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).
A grim document
11 hours ago
34 comments:
"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."
Stick that in Google translate Govspeak-> English and you get "Over the next eight years we will steal an additional £200 bn from you and give it to our mates in the private sector".
B, correct.
by "mates in the private sector", please don't forget the business interests of Lord Deben and Tim Yeo MP
"I'm indebted to Stephen S for sketching this out for me, on the back of an newspaper in a pub, as it happens."
Makes me wonder why so many pubs are closing if they can save us billions as think tanks.
Stephen S should be energy minister.
Don't forget decommissioning costs. For the UK reactors around in 2002, they were estimating 60bn (NPV if I recall correctly) for total decommissioning, over 50-100 years.
I can follow this, most of our problems could be solved by equally simple and obvious actions, but they won't be because vested interests won't let it happen.
BTW - you won't lose all that farmland, site the nukes by the sea and you halve it.
...so "a bit extra" for decommissioning doesn't really cut it. Back of a fag packet, that's 4bn per reactor in 2002, so say 6-7bn per reactor in 2012, which is a lot more than build cost. Possibly some economies of scale if you have enough reactors, but offsetting that there's probably plenty of scope for cost creep.
AKH, we meet up primarily to have earnest discussions about policy, not the football.
H, very tricky, what's the NPV of an entirely unknown figure in fifty years' time? What discount rate do you use?
Can you tell me a reasonable estimate for the costs of decommissioning one plant safely - bearing in mind we don't need to decontaminate the site as another nuke will be built in its place.
W42, yes, I thought about that, but frankly, we Brits value our coastline, beaches, cliffs and stuff far higher than farmland (on a cultural level). And then you've got erosion to deal with, ruling out about two-thirds of our coastline. And it'd be easier for a terrorist to attack by sea than overland.
H, OK, call it £7 bn per reactor, three times as much as it costs to build, or equivalent to the last ten year's of income.
So for the last ten years or so before decommissioning, we have to earmark all income from each reactor to decommissioning, we only get thirty years of "free electricity" instead of forty.
It still doesn't change tip the balance.
H, in fact, even the EU reckons it only costs EUR 1 billion to decommission a reactor, and that's current cost, not NPV.
Not that I expect it will put your figures into the negative, but you would need to build extra capacity than the 350mn MWh to account for maintenance/failures, etc. Base load will probably be higher than that as well by the time they are all built.
Land and infrastructure costs could be saved by having multiple reactors at each site.
It will never be done unfortunately as: Aieeeee! Flee! It's nuclear.
Mr C, agreed on all points, that doesn't change the basic equation much.
MW: agreed, it's still a good idea. And we could always take a cheap option and bury Slough in medium-level radioactive waste, thereby increasing house prices.
H, that's a bit harsh on the good people of Slough.
I was thinking more along the lines of asking all the NIMBYs a trick question: "Would you like the government to guarantee that no new house ever gets built within ten miles of you?" and then if they say yes, slap up a nice shiny nuclear power station at the end of their road.
"we Brits value our coastline, beaches, cliffs and stuff far higher than farmland (on a cultural level)."
Not all our coastline is attractive, County Durham being a good example, and many of our existing nukes are by the sea and could simply have another one next to them.
Salisbury Plain is another possibility - good security, too.
No it wouldn't change it enough to make building nukes a bad idea. They would probably end up getting cheaper to build as we got better with all that practice.
B, there are two issues with siting them there:
1. Prevailing wind over UK is west to east, so siting them along east coast is good idea to blow away the emissions over the sea, plus siting by the sea uses less land.
2. The east coast of the UK is particularly prone to erosion, cliff falls etc.
Clearly, siting them in clusters is a good idea, uses less land. Salisbury plain, South Downs etc, excellent locations.
Mr C, ta. Some people could spend their whole lives building nukes, and shortly before they retire they can explain to the next generation how to dismantle the things.
I wish I only paid 12-odd pence a unit. The first few are at something like that; the rest at 25p / KWh E.On Online tariff). Happy to be wrong, but you might want to check that number.
FT, I just checked my last leccy bill until recently it was 12.7p/kWh. It turns out the sneaky f-ers have now put it up to 16.1p/kWh.
But this is my energy policy, and under my energy policy, a unit will cost 12p with no VAT on top. That extra 3.4p they are charging all goes towards the £200 billion black hole I mentioned at the start of the post, which obviously will be scrapped in favour of £27 billion for the first few years net investment in nukes.
MW - Salisbury Plain, South Downs likely no good for nukes, you need a large supply of water for cooling / heat exchange, so it needs to be adjacent to the sea or a very large lake/river. You could still stick the low-level waste in those locations (though I like your NIMBY trap).
H, fair enough.
Actually, the best place for a nuke is somewhere below a large reservoir (but not so near the outlet that it might flood if the dam broke). During the night time, it can pump water uphill for extra hydro during the day, and if the worst comes to the worst, open the sluice gates and put the fire out.
And obviously, being not to far from the sea is good as well (so that the irradiated water can run off in an emergency). But not too near the sea because of cliff erosion and possible attacks by sea. Quite how many of these sites there are, I do not know and I'm not very good at geography. We can't site too many in Scotland in case they go independent on us, etc.
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.
Either I'm doing something terribly wrong or I'm failing to use enough energy. I'll have to start leaving lights on because my bill is nowhere near this.
JH, I was using very round figures to make sure I hadn't got my kW's, MW's and GW's mixed up.
"But not too near the sea because of cliff erosion and possible attacks by sea."
There aren't that many places where erosion is a problem, A bit of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts, possibly Lincolnshire and some of Dorset and Devon and that's about it, AFAIK. A lot of the Essex and Kent coasts are protected by salt marshes. In any case, it wouldn't be too difficult to site the nukes far enough inland that they would be ready for decommissioning by the time the sea got to them.
B, like I said, I'm not so up on geography and geology. I'm not too reassured by salt marshes, they don't protect you from floods as well as nice high cliffs (which in turn are more likely to erode), and if the shit hits the fans and the nuke has to release irradiated water, you want it to be washed away by the deepest bit of sea you can find and not just to accumulate on a salt marsh or mud flat.
But I'm sure we could find plenty of suitable sites if we put our minds to it.
How does this irradiated water of yours differ from the common or riverine variety?
Ch, I mean if the shit hits the fans and they have to empty half a reservoir over the reactor to put out a fire or something, that water has to flow somewhere and the further away it flow the better.
Ch, I mean if the shit hits the fans and they have to empty half a reservoir over the reactor to put out a fire or something, that water has to flow somewhere and the further away it flow the better.
Like the coast of Norway?
Kj, yes. It's nothing personal against Norwegians.
You'll get a lot of nagging, Sellafield was high on the agenda some years ago. It passes though.
That £4 billion a generator is very much a "multiply by 3 7 then add the number you first thought of because its Britain" sort of thing. And you're right that even doing so nuclear is obviously the way to go.
But the $1.3 bn for the Westinghouse AP1000 is for one unit. They have let it be known that we could be down to $1 bn each if bought in quantity (£600m). Doing it the way it should and could be done would mean replacing all our current capacity (or more likely doubling it) for £36 bn.
Which means electricity prices at a fraction of current levels and where did that recession go. None of this is difficult - China is currently building the equivalent of all our grid in nukes and expects them to take 3 years each.
On the coastline question - sorry nukes produce a humungous amount of heat & need water so the coast is the sensible place. On the other hand they don't need more space than a big building & don't irradiated anything.
On decommissioning - the reactors in use were not designed witb our current obsessions about decomissioning in mind but new ones are designed are so the costs would be minimal. They might well be negative because "waste" consists of uranium, which can be reprocessed and actinides (weird isotopes not found in nature) which ought to be extremely valuable.
All our problems are self inflicted, or irather inflicted by our "leaders".
- sorry nukes produce a humungous amount of heat & need water so the coast is the sensible place.
Why chuck all that heat away? If nothing else, it could heat acres of polytunnels. Alternatively, nukes could be sited next to heat-hungry processes like oil refining. Or is that being a bit too logical?
Neil, welcome back, I was sort of waiting for you.
"That £4 billion a generator is very much a "multiply by 3 7 then add the number you first thought of because its Britain"
Correct - and the same for decommissioning. I was taking a pessimistic-realistic view, and however you twist it, it is impossibly to make any sort of economic case against nuclear. Stuff like energy security and global warming etc is secondary but a big bonus nonetheless. Now I know why the French did it.
I'm not sure about the heat point, if they were more efficient they wouldn't lose heat. And as B says, let's not let it go to waste. Yippee for lots of mildly irradiated super-size mutant strawberries :-)
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