But Sir David King does disagree with you: "..... power outages could occur as early as 2017 as old nuclear, oil and coal-fired power stations are closed because not enough is being done to replace them. The school's study shows Britain can’t meet its goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 without ramping up nuclear power and electrifying both transport and heating....."
What else did he say? "".....switching all generation to renewables would be
“enormously expensive” because everything
would need to be backed up by equivalent
gas-fired capacity for when the wind doesn't blow. The power grid could support a maximum of 20 percent large-scale wind power alongside smaller turbines, solar panels and geothermal heat pumps fitted to homes....""
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-
15/u-k-renewable-energy-push-may-prevent-
electricity-crisis.html
Every UK member of Greenpeace must leave the sanctuary of their Disney World existence, forget the delusion of their Energy [R]evolution policy and come into the real world, where nuclear really does do the job of keeping the lights on - all of the time!
But each and every one of you can help to make the Government sit up and take notice of LFTR development. If LFTRs provide the UK's future nuclear capacity, they will allay all your fears about safety and long term storage of waste.
You can either sit on the sidelines chanting your mantras as new PWR nuclear power stations get built, or join the LFTR movement and get action on a safer and greener alternative. See the above links to the "38 DEGREES" and "E-PETITION" campaigns.
"...power outages could occur as early as 2017..."
ReplyDeleteThe first proposed new nuclear reactor in the UK won't come online before 2020 which will be too late to fill the energy gap.
"...everything would need to be backed up by equivalent gas-fired capacity for when the wind doesn't blow."
This is a myth. A reports by the National Grid and Poyry reached the conclusion that large amounts of wind on requires "relatively small amounts of back up" and that "thermal plant breakdowns pose more of a threat to the stability of electricity networks than the relatively benign variations in the output of wind plants". A report by UK Energy Research Centre reviewed over 200 studies on intermittency none of which
showed large amounts of renewables lead to reduced reliability.
"But each and every one of you can help to make the Government sit up and take notice of LFTR development"
Thorium reactors are decades from being a commercially viable option. The UK, Japanese, French and American governments have all spent billions over decades trying to build commercially viable fast-breeder reactors and have all had to admit defeat.
It is still going to happen (thank goodness) and there is nothing you can do about it.
DeleteThe capacity factor of wind turbines is so pathetic that the environmental impact per kWh generated - the steel, concrete and rare earth elements they use - is massive! Green they are not! See: http://lftrsuk.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-green-is-wind-turbine-in-my-valley.html
PWR technology (all of the UK's New Nuclear) is not the only game in town and every issue you have with nuclear - safety, waste and affordability - is answered in spades by LFTR technology. You do yourself a disservice with such a dismissive attitude. If we could get the 3 million Greenpeace members and the 2 million Friends of the Earth members behind LFTR technology, we could have the first-of-a-kind switched on in 5 years and the floodgates would open.
There are lots of ideas for nuclear reactors floating around – but so far, no one has been able to build any of them commercially. Even if these ideas can be proven to work, there is still a long way to go before they would be commercially viable.
DeletePeople have been proposing thorium reactors for decades, but have yet to demonstrate that they can be built. The Chinese are trying to build a thorium reactor, but they estimate that it could take decades to start generating electricity. According to the UK government thorium “does not currently have a role to play in the UK context [and] is likely to have only a limited role internationally for some years ahead”.
Even if a thorium (or a fast-breeder) reactor could be built by the 2020s or 2030s, it would come far too late to help us stop climate change.
Ultimately, there is only so much money available for researching new technologies. We have to choose whether to spend billions trying to build working fusion, thorium or fast-breeder reactors – which have a track record of being costly failures – or invest our money making already proven renewable technologies cheaper and more efficient.