Moorside
In early December last year NuGen submitted its application to the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) for a licence to undertake offshore geotechnical investigations within West Cumbria’s inshore waters. The application is in support of its plans to build three AP1000 reactors at Moorside. The focus of the investigation will be the location for the sub-seabed tunnels required for the reactors’ cooling water intake and outlet systems. The £20m contract for the work, which also includes onshore site investigations, was awarded last year to Dutch company Fugro. The company, with a major involvement in oil and gas extraction (including fracking) and relatively little experience in the nuclear field – which its classifies as a sustainable energy – describes itself as providing geotechnical, survey, subsea and geosciences services. The offshore work is scheduled to start on 29th February 2016 and will involve the drilling of some 40 boreholes each between 34 metres to 92 metres in depth, with an expected average depth of 70 metres. Disturbance to sediments which contain plutonium, americium and a cocktail of other radioactive elements leads not only to their spread in local waters but also to their being driven ashore where particles can be re-suspended and blown inland. NuGen however believes that the amount of radioactive sediment that will be disturbed by the borehole drilling and core extraction will be ‘small’ and no bigger than ‘storm background levels’ and therefore proposes to take no mitigation measures. Such a proposal is likely to be treated with a similar level of scepticism to that given to the pronouncement made many decades ago by the then Windscale site that its radioactive discharges to the Irish Sea would safely disperse into the wider oceans.
CORE 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Radwaste
What would it take for you to accept nuclear waste in your backyard? The country has created quite a bit of the stuff and the government is searching for someone willing to take it. Steadily produced since the end of World War Two, the question of what to do with the nuclear waste from civil, military, medical and scientific uses has been causing equal measures of fear and frustration for decades. With a new generation of nuclear power stations on the way, a fresh search is under way for a community ready to take on the challenge. Campaigner Eddie Martin says: “It’s very worrying, scary even. They have been looking for somewhere to put this material for decades and it keeps coming back to Cumbria.” Nuclear power stations have been built in 31 countries but only a handful, including Finland, Sweden, France and the US have started building permanent storage facilities. All of these are purpose-built caves hundreds of metres below ground, known as a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF). Once the waste is treated and sealed inside containers, it is stacked in the caverns. GDFs are expected to remain secure for thousands of years. Dr Roberts backs the basic idea but warns there are major questions to be answered. “While there are natural examples of radiation being contained – think of the mines where uranium for nuclear fuel has been sat happily for millennia – but we don’t know a lot of about how materials contained in nuclear waste behave. Cumbria is not alone. Previous studies have shown a dozen areas that might – under further scrutiny – prove suitable. One of these is Stanford on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, not far from Thetford. One expert says it “fits the international criteria very well indeed”. The area in and around the army base is about as empty as you can get in lowland England, which is likely to increase interest. But Joan Girling, who campaigns for improved safety at Suffolk’s Sizewell nuclear power plant, is uncompromising. “By the time it is decommissioned, Sizewell will have been a nuclear site for 100 years. The area has done its bit. “Just think of the issues bringing it here, it would be a nightmare. Imagine transporting all that waste from Sellafield, across the country, presumably by rail, then what?
BBC 18th Jan 2016 read more »
SMRs
U.K. ambitions to build small modular nuclear plants may be realized as soon as 2025, according to Fluor Corp.’s NuScale unit, which is seeking to be a pioneer in the market. NuScale plans to submit its 50-megawatt reactor design for approval by U.S. nuclear authorities towards the end of 2016. That would leave it well-placed to seek the U.K. equivalent, called Generic Design Assessment, in 2017, Tom Mundy, executive vice president for program development at the U.S. company, said in an interview in London.
Bloomberg 18th Jan 2016 read more »
A nuclear power station that can be placed on the back of a truck – or even a barge – could be the future of atomic power around the world. While many big countries are building a new generation of nuclear power stations as a way of providing reliable power while also hitting carbon reduction targets, such facilities have proved expensive to build, often requiring significant government subsidies to ensure they are completed. As a result, some in the nuclear industry are pinning their hopes on new technologies, which involve building small nuclear power plants in modules in a factory and transporting them to the sites where they will run. “Small modular reactors will open up nuclear power to places and situations that have never traditionally invested in nuclear power,” says David Hess, of the World Nuclear Association. The idea of nuclear power on a small scale is not new. India and Pakistan have nuclear units with a capacity of 300MW – a tenth of the size of the £18bn facility planned for Hinkley Point in south-west England. Tom Mundy, an executive vice-president at NuScale, one of the companies developing small modular reactors (SMRs) comments: “We wanted to make sure our steam-generating unit could be transported by a special truck, on the railways, or the waterways.” Nu¬Scale’s main module, which contains both the reactor core and the water heating system, is roughly 22m long by 4m wide. Mr Mundy adds that the economics for SMRs only work if operators order a whole fleet of smaller plants, helping drive down the overall cost per unit. “We are not talking about economies of scale here but economies of multiples,” he says. Another change that has driven the technology has been the privatisation of energy markets around the world. While governments had big enough balance sheets to be able to finance larger nuclear projects, companies are less likely to unless they get some form of state support. The UK government has guaranteed EDF, the French energy company, £92.50 per megawatt hour of the electricity it will eventually produce at Hinkley Point. The current wholesale price is about half of that, leading to accusations that the taxpayer is being overcharged. Dieter Helm, a professor of energy at Oxford university says: “The big pressurised reactor approach has come to the end of the road. In developed countries, there is no appetite to develop these.”
FT 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Energy Policy – UK
Britain’s renewable energy industry is about to “fall off a cliff” just at the point it would come into its own, analysis for The Independent reveals.The dour forecast comes as the industry celebrated a record-breaking year in 2015, with billions of pounds poured into solar and wind energy and more homes powered by nature than ever before. But experts have warned this is all about to grind to a halt as the Government abandons its commitment to green energy and instead invests in fracking and nuclear power. The impact of the Government’s end to wind-farm subsidies and the carrying-out of its manifesto pledge to “halt the spread of onshore windfarms” has been laid bare with research for The Independent. The figures from Bloomberg forecast that over the next five years the country will lose at least 1 gigawatt of renewable energy generation – enough to power 660,000 homes.
Independent 18th Jan 2016 read more »
Energy Policy – Scotland
The Scottish Government is to reduce the amount of money it spends tackling climate change by ten per cent, according to environmental campaigners. WWF Scotland said analysis of draft budget figures showed that £456m would be spent on tackling climate change in 2016-17, down from £502m the previous year – a drop of almost £46m. It comes after advisory body the Committee on Climate Change urged the Government that more action was needed to meet future targets. Campaigners are now calling on finance secretary John Swinney to amend his draft budget and invest in a low-carbon future.
STV 16th Jan 2016 read more »
RE News 16th Jan 2016 read more »
Energy Innovation
Early in the Paris climate talks last month, Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, set out for a group of reporters the administration’s view on how the problem should be tackled. “We have a lot of technology that is available right now on the shelf,” he said. “It’s being used, and can be used more, to drive emissions down now. But to get where we need to get, we need more.” The need for more innovation in energy was one of the strongest points of agreement at the Paris talks. Some have suggested that the most important news to come out of the conference was not the final accord, signed with great fanfare by the governments of 195 countries, but the commitments made by governments and wealthy individuals to research and develop technologies that can help the climate. Energy innovation is a concept that has become almost universally popular – among all from th e most traditional of oil companies to the most radical of environmental groups. Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark Delucch i of the University of California Davis have published papers arguing that it would be possible to derive all the world’s energy, for all uses, from only wind, solar and hydro power, by 2050. Their analysis used only existing technologies that had already been deployed, at least in pilot projects, by 2010. But that would mean a huge transition and would require vast investment. Mr Jacobson and Mr Delucchi suggested the world would need 3.8m new large wind turbines, for example. The biggest problem with pinning hopes for the climate on energy innovation is that, like other forms of technological progress, it is highly unpredictable. Twenty years ago, most people tho ught it would be impossible to produce gas from shale at commercially viable rates. Today, shale accounts for more than half of all US gas production. In 1976, US government officials set out plans for nuclear fusion power that suggested the first working demonstration reactors could be starting up in 2005-10 at the latest. The latest experimental reactor, ITER in France, is scheduled to start its first fusion reactions in 2027. When the first demonstration plants might be built is anybody’s guess. In the mid-2000s, companies were making claims that cellulosic ethanol, produced from agricultural waste rather than foodstuffs, would soon be commercially available. A decade later, there are a few commercial-scale plants, but overall growth has been much slower than the US Government expected or hoped. If we are relying on innovation to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change, that is not a very comforting conclusion. Mr Trembath accepts that, but argu es that with global greenhouse emissions still on a rising trend – albeit with a probable dip last year – other attempts to address the threat since the 1997 Kyoto protocol have been largely unsuccessful.
FT 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Weapons Convoys
SNP’s Bruce Crawford calls for immediate halt to nuclear bombs being transported through Scottish towns.
The National 18th Jan 2016 read more »
Nuclear Weapons
The day America dropped 4 nuclear bombs on Spain… but the disaster, 50 years ago, has been forgotten by all but its surviving victims.
Daily Mail 18th Jan 2016 read more »
The debate about nuclear weapons has overshadowed Labour politics before – revealing divisions about Britain’s role in the world and the morality of military action. Lord Hennessy spoke to Mark Mardell on Radio 4’s The World This Weekend about the party’s role in nuclear bombs coming to Britain decades ago.
BBC 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Trident
Jeremy Corbyn has suggested that Britain should keep its fleet of nuclear submarines but have them patrol the globe without nuclear weapons. The Labour leader suggested Britain could keep Trident submarines without the nuclear warheads, in a move that will placate the unions who fear abandoning the deterrent could lead to job losses in shipyards in Cumbria and Scotland.
Telegraph 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Guardian 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Daily Mail 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Corbyn’s plan for Trident submarines but without the missiles is unlikely to ease rift in the party – or even be militarily workable. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn suggested in a television interview yesterday that the UK could keep its Trident nuclear fleet but without carrying nuclear warheads. It is a startling suggestion that will struggle to gain credibility.
Scotsman 18th Jan 2016 read more »
Trident may seem to David Cameron to be a very useful weapon for attacking Jeremy Corbyn. But does it keep Britain safe? Actually, no. There is a good, hard, patriotic argument for getting rid of this unusable, American-controlled monstrosity before it bankrupts us and destroys our real defences. And lazy, cheap politics shouldn’t blind us to these facts. I write as someone who has nothing against nuclear weapons. I used to deliberately wreck the meetings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s, by standing up at the back and asking awkward questions.
Daily Mail 17th Jan 2016 read more »
DEFENCE hawks who want Britain to spend more than £100 billion renewing its nuclear arsenal admitted this weekend that they would never “push the button” themselves. Royal United Services Institute deputy director-general Malcolm Chalmers said he did not think “most British prime ministers … since we acquired nuclear weapons” would have been prepared to use them, even if Britain itself faced a nuclear attack. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been singled out for criticism for saying that he would not fire Britain’s Trident missiles under any circumstances. Mr Corbyn was sticking to his principles yesterday, telling Andrew Marr on his BBC show: “Greater security in the world is not achieved by nuclear weapons.” Speaking at the Fabian Society conference, Mr Chalmers claimed that whether or not weapons were actually deployed was irrelevant as “retention of Trident is about deterrence, and it’s about psychology.” David Clark, who worked as an aide to the late Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook, said: “For a deterrent to work doesn’t require leaders to press buttons — it requires the capability, combined with uncertainty in the mind of an adversary, about your intentions, which is why sensible leaders never get into a position of answering the question of whether they would press the button.”
Morning Star 18th Jan 2016 read more »
NUCLEAR weapons have been a central part of what passes for defence policy ever since post-war Labour prime minister Clement Attlee signed up for them with Washington behind the backs of his Cabinet. Every prime minister since has made a fetish of Britain’s “independent nuclear deterrent,”even though it is neither independent nor a deterrent. Britain’s conventional armed forces have been run down over decades to the extent that they take the field now only as US junior partners.
Morning Star 16th Jan 2016 read more »
UNITE general secretary Len McCluskey praised Jeremy Corbyn yesterday for being the first Labour leader to put forward a “serious” alternative to Trident. Unite is holding its first-ever Scottish policy conference in Clydebank — just 20 miles from the nuclear submarine base at Faslane.
Morning Star 18th Jan 2016 read more »
Nicola Sturgeon has told nuclear defence workers that the SNP’s policy of ending ¬Trident will be matched by a commitment to provide new jobs. The First Minister also met Unite boss Len McCluskey for the first time and gave him an assurance that the SNP ¬supports the union’s call for a diversification strategy to accompany any measure to scrap nuclear weapons.
Scotsman 18th Jan 2016 read more »
Fusion
Undeterred by taunts that fusion always seems to lie 50 years in the future as a commercial energy source, a growing programme of research is aimed at taming the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and the H-bomb. It releases energy by combining light elements, in contrast to the atom-splitting fission process that drives current nuclear power stations. Fusion research falls into three different camps. One is the traditional “big science” approach – exemplified by ITER, a project to build an experimental fusion reactor at Cadarache in France.
FT 17th Jan 2016 read more »
Renewables
The UK was “by far” the strongest clean energy investment market in Europe in 2015, according to new figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, with investment up 24 per cent to $23.4 billion. Much of the surge was driven by a string of large offshore wind arrays in the North Sea such as the 580MW Race Bank and 336MW Galloper, with estimated costs of $2.9 billion and $2.3 billion respectively. Europe as a whole saw investment fall by 18 per cent to $58.5 billion – its lowest figure since 2006. Germany invested $10.6 billion, down by 42 per cent, while France saw an even bigger fall in investment, of 53 per cent to $2.9 billion.
Utility Week 15th Jan 2016 read more »
Increasing renewables to 36% of the global energy mix by 2030 would provide about half emissions reductions needed to hold warming to 2C, says International Renewable Energy Agency.
Guardian 16th Jan 2016 read more »
Renewables – AD
United Utilities (UU) has been appointed to build an anaerobic digestion (AD) plant at the Glenmorangie Distillery in Scotland.
Utility Week 15th Jan 2016 read more »
Renewables – small wind
Glasgow-based wind turbine manufacturer Gaia-Wind has sold its first turbines to Japan just weeks after establishing a new local subsidiary in Tokyo. With an initial two turbines already in country, the local team at Gaia-Wind in Japan, has also won a contract for a further eight machines. YBM Japan Inc. located in Ishikawa prefecture, will sell and distribute them in a value added resale operation across the country.
Scottish Energy News 18th Jan 2016 read more »
BBC 15th Jan 2016 read more »
Renewables – solar US
In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made the case that job growth is once more on the rise. Nowhere is that more true than in the domestic solar energy industry, which grew nearly 12 times faster than the overall economy in 2015. The solar industry expanded 20 percent over the previous year to employ a total of 209,000 people, according to a detailed census of solar jobs released this week by The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit. Those new solar opportunities amounted to a whopping 1.2 percent of all new jobs added to the U.S. economy last year.
City Lab 14th Jan 2016 read more »
Renewables – wind Denmark
Danish wind turbines set a new world record in 2015. Wind power is now counted for 42.1% of the total electricity consumption in Denmark, according to data published on Friday (15 January). The percentage of wind power in Denmark’s overall electricity mix is the highest in the world. Last year, the share was 39.1%, which was a record, according to Energinet, which runs the power grids.
Euractiv 15th Jan 2016 read more »
Fuel Poverty
As the British isles struggle with the winter weather, NEA – the UK fuel poverty charity – has announced the first projects to be funded under a £26.2 million Health and Innovation Programme which will bring affordable warmth to over 6,000 fuel-poor and vulnerable households in Scotland, England and Wales. This is the biggest GB wide programme designed and delivered by a national charity that puts fuel poverty alleviation at its heart. The programme is split into three distinct funds, two programmes are being delivered by NEA – a Technical Innovation Fund and a Warm and Healthy Homes Fund, the third is being delivered by NEA’s subsidiary Warm Zones, while in Scotland a Healthy Homes Fund is being delivered by Energy Action Scotland.
Scottish Energy News 18th Jan 2016 read more »
CCS
For many years, carbon capture and storage (CCS) – trapping carbon emissions as they are emitted by power stations and industrial installations and storing them underground – has been hailed as vital to helping decarbonise the economics of energy. The circumstances are stark, says Luke Warren, chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association: “If you remove CCS from the mix, the cost of meeting the target of limiting average temperature to two degrees centigrade rises by 138 per cent.” Nonetheless, progress in establishing the credentials of the process has been slow. According to Greenpeace, the environmental pressure group: “Despite years of vociferous backing from the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a host of major world leaders, CCS continues to move forward at only a snail’s pace”.
FT 17th Jan 2016 read more »
