
He may be referring to some of the molten salt nuclear reactors. My understanding is that, by storing some of the molten salt in a separate container you introduce more flexibility in when you use the heat. That way you can produce at a steady state throughout the day but vary the amount of steam output by using the stored salt during times of high demand, without ramping the nuclear reactions themselves up and down.
At least, that was my understanding.
Military applications usually do not emphasize efficient energy use.
Because the United States Navy will NEVER allow the details of the materials their reactors are made of, and of how they function, to be freely disseminated. I worked with nukes at NAS North Island, and I can tell you just how serious they are about not revealing what they know and do.
Actually, there’s another excellent power source for generating electricity. It’s clean, cheap, reliable and has the added benefit of helping to make the planet greener. It is of course natural gas.
Chris
I am reminded of Soylent Green.
The energy source was a bicycle powered generator charging a lead acid car battery powering a single light bulb.
I recommend a lot of UK climate and energy articles on my blog because they ae leading the Nut Zero race. The few REAL conservative authors left in the UK realize leading a race is bad news when everyone is moving in the wrong direction.
What I almost never see:
Authors stating that warmer winters are good news. especially in England.
Authors describing how the past 50 years of global warming has affected them locally (almost always good news). This would be a good topic for an open thread here. If you’ve lived in the same place for at least a decade, did you notice a change in YOUR local climate?
Authors demanding that ONLY electric utilities and their grid engineers should decide what fuels to use for electricity, with no government mandates or subsidies. Why are politicians pretending to be grid engineers?
Power, control, celebrity status, ego, hubris, and of course their piece of the action (aka money).
The cost and infeasibility of Net Zero is a much more fruitful way of attacking green policy, because it really can be demonstrated and already the trends are very clear. They do not depend on abstract modelling by climate scientists, but real market observation of costs and the investments needed to support rising renewables production.
Toss in a few hail storms (Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc.), hurricanes (Taiwan), and tornados (Florida) just to get a good mix.
The “chocolate teapot” analogy is classic.
thumbnail.asp (600×463) (krausescandy.com)
What I love about the author’s focus is that there is an assumption that we all want a functional prosperous economy & society. It will force the hand of the deep greens to admit they don’t want that ( which those of us who follow the debate know to be true). At that point, all these net zero arguments will be summarily rejected by society generally and the movement should collapse
The Left has never admitted, and will never admit, to being wrong about anything.
“There are even designs on the drawing board and beginning to be built that will allow nuclear power plants to follow fluctuations in demand.”
There is more than that. The first practical nuclear power plants were for military and civilian ships where “following fluctuation in demand” is a fundamental requirement of the machine. They can change their power output as fast as the throttleman can spin the throttle. It’s been that way for over 70 years. The only reason land-based electric power generating reactors can’t do it is because they were designed not to follow demand.
Follow demand ? Why? Just short the excess to ground. Wasteful of electricity perhaps, but nuclear electricity was supposed to be so cheap that it wasn’t necessary to meter it. But very many rent seekers and fee servers got in on the program…
You can’t just short the excess. The current in a short circuit is gigantic, and it would burn out the generator in seconds. The earth can be used as the return path in single wire distribution systems: such as those installed in the Australian outback, wilder parts of New Zealand (where the system was invented) and parts of Africa. It is possible for the HVDC lines from the Cahora Basso hydro dam to operate in this way. Of course, if you try to pass the current through a high resistance to limit it, you get next to no current – but you don’t dissipate any energy. The undissipated energy must go somewhere. Heating up a nuclear core is probably not the best idea.
This article demonstrates that there are many designs in use of controlling the electrical output of steam turbine powered electrical generators. See fig 1 for a quick diagram…
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/354/1/012066/pdf#:~:text=In%20the%20selection%20of%20turbine,load%20characteristics%20and%20life%20loss.
The papers name is: “Selection of steam turbine bypass system” and it is open access.
Therefore the nuclear core could run a its normal output with constant thermal and pressure conditions with minute by minute control of electrical output by controlling the main stem valve concurrent with controlling the bypass valve.
Looks like a common setup.
Net Zero violates the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics.
British Columbia was one of the first places to have the Carbon Tax to solve climate change. Since then BC has had repeated Atmosperic Rivers and Catastrophic Flooding that never happened before the dreaded Carbon Tax. Just this weekend a State of Emergency has been declared in North Vancouver BC, and Insurers are no longer quoting Flood Insurance. North Vancouver does have a Large Windmill (eye of the wind) atop Grouse Mountain so this could also be an issue with rain clouds and changing wind patterns adding to tax woes.
The carbon tax has to go, because it has made food expensive. My son and I have spent $7,480 on food to date, and we are not big eaters.
I listened to podcast “Science vs.” with Wendy this morning on my drive to work … I ran out of Heartland’s “Climate Roundtable” with Anthony, Sterling and Linea. Wendy covered climate change with two guests who concluded that wind and solar are the fastest to build AND the cheapest sources (recording from this month, maybe the latest episode, so if they did not have new data they did not want it). Both guests also discounted nuclear as not part of the solution, arguing slow, expensive and Chernobyl. Both guests favored authoritarian behavior controls. Oh well, usually Wendy does a decent job hosting – just not that episode.
Very nice David. Excellent article. I really like the chocolate teapot comparison, I never heard it before. CAGW is fiction therefore Net Zero is completely unnecessary. Let us get on with the business of firing up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, building new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and removing all wind and solar from the grid.
The general public has nett zero interest in the whole idea.
I’ve been in waaaaaaay too many debates on the internet about Net Zero that I can actually predict how many posts in the other side will star spouting epithets.
I’ve been finding one strategy to be more effective of late, and that is to embrace the warming. That throws the other side off.
Yes its warming. So what? The changes in hurricane intensity and frequency, flooding, drought, and wild fires on a global scale are effectively zero. The IPCC admits they cannot detect any statistical change in those four horesman of the apocalypse (I stole that from Forbes) DESPITE the fact that we just had the warmest year ever.
So what’s left?
Heatwaves.
Well, for every extra death we record in heat waves we are saving 10 from dying in the cold.
Which leaves… nothing.
The other side at this point gets angry and starts with the insults. But from time to time I get a private message from someone who was following along thanking me for the info. In times of madness people recover their sanity one by one. So I got one.
If you go straight after the how much is it warming, how much will Net Zero save and cost, you get buried in minutia. If you just say yes it is, but nothing dangerous is coming out of it, I find its easier to get traction, and you get to the other side hurling epithets a lot quicker, so it saves you time as well.