Britain needs to ignore the Blob and go nuclear
- A groundbreaking American nuclear project puts the UK to shame
- Nuclear power should be a British success story, but it isn't
- Time and again, Nimbyism and bureaucracy have got in the way of affordable energy
Three C-17 Globemasters. Eight shipping containers. The first nuclear reactor in history to be moved by air. While it feels like the opening of one of those special-forces slop series on Amazon that I count as one of my guiltiest pleasures, this is the very real Operation Windlord.
The operation, conducted by the US Air Force in February to ferry a five-megawatt unit from California to a desert lab in Utah, is now in its next phase: engineers are racing to switch it on by July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence. The reactor was built by Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup that, like Operation Windlord, takes its name from Lord of the Rings.
There was a time when this story would have been Britain’s. When Queen Elizabeth opened Calder Hall in 1956, we became the first nation on earth to feed grid-scale civil nuclear power into a domestic electricity supply. By 1965, the year of Winston Churchill’s funeral, Britain had built more operational reactors than the United States, the Soviet Union and France combined. We commissioned 26 of them between 1956 and 1971, with sites approved in months and reactors connected to the grid in under five years.
Then, thanks to the usual morass of blob mentality and Nimbyism, we stopped. We have not built a single new commercial reactor since Sizewell B in 1995. The one we are currently building, Hinkley Point C, is on track to be the most expensive nuclear station in human history: roughly six times what South Korea spends per megawatt for the same job. There is a fascinating essay explaining this in Works in Progress that reads more like tragedy than history.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how hopelessly adrift we are in the UK. There are moves towards nuclear, but nothing very encouraging.
The link to Works in Progress is worth following too - it's a complex story.
6 comments:
Having worked a Sellafield for 22 years, I know what lies and exaggerations are told about nuclear power. Had this attitude prevailed about other advances like steam,we would still be plodding about behind horse drawn ploughs. (another new fangled abomination) and broadcasting seed by hand.
John - that sounds like an interesting career. Yes I agree, lies and exaggerations are told about nuclear power and have been for a long time. The wind and solar mess is based on those lies and exaggerations.
An older colleague of mine had done research on behalf of the old Atomic Energy Authority. A friend he'd made at Windscale blamed much of the AGR fiasco on Tony Benn instructing the simultaneous construction of three different designs, none of which had been fully analysed or even properly pilot-planted.
That's not the account given in your links. I wonder who gets nearer to the truth.
dearieme - although Tony Benn was a loon, ordering three different unproved designs to be built sounds odd. Unless... but that's the problem with politics, no level of stupidity is ever off the table.
The White Heat of Technology!
The only reason I took took to studying engineering. I assumed that the new Government was serious about supporting British engineering. At that time we had aircraft - civil and military-, shipbuilding, automobile, rail rolling stock, heavy electrical generating, military equipment manufacturing, advanced medical science, steel and steel fabrication industries. And on and on.
By the time my own children were old enough to make choices I earnestly advised them to avoid engineering, unless thinking of moving abroad.
Doonhamer - I like looking back at British engineering achievements from the past, but it's depressing too. Our grandson is interested in engineering, partly because he hears about Rolls Royce in Derby, but it seem like an uphill choice compared to other options.
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