Wind Turbine Factories ... or Late & Expensive Nuclear?

The nuclear reactor under construction in Finland is the 'EPR' design that the French power company EDF wants to build in the UK, and the one that the pro-nuclear UK government used as the basis of figures in its nuclear power consultation document. According to an article in Professional Engineering (October 2008) completion is now delayed by 3 years until 2012. When will governments learn that the world's 450 odd nuclear plants built over several decades are all one-off prototypes that can never be mass produced for a reliable and falling cost.

This brings us nicely to wind turbines which can and are mass produced in tens of thousands with falling costs .... but not in the UK. The UK cannot meet its targets for wind energy in part because of a world shortage of turbines (“UK wind farm plans on brink of failure” Observer, Sunday October 19 2008). Wartime Britain created industries and as recently as the 1970's the government's National Enterprise Board founded a successful semiconductor company (Inmos). Isn't it time therefore to establish a turbine manufacturer in the UK. If necessary it could be done via an agreement to licence an existing design or finance the creation of a UK subsidiary. I can already hear the howls of protest that governments shouldn't intervene in commerce ... oddly though, it seems to be perfectly acceptable for state owned EDF to buy UK power generators. And if the UK has to start from scratch, can it really be true that its engineers can build aircraft carriers, missiles and tanks for their government but are stumped by windmills?

Samso Shows the Way

In Robin McKie's excellent description in the Guardian of how the Danish island of Samso has cut its carbon emissions by 140%, it says that to do the same in Britain would cost $1100bn and is therfore impractical. But is it? If we aim to cut 100% not 140%, we get a cost of £432bn. Next let's scrap a few of the government's more crackpot schemes: Heathrow 3rd runway (£13bn), motorway widening (£13bn), ID cards (£18bn), new nuclear (£48bn), clean-up of new nuclear (£80bn). Total £172bn. [Unfortunately the £20bn spent on the Iraq war and the £80bn we'll have to pay for clean-up of existing nuclear, is water under the bridge.] Spread the remaining £260bn over the lifetime of the renewables and we're down to say £13bn per year or about £500 per household .... that's about ten times less than we spend on motoring. But then household bills will go down because we no longer need fossil fuels or expensive nuclear. Following Samso's example or something like it, may well be the cheapest energy strategy on offer.

Voodoo economics goes nuclear

A new report reveals that building a new generation of nuclear power stations would mean spending large sums of taxpayers money. Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance was written by ex Guardian environment correspondent Paul Brown.

The report exposes fifty years of disastrous performance, failed technology and broken promises. It also highlights escalating bills to the taxpayer and a backlog of toxic waste.

Download it from FOE website
here.

Vassili Nesterenko

I learnt from a Guardian obituary that a brilliant Soviet scientist died this summer (25 August 2008). His work included the development of a mobile nuclear power station to be used to power missile launchers. Shortly after its completion his career took a different turn when the Chernobyl nuclear power station blew up in 1986. He flew over the burning atomic plant in a helicopter and in the middle of radioactive smoke, threw liquid nitrogen containers onto the reactor core. He survived but three others in the same helicopter died. He then began to study the effects of the radioactivity released by the accident and eventually founded the Belrad Institute to continue this work. Because of his activities, he lost his job and was threatened him with internment in a psychiatric asylum. He is quoted as saying: "The international nuclear lobby does not want to recognise the the scale of the disaster in our country because if it does, nuclear power will be finished".

His words add to the urgent warnings of many scientists and engineers who have come to the conclusion that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous.

How Europe could supply its electricity needs without new nuclear power stations

A complete plan for how Europe could supply its electricity needs without new nuclear power stations has been produced by the Club of Rome with German government support. You can download the full report PDF or visit the desertec website for more information.

The main renewable energy technologies described (solar CSP, wind, solar PV and marine) are all eminently suited to mass production because they require production of many thousands of identical units and no unusual hazards are involved. Existing industries could retool to produce renewables as quickly as they switched to military production at the start of World War 2.

More about this at: Open Engineering