Greenpeace take over a coal train in Nottinghamshire

[Butch le zer]

Demand reduction is never going to work. China and India aren't going to stop industrialising, no one will stop South America and Africa industrialising

 

[coley]

But if we were to replace coal as a main energy source, we'd need to build stuff to replace it wouldn't we? Stuff which would be built by people with jobs.

The tories are actually legislating to limit the output of renewables like wind in the UK. In so doing they're reducing the chances of jobs being created in that industry, jobs which won't vanish when a mine dries up or the coal company finally goes bankrupt.

A recently opened UK coal open cast mine in Telford is scheduled to close several years early because the site (already heavily mined back in the days of the industrial revolution) contains a lot less coal than they had predicted. Obviously the coal had been sold years in advance before they even started digging, leaving UK coal in the tricky position of having sold something that doesn't exist. This news is bad for the people working at the mine for obvious reasons, but it's also very bad news for the company's already anaemic pension fund.

A handful of jobs as precarious as these are not really worth the scars on the landscape or the damage to the climate; not when more jobs, with more security, could be created by abandoning coal altogether.

Most 'jobs' created by wind farms are abroad,we basically provide massive returns for foreign companies by using wind while at the same time increasing domestic tariffs by about 30%.

 

[SpookyFrank]

ok, well a post-election pledge limiting onshore wind is quite different to legislating against renewables but i see your broader point. though i think the business opportunities of renewables are being recognised more so it's simplistic to say that capitalists will favour fossils.

Plenty of capitalists are investing in renewables. But the fossil fuel guys have the old money and the connections to artificially shift policy in their favour. The fact that stuff like fracking even exists should be evidence enough of this.

 

[coley]

well we've got a new nuclear reactor planned for the existing hinkley site, so we'll not need the coal.

a bod in the paper called it a 'nuclear renaissance'

Again,most of the profits and jobs will be for the benefit of foreign investors.

 

[DotCommunist]

Again,most of the profits and jobs will be for the benefit of foreign investors.

well yeah, the contracts gone to EDF.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Demand reduction is never going to work. China and India aren't going to stop industrialising, no one will stop South America and Africa industrialising

Nor does the west have any right to tell the rest of the world not to aspire to our standard of living. I personally think we could get rid of a lot of the stuff we have and live more fulfilling lives as a result, but I'm aware that that's a pretty minority view and that it's easy to say that as a person who lives in a place where people do have access to all those fancy things.

 

[coley]

Brilliant stuff.

'We're not wrecking the environment, we fill in all the big holes we dig with garbage!'

Trouble is they'll often sell off the land on top of a former open cast site for housing developments. Coal mining is a good way to turn greenfield land into 'post-industrial' brownfield land.

Building houses on top of what is basically a landfill site is not a great idea from an engineering point of view.

Most of the opencast sites around here have been returned to agriculture or nature reserves, not aware of any OC sites being used for housing developments?

 

[SpookyFrank]

Most 'jobs' created by wind farms are abroad,we basically provide massive returns for foreign companies by using wind while at the same time increasing domestic tariffs by about 30%.

People abroad need jobs too. But if the UK government wanted renewable power to provide more work for people in the UK there's a lot they could do to make that happen. When the UK's only wind turbine factory, Vestas on the Isle of Wight, closed a few years back the government did fuck all. There's state funding to put the things up but there doesn't seem to be the same incentives for people to actually build them here in Britain.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Most of the opencast sites around here have been returned to agriculture or nature reserves, not aware of any OC sites being used for housing developments?

That's just a rumour I heard, albeit from people who spent a lot of time and energy researching open cast coal mining with a view to trying to stop it.

Many open cast mines are in AONB's which makes it near-impossible to get permission for any large scale developments. For some reason it doesn't make it impossible to get permission to dig a fucking great big hole to get the coal out. UK coal's next planned development is about ten miles from me. I followed the planning process pretty closely, and despite all the objections and a statement of opposition from the local authority the plans were waved through. Nobody from the coal company even showed up to the planning hearing, because they knew it was a done deal and they didn't have to.

 

[coley]

This article seems to suggest that we've got enough Uranium for about 85 years:

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2006/uranium_resources.html

Naturally, the more nuclear power plants we build the more uranium we'll get through. But I'm more concerned about the fact we still don't know what to do with the nuclear waste we've already produced, never mind the waste from another century of nuclear power.

Thankfully Scotland is still available

 

[SpookyFrank]

Thankfully Scotland is still available

As a nuclear waste dump?

 

[coley]

That's just a rumour I heard, albeit from people who spent a lot of time and energy researching open cast coal mining with a view to trying to stop it.

Many open cast mines are in AONB's which makes it near-impossible to get permission for any large scale developments. For some reason it doesn't make it impossible to get permission to dig a fucking great big hole to get the coal out. UK coal's next planned development is about ten miles from me. I followed the planning process pretty closely, and despite all the objections and a statement of opposition from the local authority the plans were waved through. Nobody from the coal company even showed up to the planning hearing, because they knew it was a done deal and they didn't have to.

Aye, they know its a " done deal" because of the precarious state of our energy supplies over the next few years, even open casts ( I have two, a lot closer than you) are under threat as they can't compete with dumped imports, we have a power station that has converted to ecologically friendly biomass!! It imports wood from America, chopped down, transported 3,000 miles and burnt, HTF is that environmentally friendly? But add the renewable subsidy then it is very profitable
The rest of the world must be laughing their tits off at our "environmentally friendly efforts"

 

[coley]

As a nuclear waste dump?

And Cumbria

 

[SpookyFrank]

And it's not much good us closing all our coal plants if we keep importing mountains of shite from China, all of it built in factories running on electricity from coal plants.

 

[SpookyFrank]

And Cumbria

Cumbria's lovely.

The home counties on the other hand...

 

[coley]

Cumbria's lovely.

The home counties on the other hand...

You don't see much activity as to their availability to waste repositories, do you?

 

[SpookyFrank]

You don't see much activity as to their availability to waste repositories, do you?

When I'm King, that will change.

 

[coley]

And it's not much good us closing all our coal plants if we keep importing mountains of shite from China, all of it built in factories running on electricity from coal plants.

Embrace reality, use British coal in the short term while using the money saved from paying foreign investors to invest in a home grown renewable energy supply, tidal and solar,even wind if the kit is British built, CONNC the knowledge/engineering base is still there, but for how much longer?

 

[coley]

When I'm King, that will change.

Ha, some chance, yer mam will see you oot bonnie lad

 

[co-op]

I'm sure this could never happen though, it's not as if we're handing out contracts for building and running new nuclear power plants to the lowest bidder or anything.

This isn't right, unfortunately the truth is probably worse.

The govt has fallen into the arms of EDF for the Hinckley plant because no one else wanted to touch it; there's never been a privately-built and financed nuclear plant anywhere in the world, ever, for the simple reason that they make no economic sense whatsoever without huge govt subsidy. EDF are of course a state-run company (albeit by the French state) and have now been handed a massive subsidy by the UK govt to build the new plants at Hinckley.

But part of the problem here is that EDF will only build the EPR reactors designed (and being built, sort of) by Areva, another French govt-owned state operator. The EPR is a massively over-complicated design and correspondingly massively expensive. The EPR under construction at Olkiluoto in Finland is now 4 years past its original deadline (it was meant to take 4 years in total) and still not finished. Its price has doubled to ??£6billion in the process (the massive amounts of capital soaked up by these projects and the phenomenal costs of over-runs is the main reason private capital won't touch nuclear - the opportunity cost-benefit analysis never stands up to the risk analysis). Same thing is happening in Flammanville in Normandy, also Taishan in China - EPR reactors running massively over-budget and over time.

It's become (imo) a discredited design, India recently cancelled interest in an EPR. You can buy an off-the-shelf US or Korean plant for £2.5b - sure it'll probably over-run (they always do) but no one has a track record as crap as EDF/Areva/EPR do.

This is basically the French govt desperately trying to find a way of keeping its nuclear industry on track so that they have a functioning one ready for that BIG problem that they are now facing - ie replacing their massive nuclear fleet, all built in the 1970s and now coming to the end of its life. Luckily the UK govt is ready to bung a massive subsidy their way, paid for by all of us in the form of higher electricity bills (which will be blamed on "having to cut carbon because of the EU and rumanian migrants" or whatever). The fact is they ought to toss the EPR in the bin and start again but its too late for that if they want to keep their own industry alive and they'd have to buy in from abroad, probably the Westinghouse Toshiba AP1000. Not to mention the loss of face in the upper echelons of the French bureaucracy.

 

[co-op]

.

Nuclear fission is just as worthy of consideration as renewables with regards to the future of energy production.

Not if you're interested in reducing carbon emissions to the kind of level that we need to head off climate change. Nuclear can be described as "low-carbon" but it's no where near being "renewable". Highly efficient gas turbines can be called low-carbon - in fact if you include the carbon costs of decommissioning there's a case for suggesting that gas may already be lower in terms of carbon than nuclear (and gas is getting more and more efficient). Gas would make a far more flexible and efficient bridging technology to a carbon-free future than nuclear.

 

[co-op]

The article also mentions that fast reactor technology would extend reserves to over 2500 years. Do either of those figures take into account reprocessing?

The theoretical reserves are huge, the actual extractable reserves are much smaller. Mining and milling currently account for about 35-40% of the carbon costs of nuclear, as we move to the thinner ores that cost rises steeply; this is one of the uncertainties of carbon-costing nuclear. At the moment it can be considered viable to mine ores as thin as 0.02% uranium - ie 200 grams per ton, that's a lot of digging and crushing. If you get down to even lower levels you end up spending more energy on extraction than you produce at the other end, and obviously the carbon costs go through the roof. There is a gamble here about how many other countries are going to go nuclear - if loads do, then we reach non-viability sooner, possibly within the lifetime of the plants (which would really make them a bad investment). If only a few do then the easy uranium lasts a good long while. It was partly this equation that suddenly made a few govts think 'let's pile in early' a few years ago. The UK was one of these but we're moving so slowly that it's arguable we've missed the moment.

 

[bubblesmcgrath]

I'm assumng they rode there by polar bear in order to reduce their own carbon footprint?

 

[SpookyFrank]

This isn't right, unfortunately the truth is probably worse.../snip

And no doubt it will prove more important to honour our end of the contract than to do right by the British public, no matter how badly the French fuck up their end of it.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Not if you're interested in reducing carbon emissions to the kind of level that we need to head off climate change. Nuclear can be described as "low-carbon" but it's no where near being "renewable". Highly efficient gas turbines can be called low-carbon - in fact if you include the carbon costs of decommissioning there's a case for suggesting that gas may already be lower in terms of carbon than nuclear (and gas is getting more and more efficient). Gas would make a far more flexible and efficient bridging technology to a carbon-free future than nuclear.

Gas is not getting more efficient when you factor in the increasingly elaborate methods being used to extract it in the first place. But I agree that it makes sense to use gas to keep the lights on while we build up renewable infrastructure, not least because you can basically just switch off a gas power station and mothball it with no major problems. Not so nuclear power plants.

 

[co-op]

Gas is not getting more efficient when you factor in the increasingly elaborate methods being used to extract it in the first place. But I agree that it makes sense to use gas to keep the lights on while we build up renewable infrastructure, not least because you can basically just switch off a gas power station and mothball it with no major problems. Not so nuclear power plants.

Fair point, once you allow for the extra energy used in getting hold of it in the first place, gas probably isn't getting that much more efficient. But the other huge reason for using gas as the bridging tech is that nuclear and renewables are not very compatible whereas gas and renewables are. In order to get anything like a reasonable level of efficiency both nuclear and renewables have to produce base-load - ie the always-demanded level of power. I know that renewables aren't great at this but they can't do switch-on, switch-off at all* - neither can nuclear.

Gas can, in fact it's pretty good at it, basically it's just like turning on a giant grill with a giant match, so it's great for demand surges at peak points - advert-break kettle on big football match - that kind of stuff.

So apart from soaking up vast quantities of capital which would otherwise be used on alternatives, nuclear is also incompatible with renewable alternatives. The whole things a disaster really, especially since we're building the most useless design...


*apart from hydro-electric which I believe has the fastest on-time of any method, beats gas. But that's not going to be a huge element of the UK's mix.

 

[SpookyFrank]

IIRC the biggest daily surge in demand comes when everyone puts the kettle on after Eastenders.

The solution is simple: cancel Eastenders. Failing that simply show it in slightly different time slots in different parts of the country.

 

[coley]

Fair point, once you allow for the extra energy used in getting hold of it in the first place, gas probably isn't getting that much more efficient. But the other huge reason for using gas as the bridging tech is that nuclear and renewables are not very compatible whereas gas and renewables are. In order to get anything like a reasonable level of efficiency both nuclear and renewables have to produce base-load - ie the always-demanded level of power. I know that renewables aren't great at this but they can't do switch-on, switch-off at all* - neither can nuclear.

Gas can, in fact it's pretty good at it, basically it's just like turning on a giant grill with a giant match, so it's great for demand surges at peak points - advert-break kettle on big football match - that kind of stuff.

So apart from soaking up vast quantities of capital which would otherwise be used on alternatives, nuclear is also incompatible with renewable alternatives. The whole things a disaster really, especially since we're building the most useless design...


*apart from hydro-electric which I believe has the fastest on-time of any method, beats gas. But that's not going to be a huge element of the UK's mix.

Are tidal barrages classed as hydro?

 

[DotCommunist]

This isn't right, unfortunately the truth is probably worse.

The govt has fallen into the arms of EDF for the Hinckley plant because no one else wanted to touch it; there's never been a privately-built and financed nuclear plant anywhere in the world, ever, for the simple reason that they make no economic sense whatsoever without huge govt subsidy. EDF are of course a state-run company (albeit by the French state) and have now been handed a massive subsidy by the UK govt to build the new plants at Hinckley.

But part of the problem here is that EDF will only build the EPR reactors designed (and being built, sort of) by Areva, another French govt-owned state operator. The EPR is a massively over-complicated design and correspondingly massively expensive. The EPR under construction at Olkiluoto in Finland is now 4 years past its original deadline (it was meant to take 4 years in total) and still not finished. Its price has doubled to ??£6billion in the process (the massive amounts of capital soaked up by these projects and the phenomenal costs of over-runs is the main reason private capital won't touch nuclear - the opportunity cost-benefit analysis never stands up to the risk analysis). Same thing is happening in Flammanville in Normandy, also Taishan in China - EPR reactors running massively over-budget and over time.

It's become (imo) a discredited design, India recently cancelled interest in an EPR. You can buy an off-the-shelf US or Korean plant for £2.5b - sure it'll probably over-run (they always do) but no one has a track record as crap as EDF/Areva/EPR do.

This is basically the French govt desperately trying to find a way of keeping its nuclear industry on track so that they have a functioning one ready for that BIG problem that they are now facing - ie replacing their massive nuclear fleet, all built in the 1970s and now coming to the end of its life. Luckily the UK govt is ready to bung a massive subsidy their way, paid for by all of us in the form of higher electricity bills (which will be blamed on "having to cut carbon because of the EU and rumanian migrants" or whatever). The fact is they ought to toss the EPR in the bin and start again but its too late for that if they want to keep their own industry alive and they'd have to buy in from abroad, probably the Westinghouse Toshiba AP1000. Not to mention the loss of face in the upper echelons of the French bureaucracy.

christ and here was I thinking there was just some minor industry palm-greasing afoot

 

[coley]

Bit long but interesting,
http://www.naturalgaseurope.com/unconventional-gas-aberdeen-2014-five-quarter-harry-bradbury