https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10...
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy * That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy * This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage * The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand * The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
The more we dance around nuclear, the longer we're still pumping coal by product into the atmosphere... a non storage solution.
Move to nuclear faster. Do it now. You want your EVs right?
