National Grid Share Discussion Threads

[m100] 05/12/2013 22:40

@harvester

"but you should also note that ocean storage (if not accessed from land) contravenes international treaties (no doubt for good safety reasons) ."

The bottom of a deep ocean trench is, by a very, very long way, the best place for disposal. Dump all the existing nuclear waste down there from every nation and you'd not see any evidence of it again, ever. Not even if you hung around until the end of time.

"I don't accept your argument that serious problems need not be addressed by our generation since solutions will probably be found by future scientists ."

There are no serious problems needing to be addressed. You are just following the pattern of baseless arguments that the greens have been churning out for decades to kill nuclear power because of the 'waste issue'

Living in harmony with our environment is not possible unless you immediately cull about 6 billion from the population, return to living in caves, hunt furry animals with a bow and arrow and cook them over an open fire.

If you want to live in harmony with the environment then do it. Go offgrid, totally. No processed food, no clean water, no matches to light that fire, no transport, no tv, no modern medicines. no modern materials in the construction of your house, so that also means no solar pv, or wind turbines, or glass or bricks or thermalite blocks or PIR insulation or any glazing let alone double or triple glazing). Grow your own crops, rear your own livestock, starve if the crops fail. If you want copper or iron or whatever then mine it and refine it using basic techniques. Your free choice, but the greens should not permitted to force their values and restrictions on the rest of the planet and then pick and choose which bits of modern life they do want.


P.S. I agree that oil is a useful feedstock, as is coal and natural gas. Wind and solar technologies require huge inputs of hydrocarbons in their manufacture, the true, unsubsidised return on them and their total usable life is miserable. Far better to build a few dozen nukes, and more coal fired stations that use the billions of tonnes of readily available strip mined coal that doesn't kill thousands underground.

[harvester] 05/12/2013 19:51

Wikepedia contains a long and detailed article on nuclear waste disposal methods . The article is headed by a short and very simple summary as follows:

"Radioactivity naturally decays over time, so radioactive waste has to be isolated and confined in appropriate disposal facilities for a sufficient period of time until it no longer poses a hazard. The period of time waste must be stored depends on the type of waste and radioactive isotopes. It can range from a few days for very short-lived isotopes to millions of years for spent nuclear fuel. Current major approaches to managing radioactive waste have been segregation and storage for short-lived waste, near-surface disposal for low and some intermediate level waste, and deep burial or partioning / transmutation for the high-level waste."
I doubt if anybody here has the knowledge to fully understand all the details mentioned in the article which follows the above summary or the risks posed by the high level waste .
I did attend a radioisotope course as part of my training(among many other courses) but I certainly would not claim that I have sufficient knowledge to make a recommendation on the nuclear issues . I think we would all be well advised to leave that to the scientific experts .

Nevertheless the reference to thorium by tonio above is a valuable contribution to our discussion .
m100 :
you are right that coal waste also has some radioactivity (see wikipedia article) but you should also note that ocean storage (if not accessed from land) contravenes international treaties (no doubt for good safety reasons) .
I don't accept your argument that serious problems need not be addressed by our generation since solutions will probably be found by future scientists .
Maybe they will and certainly the rate of scientific progress in recent years has been phenomenal . However , one big world catastrophy could throw man back to the dark ages leaving future generations potentially with major problems .
Surely sustainable ways of living in harmony with our natural environment would not be such a bad idea . Oil has many other uses in the chemical industry besides its use as a fuel . The fact that it now needs to be extracted from deep sea wells and the arctic indicates that it has been used up too quickly and wastefully over 2-3 generations only .

I don't agree with Millibands idea of an electricity price freeze. Sensible pricing promotes investment and also aids more prudent consumption .
Government subsidies for green or nuclear generations could be justified as a short-term measure to kickstart newer generation methods but over the medium or longer term also leads to mis-pricing .

[skinny] 05/12/2013 14:30

Interesting - thanks.

[tonio] 05/12/2013 14:26

Uranium-based reactors came about to a large extent due to the need for plutonium for nuclear weapons. There was then and is now the alternative of using thorium.
Uranium isotopes are fissile nuclei - hit them with a neutron and they split releasing energy. Thorium is a fertile nucleus - hit it with a neutron and a fissile nucleus can result, hit that with another neutron and fission occurs.
If thorium is to be used in a reactor you need an extra source of neutrons to initiate the process. This makes it inherently safer - to stop it remove the extra source. In addition there are no long-lived waste products from a thorium-based reactor and plutonium is not an end product. There are also huge reserves of thorium (most in India) and all of it can be used. India is building a prototype,China is working on it and so are the UK in a joint project in Norway. It is certainly a realistic proposition - far more so than fusion which is still at the aspiration stage. Whether it ever features in the UK will depend on our commitment to it but thorium is there as a totally untapped energy source when the oil,coal and gas (however produced) run out.

[pierre oreilly] 05/12/2013 13:18

m100 - thanks for your informed input. After probably 20 years, I'm tired of the nuclear debate - people's views are pretty entrenched, and the nuke accidents every decade reinforces those badly informed views of the average bod. There has been some much anti-nuke rhetoric over the last 30 years no wonder most have a distorted view of the reality of it. The reality is that Nuclear is an almost magical technology, a gift from nature of immense proportions and yet most people shake in their boots when the word 'Nuclear' is mentioned!

As with any technology, failures will always exist. We have to accept that there'll be nuclear accidents in the future, just as we accept the risk orders of magnitude higher that there'll be many killed in car accidents. The effects of all nuclear accidents should be analysed dispassionately and the deaths/injuries/other bad effets per GWh of generation and compared with other generation technologies. As you say, most are more dangerous. Waste is no longer a problem but maybe the classification is. There are legacy problems from the waste dumped indiscriminately from the very first reactors which were mainly used by the armed forces.

Whatever, new Nukes are coming to the UK, simply because there is no rational alternative for the long term. And people will be screaming for them after a few months of regular winter powercuts.

[speedsgh] 05/12/2013 11:28

pretty close to long term rising support which it has bounced off several times since mid-2010. will be interesting to see if it holds again. sentiment is certainly against the sector at the mo.

[septimus quaid] 05/12/2013 11:24

About every decade, the unelected greens have received a "propaganda gift" be it TMI, Chernobyl or Fukushima.

This gift though is only ever a screaming headline, very little in the way of informative analysis by the dominant and left-wing biased BBC.

Trouble for the greens is that they have now backed their way into a corner, as nuclear is essentially a low carbon technology.

[tonio] 05/12/2013 11:06

Meanwhile, amidst all the government dithering and manipulation, the NG share price continues to plummet. Ah well, as defined in the urban dictionary,it is what it is.

[redartbmud] 05/12/2013 09:56

The fundamental problem here is government policy, or more precisely the lack of it.
Any sizeable energy producing plant requires a very significant capital investment. Once commissioned it should last for several decades.
Government and the opposition don't think further than the next election.
Unless they can arrive at some consensus on regulation and returns, who in their right minds is going to invest several billions of pounds in a scheme that could generate a negative return, in a worst case scenario?
There are plenty of opportunities in other areas that have greater clarity of return and free capital is not a plentiful commodity at present.

[harvester] 05/12/2013 09:30

m100: I think it is a bit of an extreme view to rule green energy out completely . Oil , gas , coal won't last forever . I also think it is morally hard to justify if we try to solve all our problems at the expense of future generations. If you have children or grandchildren whom you love you would not reject that argument out of hand .
I would support the government of any party in promoting home insulation. It clearly makes sense to address the demand side of the energy equation as well as the supply side .

[harvester] 05/12/2013 09:21

m100: I have no expert knowledge on nuclear but some types of nuclear waste have a very long decay life.
If the nuclear power station waste could really be spread safely on a city street then why do governments spend hard cash for storage in deep mines , concrete bunkers or expensive exports ?

[careful] 05/12/2013 08:51

you forget that the nuclear station in japan was an american design.

[m100] 05/12/2013 08:40

Chernobyl, a reactor design that would never be certified in the West, deliberately operated outside its permitted parameters, alarms ignored, protection measures bypassed.

The exclusion area around Fukushima remains less radioactive than the pavement outside M&S in Aberdeen.

TMI, a fully contained incident, no deaths

There have been more deaths in the UK with gas and coal fired power generation than have died at Fukushima and TMI combined. There have been no radiation related deaths at TMI and Fukushima, yes zero deaths.

Deaths from coal mining and hydro electricty dam failures in the past 50 years or so are many orders of magnitude greater than those from the nuclear industry. If iodine tablets had been handed out to the general population around Chernobyl then the total deaths due to nuclear in the past 50 years would be less than the deaths in Europe in the past five years due to wind turbine construction.

Like I said, there is no problem, only those invented by the greens to strangle progress and repeated by the mass media until people believe it to be true.

[darias] 05/12/2013 08:19

You forgotten Three Mile Island. Perhapd too young for that one.

[lord gnome] 05/12/2013 07:46

'There is no problem, only those invented by the greens to strangle progress. Most nuclear waste would be undetectable if you dumped it on a kerb in Aberdeen or on Dartmoor.'

WTF? Tell that to the people of Chernobyl or Fukushima.

[tonio] 04/12/2013 18:17

Well we did indeed have a fine nuclear power construction company in Westinghouse but it was sold off by Gordon Brown at Christmas in 2006. It is pointless though going over our historical blunders, the list is so long it's depressing.
Going forward, it seems to me that working with China is probably a lot better than working against them - not that we have much choice. Remember the golden rule -he who has the gold (not us, GB sold it) makes the rules.

[septimus quaid] 04/12/2013 16:59

The largely unelected "greens" have had a stranglehold on this country for about three decades. Supported, in no little way, by the left-wing biased BBC.

We should have started rebuilding our nuclear PS capability about 10 years ago, ready for the (inordinately predictable) replacement programme.

Once built, some of these highly trained engineers and technicians would have stayed on to run the stations the rest would have filtered out to the betterment of the wider economy.

A truly missed opportunity?

[pierre oreilly] 04/12/2013 11:47

When are all our Nukes going to be controlled by China?

The severe problems we will face in the medium term are due to the anti-Nuclear campaigns which have been very successful over the last 30 years. The general public have, until very recently, supported that anti-Nuclear stance (without appreciating or investigating the consequences) and supported the pro-green stance of very expensive and inefficient renewable energy, which is largely intermittent in nature (again, without appreciating or investigating the consequences). We are in a position which ideally we wouldn't be in, and to dig us out of it, we need the expertise of countries who have Nuclear engineering expertise, a field in which the Uk was once world leader yet now have almost no expertise whatsoever.

[harvester] 04/12/2013 09:46

Electricity clearly is partly essential and partly a luxury .
Some people seem to think that playing games and watching TV is essential .
Will Britain's electricity supplies be more secure when all Britains nuclear plants come under the control of China ?
Presumably by then the Dalai Lhama will be refused an entry visa .
A Saint without cash in his pocket is not welcome in Britain these days .