UK Draft Energy Bill Avoids Banning Coal Or Gas Power

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning coal or gas powered plants. The bill would guarantee profits for new nuclear and offshore wind plants by putting a levy on people's energy bills. The bill does not mandate a statement that minsters had previously made about having totally clean energy within two decades. The government states that provisions within the bill will ensure a balanced diverse energy mix as well has stating that future emissions from gas powered plants will have to be captured and stored. The bill also aims to increase competition in the UK energy market by making it easier for new competitors to become connected to the grid. Joss Garman of Greenpeace states: 'By failing to set a clear goal for carbon-free electricity by 2030, ministers are opening the door to a dangerous new dash for gas that will put up both bills and carbon emissions, and increase our dependence on imported fuel. This means families and business will be exposed to rocketing international gas prices. The fastest and cheapest way to bring down bills and carbon emissions is by ramping up energy efficiency but Ministers have totally failed to deliver on this.' Additionally it would appear that the guarantee of profits for new nuclear power plants may not be legal as there is a ban on subsidies for nuclear power under European law and the UK coalition government agreement." Note that wind projects are getting profit guarantees and not just nuclear.

Comments

No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[Rei]

Should we operate on the assumption that the UK assumes that it won't get built?

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[RockDoctor]

I've only heard very vague rumour of this project. Links please (assuming that you do know something about it and can avoit the adverts for Icelandic cable porn).

Working some of the time out in the North Sea and North Atlantic, I can envisage some of the scale of technology and investment that would be required for a significant power system like this. It's going to be seriously not-cheap for both installation and maintenance. Which begs the question of whether it would be worth it for geothermal (I assume) generation. Which in itself isn't particularly cheap to install, though relatively low running costs.

Tapping Etna, Vesuvius, the big fumarole field near Rome ... and other hot rock spots - surely that is going to be significantly cheaper, if only because of the power transmission costs.

PS : I don't play a geologist on TV ... because I find my day job as a geologist much more interesting than TV.

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[Rei]

Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.

I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.

Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[RockDoctor]

I knew the potential. I'm a geologist.

I'm following the link to that conference, but the connection here is pretty slow.

A priori, the problems with an export cable are multi-fold : power losses in the cable ; construction and maintenance of the cable ; environmental impact.

• Power losses : unless you're going to build a superconducting cable (hmmm, question mark, exclamation mark), it will act as a long resistor heating up the deep Atlantic. Power output = voltage X current = current^2 * resistance = voltage^2 / resistance. Choose how to balance the two parameters that you do control, but you're going to lose a lot of power over a long run. And even then, when you make landfall (presumably near Cape Wrath ; land power lines are much cheaper tham marine ones), you're also going to lose power there too.

  Construction is going to be really "interesting". You're going to have to lay a very large cable over several thousand kilometers under some pretty horrible sea conditions. You're going to be doing it in 1-2km of water depth, deeper in some parts - and that's if you take a rather dog-leg route to follow the shallowest water. I've done 5 or 6 wells in that part of the Atlantic, and I've probably spent more time waiting on weather than I have actually drilling. It will be one of the most comprehensively horrible and expensive construction projects in the world. Interesting

• Maintenance : the seabed to east and west of Iceland is scoured by significant currents which go to make the deep cold current that runs under the Gulf Stream, and which is a major component of the global thermohyaline circulation system. That's going to scour the surface of your cable ; it's going to undercut other sections ; the cable will move, sag and stretch. Eventually either the cable or one of the joints in the cable (a really long reel of this sort of equipment carries 3 to 5 km of lay ; you'll use hundreds if not thousands of joints) is going to part. Or go high-resistance. Which will heat it, and damage it further. Maintenance is going to be a repeat of construction.

  It's probably do-able ; whether it's cost effective is a separate question.

• You already raise some of the "NIMBY" aspects of the environmental impact. I'm sure that the shy retiring Icelandic people are perfectly capable of emulating their saga-inspiring ancestors and having their own arguments about that. But weigh this argument : if a power export cable is built, it will eventually employ a few operators, a few harbour people for inspection and maintenance support ... and that'll be it. How many people are employed in your aluminium smelters (fertilizer too, is a popular one for electricity-rich nations), in the harbours moving megatonnes of or in and kilotonnes of product out? Is Iceland in general devastated by the plants in existence, or can you manage their environmental impact as it is?

I remember when I was still on dial-up, and wondering if my telephone exchange would ever support 28kbps data rates, hearing a joke about "do not under-estimate the effective bandwidth of a 747 filled with CDs". Well, with the proposed power export line, you're looking at a quite similar situation, but with one important difference : 15 years ago, the technology of telecommunications was nowhere near the limits of the raw physics, as we have seen. However, the physics of electrical conduction are far more mature. Unless you really have got a superconducting pipeline up your sleeve, (ah, that conference link has opened!), then you're in well-understood territory.

I followed up on that conference link - just a press puff really - and following clues, the most recent contract I see mention of is

The Fenno-Skan 2 HVDC project [ a ] 800 MW, 500 kV submarine [following a] 200 km route across the Gulf of Bothnia.
With a copper cross-section of 2,000 square millimeters, this will

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[Rei]

Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.

I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways! :) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.

I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.

Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.

Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.

Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[RockDoctor]

Well, you clearly know more about high power electric systems than I do. 3% losses per thousand kilometres for HVDC. Well, that's better than I'd thought. 1900km London to Reykjavik ... straight line maybe. I thought it was further. Hmm, a bit less than I'd thought. But it'd still be around a thousand kilometres from {Iceland} to {landfall in Scotland}, which is still a big step up from installed base.

Where will the maintenance jobs be? There will be a small number of harbour jobs in Iceland. Maybe a small handful of design engineers etc. But unless the entire North Sea oil industry collapses, the overwhelming majority of the on-ship work will be done by re-deploying existing vessels from the North Sea. which will mean that the large majority of the jobs will be in the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and the Philippines, with the majority of the earning going to Norwegians and Dutch. (Oh, there'd be a few Canuks too.) Manufacture of the cables ... unless Iceland has an industrial base of such heavy manufacture, I'd be surprised if it's not in the places that normally manufacture the cables. The equipment base to manufacture a hundred-km length of cable, and to ship it in one piece, almost requires a substantial factory site next to a substantial quay.

Why are power (and fluid) conductors more difficult than data cables? A datacable can have 90 or 95% of it's mass-per-unit-length devoted to mechanical support of the conductor, so you can choose (say) high grade stainless steel, or Kevlar for your mechanical support, and still be able to pick up a 3km length of the cable from seabed to the laying vessel. But for a power (or fluid) conductor your choice of materials is much more constrained. For a power cable, you've got to have a sufficiently good conductor almost regardless to it's mechanical strength. Pure copper is not very strong (it goes with being ductile) and is dense, which is why it is not used normally for power distribution cables. Normally it's aluminium with a steel core for strength. But spans of that material with lengths of over a kilometer are ... rare (I can only think of one example, at Glenelg, and I haven't checked if that one still exists). Even with buoyancy of seawater, the 3km span form boat to seabed is going to be a challenge. The ratio of {strength material} to {conductor} is going to have to be different ; then there is the insulation and corrosion control (aluminium is more reactive than copper), which weighs significantly. All of that makes the cables much larger and stiffer, which means that they don't rest on the seabed so well - unless you trench them.

We've got 13 POB ("personnel on board") for terminating one pair of fluids+control pipeline/umbilicals to a well ; they've been on site for 28 days minimum (the time since I first came on board), and I suspect their total time budget will be in excess of 1200 man-days ; we've two vessels laying the pair of cables ($250k/day ; 6 weeks each) and a guard vessel has been dispatched to the location as we approach the critical phases. Our nearest coast is the Shetlands. There's not a single Shetlander in the crew (unless they're hiding their accent).

Data cables have an additional simplification : you can periodically boost the signal:noise ratio in a data cable using relatively small amounts of power from a relatively small power cable as part of your assembly. Local faults can, to a degree, be compensated for by ramping the gain in adjacent boosters. You can't do that with a power cable (unless you build two, operating at half-capacity, with cross-overs).

I'm quite convinced that the option is being seriously considered. I'm also quite convinced that the power industry is still pretty conservative (a friend in the game complains about MTBFs for his equipment of under 40 years. "Unacceptable!"), so I'll believe that an Iceland to UK (and thence, Europe) cable is on the horizon when I see a 1000km cable in place.

I'm a bit surprised that smelters aren't signi

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[Rei]

People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.

Interesting to see your insights on construction. :) Thanks!

** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).

Re:No mention of the power cable to Iceland.

[RockDoctor]

Surprising that two such closely related cultures (Norway and Iceland) can have such widely different approaches to ensuring that they actually benefit from "investments" in their country.

Time for some politics?

Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Government

[DrEnter]

This is really no surprise from the Cameron government, which acts like a puppet of oil and gas interests. First dismantling the UK Carbon Trust, and now openly pushing legislation like this. Deplorable all around. As bad as Blair and Brown were, the UK managed to find someone worse in Cameron. Amazing.

Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[LehiNephi]

Uh, perhaps there's some measure in the law which places tariffs on higher-polluting sources, but I can't recall any time when mandatory, arbitrary efficiency/emissions standards have lowered costs. If higher efficiency truly creates savings, then the mandates aren't necessary. Witness the boom in demand for fuel-efficient cars as gas prices go up.

Re:Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[polar red]

I can't recall any time when mandatory, arbitrary efficiency/emissions standards have lowered costs.

CFL's ? they are expensive, but they last a lot longer than incandescents.

Re:Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[LordLucless]

They also have different properties, which makes them not exactly a drop-in replacement. People I know who don't like CFLs tend not to like them due to the nature of the light they product (white rather than slightly coloured) when compared to incandescents (although I believe newer CFLs can ameliorate that). Also, AFAIK, CFLs can't be dimmed.

Re:Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[AmiMoJo]

Depends on your time scale. Some pain now to get us to a stage where when oil prices really start to sky rocket we are not so dependent on it that our economy is wrecked.

Re:Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[Attila Dimedici]

In what way have CFL's lowered costs? Care to give me a citation that actually shows this and not one that does it by projecting based on assumptions.

Re:Arbitrary efficiency standards lower costs?

[HornWumpus]

Unless you switch them on/off frequently. Then they don't last as long as incandescents.

It's a good thing you can get the new round space heaters (that cast off a nice glow). The ban was and is stupid. People can choose.

Kinda missing the point

[bigredradio]

Since coal and gas powered plants are the number one cause of pollution and greenhouse gases, this is a pretty big oversight.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[ZorinLynx]

Can't we come up with scrubbers to clean up the pollution that coal plants put out?

It's a shame coal is so polluting, because we have so damn much of it. It's one of the most plentiful fuels in the world! There has to be a way to burn it cleanly!

Re:Kinda missing the point

[h4rr4r]

You could, but then it would cost more than natural gas or nuclear.

There are lots of ways to burn it cleanly, but then it costs more than using something else.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

coal and gas powered plants are the number one cause of pollution and greenhouse gases

At the extreme, stupidity becomes indistinguishable from evil.

The cult of AGW has gone way beyond harmless Malthusian eccentricity - it's now killing old ladies.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[0123456]

The cult of AGW has gone way beyond harmless Malthusian eccentricity - it's now killing old ladies.

The funny part is that the British media complain about 'global warming' on the one page and old ladies dying from 'fuel poverty' on the next. The high cost of energy being due to the government's farcical anti-'global warming' programs seems to pass them by.

Or perhaps they just have big investments in 'wind farms'.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[vlm]

Conveniently the north sea fields are in steep decline such that the UK is in turmoil from going from natgas exporting nation to importing nation a couple years back, so there will be no natgas competitor. Its like claiming people would never pay $10 for dinner at KFC, because they could just eat passenger pigeon and rack of dinosaur ribs. Oh wait, they're all gone. Well then.

As for the nukes, the nimby types and "hate what you fear and fear what you don't understand" types will slow that down. Add some green fearmongering, etc etc.

So, it'll be coal.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[h4rr4r]

Then it will not be clean by any stretch, as doing so would cost more than importing natural gas.

Re:Kinda missing the point

[Fjandr]

I thought most media outlets were "wind farms" though...

Re:Kinda missing the point

[cheesybagel]

Nah, they will just build another couple of cables with GW capacity to France, then buy the nuclear power from there. NIMBY problem solved.

Britain is so screwed

[0123456]

At this rate they won't have to tell the last person out to turn out the lights because they'll be going out well before that point.

Re:Britain is so screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

They endured how many wars through the centuries, a religious fascist takeover, AND a total collapse of empire---and they are still there. A bad economy and an energy bill that is *completely reversible at any later date* isn't going to topple them to the point they aren't Britain anymore.

Re:Britain is so screwed

[DigiShaman]

The leaders in both America and the UK are essentially trying to mothball their own economies while transferring their wealth to Asia. They do NOT have YOUR interests at heart. They have their own legacies to financially float and it won't be in the UK. Yes, your fucked!

Re:Britain is so screwed

[0123456]

A bad economy and an energy bill that is *completely reversible at any later date* isn't going to topple them to the point they aren't Britain anymore.

You do realise that you can't just build new power stations overnight and no-one wants to build nuclear stations in Britain right now because the government can't decide whether they want them or hate them?

Re:Britain is so screwed

[Anonymous Coward]

you can get that by remote, like we do in Michigone

jr

Re:Britain is so screwed

[BlueStrat]

The leaders in both America and the UK are essentially trying to mothball their own economies while transferring their wealth to Asia. They do NOT have YOUR interests at heart. They have their own legacies to financially float and it won't be in the UK. Yes, your fucked!

Wow! Someone else on /. who is capable of critical thinking, understands what's going on, and doesn't buy into the propaganda!

Bravo, Sir, bravo!

Now, all we have to do is cut through all the propaganda, disinformation, deliberate self-imposed general state of ignorance/stupidity, ideological warfare, and political partisanship to educate the drooling masses of the US/UK Idiocracies.

Yeah. We're fucked. :(

Strat

Better headline.

[HornWumpus]

UK draft bill avoids fantasy land. Remains connected to reality.

Re:Better headline.

[TheRaven64]

My reaction too. It's subsidising nuclear and wind, makes it easier for small experimental generators to be connected to the grid (yay for getting back some of the R&D investment on your new test plant), requires carbon capture for coal plants, and provides an emissions ceiling for any power plant which is going to be lowered every year. And the Slashdot spin is that it sucks because it doesn't mandate immediately switching to unicorn fart power.

Re:Better headline.

[Sarten-X]

No, no, no.

That may be a true statement, but this is a headline! It has to be sensational and scandalous, or it'll never get published by a respected journalism outfit like Slashdot!

Re:Better headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

UK draft bill fails to outlaw electricity. Lights still work.

Re:Better headline.

[Rei]

Because carbon equals electricity, right?

Hmm, now when was the last time I used carbon-based electricity? Think that was about a month ago...

Re:Better headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but this is totally wrong.

The bill needs to set a trajectory to average grid emissions of around 50gCO2/kWh by 2030. Without this, there's no guarantee of the size of the market for manufacturers of renewables, CCS, and nuclear, because there's always a risk that we'll just fall back on relatively high carbon CCGTs. Not being certain about what government policy objectives are (all energy markets are driven by policy) gives rise to the sort of stop/start investment that drives up costs.

There is ample evidence that deploying steadily reduces the costs of new technology like renewables. According to BNEF, every doubling of onshore wind power has reduced the cost of the technology by 14% (http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/172); solar PV has come down even faster primarly because investors believed that the US and Germany were committed to subsidising the technology (http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2012/04/how_we_made_clean_energy_cheap.shtml - in haste, so this is a slightly more biased source, sorry).

This is generalisable to loads of high capex, low opex technologies.

Re:Better headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

But the unicorn fart power plants are 120% efficient!

Re:Better headline.

[Cederic]

That's nice for you. I'm using some right now.

It's cheaper, more reliable and the only approach currently available at the scales needed.

I'd far rather be using nuclear power to generate electricity but sadly I lack the personal resources to implement my own generator.

Re:Better headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unicorn fart power? They have that now? I thought that would always be twenty years away.

Come off it. These bozos have been dragging their feet about cleaning up my planet since the Industrial Revolutions started. It's the same reasons, the same solutions and the SAME BOZOS. Well, sons of the same bozos.

Christ! Would you people please stop apologizing for them? they are just doing it to get rich.

Re:Better headline.

[JohnnyMindcrime]

Not to mention the fact that there are still large coal reserves under the British Isles which are not being mined much now because it became cheaper to import it.

With ever increasing fuel costs, at some point it presumably becomes economical to start mining coal here again, I assume the Draft Energy Bill covers that eventuality also.

Re:Better headline.

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately it may be illegal. Under EU rules it is illegal for the state to subsidize nuclear power, so the government is forcing consumers to subsidize it through their energy bills. Either way the state requires you to pay.

More worrying is the enormous cost of nuclear and the fact that all but one energy supplier has pulled out of the running to build them. They will get built on the cheap, run on the cheap and when the next government gets in and decides the subsidy was too much cut back to the absolute minimum. Since we now won't be able to build as many as we need the existing plants will be run for decades more too, and none of them have a particularly good safety record.

This is the standard British cop-out. Avoid the radical but necessary action needed, and since this is a Tory government might as well get your mates in the city a but richer by building them some money making infrastructure.

Re:Better headline.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, an allegedly 'free market' party is guaranteeing the profits of particular companies. It's not the business of any government to guarantee any company a profit.

Re:Better headline.

[Rei]

My power is about six cents per kilowatt hour and has never gone out on me.

You were saying?

Re:Better headline.

[Cederic]

Yep, I was saying.. I can't purchase or generate sufficient power for 6c per kwh. Nice for you that you can. You probably pay less for petrol too, and have a bigger house. Can I come and live with you?

Re:Better headline.

[Rei]

Nah, petrol costs about $7.50 a gallon here. And I'm renting part of a house right now, and am in the market for buying a house.

"Nice for you that you can."

Given that I just proved a counterexample to the concept that electricity = carbon, and you accepted it, I'm glad to see that we've resolved this one.

Electricity != carbon. *Some forms* of electricity generation equal carbon, but there's no reason to say that they must always dominate.

Re:Better headline.

[Cederic]

Petrol's just under $10 a gallon here, and non-carbon electricity costs over 15 pence/KWH if I buy it from the grid.

I don't have water flowing through my property, I have planning regulations, neighbours and limited availability making wind power complicated and expensive and if you think solar power's a viable option then you're a fucking lunatic.

So yes, cheap reliable energy available to me right now is carbon based. The fact that some other people in other places with different infrastructures, different weather patterns, different legal and regulatory frameworks and different energy needs can get non-carbon electricity for 6c/KWH is frankly irrelevant.

I can't, it's not an available or viable option, and I'd be fucking delighted if it was.

Re:Better headline.

[Rei]

Pence. So you're in the UK. In a decade, you may be buying cheap, reliable carbon-free electricity from us en masse ;) (hint: you'd be paying in krónur)

Since when did Greenpeace...

[StoneyMahoney]

...have spokespeople that can actually make good sense on energy policy without sensationalizing the story, backing it up with maths based on massive over-estimates, or begging you to give them money at the same time? I'm almost impressed!

Why this?

[daemonenwind]

Slashdot is a US-centric site.

Why are we getting this news about the UK? Whoever decides what stories get posted is a nastyName.

(hey, it's about time someone said the inverse....)

Re:Why this?

[oldmac31310]

Why not? Insular much?

Now there's an idea

[slashmydots]

The bill would guarantee profits for new nuclear and offshore wind plants by putting a levy on people's energy bills.

Oh yes, because that really encourages people to support clean energy and encourages utility companies to reign in the budgets as much as possible for green energy projects.
Although if they outright banned coal and gas, nuclear is sort of controversial and on the fence, that would leave nothing but green energy from this point forward. Well, unless they can run a plant on Hogwarts magic, that would mean "Oh bloody hell, the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not out so we have no electricity at the moment." That would go over really well. What the need is a Mr Fusion that takes any regular matter like a bunch of US universities are inventing.

Re:Now there's an idea

[h4rr4r]

So in your reality power storage has not been invented yet?

Solar thermal can run for days without sunlight, wind power can be used to pump water up hill, all things that are done right now.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Those can't be done to a scale sufficient to provide all energy needs of the country. Suggesting those as a viable solution is laughable. Watch when the poor freeze and starve because energy becomes too expensive for them to buy any. But hey... at least it'll stop global warming...

Re:Now there's an idea

[h4rr4r]

It will never be not windy over the whole country at once. The poor will not freeze, they get subsidized heating. Personally I would use Nuclear for base load, but coal needs to die.

Re:Now there's an idea

[vlm]

Watch when the poor freeze and starve because energy becomes too expensive for them to buy any.

They'll be doing that soon enough because the natgas is basically gone. And they burned the coal in the industrial revolution.

Possibly some pie in the sky stuff will help lessen the impact. It will not eliminate the impact. Therefore we should not try to lessen the impact?

Re:Now there's an idea

[Rei]

Those can't be done to a scale sufficient to provide all energy needs of the country.

"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"

In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:

  * An elevation change
  * Enough water input to account for evaporation

That's pretty much it. And it's cheap. As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Baloroth]

So in your reality power storage has not been invented yet?

Efficient, large-scale power storage? Nope, doesn't exist. Small-scale, inefficient systems? Sure, thats easy. But thermodynamics states that every time you switch energy format, you lose some energy. The only proposed moderately efficient scalable system I've ever seen for energy storage is flywheels, and those pose a range of PR problems (namely, multi-ton objects spinning at hundreds or thousands of RPMs).

Re:Now there's an idea

[Rising Ape]

If I understand it correctly, it's not "guaranteeing profits" in a sense that the government will pay whatever it costs plus a profit margin. Instead, it's guaranteeing a fixed price for the electricity long term. So they'll have every incentive still to build the plants as cheaply as possible.

If you're going to go down this road though, it would seem to make more sense simply to have the government pay for the plants and recover the income by charging for the electricity. The government can borrow money more cheaply than a private company, after all.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

This is the UK, what sunlight? During the day, they have indirect, mist scattered sun from a mostly cloudy sky. No good for solar heating.

Best solution is large scale deployment of tidal powered hydro plants.

Here's the basic idea behind how they could be deployed:

You build what looks like a shipping lock. At high tide, you open the lock, and let the tide in. The at max tide, you close the lock. The tide passes, but the raised water stays in. Nature fills the tank for you. Now you release the trapped high pressure water through hydro generators, and have a small backup battery reserve to buffer production during the next high tide when generation has to stop to let the lock refill.

A very large scale installation could be made between the UK and france, if money isn't an obstacle, and could even be a joint venture between those countries like the chunnel project was.

If I were an island nation with lots of sea coast, its at least something I would try.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Tailhook]

coal needs to die

Ah no. Coal needs to continue evacuating to Asia where it can be burned safely outside the environment to make low cost solar panels and composite windmills we can then deploy throughout our happy shiny la-la land. You know, where coal is outlawed.

Re:Now there's an idea

[h4rr4r]

So you bury them. PR problem solved.

Large scale storage exists, pump water up hill. Efficiency matters not when you had no other use for that power.

Re:Now there's an idea

[h4rr4r]

That would be one way to end coal dependence. In fact almost exactly what I meant. We need to use coal power to end the use of coal power by building its alternatives.

I am so glad we agree.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

How much sewerage does the UK make? (I'm being serious here!)

If a sufficient amount is produced, then syngas plants running on gassified biomatter from the sewerage system could be dropped on top of existing nat gas infrastructures, and would have the benefit of plausibly getting labled "carbon neutral". (If it weren't for fossil fuel fertilizers in the food chain.)

Re:Now there's an idea

[compro01]

The issue is you need lots of water and/or lots of elevation, about 1000 metre-litres per kilowatt-hour of storage.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

See my idea for tidal powered locks above.

Basically, you take a section of rocky sea coast (UK has plenty), dig out an artificial harbor like area, build what looks like a shipping lock to nowhere in it.

Then, whe the tide is high, you open the doors on the lock. Tide bulge water rushes in. Close the lock when full. Tide goes down. Boom. Reservoir of free water you didn't have to pump.

Further inland, you build another lock. This is the "battery". It is elevated a few feet above the main generator pool. Using power produced at low tide, a small amount of water is pumped into the reservoir lock. At high tide, the reservoir lock flows back into the generator pool while the main lock doors are open to catch the tide. This provides relief power while the main lock refills over the hour or so that the tide is full. Rinse, repeat.

Re:Now there's an idea

[barv]

"but at least it will stop global warming"

Only if we reduce CO2 emissions from fuel to zero, and maybe not even then if stories of positive feedback on tundra swamps are accurate. But hey, look at the bright side, those little old ladies won't need heaters!

But then, why is global warming so bad? Sea level rises? Ask the Dutch to build us Dykes. Little old ladies die of heatstroke? Buy them aircon. Food production diminishes because farmland turns to desert? What about the wastes of Siberia and Canada that become fertile farmland? Also CO2 acts as a fertilizer AND reduces a plant's need for water. Or as a last resort, try hydroponics.

Re:Now there's an idea

[serviscope_minor]

"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"

Read David Mackay's book, the one on energy (the one on machine learning is worth a read, too).

In China,

TFS and TFA are about the UK.

There's a distinct lack of what people who have mountains call mountains in the UK. There's some capacity (especiall in Scotland), but not all that much, and a long way from where it's needed.

As for solar thermal storage,

The latitude of the UK is too high and the population too dense to realistically support solar.

Re:Now there's an idea

[ThosLives]

I can just see, in many years, headlines decrying ancestral decisions to tap lunar orbital energy which went too far, resulting in lunar orbital decay and imminent collision.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Cederic]

So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.

Bonus points if you don't have to destroy Ireland too.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Fwipp]

Well, for starters, it takes hundreds of years for soil to become fertile "from scratch."

Re:Now there's an idea

[Q-Hack!]

Well, for starters, it takes hundreds of years for soil to become fertile "from scratch."

Not true, it took me about 3 weeks with a tractor and several truckloads of peet to turn 50 acres of desert (silica sand) into good farming soil.

Re:Now there's an idea

[vlm]

Yeah but anerobic digestion generates less energy than aerobic digestion, so most of the calories end up in peoples guts not toilets. There is energy there.

As a crude engineering estimate, figure out what uses more oil per day, my deep fat fryer or a fuel oil furnace.

Its a brave idea but the scaling factors don't work out.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

Not biogas. Syngas. You don't use microbes at all. You just need a carbon rich feedstock. Turds and toilet paper would work great.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas

It is catalytically created with heat from a mixture of organic feedstock and water. (Essentially sewer mud.)

It *IS* more expensive than oil you get from the ground, but when that isn't an option, you can consider the benefits of eliminating septic waste while also heating homes. Charging for sewer services, as well as for fuel produced, let's you subsidise at both ends, which could lower expected costs.

Re:Now there's an idea

[dylan_-]

So combine the UK's average tidal range with the expected efficiency of the turbines you'd be able to drive using this technique and tell us how many miles of coastline we'd have to destroy to provide power to just one town in the country - say, Birmingham.

Random choice of the second biggest city in the UK, huh? About 10 miles of coastline is the answer.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

This is an argument I have never quite grasped.

Ocean water traveling around the earth in the tidal bulge does not move around free of losses. This means the orbital momentum of the moon is depleting weather you use it or not. Its like arguing that using wind power will make the winds stop.

Besides. The moon is moving away from the earth, not toward. Depleting orbita momentum will actually stabilize its orbit.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Sketchly]

No, bonus points if you DO destroy Ireland, surely?

Re:Now there's an idea

[anotherzeb]

Most (if not all) UK sewage plants already use their methane (and biodegrade their "incoming product" to make more) to make electricity, up to (I think) 40MW for a big plant. Some landfills are even doing this, but again it's not enough to compare with a power plant (if I'm right that a regular power plant outputs 1/2 - 1 GW)

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

You don't use microbes for syngas! Argh!

You could use crushed up seashells, or degraded plastic sludge for goodness sake!

You heat up the carbon bearing feedstock until it catches fire, then spray it with steam. This creates a reduction reaction powered by the prior cumbustion's heat, creating CO and hydrogen gas.

Landfill trash, sewer mud, grass clippings, tree and yard waste, lumber yard sawdust; a syngas plant wouldn't care, as long as it contains carbon, and can be burned.

Syngas can be further processed into real synthetic natural gas. The idea is to transform non-bioprocessable carbon bearing waste into an easily transportable gas form that can make use of existing transport infrastructures.

Re:Now there's an idea

[wierd_w]

You need to add clay to that as well. Peat is organic sponge, but it alone won't support heavy agriculture without the mineral and evaporation control that good clay adds.

After about 5 years of production the mineral stored in the peat from the peatbog it was harvested from will be depleted, and your crops will look scraggly if you don't.

Re:Now there's an idea

[barv]

No it doesn't. It takes about five years. And given sufficient water, you can grow most anything in fertilized sand.

Ask an Agricultural scientist. That was my father's profession, and I was a farmer.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Attila Dimedici]

Personally I would use Nuclear for base load,...

The problem with that is that current projections say that production of fissionable material will drop below current demand by sometime in 2013.

Re:Now there's an idea

[dkf]

In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:

  * An elevation change

  * Enough water input to account for evaporation

That's pretty much it. And it's cheap.

The problem is that while there's mostly plenty of water, there's very little in the way of suitable sites left. Large parts of the UK are chalk and limestone, which are totally the wrong geology for any kind of hydro scheme (the rock is just too permeable), and the shales that make up a lot of the rest aren't too much better (too unstable). Of the rest, it's usually either too flat or full of human habitation (or both).

As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.

Solar's the wrong tech for large scale deployment this far north (all the UK is north of 50N, except for one small headland). There's also damn little suitable rock for geothermal (the UK is a long way from plate boundaries and hot-spots). Wind, wave and tidal make a lot more sense, but so does nuclear and conventional thermal.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Rei]

I've been all over the UK. Yes, the London area is flat as a pancake. The rest of the country isn't, and it's not that big of a country. Most of China's population lives in flat areas, too. But the simple fact is, it doesn't take that much land area * altitude change to store a ton of power. With a water depth of 20m and an altitude change of ~120 meters (which there are even places near *London* like that, like the oceanic cliffs near Eastborne, let alone in Wales, let alone in Scotland), after accounting for losses, that's about 6 kWh per square meter, and thus, the average British home-day energy consumption is stored by 4 square meters. So the amount of land required to store 100% of the electricity for British homes for an entire day is actually notably smaller than the area taken up by the homes themselves, which are dozens to hundreds of square meters on average! In Scotland, the altitude differences to the lochs can be a kilometer or more. Heck, even Wales has *natural* lakes at ~600m not far from the sea.

Re:Now there's an idea

[Rei]

Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started.

I honestly can't blame them

[Anonymous Coward]

As a tree-hugger myself I don't see how a modern economy can just dump a major source of power like coal and gas in less than one generation so I can't blame them for this. However, I would've liked to have seem them at least set a goal with some teeth behind it. My feeling though is that people hate to sacrifice even to save themselves and we'll just have to have a real climate hell before anything changes. Sort of like the guy who ignores his health until he has a heart attack despite all the warnings.

Re:I honestly can't blame them

[CrimsonAvenger]

My feeling though is that people hate to sacrifice even to save themselves and we'll just have to have a real climate hell before anything changes. Sort of like the guy who ignores his health until he has a heart attack despite all the warnings.

The guy who pays attention to his health can avoid a heart attack.

Alas, nothing the UK government can do will have any impact on Global Warming.

EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE has to do something about AGW, or it won't matter at all.

Face it, if every country that had an obligation to limit carbon emissions under Kyoto were to stop using any fossil fuels tomorrow afternoon, it wouldn't do much beyond delay the inevitable by a few years.

Which makes your analogy a bad one.

I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[crazyjj]

Actually, as an American, I wouldn't mind seeing the UK turned into a test platform for green energy (and some social engineering to push it). If it succeeds, they could show the rest of the English speaking world how to do it. And if it turns out to be a hippie pipe dream and fails--well, then we learn a valuable lesson without having to suffer for it in the U.S.

You're on point, Britain! Watch out for mines, and good luck.

Re:I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why a large portion of Britain hates America these days - we don't like being your Guinea pig bitches

Re:I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you use American-R&D funded prescription drugs? It cuts both ways.

Re:I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to be their bitch, stop sucking their dick every time they shove it into your face. Simple as that.

Re:I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[monktus]

Your arrogance and guinea piggery aside, Scotland is making good progress towards its goal of 100% renewable energy from the wind, hydro, tidal and wave resources it has available. Indirectly this is of global benefit, but it's primarily for the benefit of Scotland, not 'Murica. The Westminster Government on the other hand seems to be struggling to get anyone to build new nuclear stations in England (the Scottish Government will not give permission for nuclear and in any case, Westminster doesn't like paying for infrastructure outside of the South East of England).

http://www.newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/5013-concern-raised-over-nuclear-subsidies

Re:I kind of like the idea of UK being a test

[AmiMoJo]

Scotland will be "100% renewable" in a few years time. That doesn't mean they will only have renewables, but rather they produce 200% of what they themselves use and half of it is renewable. The spare capacity is sold to the rest of the UK. For them clean energy is looking like the new oil wealth, and they are proving how reliable and scalable it is.

You might also be interested in Japan, which was forced to ditch almost all its nuclear power at once (25-30% of total capacity) and somehow wasn't thrown back to the stone age. Or Germany which will be nuclear free within the decade, meaning a rapid expansion of renewables.

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[geoffrobinson]

One person's puppet of oil and gas is another person's guy trying not to implode the economy.

GE has the tech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't we come up with scrubbers to clean up the pollution that coal plants put out?

It's a shame coal is so polluting, because we have so damn much of it. It's one of the most plentiful fuels in the world! There has to be a way to burn it cleanly!

I have a relative who is a big shot consulting engineer for GE.

And I pepper him with questions like this whenever I see him.

Yes, there are scrubbers - including taking out the metals like mercury - all that mercury in your predator fish (shark, tuna, swordfish, etc ...) is because of coal fired power plants.

BUT power plants have a very long economic life and environmental laws and knowledge hasn't been around that long. You also have folks who don't give a shit about the environment or at least place economic activity above human health - like China and every other Third World Country.

But anyway, GE at least, has technology to make coal as clean as Natural Gas - but you have to pay out the ass for it.

Greenpeace guy misses the point

[tomhath]

This bill isn't about efficient energy use, that's another subject which is addressed elsewhere. This is about setting a realistic policy for clean and reliable energy production.

Small NUkes

[sycodon]

The nuclear industry needs to give up on the large, one off plants and come up with smaller, factory built nukes that can be installed in series, much like batteries.

These are being worked on and some already designed and in prototype stage, but taking them commercial is a regulatory hell.

People are always trying to get the federal government to "do something" that they are better off doing themselves or being done by local governments. But clearing the regulatory hurdles and standardizing these products is a perfect example of what the federal government should be doing.

Re:Small NUkes

[Anonymous Coward]

The nuclear industry needs to give up on the large, one off plants and come up with smaller, factory built nukes that can be installed in series, much like batteries.

And keep shrinking the tech, so that eventually I can put a single micro-fusion cell into my car and ride from LA to Reno.

Re:Small NUkes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure people are working on that. I would love it too.

But, traffic will be hell if there is no financial penalty for driving.

Re:Small NUkes

[hendridm]

I'm a proponent of nuclear power and wouldn't have a problem with a plant "in my back yard."

However, having mini-nukes on the road sounds like a terrible idea!

Re:Small NUkes

[Zenin]

Honestly, nuke batteries just have bad idea written all over them.

Here's the problem with nuclear in a nutshell:

• In theory it can be perfectly safe and extremely efficient.
• In practice it is nothing but a ticking time bomb easily capable of effectively wiping a large cities right off the map with additional affects world wide. And it's the poster child for inefficient.

A battery of nukes? Again, in theory it could be even safer and more efficient...in practice however, it's just massively compounding the dangers. Remember, Fukushima was a battery of 6 reactors. A problem in one reactor will hamper or completely prevent attending to issues with other reactors, either physically, available man power, or just attention.

--

Humans have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we as a species simply are not capable of safely handling nuclear. It's not the science we lack. It's not the tech. It's the management.

Re:Small NUkes

[Anonymous Coward]

In practice it is nothing but a ticking time bomb easily capable of effectively wiping a large cities right off the map with additional affects world wide. And it's the poster child for inefficient.

The latter point is worth considering; nuclear is expensive and should be considered with cost-efficiency in mind just like any other energy source. Unfortunately, comparing the costs of energy sources in practice is very difficult; recall that we are in this problem because fossil fuels appear much cheaper on the market than they actually are: if they were priced correctly, the market would sort out using better energy sources without laws like the one being discussed.

On the other hand, the former is pure BS. Fukushima was a very old design that shouldn't have even still been running and it had a more or less worst-case disaster where the damage was no where comparable to "effectively wiping a large cities right off the map". Any new nuclear plant built would be built to modern safety standards which prevent such disasters from being possible (one of the problems with Fukushima is that it required generators to maintain its safety and the generators failed; modern nuclear designs are safe when completely unpowered).

I assume the GP was referencing TerraPower which sounds like an interesting idea. (Google around about it, that link is to the company webpage which of course is going to be overly positive and low on information.)

Re:Small NUkes

[wierd_w]

How much energy flow is needed to drive an EV? Let's see... the battery pack has a 13kw/h or so capacity, and drives for 80 miles or so... approx what, .53kw/h per mile? (530v@1a?)

Let's say instead of a mr. Fusion, we build a large carbon 14 betaelectric power core, about the size of a gastank. It weighs about 200lbs let's say. Inside is a honeycomb of thin carbon 14 rods surrounded in a cheap polymer semiconductor, and which produce about 1v @100ma of juice each. (Totally fictional numbers, btw, but other betavoltaic devices about the size of a penny produce .1v or so, from memory. These hypothetical cores are the size of a #1 pencil, so 1v is well within reason I think.)

You need 5300 cores to reach "direct drive" power output. I think you can fit that many in there if you use efficient packing.

Carbon 14 is a beta emitter, with an absurdly long halflife. It does not use catalyzed fission, and can be produced reasonably cheaply (given its long half life| and thus service life) in bulk by seeding ordinary graphite inside a fast breeder reactor, then centrifuging it properly.

By "absurdly long", I mean "over 1 million years". This means that the semiconductor wrapped around the core will fail before the power source inside it does, so old cells could be recycled economically.

Your EV could drive continuously for decades, nonstop.

We can do it now.

Re:Small NUkes

[Firethorn]

In practice it is nothing but a ticking time bomb easily capable of effectively wiping a large cities right off the map with additional affects world wide. And it's the poster child for inefficient.

We're to the point that we've had 2 disasters with major nuclear material contamination. One was a reactor that wouldn't have been certified in the rest of the world and lacked a containment dome, the other was basically one of the oldest operational plants in the world, hit by a huge natural disaster that killed far more people than what the nuclear relases are going to.

If I was Evil Overlord over an area(POTUS doesn't have enough power), I'd be embarking on a campaign of nuclear plant production - Step 1 would be shutting down polluting, CO2 releasing, coal plants. Step 2 would be shutting down the old GenII one-off reactors. I'd be replacing them with GenIII reactors while we finished the designs for the GenIV. It's my understanding that a liquid thorium reactor isn't actually all that far off for viability, and that's a reactor type where a meldown is impossible. Especially given that the core has to be a liquid for it to work...

Re:Small NUkes

[polar red]

uclear plant built would be built to modern safety standards which prevent such disasters from being possible

... is horribly expensive.

Re:Small NUkes

[AmiMoJo]

These are being worked on and some already designed and in prototype stage, but taking them commercial is a regulatory hell.

What do you expect? Any new technology needs to be safe. Proving a nuclear reactor is safe is technically difficult and takes a long time, and involves the destructive testing of expensive gear. Hardly unique or unusual, things like jet engines and aircraft have the same problem.

Another major problem will be insurance. Currently the entire US nuclear industry is only insured for $10bn. To give you an idea of scale Fukushima is going to cost hundreds of billions to sort out, and Japan isn't as lawsuit happy as the US. Start mass producing reactors and putting them all over the place and your liability will sky rocket. Like it or not insurance companies are not going to take your word that nothing bad will ever happen.

Re:Small NUkes

[Zenin]

Fukushima was a very old design that shouldn't have even still been running

Like I said, the problem is the management not the technology.

and it had a more or less worst-case disaster where the damage was no where comparable to "effectively wiping a large cities right off the map"

Will humans be able to safely live within 50 miles of Fukushimaj ever again, effectively? No, they won't.

Fact: EVERY SINGLE nuclear disaster the world has had so far, has wiped a large city off the map.

Any new nuclear plant built would be built to modern safety standards which prevent such disasters from being possible

No they won't. They could, sure. But they won't.

How do I know this to be unquestionable fact? Simple: We've known the dangers of nuclear and yet still cut corners, get lazy, and get stupid. Every, Single, Time.

Humans, as a species, are fundamentally incapable of properly handling dangers this great. We will always cut corners, get lazy, get stupid, and otherwise mismanage technology. We do this with everything we touch. The only difference is with nuclear when something goes wrong it isn't a few oil covered birds washing up on a beach, it's entire cities rendered uninhabitable forever and radioactive contamination spreading across every last inch of the planet. -That last statement refers to the fact Chernobyl particles have been found spread out across every last inch of the planet and Fukushima isn't far behind.

--

Sooner or later humans botch everything they touch. That's really just fine when botching something has a reasonably localized effect. That's a large part of how we learn and improve.

But when botching something has insanely large and widespread effects the cost of botching it even a single time is just not reasonable. Especially since, as humans, we have to botch it many times before we make any progress. It's the case with nuclear. It's the case with major banks. It's the case with GMO foods.

These are technologies that the human race simply is not responsible enough to handle under any conditions whatsoever. Doing so is no different then handing a loaded gun to a baby and trusting it to handle it safely.

It's the (mis)management, stupid.

Re:Small NUkes

[Zenin]

We're to the point that we've had 2 disasters with major nuclear material contamination. One was a reactor that wouldn't have been certified in the rest of the world and lacked a containment dome, the other was basically one of the oldest operational plants in the world, hit by a huge natural disaster that killed far more people than what the nuclear relases are going to.

The point is two fold:

1 - They both failed because of bad management decisions, not technology.

2 - Even a single meltdown in the entire history of the human race is 1 too many. We've had four to date.

It doesn't matter in hindsight if one should have had a containment dome, others should have had larger tsunami walls, redundant flood proof power, etc, etc. Everyone involved with these plants KNEW all that before they laid the first brick. Yet they still fucked them up.

Humans are simply not capable of managing technology with such massive costs of failure. We fail at everything, it's in our nature, it's how we learn and advance. Yet nuclear is something we simply can not fail at, even once, even a little bit, the consequences are simply far too massive.

Yet because humans are managing it...we know it's going to fail. It doesn't matter the design, it doesn't matter the precautions, it doesn't matter the oversight. At the end of the day we're still humans and what we do, 100% of the time, is fail. Sooner or later, we fail at absolutely everything. Failing (and, eventually, learning from it) is how we advance, it is at the very core of what it is to be human.

Nuclear simply is not compatible with the human race.

Re:Small NUkes

[Firethorn]

1. Bad management decisions made during the first generation of nuclear plant building; My entire argument is basically 'We've learned!'

2. A single meltdown is too much? By what standard of measurement? Coal power kills millions. Nuclear power kills hundreds. Natural gas might poison people(see fracking and burning tap water).

Nuclear simply is not compatible with the human race.

The human race isn't compatible with the human race. Given that we're far better off with power than without it, the question becomes 'What are our best choices'. Nuclear is actually pretty good from a safety and expense standpoint. I wouldn't go 100% nuclear, but 40% wouldn't be bad. BTW, this is ~double the current percentage.

Note the context of my construction - we start building nuclear plants, shutting down the dirtiest coal plants first; this saves us LOTS of pollution and the resulting doctors visits, medicines, sick days, and even cases of fatal lung cancer. Then we shut down the worst/oldest nuclear plants with ones designed to be even more safe than the old ones.

Pointless.

[vlm]

reporting that the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning ... gas powered plants.

Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.

The fastest and cheapest way to bring down ... carbon emissions is by

is by burning up all the gas? Can't emit carbon if there's none to burn.

I follow the energy business and the UK is in serious danger of disaster in the next decade or so. They don't have the technical equipment or the economic strength or the installed capital (like insulated buildings) to survive the transition from a fossil fuel exporter to pretty much having to import everything. The lights are going out and no more central heated homes. The strong "business as usual" and "kick the can down the road" isn't helping the situation. There will be people freezing to death in the winter, there will be rolling blackouts...

Also all/most of the coal was burned up in the industrial revolution. The last mine in cornwall (and it was a tin mine anyway) closed up more than a decade ago. They can import, for awhile. Its kinda expensive.

People have a very difficult time understanding technological limitations. If only the price gets high enough then the boffins will magically find an expensive way to do anything. Well, no, not really. Print as many pounds / euros as you want, they can't magically fill an empty fuel tank.

Re:Pointless.

[0123456]

Given the staggering decline in north sea production, because its all gone, I don't think this is terribly relevant.

Considering that Britain appears to have enough shale gas to power it for centuries, that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Re:Pointless.

[vlm]

shale gas is primarily a way to turn two barrels of crude into one barrel equivalent of natgas. Sometimes its described as a way to turn millions of dollars of capital investment into thousands of dollars of gas.
It is very similar to ethanol as a primary energy source, in that in rare and unusual geography and situations it is occasionally net positive, but by in large its not gonna work.

Re:Pointless.

[EnergyScholar]

Parent exactly nailed it. Shale gas is a scam. The 'hundreds of years of supply' meme is completely false, and is part of a paid social networking and general marketing campaign put on by a few US Fracking companies. Shale gas has poor net energy, making it not worthwhile from an energy source perspective, AND has the bonus of permanently poisoning the local water supply.

Guaranteed Profits

[Wildclaw]

I guess it was just a matter of time.

1: Government builds the infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.

2: Make the government pay private companies to build infrastructure.
Problem: Not profitable enough.

3: Steal..err...privatize the infrastructure.
Problem: You still have to pay those damn progressive taxes, and what happens when you have to build new infrastructure?

4: Guarantee profits on new infrastructure and not via taxes. Instead just force the citizens to buy it so that it works like a regressive tax.

Re:Guaranteed Profits

[Anonymous Coward]

Government guaranteed profits for favored privately held companies? Wasn't Germany into that 7 to 8 decades ago?

Re:Guaranteed Profits

[AmiMoJo]

Actually this is just no. 2 on the sly. EU rules don't allow governments to subsidize building new nuclear plants, but the government thinks it can get around that by forcing the consumer to pay the subsidy directly instead of via taxation.

Even so there seems to be little interest from energy companies. All but one have dropped out and it looks unlikely that all the plants the government wants will get built now. Probably because the companies know that as soon as a different government gets in they will try to reduce people's energy bills by reducing the subsidy, but which time they will be committed and forced to continue.

Since wind doesn't need much guarantee

[Anonymous Coward]

Since wind doesn't need much guarantee of profit and nuclear requires a huge guarantee, I fail to see how "wind projects are getting profit guarantees and not just nuclear" is any form of redress.

How the hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you ban both gas and coal and not return to the stone-age?

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[Anonymous Coward]

This electrically conveyed belly-aching brought to you by Oil and Gas Puppetry.

So the price hike was the £3 rise

[Anonymous Coward]

So the price hike was the £3 rise to subsidise renewables, not the 150% increase in the cost of gas...

right...

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[QuantumPion]

I'm pissed that he didn't ban CO2 exhalation by humans. I mean it is clear we are a threat to the planet and need to be stopped. Then again that's about what I'd expect from the Cameron government, which acts like a puppet for that outrageous corrupt evil special interest corporation known as humanity.

So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

So now the US truly stands alone as being the only developed nation to commit to doing jack to stop the planet from becoming an uninhabitable Mad Max style hell-hole.

We're number one ! We're number one !

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

And you do not accept AGW as a fact because why exactly? Please tell the world and the world's scientists because they'r anxious to hear your non-expert POV.

We're mostly engineers here. Some of us are also scientists and scientists are exceedingly cautious and humble about traveling outside their extremely limited domain of expertise.

So please , tell us why you know better than the world's assembled experts on this topic. And while you're at it, tell us about eh vast left wing conspiracy that keeps the large numb er of legitimate, duly qualified scientist's voices repressed on this topic.

I love it when deniers attempt to assume the mantle of "reasonable citizen" when in fact along with evolution deniers, two populations with enormous overlap in membership, they're the the living embodiment of anti-rational, reality-denying ideologues.

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[Mindcontrolled]

If your opinion about AGW is formed by rants of slashdotters instead of looking at the science, the problem might be on your side. However, I do agree that resource depletion will bite us in the arse before AGW will. In particular considering peak oil.

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

OK I issue the same challenge to you then. please don't keep us in the dark as to why you know better than the world's scientific bodies and duly qualified experts. No more hot air, put up or shut up.

Please, I know all the denier memes so start trotting them out so we can educate some people here.

Waiting....

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[Mindcontrolled]

Ehm, I did not answer to you, but to the poster above. How do you get the idea I am a denier?

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Fuck ....sorry. Mea culpa.. it was the layout of the posts on my screen. Total apologies are due to you, good Sir.

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[Mindcontrolled]

Nevermind. Now go and get yourself more coffee! ;)

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Early Grey. Hot. London Fog.

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

OK so it's been enough hours for my worthy opponent to post a reply.

I think that pretty much says it all.

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[Anonymous Coward]

So now the US truly stands alone as being the only developed nation to commit to doing jack to stop the planet from becoming an uninhabitable Mad Max style hell-hole.

We're number one !
We're number one !

And some people wonder why not everyone accepts AGW as fact. OP is why. Rants like this are as obnoxious as a tin-foil hat brigade screaming about aliens being in control of the White House....

Rants like this do nothing but hurt the "green" effort. I do not accept AGW as fact, but as an engineer I am well aware of resource exhaustion. That to me is a greater concern than a "Mad Max style hell-hole".......

Wasn't Mad Max about resource exhaustion? After all there wasn't enough Guzzoline to go around. Just saying :)

Re:So now the US truly stands alone

[WOOFYGOOFY]

My argument is and will always be with scale, effect, and information reliability.

This is pathetically underspecific. You can apply this to anything you don't like for any reason at all. It is not a reasoned argument, or even an argument at all, it's an emotional tone.

Saying we have to cut all dependence on fossil fuels, coal, and the like is not a problem solution. It's economic collapse.

And therefore AGW is false? Is there an argument in there somewhere?

Furthermore , as to your non-argument, no one is saying cut all fossil fuel; your statement is therefore a red herring. The Princeton Wedges concept - which if implemented would avert climate disaster and give us time to continue to develop alternative fuels- specifically does NOT require the abrupt discontinuation of all fossil fuels. I don't know of any plan that does. So, you used a red herring in an argument but worse, you use it in your own internal reasoning process.

Also, the US Navy is cutting their fossil fuel consumption by 50% no later than 2020. So apparently at least the Navy believes it can be done.

Also, there is not a consensus. In science, there should rarely ever be a consensus, until all outside explanations have been exhausted.

That is simply not how science is conducted nor could it be. No scientific theory ever is completely closed to modification, amendment, or rejection. It's an impossible standard that even Newton's laws cannot and in fact do not live up to. So all we have here is yet another poor argumentation technique- the demand of impossible standards. This is a completely typical denier technique and if accepted a perfect excuse for permanent inaction. Thankfully, no one in any position of responsibility takes this argument seriously.

Wikipedia has a decent list of scientists that oppose the notion of AGW negativity. So just because the majority says X does not mean there is consensus.

Widespread consensus means exactly super majority opinion which is even LESS than what we actually have- well over 95% agreement of scientists. To assert otherwise is to consciously and deliberately avoid seeking out the serious and definitive rebuttal of all such claims which is always available to anyone online.

Lists of scientists who are not climate experts, who have not published in the field, who are merely physicists or engineers and such like are pointless since none of these people have the required domain expertise. That's how science goes-- experts are just those people who spend all their time actively conducting research, making contributions, reading the literature and keeping up, not to mention doing the undergrad and grad school grunt work as a pre-requiste.

You can't be a dilettante - even a smart one who is or was an expert in another tangentially related field - and hope to offer arguments which will not be concisely and definitively torn apart by the real experts who spend all their time doing what you think you can do part time.

There are a few legitimate duly qualified dissenting scientists- a very few. There are also duly qualified scientists who do not believe that HIV causes AIDS. That's normal science and invariably the outliers are, just you you would suspect, wrong. This is true no matter how smart you are; Einstein's rejection of QM springs immediately to mind here.

All national academies of science are in agreement that AGW is real and caused by the release of carbon depots otherwise sequestered in coal, oil and other prehistoric depots. We know this is the source of the carbon because of the specific carbon isotope which is in such historical excess. We know that carbon is a greeenhouse gas and we know what concentration of said gases begin to cause the greenhouse effect. This is science from the 19th century.

It's amusing to see lists of alleged dissenting scientists bandied around the internet

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[operagost]

Nuclear and wind producers are getting guaranteed profits. You don't think that is a sign of special interest?

Tories

[Epeeist]

To quote Nye Bevan

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not true

[Cyberax]

That'd be true if Cameron at the same time tried to actually do something with the economy, instead of trying to squeeze it as much as possible with new austerity measures. The ones that have already caused a new recession in the UK.

Re:Not true

[geoffrobinson]

I've looked at the numbers and I haven't seen any country in Europe (besides Greece by a little bit) reduce their spending year-over-year. That doesn't sound like austerity.

He did raise taxes to reduce the deficit. And that will suck money out of the private sector and slow the economy. But I'm not sure if that warrants the label austerity.

But pretty soon we'll all see real austerity if we maintain the present course.

Re:Not true

[Cyberax]

I've looked at the numbers and I haven't seen any country in Europe (besides Greece by a little bit) reduce their spending year-over-year. That doesn't sound like austerity.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10810962 - it was futile and unable to reduce deficits, of course. But spending cuts were very real.

He did raise taxes to reduce the deficit. And that will suck money out of the private sector and slow the economy. But I'm not sure if that warrants the label austerity.

Not 'will' but 'has'. The UK is in the midst of the SECOND recession and falling down still. Cameron achieved quite a dubious feat - UK has now been depressed more than in the Great Depression of 30-s. With no way out in sight.

Re:Not true

[Malc]

You seem to have a short memory. New Labour under Blair and Brown were running an increased deficit during the boom, even after increasing taxes. There was no room left for the government to do something with the economy when the recession came.

Government debt stood at 29% of GDP in 2002, and had increased to 37% before the crash in 2007, despite incredibly strong economic conditions. What exactly do you think was going to happen? That's why it's spiralled so quickly to 90% of GDP.

Servicing just the interest on the debt is about the same as the defence budget, or if you prefer, the fourth largest budget item. We're basically fucked for decades due to the previous government's profligacy.

Re:Not true

[Cyberax]

You seem to have a short memory. New Labour under Blair and Brown were running an increased deficit during the boom, even after increasing taxes. There was no room left for the government to do something with the economy when the recession came.

On the contrary, I have a very good memory.

Government debt stood at 29% of GDP in 2002, and had increased to 37% before the crash in 2007, despite incredibly strong economic conditions. What exactly do you think was going to happen? That's why it's spiralled so quickly to 90% of GDP.

WRONG!
UK debt end 1998 : 410,2 G£, i. e. 46,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 1999 : 405,7 G£, i. e. 43,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2000 : 400,6 G£, i. e. 41,0 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2001 : 385,5 G£, i. e. 37,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2002 : 402,9 G£, i. e. 37,5 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2003 : 441,1 G£, i. e. 38,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2004 : 487,9 G£, i. e. 40,4 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2005 : 529,4 G£, i. e. 42,3 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2006 : 573,3 G£, i. e. 43,4 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2007 : 618,4 G£, i. e. 44,2 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2008 : 750,3 G£, i. e. 52,0 % of GDP (ONS)
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1950_2010UKp_11s1li011lcn_G0t_UK_National_Debt_As_Pct_GDP

So where's the debt crisis? It oscillated around 40% during the recent "good" years. It only started growing in 2008 because of the freaking global crisis. There was NO reason for austerity. And the effects of austerity turned out to be self-defeating - the projections show that their effects on deficit are minimal.

Everyone preaching about debt should read http://www.amazon.com/End-This-Depression-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393088774 . Go on, read it.

Re:Not true

[turgid]

David Cameron is just making sure that as much money as possible gets into the hands of our Lords and Masters as is Right, Proper and the Natural Order of Things.

Re:Not true

[AmiMoJo]

As far as the Tory party is concerned any service the government offers is a lost business opportunity for a private company. Libraries allowing people to read books for free? Lost book sales. NHS providing people with first rate treatment? Those people could be paying for health insurance and private hospital care. State school giving kids a good education? Then where is the incentive to pay for one?

Re:Not true

[Malc]

Convenient that you stopped at 2008. Your figures are offset from the ones on Wikipedia, but you've confirmed what I said: debt grew significantly from 2002 onwards, even though the economy was at the top of the economic cycle. Absolute madness by Tony Blair and George Brown. If they hadn't grown the public sector by 1 million employees, if they had focused on maintaining a healthy economy, they and the subsequent government would have been talking about growth policies instead of austerity when the freaking global crisis hit. Absolute moronic stewardship of the economy by Labour.

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[Mindcontrolled]

As an exercise for home: Does your strawman burn carbon neutral or does it affect atmospheric CO2?

Er

[Anonymous Coward]

the UK's new Draft Energy Bill (PDF) avoids banning coal or gas powered plants

They want the lights to stay on? No shit?

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[Cederic]

I'm confused. Story states that viable energy sources aren't banned in favour of unproven and/or expensive energy sources, and that means Cameron's a puppet?

Kneejerk often?

(Note that I'm not challenging whether he's a marionette, just your logic in inferring it from a fairly innocuous part of a report that has far more important implications)

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's always magic unicorn farts, eh Comrade?

Subsidy hypocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't anyone else notice how nuclear subsidies are banned but throwing hundreds of billions of Euros and Pounds into these outlandish "Green Energy" schemes is encouraged?

Face it, this is all a political shellgame because the populace can't accept the only rational alternative to fossil fuel power plants: Nuclear.

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly]

How are nuclear getting guaranteed profits? They don't generate, they don't get income, and the price they get is determined by the market...

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[Anonymous Coward]

I think straw counts as a biofuel and as such will be carbon neutral.

Re:Pretty Much Expected from the Cameron Governmen

[JohnnyMindcrime]

Not that I am aligned to any UK political party at this moment in time, but anything that stops my taxes being spent on organisations like the UK Carbon Trust built entirely on unproven Al Gore loony theories ("I didn't massage the global temperature change figures by 60 years, honestly I didn't") is a good thing in my book.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So why isn't nuclear banned?

[Anonymous Coward]

"viable energy sources aren't banned in favour of unproven and/or expensive energy source"

But Nuclear is proven unusable and is expensive.

So why is it still being pushed?

PS renewables are proven and cheaper than most power sources.

Oh, the powers of legislators! How soon we forget

[Anonymous Coward]

"The fastest and cheapest way to bring down bills and carbon emissions is by ramping up energy efficiency but Ministers have totally failed to deliver on this."

Didn't know that MPs were 'responsible' for energy efficiency. I guess they forgot where they put their magic wand....