Open Thread 6

@David B Benson, yes, yet one continues to see a steady stream of critiques of the Danes, such as this one. It certainly makes one wonder who knows what they are talking about, and who is having their objectivity coloured by ideology.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8040656/Stuxnet-virus-attack-on-Iranian-nuclear-programme-the-first-strike-by-computer.html

I hope this link works. More on stuxnet.

Peter Lalor was right to stress the potential import of the sort of sabotage (politica/industrial) speculated on here.

while we try and work out the technical and practical possibilities of a global nuclear build, there is the real world out there where industrial sabotage is just as or more likely than global sharing of technologies via imagined supra states (GNEP) or invisible hands.

could stuxnet write commands for removing control rods, etc? if so, passive safety becomes mandatory.

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Greg Meyerson, thank you for pointing BNC to this Climate Spectator article.

John Newlands, This Climate Spectator article, and the general flow of articles like this on Climate Spectator, the ABC web sites, and many others give some insight into what the media believes and the general public believes. Given this, do you still stand by your statements in this post of yours this morning: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/29/2060-nuclear-scenarios-p2/#comment-102611, where you said:

I think opposition to nuclear is as much due to large capital cost and construction delays as it is to green chic. I also suspect the public realises that wind and solar are limited.

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Thats a neat video Scott – who made it? It looks like a DOE promo for the IFR that must have been made just before Clinton brought the axe down on the programme and gagged the scientists. Quite a find.

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A poll was created on an Australian computer hardware forum. “Should Australia investigate Nuclear energy?”

Yes – We should (268 votes) — 91.78%
No – We should not (16 votes) — 5.48%
Undecided, need more information or don’t care (8 votes) — 2.74%

Of course, me and Luke Weston have been pushing it pretty hard whenever the subject comes up.

Here’s a link:

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=906862

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This is bizarre. From today’s TOD is a proposal for the Chinese to make coal-to-liquids from a coal basin next to Olympic Dam
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-04/china-national-offshore-altona-agree-to-australian-coal-to-liquids-study.html
However that coal basin was formed over uranium bearing basement rocks. See diagram in
http://www.ga.gov.au/ausgeonews/ausgeonews200803/uranium.jsp
That means that apart from double the well-to-wheels CO2 of petroleum liquids that small amounts of U235 can be presumed to be vapourised in the tailpipe emissions.

It’s another example of fossil fuels getting the green light but any phase of the nuclear fuel cycle, in this case uranium mining, needs years of study. However I expect the CTL proposal to go nowhere due to lack of water.

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The Brits think they could replace 15% of their NG by 2020 with sewage sludge methane
http://www.gizmag.com/human-waste-to-gas-project-goes-live/16572/
No mention of parasitic power losses from pumping or renewing the CO2 absorbent, perhaps that comes courtesy of the electrical grid. A person interviewed on the ABC TV clip (no link) said it would replace dwindling North Sea gas.

That can’t be right; surely natural gas lasts forever.

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I am also not convinced about Stuxnet originating from some government agency or secret survice.

There have been HUGE layoffs at Siemens Europe lately and I have heared lots of people talking about malware against them. You can read lots of that stuff in German forums too…though I don`t believe someone would boost on a forum about him writing Stuxnet…

Could also be some Iranian people that are unhappy with their dictatorship.

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quokka,

I agree with most of what you say. And yes, I am promoting a public sector run organisation to lead this, like the SMA was, and the NBN is now, and the Murray Darling Basin Commission is, and the Reserve Bank of Australia is. I am not locked into private sector ownership of our electricity industry, I just cannot see any realistic way that we could have a mix of publiclly owned NPP’s and privately owned other generators, nor any way that we could reverse the 20-years long established trend of privatisation, without causing decades of delay to what we want to achieve quickly – i.e. to start on the road to cheap, clean electricity for Australia.

You say:

But I do think that “cheaper than coal” may be quite hard to meet. Perhaps “at the lowest price on a level playing field with world class safety standards” might be a better charter and see what they come up with.

I suggest we need to get the terms of reference right, clear, concise and achievable from the start. We can’t start with something, “see what they come up with” and then change direction. That would cause further delay and loss of confidence. So, first, we need to decide what we really want. I believe, if we really get to the heart of what a majority of the population wants and will support, without never ending delays, it is:

1. low cost electricity (as low cost as achievable)

2. reliable power supply

3. secure energy supply for the long term

4. clean electricity (less damage to health and the environment)

5. reasonable safety (no worse than what we have now, preferably better, but not hugely better than what we have now if it means higher cost electricity).

I wonder what you mean by ” world class safety standards”? I’d expect the organisation we are proposing would also have trounble interpreting what this means. Do you mean world class safety standards for nuclear power (i.e. some 10 to 100 times safer than what we accept now for our existing electricity generators), or do you mean “world class safety” for coal fired generators, or do you mean “world class safety standards” for the majority of the industries we have dotted througholut our cities? Remember that this is the level of safety the community accepts now for our industries. If we want higher safety it costs us, and the cost can be prohibitive. We should avoid setting requirements that are so stringent and unrealistic that we cannot progress to have cheaper, cleaner and safer electricity generation.

I would suggest we modify the terms of reference I suggested earlier to include what I understand (perhaps misunderstand) you are suggesting on safety. The modified terms of reference might be better stated as follows:

Terms of Reference: to implement low emissions electricity generation in Australia such that electricity costs less than from fossil fuel generation, and with and acceptable level of safety (better safety than our current electricity generation system).

You say:

But I do think that “cheaper than coal” may be quite hard to meet.

I agree in the short term. But this is not a short term aim. It is a goal we set for the engineers. Such a goal is what engineers work to all the time, within all the other constraints they are set. This is their expertise.

The way I see it being achieved is that the organisation would lay out options with time scale and costs. A component of the costs would be what it will cost in public funding to get to the position of cheaper than coal. I expect about a decade of public support on a decreasing scale. We will need to fund the intiial plants to the difference between new coal (about $2500/kW and new, first-of-a-kind in Australia, nuclear (about $4100/kW based on the recently contracted UAE NPPs). So we would have to provide a mix of loan guarantees (no cost to the public purse unless the public stuffs it up), electricitry price guarantees (risk mitigation but should save rather than cost us over the long term and provide more electricity price certainty and stability), and direct subsidies per MWh.

The subsidies to help new industries get started is not new. We’ve established the precedent with many types of direct subsidies for renewable energy. The subsidies for nuclear, per MWh, would be much less than what we are paying for renewables.

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Peter

Heads Up:

You should know that our interlocutor, “BilB” who has not had the nerve to return here to defend his claims about you is now taking an explicit swing at you in the Quick Links on Wind topic at LP.

Separate: Quiggin has reopened a nuclear topic over at his site.

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Hi Fran,

Thanks for the heeads up. That is good news! :) The more publicity the better.

Rather than me respond to Bilb on LP (whatever that is), can I encourage you to respond to his posts and include a link to a relevant thread on BNC. But just one link per comment. That way, those interested in finding out more, can follow up on BNC. Also encourage the lurkers to post comments and questions on the thread here.

There is no point me trying to respond to Bilb elsewhere, as you know.

I expect you are already doing all this, but this is just a prompt and encouragement to keep at it (and others too!).

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We just have to give up on our irrational requirementsd that nuclear must be 10 to 100 times safer than what we have now or we’ll prohibit it.

We just have to give up on our irrational requirementsd that nuclear must be 10 to 100 times safer than what we have now or we’ll prohibit it.

We just have to give up on our irrational requirementsd that nuclear must be 10 to 100 times safer than what we have now or we’ll prohibit it.

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Finrod has been told to stop posting on the John Quiggan thread. Anti-nukes seem to be given a free reign to say whatever they like.

Quiggin is clearly an internet conservationist. The anti-nukes are a delicate, threatened species, and must be left to themselves, well away from the competion of more robust species, if they are to thrive.

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Yep, agree with the spelling correction. I make lots of them mistakes :). My ‘storks’ for ‘stalks’ was a beauty. Most can fathom the message, most of the time. For me, the numbers are more important than the adjectives, unlike some!

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Green Car Congress has an item on Victoria’s electric car trial
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/10/victoriaevs-20101006.html#more

Here’s what I said under a pseudonym
Judge Roy Bean said something like there are none so self righteous as those trying to get their respectability back. Victoria has renewed the contract on Hazelwood, the world’s dirtiest power station, out to 2031. Only 1.4 kg of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity.
This trial has a couple of serious problems.
1) the cars are free
Sure I’d use an EV for shopping trips if someone else paid the $40k sticker price. Otherwise I might stick to the clunker.
2) 100% green energy
What a shame that pesky coal fired electricity is mixed up in the grid. Surely they could eliminate it for the trial, maybe with dedicated transmission lines. Otherwise we might suspect the green energy fraction is tiny and always will be, smoothed over through necessity by the predominant dirty energy.

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Well that didn’t last long. Quiggan’s closed the thread again, and I barely had time to read it.

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The Quiggan thread closed on the topic of who was “funding” Brave New Climate. Its the standard insinuation from the anti-nukes, but that doesn’t make it any less exasperating. Apparently no person of intelligence or integrity could form the view by rational consideration that we should go nuclear, and therefore any expression of this viewpoint must be driven by a commercial interest.

I would hazard a guess that there is in fact no funded lobbying in Australia on behalf of nuclear electricity generation interests looking to establish nuclear power generation in Australia. I assume there is probably funded lobbying in support of uranium mining interests, in a manner typical of other mining activities. If anyone has any real information (as opposed to conspiracy theories) on any nuclear related lobbying activities, I’d be interested to learn more.

When I went on the Walk Against Warming with a nuclear power t-shirt, I couple of people aggressively demanded to know who was funding me. I had to laugh. I showed the back of the cards I was handing out, which usefully stated “Business cards are FREE at http://www.vistaprint.com.au!”.

Depleted Cranium recently did a piece on how the antinuclear movement is far better funded than any nuclear lobbying. There are many antinuclear groups with significant funding, Greenpeace probably at the top of the tree. This piece was inspired by the following response to the author (Dr Buzz0) on why a pronuclear comment of his was rejected at another blog:

I accept that the content is pretty much true. .. Anyway, although I know that your comment is sensible – I’m not publishing it. Why?
Well, it’s simply because, like the nuclear lobby – I am not fair.
Also the nuke lobby has funding for its campaign. We have none.
I can’t afford to be fair-minded
Best wishes

A remarkable admission. The article and comments on the thread are well worth reading, including the following from Suzy Hobbs, director of PopAtomic Studios, which does a lot of pro-bono pro-nuclear artwork:

As the Director of a small non-profit offering nuclear energy education, I am wondering where all of this nuclear lobby money is? Seriously, we could use some! All of our (very small) budget comes from contract work and individual donors. There are very few programs offered through corporations that offer support to outreach and educational programs. In fact one of the last standing industry based nuclear education outreach programs just got dropped when B&W bought Nuclear Fuel Services.

In fact, most industry lead outreach is limited to just the communities surrounding plants and direct responses to criticism. There is almost no outreach to the general public. Even groups like NEI that are supposed to do public outreach in reality exist primarily within the industry.

The closing comment on Quiggan’s thread was from the writer who implicitly accused Barry of being a paid nuclear lobbyist shows almost exactly the same kind of double standard as Dr Buzz0 encountered – lobbying for nuclear is bad, but lobbying for renewables is good because it ‘counters’ the nuclear lobbying. Take it away, ‘Alice’ – read it and weep:

Given that I do not agree with either yours or Professor Brooks pro nuclear views and given that access to minerals in the ground has been and continues to be one source of the most intense lobbying industries – then the problem of self interested industry lobbying is more likely in nuclear than in renewables. Diversification by well resourced existing mining firms into nuclear mineral extraction would be presumably relatively easy and perhaps highly profitable.

..
I am also not going to complain that Bil B is getting funding from possible renewable energy solutions which I consider much less dangerous to the environment than nuclear use.
In fact I certainly hope Bil B does have access to funding to persuade others to seek non nuclear renewable and environmentally friendly solutions to energy use.

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eclipse: thanks for that little article on ocean mining.

I would like BNC to take the peak minerals thing seriously. This article is interesting because on the one hand it views “peak minerals” as implicitly preposterous even as it tacitly admits a problem in suggesting that earth on land contains inadequate minerals.

(One wonders btw if this claim of inadequate land based minerals is PR to justify ocean mining)

The point is, I sure would like to be able to evaluate the competing claims around these questions more intelligently, without having to lean toward one side or the other on primarily a priori philosophical grounds: if you’re a techno-optimist, you assume that if the price is right, the minerals will come. If you are a techno-pessimist, you question this assumption.

The question is too important to be decided by our temperamental and philosophical leanings and hunches.

I remember Peter Lang made a comment on this issue that made sense: which was that there is good reason to think that minerals are not in quite the same category as fossil fuels since they’ve had a lot more time to accumulate. Still: I would rather not rely on this hunch either, however well reasoned the hunch.

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Tom Keen,

Thank you for your comment. No offence taken. I understand what you are saying, and recognise that many other contributors on BNC over the past year or so have been pleading with me to stop, or at least rephrase, the line of argument I am making and your are objecting to.

However, I do not agree with you or them. My reasons are as follows:

1. I see most of the contributors on BNC as coming from the Left (left-centre, Left, hard-Left and extreme-Left). They consider what is needed to convert the people from the Left. However, I feel that most of these people cannot be persuaded (a few can). So the audience we need to be trying to get to is the vast majority in and near the centre (centre-left and centre-right). I believe these people are open minded and just want the facts. They do not want the details, they just want a short summary of the facts presented to them in a way they trust and can believe. General Peter Cosgrove made up a great term when he was starting on the campaign to ‘invade’ East Timor. He reckoned all the people watching on TV in their lounge rooms had their “Truth meter” on him. I reckon the Australian public has a very good antennae for BS. They have their “truth meter” going. They just want the truth, and the facts presented in a digestible form. I don’t have the writing skills to translate the facts into the form that the general public can accept and understand. Others have that skill. So I see my role as trying to present the facts. Others to translate it. But please, leave out the BS spin.

2. Again, I see many of the BNC contributors as being more interested in anything but the finances and economics. This is consistent with the direction the environmental NGO’s have taken for many decades. The environmental NGO’s seem to believe that their belief overrides all consideration of the economics (I am exaggerating to, make my point). Their end justifies their means. They lie as much as necessary to impose what they believe is right on society. But the majority of the public is waking up to this and becoming more sceptical. I believe, in their own way, they understand it is the economics that is the key to acceptance of nuclear and in fact to cutting GHG emissions. If we don’t get nuclear at a cost that is not going to raise electricity prices, we are in for a long delay, stop-start progress, etc.

3. So I am trying to present the arguments that I see do and will affect the decisions of the vast majority of the voting public, even if not the small extreme fringe of died-in-the-wool anti-nukes.

4. Regarding safety of NPPs. It is clear to me that:

a. nuclear is about the safest electricity generation technology that can provide our electricity needs.

b. It is 10 to 100 times safer than the existing generators, which are accepted as sufficiently safe

c. The ridiculous levels of safety requirements for nuclear are costing us an enormous amount. I expect it is making nuclear much more expensive than it could and should be. I expect nuclear would be about 25% or 50% of the cost of coal if it had been developed before coal and before the nuclear weapons were first exploded. We can’t get to that point nuclear much cheaper than coal) in a hurray, but we should be striving for that goal. We should not hide the goal either. We should be striving for Gen IV’s to provide electricity at least cost consistent with a level of safety that is as safe as the other industries and technologies we accept, but not excessively safe. The left wingers cannot be converted (most of them) so the audience we need to address are those who understand the economic impacts of high cost electricity.

d. Until low-cost Gen IV is available, we have the choice of either no nuclear or low-cost nuclear. High-cost nuclear like USA, EU etc is just not going to fly. We need to be making these points to the public, not hiding it. We need to not only advocate for nuclear, we also need to advocate for low-cost nuclear. Since the Canadian CANDU6, Korean, Chinese, Russian and Indian NPP’s are much safer than our coal plants, we should be advocating for them, not for USA and EU plants.

5. So far the BNC contributors have show a lack of interest in the economic aspects. They are repeating the mantra of the Left. They seem to think Carbon Price is the answer to cut emissions, and if that is imposed it will solve the problems. But do not seem to be able to see it wont and people, the voters, will realise this. In the absence of nuclear power, a carbon price is just another symbolic gesture, like many before. All are damaging to our economy. And we wont get nuclear while we are advocating for high cost nuclear.

6. So my challenge to you, in response to your request to me is, for you and the other serious BNC contributors to get seriously into asking your selves and discussing here how we can realistically cut GHG emissions in the absence of nuclear? What can a carbon price achieve in the absence of nuclear? What do we have to do to get nuclear to Australia asap? Will putting our efforts into getting a price on carbon really speed up or delay implementation of nuclear in Australia?

7. This is quick and I haven’t taken the time to try to make it short and succinct. My apologies. I hope readers to try to understand the point I’ve attempted to make rather than just find a few items to copy and past and take issue with. I recognise some will do that.

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I was just listening to The Science Show and caught Robyn Williams interviewing Wade Allison talking about radiation. Wade is a professor at Oxford and has just written “Radiation and Reason”, and an opinion piece in I think it was Nature on radiation safety, and misplaced fears of the phenomena. It closed with a teaser for next week when he will apparently be talking about “the nuclear option”. ABC Radio National podcasts and otherwise disseminates the audio, so go find it if interested.

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John:

I force my students to read some of the ones available online.

(humor: lest peter think I’m shoving my ideology down student’s throats; actually, I shove both mine and his down student’s throats.)

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Hi Greg

I think everyone here is interested in the economics.

I don’t get that impression.

and you heard two people on the extreme left actually agree with you about carbon prices.

True. But I get the impression the vast majority of BNC contributors are not really interested. I suspect they are just following the line of their party’s policy without really considering: “will a carbon price really have a significant effect on emissions while nuclear is banned?” Cn a carbon price speed up the implementation of nuclear or will it just delay it further?

david and I favor state builds because there’s not much evidence that nukes will get built without the state. the upfront cost is high. in the u.s., a lot higher than natural gas.

There is not much evidence that the state can build NPPs in the western democracies any more. Financing has changed. I’d suggest you need to lay out a proposal and explain how it can be implemented, financed, tax consequences, etc. Not just hand waving statements. I just can’t see how we can have a mix of state owned and public owned generators competing. That will not work. So the state would have to buy back the existing electricity supply industry. That is not going to happen. It would be reversing the trend of the past 2 decades. It would take decades to reverse that trend and there is simply no support for it (except for a few who are hanging on to the past).

I agree the state has a role to play to establish a level playing field and remove all the impediments. But I see little evidence that BNC bloggers want to discuss that in depth. Why don’t we focus on that? What are all the impediments to low cost nuclear that need to be removed? How could we do it? How long would it take? I made suggestions on various threads and here: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/31/alternative-to-cprs/

Perhaps you’d like to lead a debate to tackle these key issues. :)

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Tom Keen,

This may be surprising. I agree with just about all you’ve said in your post at 13:40.

It is my opinion that most of society are uninterested, ignorant or simply apathetic to these issues. I don’t think most people are unconvincable. Most people aren’t particularly politically motivated. I believe that they will pick the most economic energy option, mostly without even being aware of it (the invisible hand, and all that).

I agree with all that. Especially, I do believe they will pick the most economic energy option, and as you say without trying to understand the details. But they do have a sixth sense for developing a gut feeling for it (most of the time; they have been hoodwinked about renewables however).

However, these people do all vote, and their opinions do all count. They’re definitely not all stupid, and will base their opinions on a collection of what they hear, read and see – and many people (definitely not just lefties) would be turned off reading something like “nuclear is excessively safe”. But that’s just my opinion of society, I doubt there’s any way to quantify this.

Some will be turned off and some will listen, take it in, weigh it and come to a decision in time. Those that are turned off have been influenced by 40+ years of anti nuclear rhetoric and Greenpeace type anti-nuclear propaganda. I strongly believe we need to confront this head on. We should not shy away from pointing out that nuclear is excessively safe and costing far more than it should because of overzealous safety requirements. I believe we need to get this point across. I’d urge readers here to reread this article: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/07/04/what-is-risk/
Or at least understand figures 1 and 2.

Understand and spread the word that nuclear is some 10 to 100 times safer than coal and safer than just about all other technologies. It is excessively safe. As a result of our excessive safety requirements and the other impediments we impose on nuclear, it is too expensive. Because it is too expensive, we can’t afford it, so we continue with technologies that cause 10 to 100 times more early fatalities in the general population than would be the case if we had nuclear instead. Yet those higher levels of fatalities are acceptable to the public. We need to get this message out, instead of shirking it. Why are we shying away from tackling it? Why are we shying away from confronting the wrong information spread by Greenpeace and the like for the past 40 odd years?

We’re not going to see lower cost nuclear (or nuclear at all) in Australia unless a lot more people are okay with it, and we have both major political parties on side.

I agree. To get people on side I strongly urge we should be explaining:

1. If we want to cut GHG emissions at a reasonable cost, we’ll have to go nuclear.
2. Nuclear is safer than what we have now, so let’s not argue about the safety aspects. They are plenty good enough.
3. What we need to do is to implement nuclear to Australia at least cost and asap.
4. Furthermore, if we want reliable electricity supply, long term energy security, and reduce the adverse health and environmental impacts of energy supply, we should go nuclear.

If they know that it’s already safe enough, that waste and fuel availability isn’t an issue (i.e. they know the TRUTH), and if it is cheap, most people will not oppose it.

I agree. But I think you are missing a really important point. It is not cheap at the moment if we try to introduce nuclear with a USA or EU type regulatory regime and with all the impediments to low cost nuclear that are currently in place. Here is a list of some of them: https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/31/alternative-to-cprs/#comment-86256

“The sort of impediments and regulatory distortions to the market that are blocking nuclear in Australia are:
1. ban on nuclear power
2. high investor risk premium because of the politics
3. Renewable Energy Targets
4. Renewable Energy Certificates
5. Feed in Tariffs for renewables
6. Subsidies and tax advantages for renewable energy
7. Subsidies and tax advantages for fossil fuel electricity generators
8. subsidies for transmission and grid enhancements to support renewable energy
9. massive funding for research into renewable energy
10. massive subsidies for research into carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)
11. Guarantees that the government will carry the risk for any leakage from CCS
12. No equivalent guarantee for management of once used nuclear fuel
13. Massive subsidies and government facilitation for the gas industry, coal seam gas and coal to gas industries (despite the latter putting toxic chemicals into the ground water and the Great Artesian Basin water)
14. Fast tracking of the approvals process for wind power, solar power, gas industry, coal industry while nuclear industry remains band from even fair comparative studies by Treasury, Productivity Commission, ABARE, Department of Climate change and more. We can just imagine what the approvals process would be like for a nuclear power plant!!

So we need to convince the public, media and politicians that there is a solution to our desires for cheap clean electricity. But it means we’ve got to let go of some of our deeply held beliefs about the safety of nuclear power and the need for excessive requirements. We have a lot of unwinding to do. We need to explain that nuclear is about the safest of all the generating options, excessively safe, and too expensive because of our excessive requirements.

I say we not only need to explain that to the public, we also need to explain it to many of the contributors here. Especially those that jeep arguing to not mention the high cost being caused by excessive safety requirements and other imposts.

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Sorry, scroll down to the “South Africa seeking to restart nuclear program at lower cost” section.

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Peter Lang:

It seems a pity that most threads on BNC seem to end up being clogged by your constant reiterations of the same message. Has it not occurred to you that your views are already understood by most readers here? If you hope to alter the opinions of any who have the temerity to disagree (all lefties in your book), might it not be more constructive to answer specific criticisms or adopt another style of argument rather than writing the same thing over and over again?

In order to assist you to make a fresh start, allow me to make a few statements with follow up questions.

1) Your previous post ended with an italicised list of 14 points that represented impediments to low cost nuclear. I think it likely that most readers here would agree with you.
2) In a previous comment (point d, 9/11 at 11.21), you wrote the following: “Since the Canadian CANDU 6, Korean, Chinese, Russian and Indian NPPs are much safer than our coal plants, we should be advocating for them, not for USA and EU plants”.

A) Could you please explain what it is about the USA or EU plants that purportedly makes them intrinsically safer than the others you list? In other words, what is missing from the designs of the latter that enables them to be built more cheaply? I might be missing something that is obvious to someone such as yourself with a technical and engineering background.

B) Do you think the 14 impediments listed under 1) are more or less of a barrier to low cost nuclear than the absent safety features of non USA and EU reactors?

3) What do you consider to be the legitimate role of the state? Might it not include defence? Do you think energy security and AGW represent threats? If so, is it a legitimate role of governments to respond to these threats? Are said threats more likely to impact adversely on future or present generations? Is it the responsibility of free market investors to concern themselves with the long term future or would they expect governments to undertake the role? When threats are acute, as in wartime, governments direct the private sector to produce what is deemed necessary for defence. Would similar action now to address energy security and AGW strike you as unnecessarily alarmist? Alternatively, do you think that a laissez faire approach to these problems will suffice? If so, have you studied statements from nuclear industry insiders who claim that there will be little nuclear roll out without strong government backing, not least because it is impossible to expect the private sector to make inter generational (long term pre return) investments?

4) Given your espousal of government delegation of energy policy direction to a quango similar to the Snowy Mountain Authority, I find your apparent hatred of anything not privately run to be confusing, particularly as you are advocating loan guarantees and subsidies to nuclear suppliers. It would almost appear that your motivation constantly to bang on about the left’s inferiority to the right is more important to you than identifying the optimum means of addressing the threats facing us.

5) While accepting that conventional nuclear power is not quite competitive with power from coal, might it not be better to focus on the fact that it is, nevertheless, a lot cheaper and more reliable than renewables and that coal costs will probably rise to delete its current economic advantage. This is what you originally did on BNC before you started banging on constantly about making nuclear less safe as if this will have much influence on the cost of the power it generates? There are new nuclear technologies that hold out this promise and, perhaps, you would serve all our interests better were you to campaign for their rapid development.

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@Douglas Wise

Could you please explain what it is about the USA or EU plants that purportedly makes them intrinsically safer than the others you list? In other words, what is missing from the designs of the latter that enables them to be built more cheaply? I might be missing something that is obvious to someone such as yourself with a technical and engineering background.

It is my understanding that Gen III+ designs (AP-1000, EPR) have superior probability risk assessments than older stuff. From memory the probability of core melt for AP-1000 is of the order of 1 in 10^7 years and probability of large radiation release is about a tenth of that. These figures may be an order or two of magnitude better than for older designs.

I would like to see these figures tabulated for various designs so that discussion of safety could have at least some qualitative basis.

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Let’s move this discussion to the other thread. :)

Thanks.

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Quiggin has now put me on moderation. I don’t expect this condition to be lifted anytime soon.

He has not informed other contributors of this yet.

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