UK customers to pay in advance for Hinkley nuclear power, AND cop the financial risk?

EDF’s EDF seeks to charge customers upfront for UK nuclear plants, Ft.com , 23 Nov 18, Financing scheme modelled on London’s ‘super sewer’ aims to cut cost of power from reactors Jonathan Ford in London NOVEMBER 22, 2018 EDF is pushing a plan to finance nuclear investment in Britain that it claims would cut the cost of power from new reactors to levels competitive with gas and renewable energy. The French state-backed power utility wants to use a technique commonly used in utilities such as water, airports and power distribution. This allows companies to charge customers upfront for new infrastructure. It is being used in the £4.2bn project to build a “super sewer” under London’s river Thames. But the mechanism has never been tried for a project as technically complicated and lengthy as a nuclear power station, which can take a decade to build. This and other challenges mean any gains are not assured.

With capital-intensive, long-life assets such as sewers and power transmission networks, financing represents a substantial chunk of the overall cost that needs to be recovered ………

Why nuclear revival is struggling to take hold EDF’s proposal comes at a time when Britain’s much touted nuclear renaissance is in danger of shorting out. The first deal — which will see the French group and its Chinese partners build a £20bn station at Hinkley Point in Somerset — was struck in 2016 at a guaranteed strike price of £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) in 2012 prices, indexed for 35 years and worth about £105 in current terms. Heavily criticised for being excessive, it was at least similar in headline terms to the prices required for renewables, nuclear’s main zero carbon competitor. However, renewable costs have since fallen sharply, with some deals for offshore wind farms being signed for as little as £55-60 per MWh with 15 year contracts. ……….

Observers agree that RAB financing could potentially secure substantial reductions in nuclear power costs. “While it should always be cheaper for the state to finance nuclear construction directly, this would clearly lower the prices from the Hinkley approach,” said Dieter Helm, a professor of energy policy at Oxford university

But it has prompted concerns about the equity of the structure. “What RAB financing does is transfer project risks to customers, who are least well placed to bear them,” said Martin Blaiklock, an infrastructure expert who likens the technique to “being forced to pay for a meal at a restaurant before the restaurant has even been built, let alone served any food”.

Will consumers benefit? Consumers who paid up front for five to 10 years would run the risk that if the reactor were delayed, over-budget or ultimately not commissioned, the power savings would not materialise and they might suffer a total loss. Nuclear has a poor record for delivering on time and to cost. Two projects in Europe using the same technology, at Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France, are running 10 and six years late respectively. Both are about three times over budget. EDF has yet to prove that its EPR reactor design can even generate electricity at commercial scale.

There are also legal question marks over whether the technique would be deemed an illegitimate subsidy under state-aid rules. “A nuclear power station isn’t like a sewer, a monopoly infrastructure asset,” said Peter Atherton, analyst at consultants Cornwall Energy. “It competes with other private sector generators, which means legally it could be shades of grey.” Lower costs may be necessary to get nuclear back on track, but most observers think they are not sufficient. “Ultimately it comes down to whether you strategically think as a nation you should do nuclear,” says Prof Helm. “But if you do think you need it, then clearly it’s right to seek to do it at the lowest cost.” https://www.ft.com/content/f9a96304-e980-11e8-885c-e64da4c0f981

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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