"The world's first floating nuclear reactor"

From The Daily Mail:

The world's first floating nuclear reactor dubbed 'Chernobyl on ice' has arrived at its permanent location in the Arctic after a perilous sea voyage of almost 3,000 miles.

The Russian-made power station is due to start providing power to the most northerly settlement in Asia by December.

Named the Akademik Lomonosov, the 472ft vessel carries two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors, and has been under construction since 2006.

The world's first?

Have they not heard of nuclear submarines or nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, all of which float? Admittedly, Russian nuclear submarines are better at catastrophically failing and then sinking than they are at floating, but I don't think that's what they meant.

A mini solution to nuclear mess

Fine article by Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard:

... there is another option, though not one which environmentalists favour, and that is small modular reactors.

Rolls-Royce has been making and maintaining the power plants which drive the nuclear-powered submarines carrying Britain’s nuclear deterrent since at least the Sixties. Today it is the largest employer of nuclear scientists and engineers in the country, with a range of expertise matched by only a handful of countries round the world.

It hit on the bright idea of using this expertise to develop similar-sized mini nuclear power plants which could be made in a factory, transported on a lorry and used to generate enough electricity to supply a city the size of Leeds. It saw a huge opportunity to secure world leadership in an emerging technology which could be worth more than £100 billion in exports from 2030 onwards.

It argued that these units provide a practical alternative to vast plants such as Hinkley which, because they are so big and complex, are almost always one-offs with costs to match. SMRs in contrast would be one design with standardised components reaping the benefits of factory-based volume production so that the economies of standardisation would trump the economies of scale.

The country has committed itself to becoming a low-carbon economy. The company argues its SMRs would be a cheaper way than building big new nuclear plants to supply the secure, reliable low-carbon electricity baseload the country will need for this to happen. It would also be timely, which is important given how little spare capacity there is in the UK generating industry.

But as the technology needed government funding this would have required a radical change in how Whitehall operates, which is simply impossible. It required Government to make a commitment to an industrial policy which supports UK intellectual property, advanced manufacturing and long-term high-value jobs in the UK.

Here's the tricky bit:

It required Government to make available resources so the licensing and safety-assessment programme could run smoothly and remove the risk of the whole thing being endlessly delayed. It required further long-term thinking in the form of a promise to buy at least seven of the plants so that Rolls-Royce could capture the economies of scale in manufacturing which are essential to bringing the costs down.

It required Government to be willing to provide matched funding in the development phase of the project. And finally it required Government support to assist the company in fully developing its export markets.

Needless to say the Government has declined to do this and Rolls-Royce as a result is no longer speculatively prepared to pour in its own funds and has mothballed the project. So the chances are that we will not have small nuclear reactors either, other than in our submarines.

Let's just have a dozen of those, then.

From the BBC:

A nuclear power station being built in Somerset is on track for its next major milestone, the firm behind it has said.

The construction of Hinkley Point C began two years ago after the government signed a deal with French firm EDF and its Chinese partner CGN.

It is expected to provide 7% of the UK's electricity needs for 60 years.

The oldest functioning nuclear power plant will be fifty years old next year. Assuming we've learned more than we've forgotten since 1969, a sixty year life span seems perfectly plausible.

Nuclear Plan B

Total UK primary energy consumption is the equivalent of around 2200 tw/h per year, of which electricity accounts for around 350 tw/h. This illustrates our reliance on fossil fuels and the mountain we face if we want to reduce and eliminate them.

We have two models in Europe we can already compare on how we might go about trying.

France has low cost (12p kw/h), low CO2 electricity,  75% of which is supplied by nuclear power plants.

Germany on the other hand shows that even a limited penetration of wind and solar (3.5% of total primary energy consumption) leads to high electricity prices. Getting on for double that of France at 23p kw/h. It’s energy companies have also been suffering record losses.

Energy taxes and subsidies more or less cancel themselves out. Graph above taken from Euan Mearns

The system costs incurred by dispersed , intermittent wind and solar rise with market share. So, if fossil fuels are to be reduced in any meaningful way, wind and solar will be a cripplingly expensive way of doing it.

Only nuclear can power a modern economy at reasonable cost free from fossil fuels.  But due to the large upfront capital costs it has to be planned and financed in the way the French did. Settle on one design, build lots of them quickly, and finance them from Government bonds.

French nuclear supplies electricity at a wholesale price a third of what Hinkley Point C is being offered. It also exports £3bn a year of it at profit.

There is no reason whatsoever that we should ever pay a penny more for our energy than the French are now. That means a reduction in our current bills.

Areva took an existing design, and added more systems and defence in depth. This has proved difficult to build, and it the reason why EDFs finances are in such bad shape.

As reported recently, the Hitachi ABWR could come in at £70 mw/h, when privately financed. Good, but we can do better.

GE-Hitachi have taken that design and gone in the opposite direction of Areva by simplifying and modularising it. The ESBWR has been approved by the American regulators, and is reported to be the safest reactor to get such approval. Designed to be easier to construct, it also has the lower operating costs.

If the UK built twenty of these, over 15 years, financed by bonds, we can benefit from learning curve cost reductions in exactly the same way the French did.

Having a standardised fleet, rather than the nuclear zoo we are currently on course to build, would have other cost and safety advantages too.

Furthermore, there is new fuel technology currently undergoing regulatory approval that can further cut costs and increase safety.  For example Lightbridge all metallic fuel rods can increase power by 30% in a new build reactor, while reducing the fuels operating temperature.

Reactors can make hydrogen from electrolysis or thermochemistry, to power fuel cells or existing gas turbines. High temperature reactors(FHRs), being developed and commercialised in China and the US, can substitute for natural gas using the air Brayton cycle(NACC), thereby reusing existing CCGT infrastructure. This also gives them faster ramping up rates than any current available technology, making them the perfect partner for the limited load following of BWRs.

High temperatures can make CO2 neutral synthetic fuels, using the existing infrastructure for internal combustion engines.

And all nuclear power stations produce lots of hot water as waste, which could instead be used as district heating, making use of the hot water systems most UK households have for gas central heating.

We cannot afford the costly grid and infrastructure upgrades needed in order to accommodate a wind, solar and battery economy.

France has shown us that cheap CO2 free energy is doable. We should copy their example, just don't buy their EPR reactor.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From City AM (can't find it online):

At a time when the newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is advancing the idea of renationalising the British power sector, the chancellor's response of selling key future energy infrastructure to foreign state-owned enterprises, while denouncing Labour's plan seems inconsistent.

The latest deal with the Chinese also appears to fly in the face of economic logic, when costs for many alternative generation assets have been falling and the recent track record for nuclear plants seems to be going the other way.

Fred Dahlmann, Warwick Business School.

I'd be interested to know what he means by "alternative generation assets", but hey, his first point stands.

See also George Monbiot, who appears to have somehow come to the right conclusion on the topic.

Top blogging this week

There are weeks when other people save you the bother of posting it yourself.

On subsidies to the energy industry...

1. Nick Drew points out that your enemy's enemy is sometimes your friend.

On the whole 'ban smoking in cars' hysteria.

2. Bill Quango MP saves the best until the end of this.

3. Chris Snowdon is one of the go-to blogs for this sort of thing, but he ended up being beaten hands down by JohnB in the comments. JohnB merely forgot to point out that Britain's boozers, once sparsely visited places at best because the smoke drove all right-thinking people away are now teeming with life and flourishing hubs of the community.

4. Dick Puddlecote, the other go-to, veers close to forgetting what 'public health' actually means (but redeems himself in the comments).

On the weather

5. Daily Mash state the bleedin' obvious.

I'm sure there were others, but I wasn't keeping a list.

"Thousands of Sellafield nuclear site workers told to stay away as 'elevated' levels of bullshit are detected"

From The Daily Mail:

The Sellafield nuclear site has been evacuated this morning because of 'elevated levels of bullshit'.

Thousands of non-essential staff have been sent away or told to stay at home following problems overnight. Sellafield in Cumbria is the largest nuclear site in Europe and bosses said the raised deliberate misinformation levels occurred 'naturally' in the northern part of the two mile site...

Sellafield was the world’s first commercial cover-up, and has suffered 21 'leaks' in 60 years:

In 1957, a misunderstanding broke out in No 1 of the twin ‘piles’ or reactors, which became the worst public relations disaster in British history. It was only discovered 50 hours later, and took three days to think up a plausible explanation. The discharge was caused by obfuscation building up in the reactor after a series of prevarications. As the arguments raged, workers at the plant used hoses to try to cool the public outrage.

However, inaccurate official statements escaped through the 400ft-high chimney and rose over the Lake District in a long grey plume. Eventually, deception fell on to the local countryside or was caught in a changing wind, which blew it further inland towards Wales and over the sea to Ireland...

In 1983 there was a notorious 'discharge incident' where misleading information was leaked, shutting a 10-mile stretch of beach and sea.

In 2005 it emerged there was gobbeldygook leaking from a cracked chamber, which may have been undiscovered for eight months.

Bosses have been fined heavily after the incidents.

It is also claimed by groups like Greenpeace that various leaks while it was being built means that the Irish Sea is one of the most falsified stretches of water in the world because chicanery was diluted and dumped into it.

Nuclear thought experiment

UPDATE: Neil Craig in the comments points out that somebody did this thought experiment years ago and came to the same conclusion. The Russkies are already building floating nukes. Cost £160 million for 70 MW electricity, amortise over 40 years = £9/MWHr.
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From FT Blogs:

As the smoke of briefings from the government PR machine clears, the shape of the deal to secure the development of the new nuclear station at Hinkley Point in Somerset is becoming clearer. As mere consumers we are not allowed to know the full facts – that privilege is given, it seems, only to the companies involved and the French and Chinese governments. But we can piece the story together.

The deal sets a price of £90-92 per MWhr – twice the current wholesale price for 35 years – regardless of any technical advances which might offer lower prices from other sources.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that nuclear power is the cheapest form of reliable electricity generation, but as we know, a large part of that £90-£92/MW cost is ransom payments to land owners, be they to the lucky owners of a site which happens to have permission to build a new nuke or bribes to the local NIMBYs and feudalists - often masquerading as greenies.

So for comparison, how much does nuclear power cost if you don't have to pay anything for the land? What if they build nuclear generators on floating platforms a bit like with offshore windmills connected to the mainline with big fat cables, how much do they cost..?

From Wiki:

Marine-type reactors differ from land-based commercial electric power reactors in several respects.

While land-based reactors in nuclear power plants produce thousands of megawatts of power, a typical marine propulsion reactor produces no more than a few hundred megawatts.

And from the BBC:

The BBC has been given exclusive behind-the-scenes access as the Royal Navy built its latest nuclear-powered Astute submarines. The submarines, which cost more than £1bn, take years to design and build, with the first of class taking 14 years to complete.

OK, we could halve that £1 billion per sub cost if the reactor were just on a waterproof platform, it doesn't need the full functionality of a nuclear submarine or the extra cost of the weapons system etc, so that's maybe £500 million for "a few hundred megawatts" capacity.

i) "A few hundred megawatts" x 18 hours per day x 365 days a year = 2 million MWHr.

ii) The annualised cost of that is £20 million (£500 million over 25 years useful life).

iii) £20 million divided by 2 million MWhr = £10/MWHr.

iv) That's a ninety per cent cost reduction right there.

v) We can afford expensive undersea cables for windmills and for the various cables under the North Sea, so let's ignore that bit.

vi) Another bit of good news is that if the shit hits the fan and the thing goes critical, we just unplug it, tow it as far as away as we can get and sink it beneath the ocean before it blows up, that'd be a fraction as bad as the nuclear bomb tests we were doing in the Pacific until the 1990s.

Sorted.

Does nuclear need subsidies (2)

Further to my recent post, from yesterday's FT:

Hitachi's purchase of the Horizon nuclear power project in the UK has propelled the Japanese engineering group into a new and uncomfortable role: as the owner of an entire atomic-energy enterprise rather than a simple contract reactor builder.

After returning some of Horizon’s cash to its current owners, the German utilities RWE and EOn, Hitachi said it would have paid £670m for Horizon’s land, organisation and building rights – about twice what most analysts had expected.

The 'organisation' is worth naff-all, and the land itself is worth a couple of million at most. The real value is in the vague outline planning permission to build a couple of nukes.

Now, RWE, EOn and Hitachi between them are the experts, they know how much it costs to build and run nukes (including interest on money invested), so all they then need to know is the likely selling price for their electricity, and the estimated net profit is pure rent/monopoly income, and that bit has an estimated value of £700 million.

IF you set up a spreadsheet with the following assumptions:
- £5 billion cost of building a 1,600 MW reactor
- running 75% of the time (i.e. 18 hours a day)
- fifty year life (not unreasonable, there are working nukes nearly that old), and
- average selling price of electricity £70/MWh (which means that out of every 15p you pay for a unit of electricity at home, the generator gets 7p, heck knows where the rest goes).

THEN the IRR is 15%, which is more than the 10% you'd normally expect, but nuclear power generation is very risky - not in terms of safety, but in terms of political risk - so fair enough.

Here's the subsidy bit: that £70/MWh is decided by the government/the regulator, and let's agree that it's a fair return on investment. Everything above that is pure profit/rent, paid for by electricity users. The discount rate for the pure-profit/rent element is much lower, let's call it 10%, so every extra penny on a unit at home (one kWh) is £10/MWH, and every extra £10/MWH has an NPV in today's money of £1 billion over the fifty year life of a reactor.

So I guess that is what Hitachi was gambling on - it was prepared to pay £700 million for the off-chance that they can stampede the UK government into agreeing a price of rather more than £70/MWH. In this instance, it was RWE and EOn who collected the subsidy, the question is, why is the UK government handing out subsidies to power companies, in particular ones owned by Johnny Foreigner like this?

"Does nuclear need a subsidy?"

Tony Lodge, author of this fine pamphlet in today's CityAM:

But what price should Britain be prepared to pay for new nuclear plants? If a strike price – the guaranteed price paid for electricity from the plant when completed – is anywhere near the £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) required by offshore wind, we should be surprised if EDF didn’t line our coast with nuclear plants, like France in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But this is an absurdly high price. Anything close would rightly destroy nuclear’s low cost reputation and, with it, the case for new nuclear. After all, £140 per MWh is more than double the current market price, and the Department for Energy forecasts that electricity prices will fall over the long term.

A challenge for the government is to make the strike price negotiations as transparent as possible. EDF has now increased the cost of each proposed reactor at Hinkley in Somerset by 40 per cent to £14bn in total*. Why? The outcome of the strike price negotiation risks saddling householders and businesses for a long time to come with further costs – the subsidy for low carbon power is to be financed by the consumer. This is why transparency and parliamentary scrutiny will be vital. Strike price plans mean that, when the market price for electricity is below the level agreed with EDF, all UK energy consumers will be liable for subsidies to top up the difference.

But does nuclear need a subsidy? Two 1,600MW reactors, operating at 90 per cent efficiency over a 50 year lifespan, could generate £88bn in cash at an average market price of £70 per MWh* (which was the government’s median projection for nuclear power last year, making it the cheapest on offer); £126bn at an average price of £100 per MWh; and £163bn at £130 per MWh. These are very large returns on a £14bn capital outlay, recognising the need to count in running costs, contingencies and profit.

* As it happens, his figure of £14 billion appears to be very pessimistic, word on the street is that Westinghouse will build you a 1,000 MW reactor for $1 billion, but even if you multiply that by seven for the usual British incompetence/corruption, nuclear is still economically viable. The author hints that EDF just plucks the figure out of the air in order to justify a higher price/MWh.

** He cheated a bit here, the £88 billion is calculated thus: 2 x 1,600 MW reactors x 24 hrs/day x 90% capacity [not "90% efficiency", whatever that is] x 50 years x £70/MWh. But the £70 is a negotiated figure, so if it turns out that they can only be run at full capacity 75% of the time, the price would have to be £84/MWh and the £88 bn looks perfectly reasonable.

Nuclear power: we own land, give us money

There have been a few headlines (e.g. here) about bids to build new nukes being withdrawn, the whole story is nigh impenetrable, but what sticks out is this, taken from Horizon's own website:

OUR SITES: WYLFA

Wylfa, on the Isle of Anglesey, has a long established history of nuclear power generation and an experienced local skills base. Anglesey has big ambitions to realise its potential as a centre of low carbon generation for the future and recognises the key role that a new nuclear power station could play.
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As well as vital infrastructure, including a connection to the national electricity grid, Anglesey has a highly-skilled local nuclear workforce and excellent access to direct sea water cooling facilities.

In total, the proposed development site comprises: 232 hectares of land secured by RWE npower in late 2008, along with a 3600MW Grid Connection Agreement and further land secured by the joint venture, now Horizon Nuclear Power, from the NDA and energy company EDF via an auction process in April 2009.

The land which surrounds the existing Magnox nuclear power station at Wylfa was nominated into the Government's Strategic Siting assessment in March 2009. After being included in the Government's draft Nuclear National Policy Statement (NPS), the site was listed in the final NPS in June 2011 along with seven other sites deemed strategically suitable for nuclear development. The Nuclear NPS was approved by a vote in Parliament on 18th July 2011.

So basically, this consortium (RWE and E.On) has been given vague outline planning permission to build nukes on land it owns, it has not invested a penny in actual generation and owns no power stations, and can now sit back and wait for some other mug to come along and first pay £ billions to buy up the outline planning permission, i.e. the now-valuable land, and then to spend yet more billions on actually building the nukes.

Man in the pub style energy planning: What would you do with £200 billion?

I'm indebted to Stephen S for sketching this out for me, on the back of an newspaper in a pub, as it happens.

1. Your budget is the £200 billion, which is the amount of our money which the nutters in charge plan to help themselves to:

The initiative is part of the Government’s commitment to setting the UK firmly on course towards a green and growing economy, while also delivering long-term sustainable growth. This transition to a green economy presents significant growth opportunities for UK-based businesses, both at home and abroad. It will require unprecedented investment in key green sectors - an estimated £200 billion is needed for the energy system alone over the period to 2020.

That's about £7,400 per household, on average, or £1,000 a year for the next seven or eight years. For what, exactly?

2. The United Kingdom uses about 350 million MW-hours of electricity a year. Looks about right: each household has an electricity bill of about £1,000 a year, at 12 pence/kWh, that 8,333 kWh = 8 MW-hours, times 27 million households = 216 million MW-hours plus half again for non-domestic usage.

3. A halfway decent new nuclear power station can produce about 1,000 MW and they cost anywhere between $1.3 and $3.5 billion for a 1,000 MW plant. Given how completely useless the UK is at sticking to the budget, and pencilling in a bit extra for decommissioning a few decades into the future, let's call it £4 billion each. Let's not get bogged down in all the various different reactor types, fission, fusion etc.

4. Sixty such nukes ought to just about provide all of UK's electricity needs. I know that demand fluctuates, but as back-up you can pump water uphill and then have extra hydro electric power when you need it quick. Let's assume we're using most of the electricity in 16 hours each day and the nukes are operating 16 hours a day.

60 nukes x 365 days x 16 hours/day x 1,000 MW = 350 million MW-hours.

5. It would cost (say) £240 billion to build those 60 nukes, which is the money that the kleptocrats intended to siphon off over the next eight years anyway. Clearly, it would take a few decades to get them all finished, but it gets easier as you go along. In theory, the maximum outlay would actually only be about £27 billion - to which see point 7 below.

6. If prices stay at 12p/kWh, that means annual income of £42 billion, which gives us a payback period of six years, after that, it's all "free". So if we the consumers/the taxpayers are paying for them to be built, we can then choose whether to have "free" electricity (the running costs are bugger all) for the next few decades (the oldest nuke in the USA still operating opened in 1969) or more rationally, to stick to 12p or whatever the revenue-maximising figure is and spend the money on repaying the National Debt.

7. Assuming we spend £8 billion a year building two nukes each year for thirty years, and each finished nuke generates £0.7 billion income per year:

i. By year seven, the income from finished nukes (2 x 6 x £0.7 billion = £8.4 billion) is more than enough to pay for the construction of the new ones;

ii. By end of year seven, our cash outlay was 7 x £8 billion = £56 billion minus revenues of £29.4 billion; capping our maximum outlay at £27 billion (nowhere near £240 billion).

iii. After thirteen years, the whole project has broken even in cash terms: we've spent £104 billion on construction and had £109 billion of income.

iv. With such short payback periods, you don't even need to worry about interest payments.

8. A fly in this ointment is of course that people don't like living near nukes and you're not supposed to eat food that was grown near them. Let's give each of them a generous safety zone with a radius of ten miles = 314 sq miles each x 60 = 18,840 sq miles in total. That's about a fifth of the surface area of the UK (94,000 square miles).

But only six per cent of the area is inhabited/developed and The Hallowed Green Belt covers twice as much again. So we could just declare those safety zones to be permanent wildlife reservations, Hallow Greenbelt, national parks, whatever. Nothing helps wildlife and nature more than if humans stay well away. That's the Greenies and NIMBYs dealt with.

8. Yes, we'd lose a bit of farm income - maybe as much as a third, but the total value of UK agricultural output is only £6 billion a year, so if we lose £2 billion a year, that's nothing terrible (it's five per cent of our current electricity bills, for example).

"Catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdowns could happen every ten to 20 days"

From The Daily Mail:

Devastating nuclear reactor meltdowns like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima could happen every other week, according to a disturbing new study.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, fear similar catastrophes could occur around the world every ten to 20 days - 200,000 times more frequently than previously thought. And they said people in Western Europe are highly likely to be affected by radioactive fallout from such a disaster.

The researchers based their gloomy predictions on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and how many meltdowns there have been. They also warned that half the radioactive caesium-137 produced, which was released following the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns, would spread over an area reaching as far as 10,000 kilometres (about 6,200 miles) from the reactor.

Western Europe is likely to be contaminated once a year, according to the research team led by Jos Lelieveld, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

Here comes trouble!

Fun Online Polls: M5 pile up and crisps

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were pretty conclusive:

What do you think caused the poor visibility that led to the M5 pile up?

Fog - 61%
Smoke - 8%
Other, please specify - 30%

I'm glad to see that most of you share my cynical view that they only tried to blame it on the fireworks because of this knee-jerk reaction that Somebody Is To Blame and Something Must Be Done. And if that involves Banning Something Which Is Pointless But Fun, then so much the better, of course. The most interesting comment was this one, which I shall have to take at face value:

Ryan: I know somebody who was in the accident. It was caused when a small car pulled out of the slip-road between two lorries. One of these lorries put on its brakes hard causing it to jack-knife and everyone else piled into it. Nothing to do with fireworks (ended ages before apparently).

Which suggests that the accident wasn't even caused by poor visibility in the first place, a thought which hadn't even occurred to my cynical mind. Although it seems beyond dispute that visibility was bad at the time (having ruled out fireworks, we are left with fog), which may have made the crash worse than otherwise.
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My recent post on crisps attracted a (to me) staggering twenty-five comments, people were naming crisp brands which I had long forgotten (or never heard of). I didn't realise that so many other people had such strong views on the topic. So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Which is your favourite brand of crisps?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
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Next week: "What's your favourite type of nuclear reactor?" Suggestions as to the best way of classifying the basic types welcome.

Prime Ministers with melty faces

Fun Online Polls: Fukushima & The Census

On a high turnout, the results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Has the Fukushima catastrophe changed your attitude towards nuclear power?

No. I'm still against nuclear power - 5%
Yes. I'm now more negative about nuclear power - 5%
Yes. I'm now more positive about nuclear power - 29%
No. I'm still in favour of nuclear power - 61%
Other, please specify - 0%

Given the right-wing nature of most of this 'blog's readership, I'm not surprised that a majority are in favour of nuclear power anyway, but I'm (pleasantly) surprised to see that so many, like me, are more positive (or less negative) than they were before. As it happens, there are six nuclear power stations in the earthquake/tsunami zone, so I find the fact that only one was badly affected rather reassuring.

As ever, thanks to everybody who took part.
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Health Minister Dick Puddlecote highlights another example of the ONS fighting back against the government - in the great tradition of bureaucratic warfare, they are continuing this war despite the change in government.

I actually trust the ONS. For sure, they'll bend with the political wind and publish statistics showing that alcohol-related deaths have trebled in a short space of time (or whatever) but they'll leave coded messages like "Due to a change in the way that the figures are compiled, later series are not directly comparable with earlier series" which is ONS-speak for "These figures are all complete bollocks."

All of which reminded me that I hadn't completed our Census form yet. Happily enough, you were supposed to complete it as at 27 March 2011 (yesterday) so I duly completed it this evening and answered every question with a straight bat. For the 'optional' religion question I entered 'smoker' as previously agreed (for the life of me, I can't remember which 'blogger first proposed this - I'll link if anybody tells me who it was. UPDATE: ViewFromTheSolent reminds me it was Leg-Iron). For 'nationality' I chose 'English' (not 'British') and for 'racial origin' I put 'Other - European' (being a mish-mash of anything between Northern Ireland and Poland).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll - have you completed your Census form yet?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Oo-er...

According to this week's Fun Online Poll, a quarter of people (including me) are more favourably (or less unfavourably) inclined towards nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, for reasons which Electro-Kevin articulated thusly:

I'm more positive about nuclear power than ever. The Fukushima plant should be a ringing endorsement to everyone. Hit by a scale 9 earthquake, a 20 foot Tsunami, various explosions and still contained. It doesn't get worse than that and ours will never be subjected to anything like the stresses... short of a nuclear attack by which time it won't matter anyway.

Lo and behold, from George Moonbat's article in today's Guardian:

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

I thought that people like Moonbat are our political compass - whatever they say is probably wrong and we just say the opposite? Bit of a moral dilemma here: do I now pretend that I supported nuclear power all along, or decide that I am actually less favourably inclined? Hmmm.

Fun Online Polls: Savings strategy and Fukushima

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which is the better investment?

Paying off your mortgage as quickly as possible/saving up cash to buy a house - 73%
Investing in stocks and shares - 27%

Please note that I was not trying to compare the respective merits of buying a house or buying shares as an investment, so I suppose I should have asked "Which is the better way of saving money?.

Nonetheless, I'm relieved that I'm with the majority on this one.
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The whole Fukushima catastrophe is still rumbling on, and we still don't know what the final outcome will be. For inexplicable knee jerk reasons, a lot of countries in non-earthquake threatened areas got the jitters about nuclear power, and nuclear power generally has taken a hiding in political terms over the last week.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Has the Fukushima catastrophe changed your attitude towards nuclear power?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Don't blame me, I voted UKIP

From the Evening Standard:

Cameron ready to approve euro bail-outs without a referendum: David Cameron clashed with Tory Eurosceptic MPs today as he offered to approve a new scheme to bail out the single currency without holding a referendum. At the start of an EU summit in Brussels, the Prime Minister signalled his support for a permanent new emergency rescue mechanism for economies in trouble.

But British diplomats were rebuffed when they tried to obtain a cast-iron guarantee that under the proposals the UK would never again have to pump taxpayers' money into the rescue of countries in the euro. More trouble brewed as Mr Cameron and other EU leaders planned to push through the bail-out plan as an amendment to the EU's contentious Lisbon Treaty without a referendum.

The BBC spins it thusly:

The eurozone stability mechanism will require a change to the EU's Lisbon Treaty - but the wording has now been agreed, diplomats say. As the UK uses the pound it will not have to contribute to the fund, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
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Also from the Evening Standard:

New power plants could put bills up: Energy bills could rise by hundreds of pounds under plans for the construction of a new generation of power plants unveiled by the Government... Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said private-sector investment of £110 billion in new power stations and grid upgrades is needed over the next decade* to replace ageing plants, to hit the UK's climate change targets and to ensure that the lights do not go out...

Additional financial support for the construction of reserve plants to provide a "safety cushion" as Britain increasingly relies on electricity from intermittent sources such as wind; and a cap on CO2 emissions of 450-600 grammes per kilowatt/hour generated, which should ensure that all future coal-powered plants use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Which the BBC spins thusly:

Price comparison website uSwitch has estimated that bills will rise by £500 a year if the measures are introduced. But Mr Huhne told the BBC that the average electricity bill of £500 a year would rise by £160 a year over the next 20 years, and if the new measures were not put in place, bills would rise by £190 a year.

In fact, the Treasury has calculated that the average annual household electricity bill will be between £4 and £28 higher in 2016, but should be between £20 and £48 lower by 2030.

Right, they can forecast electricity prices twenty years ahead, can they? Best of luck with that.

* These forecasts are also usually wildly understated, see also Olympics 2012, but let's take £110 billion over ten years at face value, that's £11 billion a year, two-thirds of which will be paid by households, unless we somehow imagine that private investors will pay for this out the goodness of their own hearts, that's about £300 per household per year.
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From The Sun:

Banned driver Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, 33, left Amy Houston, 12, to die under the wheels of his Rover car and fled the scene following the accident.

But the Iraqi Kurd was today told he can stay in Britain after judges said deporting the dad of two would breach HIS human rights following a seven-year legal battle.