Reasons NOT to back Britain’s Hinkley nuclear power project

nuClear News No 85 May 16“…… there is anywhere between 4 and 18 months to develop the argument for an alternative to building HPC.

It has been a very couple of months for the crisis-ridden project. The Stop Hinkley Campaign has listed some of the events and problems which arose between the beginning of March and midApril here: http://www.stophinkley.org/PressReleases/pr160415.pdf

These included, for instance Martin Young, an energy analyst at investment bank RBC Capital Markets, saying that for EDF to proceed with such a costly plan would be “verging on insanity”.

One of the highlights perhaps was a comment on DECC’s five reasons why it is backing Hinkley Point C by independent energy consultant, Mike Parr. Writing in Energy Post, Parr called the list “a mix of truth, unprovable assertions and omissions which could also be construed as lies”. The DECC statement assumes that the problem of intermittent generation plus storage will not be solved any time soon. He asks whether DECC has read the interview with Steven Holliday, CEO of National Grid, who said in September last year that “the idea of large coal-fired or nuclear power stations to be used for baseload is outdated” and we “…have the intelligence available in the system to ensure power is consumed when it’s there and not when it’s not there.”

The Stop Hinkley Campaign also published five reasons for NOT backing the new nuclear reactors here:http://www.stophinkley.org/PressReleases/pr160317.pdf

On 19th April the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Amber Rudd, released a letter she had sent to MPs on the energy and climate change select committee. The committee had asked what contingency plans were in place if Hinkley is delayed or cancelled. She said: “While we have every confidence the deal will go ahead, we have arrangements in place to ensure that any potential delay or cancellation to the project does not pose a risk to security of supply for the UK. I am clear that keeping the lights on is non-negotiable.”

So the lights will not go out if Hinkley is cancelled. She also said that if Hinkley is delayed there could be a risk of the UK missing its targets to cut carbon emissions, and that alternatives could cost more but would not represent a “significant increase” in cost in the short term.

Yet a report from the government’s National Infrastructure Commission in March found that “smart power – principally built around three innovations, interconnection, storage, and demand flexibility – could save consumers up to £8bn a year by 2030, help the UK meet its 2050 carbon targets, and secure the UK’s energy supply for generations.”

The Stop Hinkley Campaign pointed out that Ministers have been caught misrepresenting how close the solar industry is to being able to build subsidy-free projects (17) and refusing to extend the grace period for onshore wind farms with planning permission hit by the early closure of the Renewables Obligation (RO). (18) And yet we know that Hinkley Point C will cost around £99/MWh over 35 years at today’s prices compared with £67/MWh currently being paid to newly installed onshore wind farms for only 15 years. (19) And solar with storage and flexibility would cost roughly half the cost of Hinkley Point C over its 35 year lifetime.

Stop Hinkley Spokesperson Roy Pumfrey said: “This Government seems to make up whatever nonsense it feels like to support its nuclear ambitions. (21) Yet the reality is that scrapping Hinkley Point C and going for renewable power instead would save the UK tens of billions of pounds. (22) Now Rudd says Hinkley could be abandoned without risking power cuts. The answer is obvious – time the Government stopped depending on this failed French reactor for our electricity supplies and climate targets and got on with promoting renewables.”

Meanwhile, also on 19th April a group of EDF managers wrote to the Company’s board of directors warning they could all face legal action if the company pushes ahead with Hinkley and this leads to the “destruction of the value” at the group, its directors could be held personally responsible. (23) And EDF’s workers committee, which includes representatives from the biggest unions, voted to take legal action should the company fail to consult employees on Hinkley.

This forced EDF to delay the final investment decision until at least September. The Board of Directors has agreed to undertake discussions with the company consultative council before taking a decision.

Now plans for Hinkley have been thrown into yet more chaos, according to The Times (26) after the admission that engineers have falsified vital safety tests on parts supplied to reactors in France and possibly the UK. Power Magazine says France’s nuclear sector has been rocked to its core.

Stop Hinkley Spokesperson Roy Pumfrey said: “What little credibility France’s nuclear sector had left has now completely evaporated. Surely now an end to Hinkley Point C is inevitable. If the Government doesn’t call a halt to this soon we will become the laughing stock of Europe.”

A French state-owned factory – the Areva plant in Le Creusot, Burgundy – which has manufactured key components used in more than half of France’s 58 nuclear reactors, may have falsified safety reports on some of those components. Unverified components may also have been installed by EDF at some of the 15 reactors it owns in Britain. The falsified documents have come to light because ASN ordered Areva to carry out an audit after it detected a “very serious anomaly” in the reactor pressure vessel at Flamanville – a nuclear plant being built in Normandy which is the same model as the ones planned for Hinkley Point C. Flamanville is currently 6 years late and around €7.2bn over budget. Another reactor under construction, which is the same design, at Olkiluoto in Finland is expected to be almost 10 years late and €5.5bn over budget. Hinkley Point C was originally expected to be generating ‘in time to cook Christmas dinner in 2017’.

Stop Hinkley Spokesperson, Roy Pumfrey, said: “As Albert Einstein is thought to have said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. At the stroke of a pen David Cameron could launch projects sufficient to save or generate the same amount of electricity as Hinkley Point C which are capable of delivering long before 2025.” http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo85.pdf

May 14, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, politics, UK

1 Comment »

In the discussion in this blog site, there is very little mentioning of the on-going problem of Fukushima Dai’ichi, that is hushed-up by mainstream media, and becoming worse as the coriums of three reactors penetrate into the ground. As water is irradiated and Tritium generated, there is a serious risk that the Fukushima Dai’ichi site as a whole could explode with absolutely catastrophic consequences.

At present, there are 145000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste Worldwide, that needs to be stored for 100000 years.

Present nuclear technology is a terrible combination of characteristics: high-energy nuclear reactions create some of the most biologically toxic and dangerous materials known to mankind (i.e. P239 and Actinides, Cs134, Cs137, Strontium), and a nuclear reactor is operated at the the margin of criticality (i.e. at the threshold of exploding).

The EDF Hinkley Point and Sizewell C reactors would increase the UK stockpile of high-level nuclear waste by 80%. No suitable solution has yet been proposed how to store this waste safely. It is thus insane to add to this stockpile of waste/

If nuclear power must be used for the UK, a Thorium LFTR solution would at least allow transmutation of this high-level nuclear waste to be achieved simultaneously with generating electrical power. However, choosing the EDF design will just add greatly to the present UK stockpile of waste. It is immoral to future generations to expect them to deal with our waste (i.e. your future generations who will look back on our politicians as utterly insane if they adopt the EDF solution).

It is estimated that the Fukushima Dai’ichi site will potentially take centuries to rectify, even if ever possible. Over such a long time scale, World War I and II will be long forgotten in distant memory, and yet Fukushima Dai’ichi will fester on. Do will we really want such a disaster also for the UK?

However, with recent advances in LENR, it will be apparent in future decades how awful and antiquated this dreadful EMWR 1960’s technology employed by EDF is in practice. To lock the UK to such technology for the next 30 to 40 years would be utterly insane.

Comment by Timothy Norris | July 31, 2016 | Reply