U.K. Sees No Power 'Black Hole' If EDF Scraps Nuclear Plan

[bananas]

Source: Bloomberg

The U.K. won’t struggle to keep the lights on if Electricite de France SA decides not to proceed with its 18 billion-pound ($25 billion) plan to build a new nuclear-power plant at Hinkley Point in southwest England, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd said.

Britain has nine years to fill any gap in generation created by the loss of a 3.2-gigawatt project that could produce 7 percent of the country’s electricity supply, Rudd said in an interview Thursday.

“If there were any delay, we would have plenty of time to arrange replacements,” Rudd said after giving a speech near Rochester in southeast England. “It’s absolutely not right to think that there will be some sort of black hole in 2025.”

<snip>

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-24/u-k-sees-no-power-black-hole-if-edf-scraps-nuclear-plan

[FBaggins]

2. Missing from this reporting...

1 - Both EDF and the UK expect the project to go forward. There isn't a "hole" that needs to be filled.
2 - The "replacements" that they are "arranging" are also nuclear (including SMRs).
3 - The existing nuclear capacity that they're replacing around 2025 will all be roughly 40 years old. There's plenty of room to extend those lives by a couple years if a new plant is delayed and replacement generation is expected a little later than Hinkley Point is planned to come online.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Broadly, you're wrong

so it's just as well they didn't write that.

1: There is significant doubt about Hinkley Point C - as the article says, a final decision will be taken soon. The French auditor has doubts about the viability of the project, and EDF's CFO resigned because he thought it is a bad project.

2: They did mention the other proposed nuclear projects ("pointed to efforts to stimulate the development of smaller nuclear reactors that can be built in factories and to alternative nuclear plans by Hitachi Ltd.’s Horizon unit and by Engie SA and Toshiba Corp.’s NuGen venture&quot . But those are even more theoretical than Hinkley Point C is.

3: They already extended the lives of the existing reactors that they could a month ago:

Heysham 1 and Hartlepool will have their life extended by five years until 2024, while Heysham 2 and Torness will see their closure dates pushed back by seven years to 2030.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35583740

No, you can't just say "there's plenty of room to extend those lives" when that's already been done.

[FBaggins]

5. Nope

1 - The auditor did not question the "viability" of the project - it merely mentioned the risks, and this was prior to Chinese bankrolling much of the project. Nor did the CFO resign because he "thought it is a bad project"... he resigned because he didn't think that the company could sacrifice the necessary capital when they needed the money to fund their own fleet and energy price declines had dented their balance sheet. No matter how profitable the project would be, it would still be several years before they saw a single euro-cent for it. Not having enough capital is not at all the same thing as the project being a bad idea.

It's more than a little comical to watch the anti-nuclear community in the UK complain simultaneously that the plant would give too high a return to the French at the expense of the rate-paying public... AND that the project is not economically viable.

And, of course, since then the French government (essentially the owners of EDF) has green-lighted the expenditure with a guarantee that the capital will be made available. Essentially accepting additional stock ownership of the company in lieu of the dividend income that they currently take.

2 - It's a anti-nuclear pipedream to refer to other plants as "theoretical".

3 - The fact that a couple plants were extended slightly is not evidence that they have "extended the lives that they could". As I said... their plants are scheduled to retire at roughly 40 years old. After that Heysham 2 and Torness estension of seven years... those units will be 41-42 years old. Heysham 1 and Hartlepool will similarly be 40-41 years old. Hardly the end of their potential lives. They're labeled "accounting closure dates", not "end of viable life" (or similar)

The existing Hinkley Point reactors are planned for retirement at 47 years old. On what basis would you imagine that there isn't at least five additional years of available extension in the four plants you mentioned?

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. The CFO thought it could ruin the company - that's a 'bad project' by anyone's definition

Piquemal is said to have been arguing that pursuing what would be the world’s most expensive power project at this moment could jeopardise the French group, which already has rising debts.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/07/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-project-in-crisis-as-edf-finance-director-resigns

The auditors think it's risky. Both point to the potential for them withdrawing from the project, which is why there might a a 'hole', and why the reporters have described things well, whereas your picture would have been blindly optimistic.

Wayhay! I have achieved someone's pipedream - and I'm not even an anti-nuclear person! Yes, the design proposed for the Horizon project does not yet the regulatory approval; NuGen won't get a site license before 2018, so that's not a definite project either. No-one has actually built a modular nuclear reactor yet. This is why these are all more theoretical than Hinkley Point C.

EDF's aim was to extend the AGRs' lifespan by an average of 7 years. As that link says, Heysham 1 and Hartlepool were extended by 5 years, Hinkley Point B and Hunterston by 7; Heysham 2 and Torness have now been extended by 7, and the other AGR - Dungeness B - was extended by 10 years. They achieved the extensions they thought they could aim for. To say "there's plenty of room to extend those lives by a couple years" would have been blind, evidence-free optimism and a gross misuse of journalism.

[NNadir]

11. The fact is that nuclear plants built on decades old technology were engineered to operate...

for more than half a century.

The picayune quibbling raised by anti-nukes, given that every seven years, air pollution kills as many people as died in World War II, in my opinion borders on obscene.

I note, that was has "already been done" is that the world built close to 450 reactors in 25 years beginning in the early 1960's, saving millions of lives from air pollution.

The data on air pollution is available for anyone willing to go to a science library and open a paper reporting on the 67 most important factors in human mortality.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240)

Despite the hair splitting nonsense commentaries of anti-nuke - they being the class of people who are directly responsible for the fact that 2015 was the worst year ever observed for increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the first to register over 3.00 ppm - no where in the paper reporting on causes of mortality is "nuclear power" reported as a risk.

The moral and ethical ignorance of the anti-nuke community is obviated every time they open their mouths.

[greymouse]

4. global warming can only be combated

by nuclear power. Does that mean the badly built and badly run plants? No. But, realistically, only nuclear power has the potential capacity to do this.

[bananas]

6. No - nuclear is one of the worst solutions, and isn't needed at all. nt

[Helen Borg]

9. There are NO safe nuclear plants. Period.

Catastrophe can strike anywhere.

[NNadir]

12. Actually, the real catastrophe, the one anti-nukes couldn't care less about...

...is the ongoing catastrophe that 7 million people die each year from air pollution.

While anti-nukes run around making very, very, very stupid remarks about "safety" - a subject that anti-nukes know nothing about since they are unacquainted with the contents of science books in general, and epidemiology in particular - the annual death toll from air pollution rises and rises, as does the clear and obvious risk of climate change.

In the next 24 hours, more than 19,000 people will die from air pollution.

The commercial nuclear industry is now more than half a century old. It would be interesting if there was an anti-nuke on this planet who could produce a reputable paper from the primary scientific literature showing that the commercial nuclear industry in its entire history has killed as many people as will die before the upcoming Easter morning in two days from air pollution.

Nuclear power is not nearly as dangerous, as deadly, as destructive as the people who hate it.

Have a happy Easter.

[Helen Borg]

8. In short, this was all a big bribe from the beginning....

[NNadir]

10. There will be a black hole, however, for the additional people killed by air pollution.

Anti-nuke rhetoric is a huge reason why air pollution deaths now stand at 7 million human beings per year, and every single effort by anti-nukes to raise specious objections to the form of energy invented by the finest minds of the twentieth century is a reason for those deaths.

There is no reason that nuclear plants should cost $25 billion dollars to build. In less than 25 years, the world built almost 450 of them, saving millions of lives that would have otherwise been lost to air pollution.

The main reason that nuclear plants are expensive to build is that fear and ignorance from an awful phalanx of people ignorant of science and engineering have worked tirelessly and insipidly to destroy nuclear infrastructure, making every reactor built a "FOAKE" or "First of a Kind Engineering" effort.

I note, with profound moral disgust disgust, that the two trillion dollar squandered on the useless "renewable industry" energy in the last ten years world wide has only resulted in the following result from the Mauna Loa observatory:



It is notable, that since 2000, around the tim that so called "investment" in so called "renewable energy" was foolishly given wide acceptance as a means to address climate change - something it isn't - the average rates increase in the levels of dangerous fossil fuel waste, as been rising. For the decade beginning in 2011, there is only one year that is less than the already disastrous average obtained from 2001 to 2010.

Objections to nuclear energy are crimes against all future generations.

Have a nice weekend.