If nuclear is low-carbon then surely it's a relevant option as far as climate change is concerned?
My point is that nuclear is commonly assumed to be de facto renewable/zero carbon. I have met very few people who get that it is not the embedded carbon costs of construction that are their major carbon load (althopugh these are of course pretty massive) but the fuel supply itself. In other words they are just another fossil fuel, albeit that only makes up a third to a half of their final output (IFYSWIM).
Not entirely true. Retracting the fuel rods will certainly decrease energy output, the rate of decrease being limited by the cooling rate of the heat transfer media (which would be an engineering problem, not a physical one). This would be more controllable and predictable than the vagaries of the weather which an all-renewable grid would be vulnerable to, and would avoid the carbon emissions associated with a hybrid gas-renewable grid.
My point wasn't that you can't vary output from nuclear power plants, just that it's massively inefficient to run them that way; you want to run them at their peak efficiency, constantly, otherwise their (already ludicrously high) generating costs go through the roof. That's pretty much the same with genuine renewables. So they compete for the base-load role. Gas doesn't need to do that, it is (energy wise) pretty good at turning on and off, although obviously there's an economic issue with the capital tied up in an under-used plant, but there's a hell of a lot less of that with gas than with nuclear, I mean less than a tenth.
Even the cleanest gas will still produce net additions to atmospheric carbon as an integral part of its operation. You can't avoid that.
And even the best nuclear will do exactly the same, in fact over the course of its life, and including the decommissioning costs, it is possible/likely that gas produces less GHG than nuclear. As I said.
Nonsense. Research into physics gets a lot of money, but that doesn't mean we have no cash left over for biological research. Same thing with nuclear and renewables.
Not at all nonsense. Not sure why you can't see this, it seems kind of obvious. There's a finite amount of capital available, what is spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. Opportunity costs and all that.
Who's building what design?
Er, I've posted several references to this, not sure how you missed them, but - EDF/Areva are building the EPR, a notoriously poor design. They are doing this for political reasons, relating to France's need for a replacement for its ageing nuclear fleet (and therefore to keep its fabulously expensive nuclear industry ticking over for the time being), embarrassment about scrapping the EPR and the resulting humiliation of having to buy in a technology which they have presented themselves to the world as World Leaders in, and of course the UK govts need to put a fig-leaf of "private capital" into the new nuclear programme here in the UK (when in reality the whole thing is going to be funded by taxpayers, UK and French - and possibly the Chinese if the rumours are right that tey are going to take a stake in Hinckley).
It's really bullshit on bullshit. A programme that won't deliver on de-carbonisation, that will cost billions of pounds, to produce incredibly expensive electricity, that will throttle our ability to create a renewable energy platform, using a design that most people get is really crap in order to save ideological and political embarrassment for people like Nikolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown and the idiots who have followed them.
And at the end of which (and that will probably be at least a decade if other builds are any guide) it will - at best - produce 7% of the UK's electricity needs, so it doesn't solve any big problems anyway.
It makes projects like Concorde look smart.
