According to the DTI we consumed 405 tera watt hours of electricity last year.

http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/statistics/source/electricity/page18527.html

According to this report, the best European renewables is Germany

"Germany as of October 2003 had 13,512 MW of wind power installed (40% of the global total). It also had approximately 350MW of photovoltaics installed (second only to Japan)."

About 14GW, assuming it's 50% availability (night time no solar, still winds no wind power), thats 61 tera watt hours per year. So we'll be pushed to even meet the 15% and 20% renewables targets even if we can match Germany and there's no growth in demand.

I don't see it, as the oil runs out we'll need to make hydrogen, so I'd expect a big jump in demand pretty soon (like 2020). So I don't see how we could achieve what they are suggesting.

Nuclear sucks, but not as much as being cold and hungry sitting in the dark does.

Before we go nuts building these monstrosities all over the place, how about we get some mileage out of the ones we have? There are two sites in my area, and there are never more than a third of the turbines working when I drive past.

Can these guys really be serious?

"still, freezing, winters' nights" - you're forgetting "and between tides". That equates to absolutely *zero* natural energy sources at certain times!

Natural sources are only suitable if we can build enough pumped hydro-storage stations like Dinorwig to cover base load and take the energy when it's available. But Dinorwig is 1,320MW (just read the web page :-) so we'd need a heck of a lot of them.

On the other hand note that there's only been 2 nuclear accidents *ever* so nuclear is pretty safe. Also, create a UK export industry in power-plant grade Uranium so them-thar bad guys don't need to build their own fast-breeders.

Wins all round...

"Elliott goes further, saying that significant amounts of renewables and nuclear cannot coexist on the same power grid, owing to "operational conflicts"."

So electricity from nuclear sources is incompatible with electricity from renewable sources... Strange that, I thought there was only one kind of electron.

Also we have to note that Germany has slightly more land to build "renewable" energy sources. I think they should be called renewable cash sources for the guys getting the maintenance contracts on these things.

The only solution to cut carbon is to kill say... 75% of the Global population. It'll save all the shortage problems we have, reduce the need for energy and leave us clear for the future.

The other solution is to keep on going as we are and reach a point where we have new clean sources of power.

Fine, nuclear may be a solution for electricity, but anyone that thinks we'll have a functional hydrogen-based economy in time for the run out of oil is living in fantasy land. Be ready for pain people, and a lot of it.

"According to the DTI we consumed 405 tera watt hours of electricity last year."

And electricity accounts for just a quarter of the nation's energy consumption.

The true demand for carbon-neutral energy is about 4 times what these guys are talking about. Their report suggests that we could replace about half of our current electricity generating capacity with renewables. That's great guys! Just the remaining 85% to go then.

Fortunately, a hundred-fold increase in nuclear capacity accompanied by a ten-fold increase in electricity distribution capacity is probably just about achievable by 2050 if we start now. Unlike (say) solar, we don't have to wait for a technological breakthrough to make it possible.

Alternatively, we could just fuck the planet. I wonder which the politicians will jump for.

They haven't even mentioned pebble reactors.

Mmm, shiny thing..

Its been estimated that there's only about 40 years supply of high quality uranium ore at present comsumption. So, if the UK and other countries commit to nuclear as a replacement for coal base load the available uranium won't even last out the lives of those new reactors.

Low grade ore isn't the answer: the energy that goes into extracting and refining it exceeds the energy it contains.

So, a nuclear future will be a fast breeder reactor powered future regardless whether you like that idea or not. Welcome to the real world

Nice try, but only two of those on your list resulted in radioactive material being released to the environment as a result of power generation - and nobody's proposing building Soviet-style or 50s technology nuclear plants. What's beyond doubt is that orders of magnitude more radioactive material has been released from coal-fired plants than from nuclear, as a result of trace amounts of radioisotopes that are contained in coal.

Just to add to the debate.

There is a demonstrated technology called a Molten Salt Reactor that can safely produce the high temperatures needed to make hydrogen and can breed its own fuel from abundant Thorium. It produces far less long term radioactive waste and can actually "burn" much of the actinide waste it produces. Fuel can be reprocessed on site using a proven, non-solvent based technology called pyroprocessing.

A small scale version, complete with prototype pyroprocessing technology, was built and operated for years in the US in the 60s and 70s. Unfortunately, the technology lost out to the better politically positioned Fast Breeder Reactor. One reason might have been that the Fast Breeder produces Plutonium that could be used to make bombs, which still looked like a good idea to the military at that time. The MSR breeds U233, an excellent "fuel" that emits hard gamma radiation. It's very difficult to hide and tends to kill anyone not using good safety practices. The U233 would never need to leave the reactor site, since it is consumed as the fissile "fuel" that powers the reactor.

Search on MSR and thorium for more info.

Craig

PV Solar power is a fantacy. Nuclear power is a dangerous fallacy.

Sea or land located, Equator based, solar kettles for steam raising and H2 generation for carbon fuel displacement could be viable in the near term with a bit of R and D investment by governments and incentivised industry.

Wave and tidal power can readily solve base load electricity generation needs if sufficient investment is made both in them and in storage of excess energy in rotating inertia, compressed gas and H2 storage. I'd rather the birds and fishes get used to a change in the tidal patterns round our coast than grow 2 heads from nuclear contamination.

If we need pollution free energy then there is a big hot orb up there that served the planet very well before humanity came along. If it doesn't put enough energy into the planet for us to survive then we are not going to do so cheaply and easily with carbon or nuclear in the long run.

"Sea or land located, Equator based, solar kettles for steam raising and H2 generation for carbon fuel displacement could be viable in the near term with a bit of R and D investment by governments and incentivised industry."

Again I have my doubts, 1kw/m2 for solar max, so 46 GW is 46 million square meters of solar capture no? Thats 100% efficiency, at the equator, just for the UK with full sunlight 24 hours. It sounds a bit much, 46 million 1x1m mirrors just for the UK alone?

I don't know what the European numbers are, but lets say 500 million 1x1m sized mirrors for Europe doesn't sound feasible to me. Even if we could make and install 1000 mirrors a day is still 1300 years to build it.

On the other hand France generates 430 terra watt hours of electricity NOW by nuclear power, more than we consume in total, and if they can do it, I don't see the problem with us doing it.

I think the alternate energy people are really not facing reality here.

The other thing about thorium reactors is you can shut them down before Xmas, and take them to bits in the New Year. And if you're scared of "tourists" you can build them entirely in a hole in a ground - try doing that to a windmill.

Hydro power -- both conventional river dams and tidal based -- have dramatic ecological impacts that render them unacceptable.

Coal, Oil, and other fossil fuels have the current screamers over global warming, and even if that's nowhere near as siginificant as portrayed they still have serious pollution issues with much more specific science behind them like acid rain and mercury emmissions. More over they can represent a tremendous balance of trade issue -- some 20% of the U.S. trade deficit currently goes to energy imports from outside of North America. I'd assume Britain, like the U.S., would benefit from keeping a like sum of money ashore with local investments and good paying jobs instead of building a palace for a middle eastern sheik.

Wind will not be tolerated at the scale that would be necessary. To completely displace other forms of electric generation for my state (Connecticut -- pop. 3 Million in 5,000 sq. miles), displace fossil fuels for heating, and displace fossil fuels for trips under 40 miles / day would take something like 10 to 20 thousand 100 Meter high turbines. In a state that has caniptions over cell phone towers, and is paying hundreds of millions of dollars extra to install a new 40 mile long electric transmission line underground because the people near it didn't want the visual pollution of it on the skyline. Plus the ecological impacts of all those spinning blades, and if you put them out to see of burying electric transmission cables on the sea floor.

Solar thermal for electric generation is not practical in northern climes. Solar photovoltaic has grave concerns about it's abiltity to scale up to truly revolutionary size -- even if they can get the costs low enough to compete with wind, they probably can't physically make enough PV cells to make it practical.

Nuclear is the proven technology with the smallest environmental footprint. It should be pursued immediately -- for environmental, economic, and geo-political reasons.

However, deep-well Geothermal probably offers the best long term solution. We currently drill average oil wells 10-15,000 feet and go up to 20,000'. 20,000 feet will start to produce, in average places, superheated steam which can be used in a closed-loop system to drive electric turbines 24x7x365 without regard to weather. Hmmm, can you say synergies between oil well drilers and geothermal? It has a fairly small foot print as many wells can be drilled from one site (going laterally as well as down), and will be more tolerable then nuclear in urban areas -- providing electricity and steam for heating in immediate vicinity of the concentrated loads of urban cores.

In my own nation, I'd like to see Nuclear with an eventual transition to Geothermal as the main source of energy. Transportation for freight shifted to an electrified, high-speed rail network. And cars that are battery hybrids, charging off the grid for 40 miles / day of range, and as the batteries get low kicking in a compressed natural gas powered generator (no need to mess around with that hydrogen stuff if you don't want to). Which also means after the big ice storm knocks out the electric grid, you plug your car into the house to keep running the electric heat :)

There are more industrial accidents than that in a year in all the coal plants, which spew enormous amounts of radiation into the air.

How about thorium reactors. I hear we have a few thousand years worth of supply for those.

Doing the calculation for wind power,

The small 1MW ones, forget it, we'd need hundreds of thousands of them, but I've read about much bigger ones (230m, about 1 and half blackpool towers) , that can generate 5Mw, and one of those near Hamburg that's generated 17GWhs a year, so we'd need 24000 of those.

That sounds much more plausible, but again can you imagine 24000 blackpool tower sized windmills? I guess the best place for them would be the sea, but I don't know how we'd make the 24000 concrete platforms needed to support them, or find that much copper to transmit the power.

Lets check the concrete, "In 2002, Britain exported almost 260,000 tonnes of ready mixed concrete"

http://www.concretecentre.com/main.asp?page=653

2300kg/m3 density.

So a cubic meter of concrete is 2.3 tonnes, so say 100,000m3 annual production is available to make these (all UK exports of concrete are diverted to it). A tower 3mx3mx 150m = 1530 m3 of concrete. So 24000 wind turbines would need 369 years worth of concrete. Ignoring the foundations of course, and any sea platform if there was one.

I don't see how tidal could substitute for base load, surely it is on a lunar cycle not continuous. Wave power is just wind power in a different form, so I don't see how that can work any better than the turbines.

All of these numbers seem like insane mega construction projects to me. I just don't see how any of this is realistic.

Except it's the nuclear power we import from France.

The DC link to the French has been running close to - if not at - capacity throughout the winter this year, and it's only going to get worse.

Without more generating capacity quickly, we really are going to have problems maintaining supplies in the UK without brownouts and rolling blackouts.

As to Dinorwig - that is a pumped-storage power station, not a generating plant.

It doesn't actually generate much (if any) electrical power itself - instead it buys in electricity during periods of low demand, and uses it to pump water up to the top of the mountain.

When the load required by the National Grid suddenly peaks, Dinorwig can spin up to max capacity in mere seconds. giving the coal-fired and nuclear baseload plants time to pick up speed, as they cannot respond quickly to changes in load.

Possible hydroelectric capacity in the UK is not great - there will be a new plant in Scotland quite soon, but it will be the only new *large* hydro plant that is possible in the UK.

The UK desperately needs more generating capacity - and the only ways we can do it are to build more coal-fired stations, or more nuclear stations.

Take your pick.

I have no idea where some of the commentators have gotten their numbers from; they don't seem to tally up to the journals or reports I've read.

A mix of solar, wind, tidal, geothermal with either/and chemical pump or inertia based over flow storage is the only real way for the long term. Nuclear is a stop gap and a very expensive one, the cost of building the plants is quite high and the release of CO2 is high enough to warrant rethinking.

It would be better if this government had any real sense of working with people and public works, or in fact coming up with any sort of workable polices that make long term sense instead of railroading the opposition with what ever they think is best.

Nuclear makes more sense than any other technology for the long term -- all of the other renewable sources are simply not efficient enough for generating the amount of power that society demands. And with a combination of Thorium & Fast Breeder reactors, we shouldn't have to worry about running out for hundreds (if not thousands) of years -- which should give us time to come up with something better (i.e. fusion).

Additionally, if managed properly, the danger from nuclear is miniscule. And as far as that goes, even nuclear waste is not THAT dangerous -- radiation is a fact of life and we are all exposed to it ALL the time from the sun, radon gas, etc. The amount of uranium dumped into the environment annually by one single coal fired plant due to trace materials exceeds that released by any any nuclear plant over it's entire life cycle!

As far as disposing of nuclear waste goes, it's just not that difficult. Pick one spot and put it there -- yes, that ONE spot will be dangerously contaminated and uninhabitable, but the rest of the world will not be. Our current fossil fuel consumption effectively contaminates the ENTIRE world rather than just one spot!

If Russia would think about it, they are sitting on a gold mine -- they just need to volunteer Chernobyl as the nuclear waste dump for the entire world. It's already effectively screwed over for the next 10,000 years -- so basically nothing we can do to it can really make it any worse!

"I have no idea where some of the commentators have gotten their numbers from; they don't seem to tally up to the journals or reports I've read."

Martin, look, I read this report, I wanted numbers to check, but it only had percentages and goes straight into scare mongering and politics. So I go see the numbers myself.

The 405 TerraWatt Hours comes from the DTI link quoted.

405TWh/365 days/24 hours = 46 GWatts average load.

Solar, radiation is approx 1Kw per m2 normal to the sun. (a little higher perhaps 1.3 according to Wikipedia, but then I ignored NIGHTIME I skewed the numbers to strongly favour solar)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

i.e. 46 million 1m2 mirrors minimum to make 46 GW.

Turbine size I got from a search, this page is typical of the results (they plan to install 5):

http://www.reuk.co.uk/Worlds-Largest-Wind-Turbine-Generator.htm

The concrete export figure I got from concretecentre the site I quoted.

The density of concrete I got from a search [density concrete kgs]

I can't even crunch the numbers for geothermal, we pump water into deep wells, and pump out oil now, it does not spurt out as energy rich steam, or hot oil, it takes a load of energy to pump it out! So I can only imagine that geothermal works where the crust is thin? Iceland perhaps?

Hydroelectric, maybe, we have lots of rain, so lets take a quick look.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam

Chinese mega dam project generates 22.5GW, impressive that would be half our current electricity demand. Catchment area is 1,000,000 km2. Damn, the whole of great Britain only covers 1/5th that area

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_British_Isles_by_area

There seems to be a huge gap between what the renewables can deliver and what we need. We should do the renewables, every one of them, but I'm pushed to see how we can even deliver 20% of current demand that way.

"a nuclear accident is a nuclear accident whether directly as the result of power generation or not."

I was responding to the 'scary' list posted by Greem, who seems to think the number of nuclear accidents was very large. I suppose it could be argued that a dropped spanner hitting someone on the head at a nuclear plant is a 'nuclear accident', but that isn't what the general public understands by it - their view is much closer to the Chernobyl model!

So we're down to four nuclear accidents where there was (at least) the possibiliity of significant environmental contamination. Of these:

Windscale was a first-generation experimental reactor, comparing it with modern generating plant (as installed, for example, in France) is like comparing the safety features of a Model-T with a Mondeo.

TMI arguably demonstrated that the containment design features intended to handle a 'worst conceivable accident' actually worked as advertised. If any ill effects were caused, they were sufficiently slight to make them difficult to distinguish from emotional stress.

Chernobyl was the combination of a flawed design (no longer built) and (drastically) flawed operating procedures.

Monju was an experimental (sodium-cooled) Japanese design and again the accident had minimal external environmental impact.

Sounds to me like a pretty good safety record Against the possibility of a nuclear accident must be balanced the global warming impact (if you buy into the full 'litany' this is many millions of deaths) of continuing to burn fossil fuels or the impact of our power network going dark (if we try to rely solely on renewables). I know which looks to me like the smaller risk.