Reply #5: No. They shut a 47 year old 50 MWe reactor - the first commercial reactor ever - because it was [View All]

[NNadir]

too small to be worth maintaining.

Despite having a gaggle of grotesque Greenpeace goons and gargoyles there, nuclear power has been a key player in Britain since the 1960's, where, essentially it killed no one.

Now it happens that Britain's reactors were basically unique, magnox types, gas cooled. The cladding was designed to fast recycle for the regrettable reason that the reactors were designed to be dual use. These were what might be called "Generation I" or at best "Generation II" reactors. They functioned fine and in fact were much safer than the crap Amory Lovins recommended in 1976, wildcat coal as "transitional" to the solar and wind Nirvana he said would come by the year 2000.

Thus question was whether to replace that nuclear capacity with Lovins' fantasies or with the reality that the folks across the Channel used.

(Britain never really abandoned coal. The filthiest electricity plant in Western Europe is the monstrosity at Drax, which has 12 cooling towers, not that there is ONE anti-nuke who gives a rat's ass about the thermal effects of coal, although all of them become concern trolls when nuclear also obeys the second law of thermodynamics.

If you push an anti-nuke hard enough, they will ALL announce their fondness for filthy, disgusting, earth ripping, IGCC coal, coupled with idiotic fantasies about billion ton waste dumps that they call, in an appalling euphemism, sequestration facilities. They do not care that dangerous fossil fuel waste cannot be sequestered for eternity. They don't give a fuck about the future.)

But we were talking about Britain...

Then there was the matter of that temporary load of North Sea gas the British burned in the 1980's and 1990's. I think now, everyone in Britain realizes that the gas was just that, temporary.

There is still genuflecting in the direction of the priapic kids' whirlies, of course, and billions of dollars in resources that could be better spent on nuclear energy will be wasted but the reality that has been true for many decades is beginning to stare Britain in the face, particularly as the gas fields are giving out.

At the risk of having an illiterate post - for the 9000th time - that idiotic paper from the equally idiotic Jacobsen, the British are coming to recognize that nuclear energy is the only reliable, cheap, sustainable, economical and most important, rapidly scalable form of energy is nuclear energy.

Everyone will come to that sooner or later, or else be impoverished or, equally likely, perish. The reason that this is the case, is that it is true.

There were a lot of announced nuclear phase outs in Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany so on and so on, but only ONE, Italy, where the phase out actually occurred.

Italy - which has the world's oldest geothermal power plant - and recognized that it is screwed royally, and ENEL crawls around Europe trying to buy interests in Slovakian and French and even Romanian nuclear facilities, but mostly they buy Greek coal based power, French nuclear power, and burn other dangerous fossil fuels, mostly gas, that they import, themselves.

Lots of noise is being made even to reopen the shut reactors - although they cannot be because the infrastructure was allowed to rot to benefit the ignorant. More likely, Italy will finally concede that it must build reactors itself, particularly with the ups and downs of the Swiss and Italian glaciers, the failure of rivers like the Po, etc.

Almost every Energy prognostication in the last two decades - and if you look you will see that all energy soothsaying proves remarkable for being wrong - said Europe's nuclear energy use will decline. Bull. When the wolf is at the door - and he is - they will do the only thing that is possible: Build sustainable nuclear power plants.

What's going to be ironic as hell is that they may end up buying technology and fuel from India because they were so quick to bite the hand that fed them so well, their long history of commercial nuclear power. It's sad that the very first commercial nuclear power, Britain, is so far behind technologically. This forge building shows that at last, they get it. (India's reactor forges constructed its first FBR reactor head under budget and ahead of schedule. It looks like Britain will take three years to compare.)