Nuclear power is costly, risky and wicked
ICOULDN’T help pricking my ears up last week, at news regarding Hinkley Point C power station. As well as the completion date being set back, the projected costs have now risen to £23 billion – although, as we all know, these figures only ever creep up. Happily, this is supposedly going to be shouldered by its funders, although I wouldn’t wager on that.
As things are, French owned EDF, and a Chinese partner, are fronting the money, expecting a 7% yield over 35 years from completion. Simple maths suggests these figures are now out of the window, and I’ve little doubt there’s some difficult ongoing discussions. But, however you cook the ingredients, here are some hard figures to grasp. EDF admit that it’ll need 3 million tonnes of concrete and 230,000 tonnes of steel. The upfront carbon footprint of the project is stratospheric.
It’ll eventually generate 7% of the UK’s predicted electricity requirements, although that figure was conjured before the government statements above pushing electric cars. 7% of UK households would be circa 1.8 million, so the budget is about £12,800 per household. This is only the build cost, not the running cost, or maintaining the supply network. Nor, most pointedly, the costs of dealing with the unsavoury leftovers, to which we’ll return.
I’m a simple man, and use simple measurements to compare things with. You and I could go out and buy a diesel generator today, and produce electricity for about £1 per household per day, all in. No economy of scale, generator running 24/7, and with a bit of tweaking, it’d run on vegetable oil. I’m not advocating this, but would use the example to illustrate that idiots like us could do no worse...which begs some pretty fundamental questions.
The briefest bit of oogling suggests that the tedious Musk bloke would supply solar panels and battery banks for every household for less than the coast of Hinkley C. And much as I detest him, I’ve got to wonder what is wrong in the head with those who’ve taken these decisions.
Just on the immediate cost analysis, it’s evident lunacy. But if you want to see it clearer, let’s look forward a few years. The leftovers from smashing bits of uranium and such together, until their atoms go ping, are quite extravagantly dangerous. They will kill you if you sit on them to eat your sandwiches, snuggle up near them for a snooze, or just stroll too close. Contrary to popular misconception, this nightmare stuff doesn’t really glow in the dark, although it might be better if it did, because it remains extremely hazardous for tens of thousands of years. Admittedly, some of the waste is quite handy for making nuclear bombs, which explains our original 1950’s atomic fixation. And you and I are still paying for the very first plant that sparked up. Our great grandchildren will be too.
EDF’s payback should take 35 years, and the plant might reasonably be expected to run for some time after that. By then, there will be an awful lot of this waste kicking about. Some is safe enough to simply landfill; some manifestly isn’t. The industry trick has been to ‘mothball’ the old plants for as long as possible, putting off the expense. Figures I was looking at backalong suggested we were commissioning new nuclear power stations a lot faster than we were dealing with the old ones, simply deferring the pain for later.
And you don’t have to be a very rounded character to know that putting things off for a later date isn’t the best way to run a railroad.
Another little issue with building this poison chalice for our descendants is that it’s been sited less than 50ft above mean sea level. And sea levels are currently rising by something around a foot a century, meaning the site will be breached well before it stops being hideously dangerous. The whole lot will eventually have to be moved, like some darkly malicious Stonehenge. And that simple bit of maths is somewhat disingenuous, as the graph showing sea level rise is shooting skywards these last few decades.
It’s hard to conclude that Hinkley won’t be breached well before ‘official’ projections. And that isn’t allowing for any kind of unpredictable geological changes or incidents. The Japanese thought their nuclear plants were safe right up until a tsunami flooded one, which kinda focussed their minds. Notably the Germans took that as the cue to stop playing this shockingly dangerous game.
The whole project is the utmost folly, and a truly wicked thing to do to our descendants. This mind-set has to stop.