Energy infrastructure

Nuclear power lost referendums in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Going, going, gone.

Build nuclear ASAP ? The French have been building Flameville 3 since 2007 and it won't be ready until 2023 at the earliest. Nuclear would arrive too late to help. And as wind, solar and storage costs plummet (Lithium ion batteries dropped 85% in the last decade, 97% in the last 3 decades ) it would be too expensive to compete.

Please explain how we would provide financing for the €20Bn capital cost a nuclear plant without paying a ton more in bills ? figure that is given in 2012 pounds is the government's estimate that the cost of Hinkley C will add £10 per year to each household's bill. The UK were planning on building 6 nuclear plants so the plan was £60 per year, and it would still need peaking plant and spinning reserve.

A graphic reminder of how renewables keep getting cheaper while nuclear has gotten a lot more expensive. (gas prices are volatile at the moment , but its a transition fuel , it's main usage could be replaced by insulation)

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Look at the UK or France. Both have been building fleets of nuclear plants for ages, the UK now needs to import the technology and the French are late and over budget on the ones being built in France, Finland and the UK.

If they can't do it on-time, on-budget we certainly won't because we'd be competing for resources with them, starting late and needing way less plants so no one would do us any favours.

Just ONE of the SIX nuclear plants proposed in the UK is under construction. That's an 83% failure rate so far.

Moorfield (at the Calder Hall/Windscale/Sellafield site) has seen US, Korean and Japanese companies go bankrupt and/or abandon the project so it's an industry wide problem. The other four didn't get that far.

Hinkley C is relying on guaranteed prices, and financing and financial guarantees from the UK, French and Chinese governments. We can't do that. Reunification would probably be cheaper in the long run.

The French design was inefficient because it allowed changes in output over ~ 5 hours to provide a hint of load balancing. Until proven otherwise the new EPR takes 10 years to build.

High level waste is easy to store in the sense that it's so awful but decays relatively quickly that it's worth taking the trouble to keep it secure for the foreseeable future.

The real problem is the larger volumes of intermediate waste with longer half lives. If Cro-magnons or Neanderthals had nuclear power we'd still be looking after their waste repositories.