Tactical Grace
29-01-2006, 18:16
Why does an individual as frequently and consistently accused of liberalism as I am, give a firm YES to nuclear power in the UK?
Allow me to explain... :)
The first step is understanding the current UK electrical energy mix and history. Our generation capacity is currently 40% gas, 30% coal, 25% nuclear and less than 5% everything else. Most of this is hydro / pumped storage used in system frequency regulation. Some is wind, biomass and waste incineration. The rest is even more negligible.
Our energy transmission and distribution system was largely put in place under the authoritarian auspices of the CEGB in the 1960s, a remarkable technocratic body with near unlimited powers, combining corporate and state characteristics. Prior to the 1950s, the UK's electrical energy system was an inconsistent patchwork of non-interconnected local networks with varying and variable fequencies and voltage levels, and extremely low power quality. It took the CEGB two decades to draw everything together into a unified system with an extremely high degree of centralisation. Those were the days when the body could mark a cross on a map, and say that this is where a power station could be built, draw a straight line on a map and say this is where an overhead transmission line would be built. No-one had the power to object in any effective fashion, nor was there a forum for complaints.
Once built, the system stood, and remained capable of upgrades and expansion for three decades. During this time, the CEGB took a lead in developing the entire body of specifications which dictate electrical energy network construction throughout the world today.
Post-privatisation, the CEGB was dismantled into a group of companies we know today as National Grid, the generators and the distribution network operators. Much of their technical expertise was shed into a multitude of consultancies and multinational engineering conglomerates. Any opportunity the government had, to retain a role in the management of the energy system, was squandered with the closure of the British energy ministry, and the decision that the DTI and Ofgem would handle purely financial regulatory matters. The deliberately intended effect of this was to ensure that no-one had overall control, oversight or crucially, responsibility for British domestic energy policy.
The market also played a role, as virtually all spare generating capacity was perceived and destroyed as glut, rather than the backup it had once been. The earlier decision to shut the domestic coal industry and pursue combined-cycle gas turbine technology was environmentally sound in its day, but would have serious consequences later.
Simultaneously, a dramatic expansion of planning regulations gave the public the mechanisms and right to halt any national infrastructure project. The first uses came during public inquiries into road and airport expansions, but as we will see, this would have a dramatic impact on the energy system.
Returning to the present day, the North Sea has been clocking up a 7% annual decline rate in oil and natural gas since 1999. This implies a halving in the decade to 2010, and halving again in the subsequent decade. In fact the situation is even worse, as enhanced recovery techniques temporarily reduce, then dramatically increase the decline rate. By 2020, the UK would be out of the oil and gas business. In 2005, it ceased to be self-sufficient.
There are numerous short-medium-term technical fixes. Additional pipelines to Norway, as currently being constructed, only drain the fields in that country's waters faster. Liquified natural gas terminals for LNG shipped from Nigeria and Algeria are another, as are strategic gas storage facilities (the UK has capacity for 10 days, while other European countries have 50 days). However, planning regulations impose limitations here, as the process of obtaining permission from the general public is a long and painful one. Ultimately, these are only temporary top-ups until Russian subsea gas pipelines are built. At that point, the current CEGB-era nuclear power stations will have closed, and we will be dependent on natural gas for 60% of our electricity needs, 80-90% of that being imported from Russia.
Essentially by (read, before) 2020, Russia will own our means to provide heat, light, and water treatment. In other words dominance of the full spectrum of our utilities. ;) If this sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that today's network was subtantially built in the 1960s and 1970s. In this industry, accurately knowing the shape of the future 15 years ahead, is easy.
Now that you know something of the background, for the nuclear vs renewables bit. I do hope you have read the above, because very few people in this country understand that the debate is not about climate change, but energy security. Climate change is merely the sweetener used to sell the policy, and it is the only time I will mention it here. If you believe the terms of reference of the debate are in some way connected to it, then to the government and industry, you are yet another member of the public arguing in the wrong room.
The terms of reference of the nuclear vs renewables debate is energy security.
Now consider renewables.
Hydropower in this country is at maximum exploitation. The only further gains to be made are in replacing the generators themselves as they age. The capacity is not great in this part of the world, and it is not even particularly useful when it is constantly running, ie as part of baseload. Its most valuable use is in system frequency regulation. Essentially the system frequency falls when there is an excess of demand, and rises when there is an excess of generation. Opening up the valves on hydro gives an instant boost to generation, and hence allows grid control to correct a falling system frequency.
Suitable fuel for waste incineration and biomass are not quite as easily available as the South African coal shipped to the current generation of coal-fired thermal plants. Just forget them.
Solar power - ha. Semiconductor plants don't grow on trees, and anything which can be made cheaply enough to print by the square kilometer, will have efficiencies of a couple of percent. You would need to tile every roof in the country with the stuff, and then feed it into switched-mode power supplies. These are great sources of harmonics. For those not familiar with power systems engineering, these are not nice things to have. You could probably fill bookshelves with the British, European and international standards which say that phenomena which cause power system equipment to melt, are not good. There are numerous regulations limiting harmonic sources on the network. Believe it or not, every time you plug in a phone charger or laptop, a power systems engineer cries. Every roof in the country covered with PV - just say no.
By the way, this is another reason why mains-charged battery electric cars are not going to happen. The moment they become numerous enough to cause power quality issues, they get banned.
I will deal with tidal and wave after I have covered wind turbines. Once you know the wind picture, you will understand why the rest is silly.
Wind has made remarkable strides recently, with the turbine rating reaching 3MW on mass-market units, 5-7MW on experimental sets, and 10MW being seen as feasible. The problem is, they hit a ceiling at that point, because materials science imposes certain limitations on the blades. 10MW is probably as big as they can be made. Considering a medium-sized conventional thermal / nuke plant will have 3x 400MW generators, and wind availability is 30% rather than 80%, you are going to need MANY. Also, you will need to retain gas turbines for peak shaving.
So we're talking forests of thousands of the biggest feasible wind turbines. Now we run into the first of several problems.
One is the general public. The very best wind resource in the world is off the NW coast of Scotland. The people there do not want their view of the sea ruined by a tiny picket fence type structure 10 miles away on the horizon. And they vote. The existing planning process means they exercise a veto over any such project.
The second problem is the supply bottleneck. Vestas of Denmark own a stack of patents and exercise an effective monopoly over the equipment in question. They also have a limited production capacity, and a country with public inquiries is not a safe customer. Suppose you are about to build a batch of 100 turbines. The UK says, we can buy them at any point between now and two years into the future, but we may not be able to, if the planning process fails. Germany says, here is the cash. To whom do you sell? Not to the UK. A fact which has not yet entered the public consciousness is that the wind generation industry is now under threat in part because we can't buy the stuff. Because of our planning regulations, we are rapidly becoming too much of a commercial risk.
The third problem is feeding the power into the network. The network in Scotland is extremely weak, because it was never designed with massive amounts of demand in mind. The network in the North of England and Midlands is strong, because it was designed to cope with massive industrial and residential loads. So you have to ship the power south. How?
Well, the CEGB just drew lines on a map and put overhead line circuits there. But we can't do that. No new overhead line circuit will ever pass a public inquiry ever again. The process literally takes a decade. But we need HVDC (high coltage direct current, as opposed to alternating current) to bring the power to shore anyway. So we could ship it all the way south as HVDC. Except, not over land, as that is too expensive. It will have to be undersea cables.
A whole new electrical energy infrastructure, then. Except you have to remember that the CEGB is dead, and no-one is in overall charge of UK energy policy. That applies to infrastructure stuff too. The construction conglomerates can build stuff, but someone has to make the decision to order it. You need all the private companies to act in a coordinated fashion, and wait a decade for every project to clear the inquiries. It really can't be done.
This is why tidal and wave fails. The vast civil engineering involved cannot be sold to the public, and is too great a commercial risk.
The simplest solution is therefore to replace the nuclear power plants. The sites on which they sit, are existing nuclear sites. The local network infrastructure is already built. The transport infrastructure is already there. All you have to do is build a new plant on an unused space at each location. Plug and play. What's more, because the technology is nuclear, the government has retained enough strategic oversight to force it through.
Regarding safety, it is a non-issue. Windscale took place in the infancy of the science. Chernobyl was a test, the equivalent of doing a crash dive in a submarine, or taking a car 0-200 to see how it copes. It was a big risk. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, the ones we have in the UK largely of 1960s construction. They are reaching the end of their lives without incident. The stuff we can build today is even better, based on proven methods. A meltdown is a low-probability, high-impact scenario, something the human mind has been shown to be unable to consider rationally. One may as well fear flying, or an asteroid impact. A phobia is not an adequate reason to refuse.
Note that the question of how much CO2 is emitted in the construction process compared to savings achieved, is irrelevant. No-one will sacrifice their present for someone else's future. We can see this in the complete failure of energy conservation.
The government and industry now has no choice but to take all necessary steps to ensure the viability of the energy system. The public has shown itself unqualified to discuss the subject. It has become a national security matter. End of discussion.
There is no conspiracy at work here. I am not lobbying for the nuclear industry, nor is the nuclear industry alone in its lobbying. The whole utility sector needs and wants nuclear. This is merely the public's failure to act in their own interests, when given the freedom to choose.
So this is my argument. I welcome any sensible comments from people who have taken the trouble to read the whole thing.
Allow me to explain... :)
The first step is understanding the current UK electrical energy mix and history. Our generation capacity is currently 40% gas, 30% coal, 25% nuclear and less than 5% everything else. Most of this is hydro / pumped storage used in system frequency regulation. Some is wind, biomass and waste incineration. The rest is even more negligible.
Our energy transmission and distribution system was largely put in place under the authoritarian auspices of the CEGB in the 1960s, a remarkable technocratic body with near unlimited powers, combining corporate and state characteristics. Prior to the 1950s, the UK's electrical energy system was an inconsistent patchwork of non-interconnected local networks with varying and variable fequencies and voltage levels, and extremely low power quality. It took the CEGB two decades to draw everything together into a unified system with an extremely high degree of centralisation. Those were the days when the body could mark a cross on a map, and say that this is where a power station could be built, draw a straight line on a map and say this is where an overhead transmission line would be built. No-one had the power to object in any effective fashion, nor was there a forum for complaints.
Once built, the system stood, and remained capable of upgrades and expansion for three decades. During this time, the CEGB took a lead in developing the entire body of specifications which dictate electrical energy network construction throughout the world today.
Post-privatisation, the CEGB was dismantled into a group of companies we know today as National Grid, the generators and the distribution network operators. Much of their technical expertise was shed into a multitude of consultancies and multinational engineering conglomerates. Any opportunity the government had, to retain a role in the management of the energy system, was squandered with the closure of the British energy ministry, and the decision that the DTI and Ofgem would handle purely financial regulatory matters. The deliberately intended effect of this was to ensure that no-one had overall control, oversight or crucially, responsibility for British domestic energy policy.
The market also played a role, as virtually all spare generating capacity was perceived and destroyed as glut, rather than the backup it had once been. The earlier decision to shut the domestic coal industry and pursue combined-cycle gas turbine technology was environmentally sound in its day, but would have serious consequences later.
Simultaneously, a dramatic expansion of planning regulations gave the public the mechanisms and right to halt any national infrastructure project. The first uses came during public inquiries into road and airport expansions, but as we will see, this would have a dramatic impact on the energy system.
Returning to the present day, the North Sea has been clocking up a 7% annual decline rate in oil and natural gas since 1999. This implies a halving in the decade to 2010, and halving again in the subsequent decade. In fact the situation is even worse, as enhanced recovery techniques temporarily reduce, then dramatically increase the decline rate. By 2020, the UK would be out of the oil and gas business. In 2005, it ceased to be self-sufficient.
There are numerous short-medium-term technical fixes. Additional pipelines to Norway, as currently being constructed, only drain the fields in that country's waters faster. Liquified natural gas terminals for LNG shipped from Nigeria and Algeria are another, as are strategic gas storage facilities (the UK has capacity for 10 days, while other European countries have 50 days). However, planning regulations impose limitations here, as the process of obtaining permission from the general public is a long and painful one. Ultimately, these are only temporary top-ups until Russian subsea gas pipelines are built. At that point, the current CEGB-era nuclear power stations will have closed, and we will be dependent on natural gas for 60% of our electricity needs, 80-90% of that being imported from Russia.
Essentially by (read, before) 2020, Russia will own our means to provide heat, light, and water treatment. In other words dominance of the full spectrum of our utilities. ;) If this sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that today's network was subtantially built in the 1960s and 1970s. In this industry, accurately knowing the shape of the future 15 years ahead, is easy.
Now that you know something of the background, for the nuclear vs renewables bit. I do hope you have read the above, because very few people in this country understand that the debate is not about climate change, but energy security. Climate change is merely the sweetener used to sell the policy, and it is the only time I will mention it here. If you believe the terms of reference of the debate are in some way connected to it, then to the government and industry, you are yet another member of the public arguing in the wrong room.
The terms of reference of the nuclear vs renewables debate is energy security.
Now consider renewables.
Hydropower in this country is at maximum exploitation. The only further gains to be made are in replacing the generators themselves as they age. The capacity is not great in this part of the world, and it is not even particularly useful when it is constantly running, ie as part of baseload. Its most valuable use is in system frequency regulation. Essentially the system frequency falls when there is an excess of demand, and rises when there is an excess of generation. Opening up the valves on hydro gives an instant boost to generation, and hence allows grid control to correct a falling system frequency.
Suitable fuel for waste incineration and biomass are not quite as easily available as the South African coal shipped to the current generation of coal-fired thermal plants. Just forget them.
Solar power - ha. Semiconductor plants don't grow on trees, and anything which can be made cheaply enough to print by the square kilometer, will have efficiencies of a couple of percent. You would need to tile every roof in the country with the stuff, and then feed it into switched-mode power supplies. These are great sources of harmonics. For those not familiar with power systems engineering, these are not nice things to have. You could probably fill bookshelves with the British, European and international standards which say that phenomena which cause power system equipment to melt, are not good. There are numerous regulations limiting harmonic sources on the network. Believe it or not, every time you plug in a phone charger or laptop, a power systems engineer cries. Every roof in the country covered with PV - just say no.
By the way, this is another reason why mains-charged battery electric cars are not going to happen. The moment they become numerous enough to cause power quality issues, they get banned.
I will deal with tidal and wave after I have covered wind turbines. Once you know the wind picture, you will understand why the rest is silly.
Wind has made remarkable strides recently, with the turbine rating reaching 3MW on mass-market units, 5-7MW on experimental sets, and 10MW being seen as feasible. The problem is, they hit a ceiling at that point, because materials science imposes certain limitations on the blades. 10MW is probably as big as they can be made. Considering a medium-sized conventional thermal / nuke plant will have 3x 400MW generators, and wind availability is 30% rather than 80%, you are going to need MANY. Also, you will need to retain gas turbines for peak shaving.
So we're talking forests of thousands of the biggest feasible wind turbines. Now we run into the first of several problems.
One is the general public. The very best wind resource in the world is off the NW coast of Scotland. The people there do not want their view of the sea ruined by a tiny picket fence type structure 10 miles away on the horizon. And they vote. The existing planning process means they exercise a veto over any such project.
The second problem is the supply bottleneck. Vestas of Denmark own a stack of patents and exercise an effective monopoly over the equipment in question. They also have a limited production capacity, and a country with public inquiries is not a safe customer. Suppose you are about to build a batch of 100 turbines. The UK says, we can buy them at any point between now and two years into the future, but we may not be able to, if the planning process fails. Germany says, here is the cash. To whom do you sell? Not to the UK. A fact which has not yet entered the public consciousness is that the wind generation industry is now under threat in part because we can't buy the stuff. Because of our planning regulations, we are rapidly becoming too much of a commercial risk.
The third problem is feeding the power into the network. The network in Scotland is extremely weak, because it was never designed with massive amounts of demand in mind. The network in the North of England and Midlands is strong, because it was designed to cope with massive industrial and residential loads. So you have to ship the power south. How?
Well, the CEGB just drew lines on a map and put overhead line circuits there. But we can't do that. No new overhead line circuit will ever pass a public inquiry ever again. The process literally takes a decade. But we need HVDC (high coltage direct current, as opposed to alternating current) to bring the power to shore anyway. So we could ship it all the way south as HVDC. Except, not over land, as that is too expensive. It will have to be undersea cables.
A whole new electrical energy infrastructure, then. Except you have to remember that the CEGB is dead, and no-one is in overall charge of UK energy policy. That applies to infrastructure stuff too. The construction conglomerates can build stuff, but someone has to make the decision to order it. You need all the private companies to act in a coordinated fashion, and wait a decade for every project to clear the inquiries. It really can't be done.
This is why tidal and wave fails. The vast civil engineering involved cannot be sold to the public, and is too great a commercial risk.
The simplest solution is therefore to replace the nuclear power plants. The sites on which they sit, are existing nuclear sites. The local network infrastructure is already built. The transport infrastructure is already there. All you have to do is build a new plant on an unused space at each location. Plug and play. What's more, because the technology is nuclear, the government has retained enough strategic oversight to force it through.
Regarding safety, it is a non-issue. Windscale took place in the infancy of the science. Chernobyl was a test, the equivalent of doing a crash dive in a submarine, or taking a car 0-200 to see how it copes. It was a big risk. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, the ones we have in the UK largely of 1960s construction. They are reaching the end of their lives without incident. The stuff we can build today is even better, based on proven methods. A meltdown is a low-probability, high-impact scenario, something the human mind has been shown to be unable to consider rationally. One may as well fear flying, or an asteroid impact. A phobia is not an adequate reason to refuse.
Note that the question of how much CO2 is emitted in the construction process compared to savings achieved, is irrelevant. No-one will sacrifice their present for someone else's future. We can see this in the complete failure of energy conservation.
The government and industry now has no choice but to take all necessary steps to ensure the viability of the energy system. The public has shown itself unqualified to discuss the subject. It has become a national security matter. End of discussion.
There is no conspiracy at work here. I am not lobbying for the nuclear industry, nor is the nuclear industry alone in its lobbying. The whole utility sector needs and wants nuclear. This is merely the public's failure to act in their own interests, when given the freedom to choose.
So this is my argument. I welcome any sensible comments from people who have taken the trouble to read the whole thing.