At least someone’s pulled their finger out and the first new nuclear station is to be built (by the bloody french!).
I’ll be dead before it comes on line.
Quite.
No, I'm not wishing you dead. Honest, guv!
Our electricity supply capacity is stretched to say the least. About 19% was from nuclear reactors. If memory serves, all but two of the reactors will be closed within a decade. By 2023.
It would seem that the general public, the electorate, has, or is perceived to have, a negative view about nuclear power. I have read that Thatcher was pro but then Chernobyl happened.
Nuclear was never going to be a vote winner. People seem to have an irrational fear about it and the gestation period from approval to getting a new station on line is much longer than a government term in office so it has never been likely to get on to an election manifesto.
Mention Fukushima and it's the nuclear power plant that continues to get the attention. Not the real disaster of the 20,000 deaths resulting from the tsunami and totally unrelated to the nuclear power plant.
Perspective is sometimes totally lacking.
But media sells what sells. The voracious appetite for the steamy, sordid, and the sensational. Nigella Lawson's weight loss took front page on the Daily Wail yesterday. I don't blame them. Their business is to sell newspapers so they will print what sells newspapers.
So, new nuclear has been given the green light. Whether it will be on line soon enough to avert a shortfall in our electrical supply is debatable.
The irony is that we have continued to import from France, 70% nuclear powered, usually at the full capacity of the HVDC cross channel link.
But this topic was about wind power.
People object to wind turbines for all sorts of reasons. Ugly bird slayers. Perception on the one point and nonsense on the other.
I have no real objection to them on either of those counts - or any other for that matter. They are harvesting a natural resource. Currently (05:00) providing about 9% of our electrical consumption.
But the limitation is variability. The same applies to solar. Nothing from either on a calm, dark night. They are on availability sources. We have on demand expectations. Flick that switch and we expect that light to come on.
We can't make the wind constant or the sun shine 24/7.
I quite like the idea of using renewable resources instead of fossils.
But I think we are quite some way off being able to do so.
To be able to cope with the variability, we need storage capacity at utility scale.
We don't have that.
