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UK's Coal Plants To Be Phased Out Within 10 Years (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes: The UK's remaining coal-fired power stations will be shut by 2025, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has announced. They will mostly be replaced with gas. Currently, coal provides 28% of the UK's electricity. Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute. The big question is how to ensure gas plants are built to replace it. Only one large plant is under construction today. Another, which secured a subsidy last year, is struggling to find investors. The government cut renewable energy subsidies earlier this year, which led to questions about the government's commitment to tackle climate change.
We could just harness all the politicians hot air thats been produced about this over the last 15 years.
I'm really beginning to believe that technically pig ignorant people should not be in politics. It seems to me that they Just Dont Get that we're have hardly any spare capacity and closing another load of stations without any new ones to immediately replace them is only going to make things worse especially if we have another cold winter.
FFS , if they can't even formulate and carry out a sensibly policy for building basic infrastructure what fecking chance do we have if there's a real emergency?
Mod parent up. Starting with liberal Thatcher, the standard-bearer of liberalism who liberally closed down so many coal mines despite the objection of non-liberals everywhere, the liberal "Tory" party has spewed its liberal values all over England. We're going to hell in a handbasket, I tell you what. Liberals.
The strongest commitment of any Conservative party government when it comes to energy policy has always been, is, and always will be, to ensure the best possible bottom for of the oil companies, nothing else matters to them including what is best for the nation.
Yeah, that damn liberal Conservative party. They'll be the ruin of this country, I tell you.
Do your bloody homework!
--JG
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
Yes, the British Conservative Party are such mindless Liberals, aren't they?
Our government has no clue about energy policy. They are a bunch of utter morons tied to lobbyists' interests. They have already agreed a new nuclear with the Chinese that guarantees a 100% rise in energy costs over current prices and have sold (with the help of the BBC) this to the general public as an energy security initiative. My countrymen are fools and the government is made up very much of their ilk.
Dear Comrades...er...Customers,
Thanks for ditching your remaining coal plants.
Now that you threw those pesky Ukrainians under the bus, we can now offer our natural gas without problems. I will love to sell more to you by 2025 and later.
From Russia, with love.
Putin
XOXO
What I find highly amusing is that gas (i.e. natural gas) is viewed as being renewable or environmentally friendly. It's neither, although it's not as bad as coal in several aspects.
Read the bloody article.
The first hint that this isn't purely about "liberal demoncrap" is that it is filed under business, not environment. The second hint is that they're talking about aging plants that won't be shut down if they are upgraded with carbon capture. It is also possible that other upgrades or maintenance is necessary, but unmentioned. In other words, cost is a factor here. The third hint are mentions of economic and political issues, such as energy security.
There are other subtle (as in subtle as being hit by a sledgehammer) issues being mentioned, none of which indicate that environmental considerations are secondary issues.
and how are they gonna do that ? Look at what little those few hundred fundamentalists really have accomplished since 9/11. Theyre a bunch of retards which cant accomplish a fucking thing.
"none of which" should read "all of which"
Why phase it out?
Because coal is filthy.
Is it more expensive than the alternatives?
No, coal is cheap, at least in many areas.
Is the coal going to be used for something else?
It will remain as a non-rigid filler under the ground where it had been.
Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes. Not as bad as old ones without scrubbers and other filters on the smoke, but they're still horribly messy. CO2 is not the only waste product, sulfurs, toxic heavy metals, and trace radioactive materials get burned in those plants and sent out with the ash.
The only power source I am aware of that rivals coal for filthiness (even with current expensive top-tier filters) was the old Mongolian (for an old definition of Mongolia) standard of burning dried pack-animal feces for heating and cooking. While the ash of that lacked some of the more toxic minerals in coal, the smoke formed a giant black cloud over the land with all the environmental damages you expect from a giant black cloud hanging over the land.
I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
More than before, but not clean by any stretch of delusion.
Coal is worse than gas no matter how you look at it. Mining operations, shipping it around the world, and even with modern plants that have carbon capture it's still just about the most damaging option. And yes, since we have an NHS, they are very expensive.
Note that the Liberals that you hate so much helped get new nuclear plants built in the UK, even if they are designed by a Japanese company, built by the Chinese and owned by the French.
There are lots of reasons to dislike the Lib Dems, but your second paragraph is just right-wing ranting, only fit for the Daily Mail.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
One minute he's griping that they aren't building enough gas stations. Then he says they aren't pushing enough renewables.
Last time I looked, gas is a fossil fuel. Stupid summary.
Aren't coal scrubbers a solved problem?
helped get new nuclear plants built in the UK
And guaranteed them a spot price double the going rate. They're only interested in helping taxpayers money into the pockets of those who can bribe them.
Why phase it out? Is it more expensive than the alternatives? Is the coal going to be used for something else? Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment? I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
None of these questions enter into the "mind" of the liberal demoncrap. They are only concerned with making things more expensive and shouting you down for employing basic logic and asking simple questions which expose their positions for the lunacy that they are.
Maybe the problem is in the way the questions are asked? Maybe a better approach would be to show that a coal fired plant can be retrofitted to release no more emissions than a natural gas fired plant for 1/4 the cost. If tax dollars are limited, wouldn't it make more sense to retrofit four plants for the cost of one new plant? Then the savings could be used for other programs.
Put differently, if my utility bills for my house are too high, I just add more insulation, I don't build a new house.
Yeah, that damn liberal Conservative party. They'll be the ruin of this country, I tell you.
Do your bloody homework!
--JG
Careful. You don't understand the mind of the American bubble person. Disagree with him again, and he'll be calling for attacks on London to win the hearts and minds of the British people.
And completely ignoring the efforts of getting the coal to the generating stations is showing his ignorance. It gets a little harder to extract these days, and it isn't like oil, where you have a hole in the ground. You remove entire mountaintops and dump the fill in the next valley over . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
Dunno how it is in GB with getting to the coal, but when we get to doing that, it doesn't take a "liberal demoncrap" as he quaintly puts it, to understand maybe its time for a switch. Coal is dangerous work, messy, dirty, and poisonous in multiple ways. It makes as much sense to use coal as it does to cut down all the trees in a country to use as fuel.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There's lots of reasons to dislike all of the parties.
Thing is though now that the Tories have shed the lib dems, they are showing their true face and engaging in a massive slash and burn spree. I'd say the lib dems were the most under rated party I've ever seen in power.
To all the defectors who pissed and moaned because the coalition didn't behave like perfect lin dems (no shit, they were the minor party): congratulations, you've now got the government you deserve.
Trouble is of course, the rest of us are also stuck with the government they deserve.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
From the summary:
Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute
No, we're getting Chinese ones. I think our politicians must be among the most easily bought.
What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place. Ideologically they are far closer to Labour, and could have built a working coalition with them. A minority government was even an option. Instead they enabled the Tories.
Sure, it would have been worse if it was a Tory majority government like it is now, but that was never on the table. They saw an opportunity to get some power and seized it, and got screwed in the process.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Where's your logic? Why ask a bunch of rhetorical questions when you could look up the answers yourself in five minutes? Maybe because you don't really want to hear the answers. . .
Coal is the dirtiest and most lethal power source by many measures. Yes, we've introduced a lot of environment and safety regulations on coal mining. Yes, we've put scrubbers in the smokestacks and largely gotten rid of acid rain. Coal is much better than it used to be -- but it's still the worst, by far, when compared with any other energy source in widespread use. And we still haven't gotten CO2 sequestration proven and deployed. THAT is why they want to get rid of coal power plants.
Read the bloody article.
The first hint that this isn't purely about "liberal demoncrap" is that it is filed under business, not environment. The second hint is that they're talking about aging plants that won't be shut down if they are upgraded with carbon capture. It is also possible that other upgrades or maintenance is necessary, but unmentioned. In other words, cost is a factor here. The third hint are mentions of economic and political issues, such as energy security.
There are other subtle (as in subtle as being hit by a sledgehammer) issues being mentioned, none of which indicate that environmental considerations are secondary issues.
There are two big problems with your argument-
1. Nobody has demonstrated carbon capture using the full exhaust stream. Typically they extract carbon from only 1 to 10% of the exhaust gasses. The reason is because the amount of carbon is large, and the parasitic losses from even a partial treatment system make the plant uneconomical. These projects are just good enough to attract government subsidies and grants. A full scale system would never be economically viable in most countries.
2. Nobody is going to install such a system on an old coal plant without a fat government subsidy. The economics aren't viable, especially given that the government may change their mind in 5 years.
Killing coal like this is like saying "all girls on the cheerleading team must be slim and petite". It sounds like a great idea until you need to make a pyramid.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Natural gas is a stopgap -- and a highly useful one. I would compare natural gas to a hybrid car, like a Prius. It still burns petroleum fuel, but not as much, and it still pollutes, but not as much, and it can help fill the gap until pure battery electric cars are perfected and take off.
In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.
What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place. Ideologically they are far closer to Labour, and could have built a working coalition with them. A minority government was even an option. Instead they enabled the Tories.
I don't know how anybody can think this: the maths weren't there. They could form a stable coalition with the Tories, or cobble together a highly fractured coalition with almost everybody that wasn't the Tories, the so-called "rainbow coalition". It would have seemed hugely undemocratic, and allowed a clearly voted-out Prime Minister to stay on. A minority coalition would have lasted 5 minutes - it would have to agree internally and *then* try to find agreements with other parties.
The LibDems are closer to Labour, but they had very little choice. To stay out of coalition would have led to a minority Conservative government that wouldn't have to last long, just long enough for another election when the polls swung slightly their way.
Yes, coal scrubbers are a "solved problem", and that's why we don't have acid rain killing the forests anymore.
However, CO2 sequestration is not a solved problem, and we still have global warming.
I see much evidence that major governments -- and major environmental groups -- don't really take global warming seriously and don't really want the problem solved. You can judge them by their actions.
If they really took it seriously, the environmental groups would all be backing nuclear power instead of fighting it.
If the US government took global warming seriously, they'd allow new reactor designs instead of forcing companies to go build in China because they have given up on ever getting anything approved in the USA.
If the world took global warming seriously, we'd have massive programs to develop nuclear fusion reactors. It would be like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. I have to grit my teeth when the UN announces ten billion dollars in financial aid to sinking island nations, but nobody can cough up 1/50th of that for a new research reactor.
UK will sit in the dark and freeze.
Leftist tools are the funniest peoples.
Compared to the American political parties? Yeah.
But ultimately you want to replace all fossil fuel power plant with zero-carbon power plants which means nuclear, solar, wind, wave, and bio-based fuel power plants.
What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place.
Honestly if they'd have gone with Labour I would have not voted for them in a VERY long time. Labour had been in power for ages and was full of rotten corruption. Note also, that it was "new labour" which were ideologically identical to the Tories anyway.
Given quite how unpopular Gordon brown and the Blairites were, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there would have been some serious riots if Labour even had a sniff of power.
Sure, it would have been worse if it was a Tory majority government like it is now
Exactly, in hindsight, and not even very long hindsignt the coalition did a reasonably decent job. Much better tha nthe previous labour lot or the following conservative bunch.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They had plenty of choices. They could have got a much better deal from the Tories. They could have stuck to their principals and demanded a rainbow coalition of consensus rule. They could have at least demanded a proper electoral reform programme and referendum. No one forced them to do a really bad deal with the devil. They were supposed to be principled, after all.
Note that Brown announced he would step down by September before serious negotiations between Labour and the Lib Dems began, meaning that the issue of having a rejected prime minister would have been moot. Also note that the election is for local MPs, not the PM, so there is no constitutional issue changing leader that way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes. Perhaps you've heard of climate change?
I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
The cost of carbon capture for coal plants makes the operation far more expensive (per MWh and per MW) than nuclear or renewables. As a result, a tiny fraction of one percent of coal-fired generators in first world nations are capturing the carbon emissions and sequestering them.
As for your second paragraph -- it's one thing to be ignorant of a specific industry and its technologies and economics. That's your first paragraph, and that's fine. That's how we learn. But the ignorance exhibited in your second paragraph indicates a different kind of ignorance altogether. Please go back to the kiddie table.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Given the decline of coal usage in the U.K. (on a downwards slope since a now somewhat rusted lady held power, though plateaued of late) and that the U.K. has been a net importer of coal over a similar period of time, phasing out old coal plants may be something of a no-brainer. Granted, the U.K. is now also a net importer of gas, and a net importer of oil, but those declines are much more recent than that of coal. It will be interesting to see, moving forward, how the British economy pays to import those resources, having burned through its own easily obtained stocks with quite some abandon...
You make it sound like Labour was some small minority fringe party. In fact they only got 5% less than the Tories, and 6% more than the Lib Dems. That's how screwed up our system is. A combined Labour/Lib Dem coalition would have taken over 50% of the votes, if not the seats.
I'm not a huge Labour fan either, but they would have been infinitely preferable to the Tories. They may have adopted much of the same ideology, but they aren't nearly as nasty.
The coalition did a terrible job. Labour was hobbled by having to stick the Thatcherite ideas and policies, which the Tories are too. I really doubt that the Tories would have done any better than Labour during the 2000s, especially considering how they did in the early 90s when things got difficult. So Labour did what was necessary with the banks, and then the coalition got in and started hacking away at public services as fast at the Lib Dems would allow. It was irresponsible and ideologically motivated, and unsound economic policy. This is our lost decade thanks to them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
Does it mean Great Britain's climate will improve? How? What will the home of the coal powered industrial revolution get for its horrendous sacrifice? Handshakes at the UN?
Exactly. I see I was modded down for my questions. But the fact remains: if people do that Climate Change seriously, why are they not changing? Why is Co2 output and energy usage per person going UP not DOWN? Surely everyone knows the effect that Co2 has on Climate Change???
All three due to problems with unreliable coal powered stations.
I'm left wondering why the fuck they want gas.
I can only think because we don't otherwise really need fracking in this country, so the politicians hope to make us hostages to gas to force us to allow them to blow the shit out of our water sources so they can sell the gas on the open market to the rest of the world.
PS, all those rolling blackouts to make people listen? That's what the private industry did in California so as to gouge higher profits from the state and their customers. Deliberately manufactured and unnecessary blackouts to "make people listen". If some arab had done the same shit, they'd be in Gitmo so fast the earth would have been slowed down by their acceleration to Cuba.
> we'd have massive programs to develop nuclear fusion reactors.
The G7 countries are already building the 14 billion dollar (!) ITER fusion reactor in Cadarache, France. It would be a miracle if final costs stop under twice as much.
More facilities aren't built simply because nobody has the slightest idea on how to stabilize a permanent, controlled fusion reaction with currently existing or even fore-seeable technology? The ITER itself is just a very large copy of the Tokamak, an early 1970s soviet concept.
Somewhere, somehow something is very wrong with the theoretical background of fusion but currently nobody has a clue, so it makes no sense to build more facilities. It will take a future genius of Einstein's or Schrodinger's caliber, to get the equations right and them fusion will be practicable. In other words, fusion energy is always just 50 years from being practically realized...
Good thing there's no carbon in natural gas.
OK, bear in mind I'm not supporting any particular party. As far as I'm concerned they're all hateful in a rich and interesting variety of ways.
You make it sound like Labour was some small minority fringe party.
No, I don't mean to. But you're referring t ovotes cast, which is only about 50% of the country. It'd fashionable to discount the un-cast votes, but to do so ignores that a large number are due to disaffection the part of the voters.
I live in a Labour stronghold. It will never be anything else. What's the point in voting? I do vote, but what's the point? For a large proportion of the country there is literally no point in voting. And then there's the people who are tired of the same old crap again and again. Spoild ballot papers rarely make a mention, so going to the booth ans spoiling the paper is yet again a waste of time.
Anyway, I remember a deep disaffection with the Labour party. I also remember them making some very, very nasty parting shots. As a last act they "funded" al lsorts of random crap about the place knowing it would have to be cancelled by whoever followed.
So Labour did what was necessary with the banks,
Massive deregulation? That was pretty much the cause of the problems. Without that the banks would not have needed bailing out with VAST amounts of public money.
I'm not a huge Labour fan either, but they would have been infinitely preferable to the Tories.
I wish I could say that but I honestly don't know. The blairites were as nuts as the tories.
The coalition did a terrible job.
In an absolute sense, maybe, but compared to the administration either side it was something of a high point.
Labour was hobbled by having to stick the Thatcherite ideas and policies, which the Tories are too.
Thatcher liked her privatisation, Blair took it to a whole new level. The privatisation of the royal Mail was a one-two punch by Labour and the tories. Labour dealt a staggering blow and the tories followd up with the knockout punch. For example...
the coalition got in and started hacking away at public services as fast at the Lib Dems would allow.
Pretty much, though labout made a MASSIVE mess of them. They instigated all the PPP deals which amounted to an elaborate yet effective way of transfering massive amounts of money dedicated ot public services into private hands. A lot of the slide started as a result of that.
Now don't get me wrong, at this point the conservatives are determined to one up labour in terms of shittiness.
It was irresponsible and ideologically motivated, and unsound economic policy.
I level the same charge at much of what Labour did too.
That's why I still contend that the conlib coalition was the best government we've had in years and the best we're likely to have for years.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The UK Conservative Party wants a higher nationwide "Living Wage"...so it ends up being on the liberal side of the US spectrum.
If they really took it seriously, the environmental groups would all be backing nuclear power instead of fighting it.
They aren't all fighting nuclear power. I'm sure some are. There are many groups who would go all Tarzan if they could. Meanwhile, here's a few names:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pro-nuclear_environmentalists
Do you think they're alone and unsupported? Nope.
But you know where nuclear power dies?
In the boardrooms. They know what widespread nuclear power would do. Kill their lucrative fossil fuels industry.
If the US government took global warming seriously, they'd allow new reactor designs instead of forcing companies to go build in China because they have given up on ever getting anything approved in the USA.
The US Government is beholden to those same boardrooms, they don't even need to worry about approving a design since nobody will submit one.
If the world took global warming seriously, we'd have massive programs to develop nuclear fusion reactors. It would be like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program. I have to grit my teeth when the UN announces ten billion dollars in financial aid to sinking island nations, but nobody can cough up 1/50th of that for a new research reactor.
And that's just stupid. We don't need nuclear fusion, it'd be nice if by some chance a miracle in development occurred, but you might as well spend your money on making a MAUS for all the good it'll do you. A smarter plan would simply be implementing a coal-phase out plan worldwide.
Oh wait, that'll just be gas turbines because those are cheap and yet costly for consumers.
Russia is not a reliable supplier. Shipping gas across the Atlantic is costly or at least undeveloped. Fracking has not taken root in Europe So, where is all that natural gas priced to be cost effect for power generation going to come from?
"he'll be calling for attacks on London"
Nah, not enough oil there.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They demanded plenty, and were a minority partner. You don't get to dictate every piece of policy in that position. At the time the consensus was that they got more than expected. They were hugely naive and let the Tories manipulate the next 5 years away from them, but at the time, they got more than most people thought they would.
If the negotiations had failed then absolutely we would have had a majority Tory government in a second general election within a few months, Labour were hugely unpopular.
In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.
If we ever get fusion to work effectively it might end up killing everything off. But in the moderate term, solar isn't going to be the only one. A combination of nuclear fission, solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric is much more viable and solves many of the problems. Fusion is a very long way off and it is likely that we'll stop having susbstantial fossil fuel use well before fusion is a common power source.
Wishful thinking. Natural gas has a couple of big advantages over nuclear (both fusion and fission):
1. They can scale down and provide peaking capacity, quickly brought online when renewable energy is down.
2. It really isn't a bit cleaner than coal, it is a LOT cleaner than coal.
3. People don't turn into full retards when discussing the safety of natural gas.
But, hey, that's just economics.
Cameron is a pig.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm left wondering why the fuck they want gas.
Presumably because gas power stations are far cleaner than coal, provide output that can be relied on (unlike wind or solar) and can be built quickly (unlike nuclear).
I agree, for many people voting is pointless. I'm not sure what your point is though, in relation to this debate.
As for deregulating the banks, yeah that was a mistake. But it was the legacy of Thatcherism and they pretty much had to do it to get elected and stay in power. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, I'm just pointing out that it's more the fault of the British electorate who mandated the irresponsibility that lead to the crash, and that the other lot would have done the same or worse.
Nuts as the Blairites were, they were not nasty like the Tories are. They didn't spout all the "us and them", poor hating rhetoric. While as you point out the Blairites were at times highly incompetent, motives matter. I think they were genuinely trying to improve the NHS with PPP deals, where as the Tories are motivated primarily by a desire to help their friends and maintain the hatred of the poor and immigrants that gets them in to power.
Again, I'm not excusing anyone, and there is a lot of immoral and unforgivable stuff that Labour did (the Iraq war, torture etc.) but even so, the Tories are still worse by any objective standard.
I'm sure that under a lab/dem coalition the cuts would have been a little less severe and done in a more responsible way (e.g. councils in affluent areas lost a lot less than those in deprived areas), compared to the con/dem one, for example. Either way the economy was probably screwed, but people would have suffered a lot less.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The going rate in the UK for unpredictable and variable onshore wind generation, guaranteed by law, is about £95 per MWhr or a little over the asking price for new baseload nuclear. Offshore wind in the UK is guaranteed about £145 per MWhr. The folks planning to build new nuclear plants in the UK simply want price parity with the other non-carbon generators. At least one large offshore wind project was recently cancelled because £145 per MWhr wasn't thought to be enough return for the construction and operating costs and predicted profit over the project's lifespan.
The headline strike price of £92.50 per MWHr for the new nuclear plants is a maximum; it may well be reduced in the future depending on operating costs etc. and the deal runs out in 35 years time. At that point the plants will have been paid for and fresh price negotiations will ensue since those plants will still have an operating life of more than 30 years ahead of them. The initial high strike price is to ensure that if the reactors are built and deliver the non-carbon electricity they are supposed to the reactor builders won't lose out financially in the medium term.
As for taxpayers they are not involved. The funding and construction will be carried out independently of the British government and no tax monies will be used. In return the builders want a price guarantee to build generating capacity which will supply baseload electricity for most of the next hundred years or so.
No, I don't mean to. But you're referring t ovotes cast, which is only about 50% of the country. It'd fashionable to discount the un-cast votes, but to do so ignores that a large number are due to disaffection the part of the voters.
I live in a Labour stronghold. It will never be anything else. What's the point in voting? I do vote, but what's the point? For a large proportion of the country there is literally no point in voting. And then there's the people who are tired of the same old crap again and again. Spoild ballot papers rarely make a mention, so going to the booth ans spoiling the paper is yet again a waste of time.
You should go for MMPR and MCV.
Then you'd solve one problem, and address the other.
There are some other reforms that could be implemented, but that's another story.
They stole the name "Living Wage" from the ... Living Wage Foundation, a charity. Then redefined it as somewhat less than what is agreed to be a living wage. Just another bit of doublespeak.
"Harry Bradbury .. has been given licences by the government to drill for and extract gas from massive coal reserves under the sea and off the North East coast."
"Under the North Sea there are vast deposits. We're talking about two billion tonnes of coal off the coast here. Now, to give you some measure of that, two billion tonnes has more energy in it than we've ever extracted from the totality of North Sea gas since we began." link
More likely because their anti-nuke hysterics are as bad as our anti-nuke hysterics.
Just remember, the one thing that can turn an AGW fanatic into a proponent of coal is the thought that the easiest zero-CO2 replacement for a coal plant is a nuclear power plant....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
It sounds like both sides of the Atlantic have bought into what's good for business is good for the people. What's the saying -- those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it -- or something like that? We've been down this path before and will suffer the same consequences before things normalize. But hey, at least on your side of the pond, the trains run on time!
Well, as you might have guessed, I'm from the other side of the pond and while I know that the UK uses pounds, tax pounds sounds awkward to me, so I just used generic language.
With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile. If you mention the doing something for the common good - you are a socialist. If you mention helping the poor, again, you are a socialist. If you mention helping millionaires and big business, you are a true red blooded American.
> Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes, they really are all that harmful to the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In comparison, gas is squeaky clean. Less CO2, virtually no fly ash, etc.
> I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
Nope. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is still a long ways off from being practical, if it can ever become practical. They can capture fly ash but where does it go? They usually just dump it all in a big pile beside the power plant. You can find tailings piles near most coal power plants. Water seeps into the piles and causes seepage of all sorts of nasty stuff like mercury and lead and radioactive ash into water supplies. About 95% of the mercury in the tuna you eat has come from burning coal. The FDA advises against pregnant women eating tuna for this reason.
I could go on.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
CO2 sequestration is a "look over there!" solution. The energy costs in capturing, compressing, and transporting CO2 are huge, and where do you put the CO2 anyway? Few rock formations are suitable for permanent storage of CO2, and those that are suitable are rarely located near coal plants. As far as I know there's only one carbon capture operation running, and that one is only commercially viable because it's conveniently located near a bunch of oil wells that need the CO2 to push oil up out of the ground.
I honestly think fusion has a better chance of becoming viable in fifty years.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
As for taxpayers they are not involved.
Who the fuck do you think will be paying for the electricity from this power station?
Indeed, the £92.50/MWh is certainly fairly generous, but in reality, even new-build CCGT is expected to have a levelised cost of energy in the UK in the region of £70-80/MWh depending on assumptions about load factor and price of gas/carbon taxation.
That said, the contract for difference method of subsidy has the advantage that there is no up-front cost for the taxpayer; the taxpayer only pays based upon performance. The CfD expiry date is scheduled 35 years from the date of expected start of commercial operation. In the event of construction delays, such as the clusterfucks in Finland and France, then the expiry date should remain fixed.
The advantage over this method over things such as direct cash subsidies or loan guarantees, is that the taxpayer is protected from all construction and engineering risk.
In addition, the government is trying to change the CfD arrangement for new low-carbon build. Up to now, the agreement has been a fixed price tariff - £155/MWh for offshore wind, and £100/MWh for onshore wind. From this year, the CfDs are awarded on a competitive basis, so construction firms bid at auction for the CfD, and the lowest strike price gets the CfD.
I fully expect that for any additional nuclear build, there may be an element of competition in the application process, particularly as there are several consortia who have expressed a strong interest.
Who the fuck do you think will be paying for the electricity from this power station?
Industries, folks on low income who don't pay taxes, Irish people (via one of the interconnectors that feeds British electricity to Ireland) and regular consumers here in the UK. The construction and operating costs don't come out of taxes so "taxpayers" don't have any financial skin in the game.
"he'll be calling for attacks on London"
Nah, not enough oil there.
Cymbal crash!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Coal baseload power in Australia is about $25MWhr or about £12.
A major problem with shutting down coal plants in Australia is that the coal plant operators are the ones paying to protect the coal from fires. If they stop paying, it will catch fire and burn. There is a coal fire north of Sydney that has been burring for about 6,000 years. Not using the coal doesn't mean it isn't going to burn and it is much cleaner to burn it in a coal plant than in a coal seam fire.
The worrying thing is that, as you say, there are several competing consortia which is good for competition but it will probably mean the UK will end up with a range of different reactor designs rather than one or two standard models. This will cause problems for fuel manufacture, operations, staff training, ancillary equipment procurement and so on.
The existing French reactor fleet is mostly a standardised M910 design with some tweaks here and there -- they're in the process of replacing a lot of steam generators in a fleet-wide mid-life maintenance operation and they've been able to pre-order more than forty identical steam generators to be manufactured in a rolling contract, meaning big savings and some flexibility in the replacement tempo.
In contrast the UK is planning to build a couple of EPRs, some first-of-their-kind ESBWRs, a couple of AP-1400s and maybe even some Hualong-1s, the Chinese home-sourced reactors (based on the ACPR-1000 design which has its roots in the French M910 design). That means mid-life kickers in thirty or forty years will be a dog's breakfast of replacement hardware, different for each class of reactor.
We should be completly replacing fossil fuels of all kinds in electricity generation. Replacing power plants that run on coal with power plants that run on coal gas is like re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, it doesn't do a thing to stop climate change.
We should be replacing the fossil fuel with modern safe generation IV nuclear reactor designs (that includes breeder reactors and spent-fuel reprocessing to reduce the amount of waste that we have to store at the end of it all), solar thermal plants, geothermal plants, biofuel plants and tidal/wave plants. All of these technologies are more than just blueprints or thought bubbles in some lab somewhere, all of them can generate baseload power 24/7/365 and all of them are better for the planet than anything running on fossil fuels.
Anybody think that coal is clean AND cheap is kidding themselves. The only way to have cheap coal is turn off all scrubbers the way that china does. Then you simply shifted costs from the electrical plant to health services, as well as real estate, business costs, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The UK is giving aways its nations power payments to China.
The design, build costs, running costs, decontamination, decommissioning cost all get covered by the UK with profit making for all the owners and services provided over the life of a nuclear project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Coal is worse than gas no matter how you look at it."
Except for fracked gas which has a habit of leaking, and with methane being a far more potent greenhouse gas, natural gas can actually be worse.
Satellite image shows massive gas leaks on this page:
Life around New Mexico's gas wells: how fracking is turning the air foul | Environment | The Guardian
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Except it isn't. While well managed nuclear at scale with current technology holds a lot of promise it requires a large amount of capital and quite a bit of infrastructure. The will to do that does not currently exist so whether we like it or not we'll have to wait for 1950s style prosperity before it is going to be given serious consideration - as China did recently.
To boil things right down, a windmill or two requires little effort or action on the part of people in politics while nukes would require actual work.
Are you getting the picture now? The question - "where is my network of power stations with GenIV reactors" can be filed with "where is my flying car" for now.
Pretence that it is easy is going to be met with various levels of disbelief by anyone with a clue.
Finally someone stated the obvious.
Monocultures in power generation are a very bad idea.
I've run into that even with a power station sited next to a large coal mine - those things still need a lot of available water for cooling and a drought resulted in having to get a water pipeline built quickly before the dam ran dry. With no hydro, wind or anything else to fall back on the state would have been down a couple of GW in the middle of summer with no adequate connection at the time to the national grid (or even another part of the state grid).
Chemistry gets in the way. There's a lot more CO and CO2 from burning coal and stopping that getting into the air has not been cheap so far so the "retrofitting" has not yet turned out to be cheaper than new gas turbines.
There's a few around the world, one in my state is at a tiny 30MW unit from the 1960s.
A massive effort to plant hedges to break up airflow on large plains and deter tornadoes would tie up far more CO2 than sequestration ever would, as would other things that are probably less silly.
Bit of a downside to changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and telling the Scots to go fuck themselves isn't it? The legacy of Thatcher still has not been repaired.
Wait, what? I thought there was no fracking in the UK? And Gitmo is a US thing. I don't think the UK sends people there, as a general rule?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Have you ever seen wolves eat? They'll eat - only to vomit the food up later. They eat it because they don't want someone else to get it. I believe this is where the "wolf down" turn of phase comes from.
The person you replied to? They're like that wolf. The idea that the resource is going to sit in the ground, perhaps used by a needy later generation or simply keeping carbon sequestered, is abominable. They want to consume it, they want it for themselves - even if it means they'll simply vomit it up later.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Chemistry gets in the way. There's a lot more CO and CO2 from burning coal and stopping that getting into the air has not been cheap so far so the "retrofitting" has not yet turned out to be cheaper than new gas turbines.
When you figure in the costs of the environmental studies involved, the scrubbers are cheaper than new plants, at least in the US. Don't know about the UK regulations.
Scrubbers remove NOx and SOx but not CO2 and they are relatively cheap although you need a lot of space for water storage to go with them. The currently experimental measures to remove CO2 are a different story and look like they will be very expensive.
With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile
I hear what you're saying, mate, and it looks like we agree on many things. It's a strange, strange world we've made for ourselves and our children.
Actually the £92.50 is guaranteed for the entire lifetime of the plant, and will never go below that (but could potentially go up). That was a requirement to get the deal in place for the Chinese to build the plant and the French to operate it.
The costs for wind are expected to fall. While individual installations will get that price for their lifetime, the point is to develop the technology so that future farms will be more competitive. In fact, new on-shore wind is already cheaper than nuclear.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nuts as the Blairites were, they were not nasty like the Tories are.
I agree: the tories do have a very nasty streak. Of course it was the blairites who went to war in the face of the largest ever public protest based on fabricated evidence. Oh that and putting a tax on charities.
They didn't spout all the "us and them", poor hating rhetoric. While as you point out the Blairites were at times highly incompetent, motives matter. I think they were genuinely trying to improve the NHS with PPP deals, where as the Tories are motivated primarily by a desire to help their friends and maintain the hatred of the poor and immigrants that gets them in to power.
I disagree though. Ultimately motives do matter. For those on the receiving end of a fucked up NHS, the reasons behind why it was fucked don't ultimately matter. And on another note, there seemed to be plenty of cases where Labour cronies benefited a lot from PPP.
Again, I'm not excusing anyone, and there is a lot of immoral and unforgivable stuff that Labour did (the Iraq war, torture etc.) but even so, the Tories are still worse by any objective standard.
Things aren't steady state, however. The new Labour bunch were OK at the beginning. By the end they were awful as usually happens when one bunch have been in power too long. To extend their time in power further would have made things worse. It had got pretty bad by the end.
I'm still convinced that the conlab government was better then the end of new labour Brown government it replaced and much better than the current conservative bunch.
I'm sure that under a lab/dem coalition the cuts would have been a little less severe and done in a more responsible way (e.g. councils in affluent areas lost a lot less than those in deprived areas), compared to the con/dem one, for example. Either way the economy was probably screwed, but people would have suffered a lot less.
Possibly, though I'm not convinced. Certainly some things would have been better the other way round.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I should add that not all ash ends up in the ash dam just the fly ash so that's why the numbers may look weird at first glance. Bottom ash, which is taken out of the bottom of the boiler, typically ends up in concrete and cinder blocks among other things.