Weird how anything that can possibly reduce fossil fuel usage is always too expensive, yet building pipelines, and north sea oil platforms, and shipping oil all over the world is free or the cost is not worth talking about.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Weird how anything that can possibly reduce fossil fuel usage is always too expensive
That's not true. Wind and solar are often cheaper than fossil fuels and the prices are still going down.
Sure but they can't replace fossil fuels. Every single renewable energy scheme that a government invests int has Natural Gas plants that are running 24/7 to handle peak demand and smooth out the supply curve of solar/wind.
Either they run to smooth out the curve OR they run 24/7. Not both.
They can't be kept on cold standby, so they aren't running at 100% capacity 24/7, but they do have to run.
You could install solar panels on five million homes for that amount of money.
The UK doesn't have great solar energy potential because of the high latitude and general lack of sun. Wind is much more practical in this country however like solar it provides it's a non-stable energy source. To have a stable energy grid you ideally want a mix of stable and non-stable sources or non-stable sources and large battery storage facilities.
But that would solve something. And that's not wanted.
So instead we will lament ballooning costs and build times for nuclear and invent narratives how that's totally not caused by nuclear being a shitty alternative to renewables and storage.
This way we can spend another few decades on building a none-solution while just accidently also having sunk so much money already that changing to an actual solution doesn't make sense anymore.
Oh, sorry. Were we expected to stop burning fossil fuels? Doesn't seem to work for some reason, but don't worry. Building nuclear will totally solve this. Any decade now... (And no, we totally did not build to little anyway, just to make sure it will never solve anything even if the unimaginable happens and build times and costs become manageable...)
My favorite is when they try and blame environmentalists for giving nuclear a bad rep and that's why more nuclear isn't being built. As if those making the decisions care about what environmentalists think.
To fair, there are these so-called "environmentalists" fighting nuclear... in their breaks between protesting wind turbines and solar panels. And who actually finances those is not exactly secret.
EDF, the French developer responsible for the project, is demanding more money from the UK in order to fulfill the contract.
Owned by the French state toboot.
Ok. Get to work.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The U.K. government says nuclear projects like the Hinkley Point C plant are a key part of its plans to ensure greater energy independence and achieve its “net zero” by 2050 strategy.
Officials had previously said that the Hinkley plant would start producing electricity in 2027, but the completion date has now been pushed back to 2029 at the earliest.
“Like other infrastructure projects, we have found civil construction slower than we hoped and faced inflation, labor and material shortages — on top of Covid and Brexit disruption,” said Stuart Crooks, managing director of Hinkley Point C.
The Conservative government is investing heavily in nuclear power, with ambitions to generate up to a quarter of the country’s projected electricity demand by 2050.
Critics, including the U.K. government’s own climate advisers, say the U.K.'s support for new domestic oil and gas production and its slow pace in transitioning to green energy were undermining its “net zero” pledges.
Authorities have promised to reduce emissions by 68% by 2030, eventually reaching net-zero — or releasing only as much greenhouse gas as can be absorbed again through natural or technological means — by 2050.
The original article contains 374 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Will anglo countries ever learn anything from other countries that can build things at reasonable prices? I'm guessing no.
And yet the people bitching about the cost will be the first ones to lose their minds when there's a potential safety issue because corners were cut.
Or are we to assume that all these low-cost reactors are safe as houses because being not-anglo makes them inherently better for some reason?
Spain and South Korea build high rail infrastructure for one tenth the cost of the US.
Do you think they are cutting corners in construction?
The cost of construction in the anglosphere doesn't come from "too much safety". It comes from a culture of consultants and managers and legalized graft.
Oh, yes. Spain, the home of "complete lack of corruption".
Give your head a shake. Corruption is everywhere, but in NA they have to pay closer to full cost for skilled trades and have very close eye kept on the results being safe and to spec.
I'm pretty well acquainted with the situation. I'd recommend this research on the subject that are mainly applicable to building transit, but I expect the same observations are generally true in other megaprojects: https://transitcosts.com/
From the executive summary:
In our New York case, we show examples of redundancy in blue-collar labor, as did others (Rosenthal 2017; Munfah and Nicholas 2020); we also found overstaffing of white-collar labor in New York and Boston (by 40-60% in Boston), due to general inefficiency as well as interagency conflict, while little of the difference (at most a quarter) comes from differences in pay.
Projects in the anglosphere are overstaffed for both design and construction, and there's little evidence to show that there are better outcomes. Costs in Sweden are 20% those of the US, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to claim that Swedish workers are undercompensated or produce shoddy work.
As for "to spec", the SF Central Subway, which opened 5 years after it was planned to and cost 3x as much as initially forecast, had delays because the contractor attempted to get away with using sub-standard steel. In order to save time and open sooner, the city kept some of the sub-standard rails in use in lower-traffic areas.