Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

forkboy84 posted:

Man, imagine if there was a company, you could call them British Energy, who were owned by the taxpayer & didn't have to try to make as large a short-term profit as possible to quench the never ending thirst of shareholders but instead could act in the long term interests of the nation when it comes to something like new nuclear plants. Or hydro plants. Or the development of tidal/wave/other things. Or all of the above! Of course then stop imagining it because as everyone knows, nothing is more perfect and flawless than The Market.
You mean the British Energy that the government had to bail out to the tune of £3 billion in 2004 when the cost of grid power fell so low that they couldn't stay profitable with their expensive nukes?

I'm not opposed to nuclear power in principle, I just find it really hard to see a world in which it's competitive and that's what ultimately governs what gets built. The only way I see nuclear slotting in right now is a sky-high carbon price coupled with a lack of progress in energy storage so that it becomes the go-to option for baseload. But god, it just costs so much goddam money. If you think Port Talbot is struggling with expensive electricity right now it'd be a lot worse if 50% of it was coming from Hinkley Point-style EPRs.

edit: Xenon-139 has a half-life of about 40 seconds

Zephro fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 31, 2016

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Zephro posted:

You mean the British Energy that the government had to bail out to the tune of £3 billion in 2004 when the cost of grid power fell so low that they couldn't stay profitable with their expensive nukes?

I'm not opposed to nuclear power in principle, I just find it really hard to see a world in which it's competitive given that solar is cheaper than fossil fuels in much of the world already and is only going to get cheaper. A truly sky-high carbon price coupled with a lack of progress in energy storage (which would mean renewables couldn't provide baseload) might make some nukes economically viable but besides that I just don't see it.

edit: Xenon-139 has a half-life of about 40 seconds

Yeah but there's a pretty big difference in lifetime cost of "solar in the middle of the desert at noon" and"solar averaged out in a country above 50 degrees north that has overcast at least half the time". It'll need some pretty amazing advances in storage to deal with the northern European winter.

As others have pointed out though, tidal makes a lot more sense in the UK than solar, and it even provides it's own storage if done right. You're talking an absolute shitload of up-front capital expenditure (plus NIMBYism) though, which makes it even less likely than the country getting covered in solar panels and Electric Mountains.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The village of Bummerington-on-sea says NO to tidal power! We feel that building these new fangled turbines at the bottom of the sea near us will damage the heritage of our seafloor.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Guavanaut posted:

When no Parliament can bind a future Parliament in any way, what's the point of being long termist? You could set up the most wonderful thing for the long term, then fall out of public favor due to sleaze or stagnation or cyclical worldwide economicsspending all the poonds and the next lot of bastards can just sell it all at a bargain price in exchange for directorships.

See also why we'll never got proper large-scale council house construction by the State ever again.

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!
The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely frontloaded in the construction, it's an excellent bit of stimulus style building/government investment.

Zephro posted:

You mean the British Energy that the government had to bail out to the tune of £3 billion in 2004

Obviously forkboy was talking about a hypothetical nationalised electricity structure and not the privatised (then effectively renationalised then sold off to EDF) company with the same name.

Saying that BE was in trouble because of "expensive nukes" is silly (if they'd had a direct retail arm they'd have rode out the dramatic post-neta fall in electricity wholesale price), especially as a lot of the cost of the alternatives of the time (viz: coal, mostly) is hidden anyway.

MrL_JaKiri
Sep 23, 2003

A bracing glass of carrot juice!

Zephro posted:

Functionally there's no difference, though. In some alternate universe where we don't demand as much safety engineering and where the licensing process is much easier and where the workforce make much lower wages* nuclear might be cheaper than it is now. But Finland, France and the UK have all tried building EPRs. Finland is now 9 years behind schedule, I think, France is late and the estimated cost has (I think) doubled, and Britain it's not even clear whether the thing will be built at all. At the moment nuclear power is so expensive as to be really hard to justify, especially in a world where renewables keep getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

There isn't some physical universal law saying that you have to build EPRs (or indeed that the delays the current ones are having will still be there for the next generation, if one is built).

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Isn't most of the cost of nuclear reactors that there are so few built and so spread out that there is zero standardisation so every one has to be reinvented from scratch?

Paul.Power
Feb 7, 2009

The three roles of APCs:
Transports.
Supply trucks.
Distractions.

OwlFancier posted:

The village of Bummerington-on-sea says NO to tidal power! We feel that building these new fangled turbines at the bottom of the sea near us will damage the heritage of our seafloor.
That's the thing with Swansea, though, it's the first tidal lagoon to get past the public consultation phase (I mean, this is obviously anecdotal but I'm all for it and I'm a Swansea resident).

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!
Oh yay, nukechat! Time for an :effortless: post!

Zephro posted:

The contract we signed with EDF for Hinkley Point gives them a guaranteed sale price for their power of roughly double the current going rate, for the next thirty years. And they're still not sure it's enough to make them want to build the thing. Every new-generation reactor currently under construction in western Europe is very late and very over budget atm.

Note: there are exactly two nuclear reactors under construction in Western/Northern Europe, one in France and one in Finland. Both of them are French Surrender Reactors EPRs, i.e. the reactor model that turned out so terrible it's currently sinking the French nuclear industry, which has been failing pretty hard over the last decade at anything beyond keeping its existing reactors running. Obviously, the EPR is the model that will be built at Hinkley. There's also two Russian VVERs in build in Ukraine but :lol: Russia and Ukraine, and those are not the cost overrun reactors everyone talks about.

If you look at the countries where new nuclear power plants are both plentiful and cheap or at least not three times over budget, you're looking at South Korea, Japan (until Fukushima obviously), and to some extent Russia and China and maybe India. America is still building nuclear power plants occasionally but seeing rising costs, though not quite as badly as with the sample size of two in Europe.

South Korea is basically the best country at deploying a fuckton of reactors on a budget. They have been standardising nuclear reactors for the last 25 years and manage to shave hundreds of millions of dollars off the price of duplicate reactors. The the first standard South Korean reactor type (OPR-1000) got built 14 times in the country before the design became obsolete, the second series of standard south korean reactors (APR-1400) is currently at 4 in build in South Korea and 4 more planned, plus some exports to the UAE.

Japan has a zoo of reactors so they're not cheap, but apparently they were building enough (and enough of each of multiple types?) to maintain stable costs. In addition, there are allegedly ongoing (but probably heavily stalling - see Fukushima) efforts to maintain active nuclear R&D.

Russia built a lot of progressively larger RBMKs till Chernobyl happened (oops), and has since built a lot of progressively larger VVERs. Apart from cheap oil and gas the Russian nuclear industry is doing pretty well, and together with China is the main place where more advanced reactor types get developed and rolled out as commercial scale power plants, mostly because the traditional big nuclear inventors (US, UK, France, Germany) haven't felt like sinking money into developing better reactors when every post-cold war administration could just extend the lives of the existing reactor fleet instead and make the next administration deal with the problem of all the nuclear reactors being increasingly outdated pieces of poo poo.

China just got properly going with their nuclear rollout, apparently following a strategy of 1) building simple knockoff French reactors a lot because they're simple and available right now, 2) building 2-4 of almost every major reactor model available on the world market to see which ones turn out nicely so they can order more and build knockoffs, and 3) continuing where the West lost interest by building fast reactors and a version of the pebble bed reactors that were the swan song of the German nuclear R&D effort before idiot politics happened so their nuclear programme doesn't hit a dead end like in the US or UK.

India have rolled out a bunch of Canadian CANDUs + knockoffs, with some additional emphasis on developing thorium based reactors to make use of the large Indian thorium deposits, but probably have insufficient money to make progress fast enough (see e.g.: Indian climate targets are expressed as expanding coal at a lower rate and not as intending to burn less coal).

America has a patchwork of different electricity market types ranging from completely deregulated state markets to markets forever ruled by the iron fist of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it shows in where nuclear power plants continue to be built or planned (everywhere that's not too deregulated). Due to FREEDOM in unregulated markets and with the regulated markets all being tiny little islands too small to host more than one new nuclear power plant every other decade or so, every nuclear power plant is a completely separate project from every other nuclear power plant. Every five years you get a bidding war for a possible nuclear power plant by Westinghouse, GE/Hitachi, EDF/Areva/Framatome/whatever the French are calling themselves after the latest reshuffling, and maybe some other company. Perhaps half of these power plants actually get built, and each of those by a different company, and by the time the cycle repeats it's 20 years later and new reactor models have been developed, so almost every recent power plant uses different reactors. Because of the way that nuclear gets rolled into occasional completely different giant powerplants there's no workforce that continually works on nuclear projects, especially because random construction contractors get hired to do much of the build at each power plant, so nobody learns from experience and prices can never go down. Because for every nuclear power plant you are essentially training a completely seperate work force to become competent at building nuclear power plants while technology and regulations become more complex, prices actually go up.


If you look at these examples, the countries that are doing nuclear without going wildly over budget all the time, they all have a domestic nuclear industry that's
1) forced to plan ahead
2) forced to standardise
2a) on something that can be rolled out simply and in large numbers
3) gets to continually build something nuclear without decade long breaks where everyone competent gets laid off or retires

Besides Hinkley Point being basically a subsidy to the French, the UK strategy for nuclear in general is totally nonsensical. IMO, the UK is failing pretty hard at nuclear because, see above,
1) there is basically no domestic nuclear industry, except for some academics who come up with nice ideas that at best get licensed to some other country
2) nobody thinks about standardisation, with Hinkley getting EPRs, Wylfa+Oldbury getting ABWRs, Moorside getting AP-1000s, and Bradwell getting Chinese Hualong 1s :ughh:.
3) these plants will (or won't) mostly get built in the late 2010s/early 2020s, and then the UK has enough nuclear power plants for another 50 years. Only Oldbury is supposed to be a cheaper Wylfa 2.0 where construction starts after Wylfa finishes to take fuckups and their solutions lessons learned into account.
Basically the UK is trying to copy and paste the US nuclear industry with all of its problems (lack of standardisation, cost) and none of its advantages (is actually domestic, still has R&D) into the UK, so UK nuclear power will inevitably end up being messier and more expensive than it could be.

The one redeeming feature of UK nuclear policy is that they have also copied the one sensible US nuclear policy decision of the previous 20 years, which is trying to develop small modular reactors that get built in a factory and get put in a warehouse so you can buy them off-the-shelf. The idea is to have small reactors with outputs perhaps 5-20% as high as a regular giant reactor, so that instead of building two 1600MW EPRs over eight years that put you 18 billion quid in the hole before you even begin to generate revenue, you successively buy two 200MW small reactors for 100 million a pop (e: this was supposed to say "a few 100 million a pop") from a warehouse every year for eight years (possibly spreading them out to multiple sites if that makes sense) and start generating revenue in year one with the option to stop partway through if electricity prices are lower than expected without turning the project into a complete loss.
Due to the UK being poo poo, the official plan is to attract investment from US companies so we can buy the things after the Yanks do all the hard work.

Zephro posted:

You mean the British Energy that the government had to bail out to the tune of £3 billion in 2004 when the cost of grid power fell so low that they couldn't stay profitable with their expensive nukes?

I'm not opposed to nuclear power in principle, I just find it really hard to see a world in which it's competitive and that's what ultimately governs what gets built. The only way I see nuclear slotting in right now is a sky-high carbon price coupled with a lack of progress in energy storage so that it becomes the go-to option for baseload. But god, it just costs so much goddam money. If you think Port Talbot is struggling with expensive electricity right now it'd be a lot worse if 50% of it was coming from Hinkley Point-style EPRs.

edit: Xenon-139 has a half-life of about 40 seconds

Wholesale electricity price is a bad metric. It ignores costs of restructuring the grid and running it in different ways to accomodate more decentralised (or, in developing countries, more centralised) generation, which gets paid for by taxes. In countries where these taxes go into the electricity price (e.g. Germany), wholesale electricity prices can literally go negative while power bills keep increasing. In principle it's not a bad idea to guarantee higher wholesale prices for nuclear power plants in developed countries if that means we have to spend less money on other things, though the UK is being particularly stupid about things.

Sensible big-reactor nuclear in the UK or the EU as a whole would require us to consolidate the nuclear industry, and then fix it by pushing for standardisation and making sure this company actually gets to supply most of the EU's nuclear power plant builds in a standardised way, and with enough long term planning to make sure it does so continuously and can afford to wait 20 years for its new shiny nuclear reactor to pay for itself or can set some billions of euros on fire if a single power plant or R&D project turns out poo poo without sinking the company. Apart from EDF having gobbled up every other dysfunctional company to create a larger dysfunctional company, none of this will happen.

The more realistic hope for EU nuclear is to get some small modular reactor stuff going and thereby turning nuclear reactors into a normal industrial product that utilities can order with overnight shipping months instead of decades of lead time.

suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Mar 31, 2016

Scikar
Nov 20, 2005

5? Seriously?

OwlFancier posted:

Isn't most of the cost of nuclear reactors that there are so few built and so spread out that there is zero standardisation so every one has to be reinvented from scratch?

Building has slowed to a crawl ever since Chernobyl, and it's a vicious cycle.

No new reactors
-> extending the life of older plants like Fukushima
-> more incidents with these old plants extended beyond their design life
-> more redesigns of the new planned reactors
-> less actually getting built so fewer people have the experience of actually doing it any more
-> new plants delayed even further
-> older plants extended again...

The problem is there is no way politically to take a proposed nuclear plant and say "this is good enough compared to our other options (i.e. a whole bunch of coal plants, extending other old nuclear plants, or forced reduction in energy consumption which would gently caress the economy)", instead the first one built has to be more or less perfect or whoever approved it is hosed. Hinkley C probably doesn't even meet the "good enough" criteria which is why everyone has their head in their hands over it.

TinTower
Apr 21, 2010

You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.


Private Eye :allears:

Jrbg
May 20, 2014

TinTower posted:

Private Eye 'forums'

All these posters in the UKMT and not one of them a Hatfield Gooner...
Puts us all to shame

TinTower
Apr 21, 2010

You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.

J_RBG posted:

All these posters in the UKMT and not one of them a Hatfield Gooner...
Puts us all to shame

Great stuff, guys!

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
I don't disagree with any of this. There is indeed no physical law that says we have to build EPRs. That's what we are building, though, out there in the real world (or at least we're trying to), because that's what's available and that's what's licensed. Restructuring the grid, merging a bunch of European nuclear companies and so on may well help. I just don't think much of it is likely to happen, at least in the short term. Drug deaths would fall dramatically if we legalised heroin and prescribed it to addicts from doctor's surgeries. But we aren't going to, at least in the forseeable future, so there's an element of pissing in the wind involved in talking about it.

Britain is making decisions about electricity generation now, not in some more rational, nuclear-friendly future. And right now nukes are not attractive because they are very expensive and do not get built on time. If nukes were attractive we wouldn't have to offer EDF a jaw-dropping sweetheart deal to get them to even consider building one. The supposed "nuclear renaissance" in the UK has been happening since 2006, when the government altered energy policy to make it explicitly nuclear-friendly. Every minister you could ask swore blind at the time that there wouldn't be any subsidies, which looks pretty funny now that we've promised to pay the French twice the going rate for a third of a century for a single power station. A decade into this supposed renaissance and nukes are still expensive, still late, and Britain still hasn't built a single one. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Scikar posted:

Building has slowed to a crawl ever since Chernobyl, and it's a vicious cycle.

No new reactors
-> extending the life of older plants like Fukushima
-> more incidents with these old plants extended beyond their design life
-> more redesigns of the new planned reactors
-> less actually getting built so fewer people have the experience of actually doing it any more
-> new plants delayed even further
-> older plants extended again...

The problem is there is no way politically to take a proposed nuclear plant and say "this is good enough compared to our other options (i.e. a whole bunch of coal plants, extending other old nuclear plants, or forced reduction in energy consumption which would gently caress the economy)", instead the first one built has to be more or less perfect or whoever approved it is hosed. Hinkley C probably doesn't even meet the "good enough" criteria which is why everyone has their head in their hands over it.

Anything that gets past increasingly strict nuclear licensing guidelines must either be much safer compared to existing lovely reactors, or come with absolutely staggering amounts of bribes, or both. The EPR looks like it has a completely overbuilt containment system and is basically a nuclear bunker with a nuclear reactor inside. It's just not good enough in every other way

hand-fed baby bird
May 13, 2009
anyone gives red pills to my kids I swear ill do time

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I dunno ibuprofen is pretty good.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
The world's highest-profile ongoing case of hybristophilia continues as Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch's ex (who may have also had a thing with Tony Blair) begins dating Vladimir Putin.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Zephro posted:

I don't disagree with any of this. There is indeed no physical law that says we have to build EPRs. That's what we are building, though, out there in the real world (or at least we're trying to), because that's what's available and that's what's licensed. Restructuring the grid, merging a bunch of European nuclear companies and so on may well help. I just don't think much of it is likely to happen, at least in the short term. Drug deaths would fall dramatically if we legalised heroin and prescribed it to addicts from doctor's surgeries. But we aren't going to, at least in the forseeable future, so there's an element of pissing in the wind involved in talking about it.

Britain is making decisions about electricity generation now, not in some more rational, nuclear-friendly future. And right now nukes are not attractive because they are very expensive and do not get built on time. If nukes were attractive we wouldn't have to offer EDF a jaw-dropping sweetheart deal to get them to even consider building one. The supposed "nuclear renaissance" in the UK has been happening since 2006, when the government altered energy policy to make it explicitly nuclear-friendly. Every minister you could ask swore blind at the time that there wouldn't be any subsidies, which looks pretty funny now that we've promised to pay the French twice the going rate for a third of a century for a single power station. A decade into this supposed renaissance and nukes are still expensive, still late, and Britain still hasn't built a single one. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.

Oh, the wonders of the deregulated UK (and wider EU) electricity market. Companies building big reactors need subsidies if they can't plan far enough ahead to wait two decades for their new shiny nuclear reactor to pay for itself or if your electricity market is so deregulated that wholesale electricity is effectively free, so either nationalise this industry or pay the subsidies. Alternatively, wait ten years to see if small modular reactors become a thing.

The thing is, looking at Germany and the (currently stalling, increasingly over budget) €500 billion renewable project, even completely overpriced EPRs would be competitive on a pure cost basis.

suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Mar 31, 2016

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

How much will her inheritance be if Putin croaks?

Rush Limbo
Sep 5, 2005

its with a full house
The British government had no problem flooding an entire Welsh village to provide a reservoir for Scousers. One has to wonder if the reason they balk at tidal lagoon stuff is because they're infact Satan's minions on this planet and not for any other reason.

tooterfish
Jul 13, 2013

blowfish posted:

How much will her inheritance be if Putin croaks?
Nothing, he'll take her and any other fucker who's nearby with him!

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

blowfish posted:

Oh, the wonders of the deregulated UK (and wider EU) electricity market. Companies building big reactors need subsidies if they can't plan far enough ahead to wait two decades for their new shiny nuclear reactor to pay for itself or if your electricity market is so deregulated that wholesale electricity is effectively free, so either nationalise this industry or pay the subsidies. Alternatively, wait ten years to see if small modular reactors become a thing.

The thing is, looking at Germany and the (currently stalling, increasingly over budget) €500 billion renewable project, even completely overpriced EPRs would be competitive on a pure cost basis.

e: for the UK specifically, if we actually built all the 13 planned nuclear reactors that go into power stations (not counting R&D/burning weapons grade stuff in Sellafield) from 1-2 reactor types, one after the other and not all at the same time, you'd probably start out with something as overpriced as Hinkley Point and then get major cost savings in the 2nd and 3rd tranche of reactors in the late 2020s and 2030s, like South Korea.

e2: quote is not edit

suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 31, 2016

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

tooterfish posted:

Nothing, he'll take her and any other fucker who's nearby with him!

So he's literally Emperor Putin then? :v:

LemonDrizzle
Mar 28, 2012

neoliberal shithead

blowfish posted:

Oh yay, nukechat! Time for an :effortless: post!

...

Besides Hinkley Point being basically a subsidy to the French, the UK strategy for nuclear in general is totally nonsensical. IMO, the UK is failing pretty hard at nuclear because, see above,
1) there is basically no domestic nuclear industry, except for some academics who come up with nice ideas that at best get licensed to some other country
This isn't actually true, as noted above - Rolls Royce design and build the reactors that go in British military subs, and have been trying to wangle money from the government to translate that expertise into building small modular reactions for civilian purposes.

Also, we owned Westinghouse until 2006. :|

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

LemonDrizzle posted:

This isn't actually true, as noted above - Rolls Royce design and build the reactors that go in British military subs, and have been trying to wangle money from the government to translate that expertise into building small modular reactions for civilian purposes.

Also, we owned Westinghouse until 2006. :|

Ok, got me there. I was thinking of basically any one currently on the market, and forgot about the remaining military nuclear companies. Though all the recent noises have been about the UK becoming the manufacturing location for some specific parts of the SMRs, which would mean NuScale or mPower or Westinghouse contracting out some production.

suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Mar 31, 2016

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Ddraig posted:

The British government had no problem flooding an entire Welsh village to provide a reservoir for Scousers. One has to wonder if the reason they balk at tidal lagoon stuff is because they're infact Satan's minions on this planet and not for any other reason.

Poor Welsh, Scottish, and Northern people live in valleys, rich old people live by the sea.

Lord Twisted
Apr 3, 2010

In the Emperor's name, let none survive.
On the energy chat, does any knowledgeable goon know anything about how far we would get with rolling out greater microgrid programs? As in villages or even houses providing a portion of their own supply with solar or wind etc. Wouldn't be self sufficient but would surely ease the grid.

Zeppelin Insanity
Oct 28, 2009

Wahnsinn
Einfach
Wahnsinn

forkboy84 posted:

What was the last government who pursued actual long-term policy? Even Trident, which I'd like to see scrapped but is widely pretty popular, has been continually kicked into the long grass as they try to delay the inevitable. Basically our politicians are the sort of people who are in charge of the financial sector. Short term interests win it all.

That's not just a problem with particular politicians, that's the whole setup for a democracy. You have maximum incentives to be as popular as you can (which short term things are, because ~RESULTS~), while loving up things for the other party to deal with so you win the next cycle. Putting into action plans that cost you, but might potentially benefit the opposing party (since in people's minds, the party currently in power always gets credit or blame, not the previous one) is quite simply a bad move.

Well, unless you are actually into making things better for the country and its citizens, but most people don't give a poo poo about that.

LemonDrizzle
Mar 28, 2012

neoliberal shithead

blowfish posted:

Ok, got me there. I was thinking of basically any one currently on the market, and forgot about the remaining military nuclear companies. Though all the recent noises have been about the UK becoming the manufacturing location for some specific parts of the SMRs, which would mean NuScale or mPower or Westinghouse contracting out some production.
Nah, Rolls have been talking about going it alone: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/19/rolls-royce-could-power-britains-nuclear-future-with-mini-reacto/

quote:

Rolls believes a series of mini reactors – known as “small modular reactors” (SMRs) – are a more viable medium-term solution to Britain’s looming energy crisis, although the first crop of new large reactors will still need to be deployed.
Rolls argues its decades of manufacturing experience mean it could bring the SMRs into service faster and cheaper.
Paul Stein, Rolls’s director of research and technology, said: “Traditional plants are bespoke projects and aren’t getting cheaper. SMRs could be made in factories and assembled on site, speeding up work.
"I’d be disappointed if using SMRs we couldn’t generate power at least a fifth cheaper.”
Rolls has submitted detailed designs to the Government for SMRs capable of generating 220MW, that could be doubled up to 440 megawatts on plants covering 10 football fields, a 10th of the size of a traditional nuclear power station.
Mr Stein said with financial backing from Government to seed development and political and regulatory support, the company could have the first SMR generating power in 10 years for £1.25bn. Costs would fall as more were produced.
Britain is “ideally placed” to take a global lead in the SMR market which could be worth £400bn, according to Mr Stein.
“We have no significant indigenous large reactor nuclear power industry to stand in the way but we have skills in place to develop the technology.”

goddamnedtwisto
Dec 31, 2004

If you ask me about the mole people in the London Underground, I WILL be forced to kill you
Fun Shoe

Lord Twisted posted:

On the energy chat, does any knowledgeable goon know anything about how far we would get with rolling out greater microgrid programs? As in villages or even houses providing a portion of their own supply with solar or wind etc. Wouldn't be self sufficient but would surely ease the grid.

Combined heat and power systems are making some headway in both new build large developments and replacing aging central heating and hot-water systems on (ex)council estates. It's not really micro-gridding, but it is effectively capex-free baseline capacity for the grid during winter.

It should probably attract considerably more subsidy than it does, because it is both considerably more efficient than conventional oil-fired hot water systems as well as providing fairly cheap electricity (by microgeneration standards) but because there's no particular subsidy for making hot water systems more efficient (and your tenants pay for the fuel so who gives a gently caress about efficiency?), and it uses non-renewable fuel for electricity generation, not many developers are willing to pay the higher up-front cost of installing turbines instead of normal boilers.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Lord Twisted posted:

On the energy chat, does any knowledgeable goon know anything about how far we would get with rolling out greater microgrid programs? As in villages or even houses providing a portion of their own supply with solar or wind etc. Wouldn't be self sufficient but would surely ease the grid.

At a basic level, that's what decentralising the grid means. The issue is you either need a very interconnected grid (i.e. an expensive rebuild of the grid), or on site storage, or very likely a combination of both. It's technically possible but will still be a very large investment, just spread out over many tiny projects instead of big money pits.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

That's nice to hear, and it would be a fitting parallel to how the US did their initial successful nuclear power rollout.

Lord of the Llamas
Jul 9, 2002

EULER'VE TO SEE IT VENN SOMEONE CALLS IT THE WRONG THING AND PROVOKES MY WRATH

There must be a Tinder for power mad psychopaths or something.

Malcolm XML
Aug 8, 2009

I always knew it would end like this.
solar is getting cheaper faster than nuclear is getting viable so i suspect that investment will go into grid improvements to handle solar's fickleness and maybe some natural gas plants to deal with the weird load patterns + home batteries to tide power consumption.

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

Malcolm XML posted:

solar is getting cheaper faster than nuclear is getting viable so i suspect that investment will go into grid improvements to handle solar's fickleness and maybe some natural gas plants to deal with the weird load patterns + home batteries to tide power consumption.

there would need to be an eu-wide (or possibly larger) power grid for solar/wind to be viable, and it would still need storage. natural gas is still a lot of CO2 and quickly load following natural gas is less efficient and more expensive

renewable-happy countries are currently approaching the point where you start to need storage and guess what that's where renewable rollouts are stalling

basically once you introduce another big ticket item to the bill in our lovely deregulated electricity markets stuff stops getting done again

Jose
Jul 24, 2007

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer

Zeppelin Insanity posted:

That's not just a problem with particular politicians, that's the whole setup for a democracy. You have maximum incentives to be as popular as you can (which short term things are, because ~RESULTS~), while loving up things for the other party to deal with so you win the next cycle. Putting into action plans that cost you, but might potentially benefit the opposing party (since in people's minds, the party currently in power always gets credit or blame, not the previous one) is quite simply a bad move.

Well, unless you are actually into making things better for the country and its citizens, but most people don't give a poo poo about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdfRRtAs3o

suck my woke dick
Oct 10, 2012

:siren:I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!:siren:

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

it doesn't, but same for everything else :v:

Ms Adequate
Oct 30, 2011

Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling



Oh joy I get to fill out another Work Capability Assessment form, I'm sure this will be fairly judged and I will not at all be put in the WRAG and then have to submit things a second time to emphasize that no, actually, I am not suddenly better after five+ years of disability, and that what I said in said form was true, and please can I still receive that money I need to live without having to subject myself to stresses that would drive me to suicide?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

DesperateDan
Dec 10, 2005

Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

No it isn't, but it still tramples my bloody lavender.

blowfish posted:

Oh yay, nukechat! Time for an :effortless: post!

Awesome posting, thanks :coffeepal:

  • Locked thread