Nuclear power , not that cheap or safe it appears

The 2011 UNSCEAR report

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) produced a report drastically different to many appreciations of the effects previously produced. The report concludes that 134 staff and emergency workers suffered acute radiation syndrome and of those 28 died of the condition. Many of the survivors suffered skin conditions and radiation induced cataracts, and 19 have since died, but not usually of conditions associated with radiation exposure. Of the several hundred thousand liquidators, apart from indications of increased leukaemia risk, there is no other evidence of health effects. In the general public, the only effect with ‘persuasive evidence’ is a substantial fraction of the 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer in adolescents observed in the affected areas. By 2005, 15 cases had proved fatal.

The total deaths reliably attributable to the radiation produced by the accident therefore stands at 62 by the estimate of UNSCEAR.

The report concludes that ‘the vast majority of the population need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident’.

Full report: http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/11-80076_Report_2008_Annex_D.pdf

As I understand it, previous reports had been very-much based on predicted effects, whereas when people actually went looking for evidence, they found a lot less than expected.

Dounreay IS unrepresentative by the way. It is/was an experimental reactor from the start and has been a complete f***-up in terms of waste management throughout its existance.

Friend of mine who works in the industry was asked to quote for the clean up and he reckons his company just came up with the stupidest number they could think of as there was no way they wanted to get involved with it.

We need to invest in more modern technologies, it’s not difficult to create!

Unlike wind farms which are sooooo good value that they are not viable or reliable even with huge subsidy.

I don’t know what the cost of wind farms is.

How is that relevant to the fact that nuclear energy is so expensive that nowhere in the world has it ever been practical without government support ?

We need to invest in more modern technologies, it’s not difficult to create!

Evidently it is, otherwise we’d all be doing it.

ernie – wind farms are subsidised, so worth mentioning when talking about subsidising other energy generation.

TooTall – Member
Seems like the obvious comparison to make?
Not really – wind power only generates when there is wind and even then only in a certain wind speed range. Nuclear provides the base load that you need to have regardless.

So you saying that you can’t estimate the power generated/cost to built/cost to disassemble/jobs generated by a number of wind farms over say 40 years? and then compare to the numbers for dounreay? I don’t really understand why a windfarms downtime should affect that analysis?

ernie – wind farms are subsidised, so worth mentioning when talking about subsidising other energy generation.

But we weren’t talking about that when I made the point that I had never heard of nuclear energy being described as cheap.

Nuclear weapons factories have a beneficial side effect – producing electricity

So you saying that you can’t estimate the power generated/cost to built/cost to disassemble/jobs generated by a number of wind farms over say 40 years?

Not realistically – no. It isn’t like for like. Without suitable energy storage, renewables can never replace the likes of nuclear as they don’t produce constant electricity so you can only have it when it is available. We can’t do without the steady base load that wind adds to at this time.

I really like the fact that the people who are most opposed to nuclear, and so for renewables, are also the people who so often tell us that Britain needs more manufacturing… how we don’t make stuff anymore

Ever wonder why there were all those gert big power stations & coal yards dotted round Yorkshire?

Ever wonder why there were all those gert big power stations & coal yards dotted round Yorkshire?

Cos it’s ugly and no-one wants to go there? 😛

renewables can provide base load – tidal will which is why it is being installed of the scottish coast now. Mind you I don’t know how any of the machines got installed this summer nor how many will be left by next summer

“The cost of decommissioning offshore platforms is massive, however, those offshore windfarms are the biggest legacy anyone is going to be left with.
(I’ll get my coat.)”

While I’d agree the cost of building and running offshore windfarms is very high, I’m not sure the decommissioning costs are going to be comparable to nuclear.

My position on nuclear remains the same… An obviously bad option, but currently the best of a list of bad options, and so it’s a suitable stopgap til we can improve some of these bad options. Renewables seem to have lots of potential but we’re not there yet and rushing into things isn’t generally a very smart approach.

renewables can provide base load

Nuclear power can be safer.

If you are going to knock supposition in nuclear, best you stick to what works now in renewables. Are you sure tidal can provide base load? It seems you would have a fluctuation throughout the year with spring tides etc. Not very base. Slack water goes against a steady flow as well.

tootall – you need to look into the scottish tidal setup – two locations far enough apart that the tides are at different times, its done on flow not height so spring tides make little difference. So yes – it should provides a steady baseload 24/7/365

The main issues is the robustness of the hardware and getting the energy to the consumer.

the other way to get baseload is use pump storage (planned undersea connector to Norway to use pump storage there as little more can be built in the UK and hydrogen generation / storage as in the unst project might have a role on a larger scale but is only proven on a small scale

Doesn’t it only cost so much money to decommission because rabid anti nuke nutters like TJ make decommissioning so difficult?

Yes, damn all those “do gooders” for putting all those rules and regulations in place. I mean, we should just dump all that radioactive material anywhere we like. Isn’t that what the Irish sea is for?

Nuclear power is here for the foreseeable future, we should be focusing on what will replace it after that. Renewables aren’t quite there yet and simply telling us to use less energy isn’t being particularly realistic.

How is that relevant to the fact that nuclear energy is so expensive that nowhere in the world has it ever been practical without government support ?

Is this argument really a valid one? While the burning of fossil fuels for the production of energy is so relatively cheap it’s never going to make financial sense to pursue any form of alternative.

Be an interesting debate to consider what we would do if we had to stop using fossil fuels right now.

it should provides a steady baseload 24/7/365

Should – when and how much? Not enough soon enough.

Planned undersea connection to Norway and use pumped storage there? You voted for an independent Scotland and you believe it could happen as well don’t you? 😀

I love futuristic possibilities, but you really need to pin your hopes on more affordable closer-to-realities.

Tidal, its the future.

Is this argument really a valid one?

Well it certainty was when the OP suggested he had just discovered that nuclear energy isn’t cheap. Very valid indeed I would have thought.

Tootall – the tidal is being installed now with proven tech. It will provide base load quicker than new nukes which will take more than ten years to do so. In ten years there should be enough tidal for Scotlands base load. Its a multiphase plan for many many years. stage 1 is get the north south interconnect up and install the offshore tidal wave and wind – this is all underway.

Interconnnects to Norway and further afield are further away in time but are well into planning – thats real joint government planning – its a useful idea for them as well.

You voted for an independent Scotland and you believe it could happen as well don’t you?

Did I? I was too young for the referendum in the 70s and must have missed a recent vote on Scottish independence.

I love futuristic possibilities, but you really need to pin your hopes on more affordable closer-to-realities.

this stuff will produce electricity in significant quantities befoer any new nukes do
tootall – really you might be interested in looking into the current scottish developments and plans for renewables – its hopeful and promising and the hardware is appearing in reality. Its not pie in teh sky – its a real and achievable aim.

As I say – the major problem as I see it is: will the hardare survive the winter storms?

I was too young for the referendum in the 70s and must have missed a recent vote on Scottish independence.

Considering how much stick you get on here, it’s surprising how little some people read of what you post. Specially on a subject such as Scottish independence.

i ll have wager if anyone will take it that No new nuclear power station will be operational in the uk before petrol hits 3 quid a litre

Hiroshima, nagasaki incidents were nuclear bombs not power plants

chernobyl explosion that blew the lid off the core was thermal not nuclear.

It’s a mistake to conflate weapons with power generation in this discussion.

It’s also a mistake to compare modern commercial reactor designs to old soviet designs. You would not confuse the safety of a 2011 honda with a ford pinto

To beclear I advocate mix energy sources including renewables andrenewal of existing uranium reactors and fast breeder research to resume to usefully use that dangerous stock pile of weapons grade plutonium up. And then we need to be looking into liquid thorium salts in parallel with fusion

i ll have wager if anyone will take it that No new nuclear power station will be operational in the uk before petrol hits 3 quid a litre

Is that because you predict that petrol will more than double in the next 14 years ?

Well it’s more than doubled in the last 14 years, so you could be right.

How much will a pint of Guinness be ?

Tidal is the way ahead, but TJ in ten years, bolloks! 50 years maybe, a mate of mine was involved in the project that put the turbine in the Pentland firth, he said it was way over engineered and the designers/engineers said it would withstand blah blah, 5 weeks after they put it in he was back up there taking it out because it was f#####d.

TooTall – Member
So you saying that you can’t estimate the power generated/cost to built/cost to disassemble/jobs generated by a number of wind farms over say 40 years?
Not realistically – no. It isn’t like for like. Without suitable energy storage, renewables can never replace the likes of nuclear as they don’t produce constant electricity so you can only have it when it is available. We can’t do without the steady base load that wind adds to at this time.

Fair enough, my real point was that there should be comparisons made against them both. As the choice for alot of people is one or the other, so tot up a list of positives and negatives and see which one comes out the better(things like storage issues/how they will solve that will go in the positive/negative columns etc)… Like I said earlier though, I’m for both(which is how we will go anyhow) so the arguement for me is fairly redundant.

Someone wanted comparative costs??

£4.5Bn gets you 300 offshore turbines generating 1,500MW.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/new_scots_coast_wind_farm_to_be_biggest_in_the_world_1_1977990

scotsman – Member
Tidal is the way ahead, but TJ in ten years, bolloks! 50 years maybe, a mate of mine was involved in the project that put the turbine in the Pentland firth, he said it was way over engineered and the designers/engineers said it would withstand blah blah, 5 weeks after they put it in he was back up there taking it out because it was f#####d.

Is that the one put in in August this year? I wasn’t aware it had developed any major faults.

Cheers Druidh,

So is nuclear cheaper? I don’t see any power output number here mind, and obviously there are a million other factors to consider..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7180539.stm

The Olkiluoto project is Western Europe’s first new reactor in a decade and is expected to cost about £2.25bn ($4.5bn), but there have been serious delays there.

From that bbc link…

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has said the cost will be £72bn over 20 years – up from an estimate two years ago of £56bn.

Not only do I find £72bn to be quite a frightening number, but that fact that it could have gone up by £16bn in only two years!!! Makes me wonder just how accurate any of these figures are

Critics, such as Greenpeace, say that the bill for building new waste dumps will be a further £21bn and then £30bn to build the new nuclear power stations.

Let’s accept the fact that the Greenpeace figures are likely to err on the high side, but splitting those costs over 6 power stations gives us £2bn to build, £12bn to decommission and maybe £3bn for waste dumps – that’s £17bn per 1,7000MW power station – not including the actual cost of the uranium. Do you think that’s going to be getting cheaper or more expensive??

This might give you a clue…

What we don’t have are the decommissioning costs for 300 offshore turbines and the actual amount of electricity they’ll produce averaged over windy and non-windy times.

To be fair it’ll take a better man than me to figure it all out! I still think we should use both until renewables can eventually take over. Imo we’ll need a new generation of nuclear plants in the meantime. As it’s all well and good the scottish government planning all our energy from renewables within 10 years but that becomes a different prospect when you think uk wide.

especially as there are unknowns all round – no solution to waste from the nukes and no real idea of what decommissioning will cost.

Unclear the longevity of the turbines both tidal and wind in the scottish seas as well as the rest of the hardware

Aye – I don’t think the same possibilities exist across the rest of the UK (yet).

seosamh77

UK wide more could be done – there are possible tidal generator places in England. Nukes are only a small part of the generation in the UK and it will take tenplus years to build any new ones

TJ, That’s a big if though, I’d be more than willing to be convinced otherwise mind.

I think there are timescales that need to be kept to, to ensure a constant supply? In that building will need to start sooner rather than later because it takes so long?(unsure on that)

So for renewables on a UK level they are really running against the clock? Plus it really is a case of proven technology against unproven technology at the moment. So still both for me. I’m not one for betting on the energy needs of the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m more on the renewables side, in that I’d like to see them as the main and the only source, I just don’t think they are there yet and we’ll need to bite the bullet on nuclear this time round.

the timeline is around ten years IIRC. The renewables are hardly less proven than Nukes, remeber people keep talking about fast breeders and thorium cycles – non of whichcis working commercially yet. AGRS are known yes.

In ten years we could install a lot of wave and tidal. similar scale to the nukes

By going for nukes you are gambling – the time effort and money devoted to them mean not enough investment in alternates. Spend the money for one nuke on energy efficiency and you save more power than the nuke generates.

Nuclear fuel will run out soon but the main issues remains what to do with the waste and the huge open ended costs involved

Working within the infrastructure/civils industry I don’t really regard 2.6 billion as a huge number for the amount of work involved. Whether or not it represents value for money in the bigger scheme of things depends on how much it would cost the economy to put up with the vagueries of a power system that may/may not generate enough to keep all the lights on.

I’d imagine the most cost effective way of ensuring enough energy is provided is to drive down power consumption in the homes/offices/factories and employ more smart technology at the final user end.

Oh well at least there’s some facts/numbers getting posted….and the OP has left coincidentally left the thread.

Three of us in this household, leccy:

Consumption Production

September 160kWh 352kWh
October 160kWh 301kWh
>Nov 22 126kWh 118kWh

Gas: zero

Wood: about one tenth of a metre cube so far this heating season, I cook the evening meal on the stove which cuts our electricity consumption during peak demand.

And you Project? We are all part of the problem and can also be part of the solution.