Skip to main content

Neeraj Oak reports on the APPCCG meeting on the UK Energy Bill

Image
By
Ever since the birth of commercial nuclear power at Calder Hall, Cumbria in 1954, fission-based reactors have been an important part of the UK energy mix. Today, policy makers stand at a crossroads. Increasing demand for electricity and the constraints of carbon reduction treaties are forcing the government to consider renewal and expansion of our existing nuclear power generation capacity. At the same time, the old spectres of safety, cost and nuclear waste still haunt the industry.

I was recently lucky enough to attend a meeting hosted by the APPCCG and NCG on the current UK Energy Bill and it's relation to new nuclear generation capacity. Among the large number of attendees were  Hergen Haye (head of new nuclear, DECC),  Dr. Nigel Knee (head of nuclear policy, EDF energy), former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP as well as representatives of academia, trade unions and environmental organisations. The meeting was chaired by Joan Walley MP (labour). Interestingly, the only major party not represented at this meeting were the conservatives, which left the burden of defending government policy to the DECC.

Points of contention at the moment are numerous, but a few do stand out. The government appears not to be upholding its commitment not to subsidise nuclear energy, at least in the eyes of the Green Party and present academics. The current energy bill details a change in the subsidy mechanism for low-carbon energy sources, known as the contract-for-difference feed-in tariff (CfD). While CfD is openly referred to as a subsidy in the renewable energy industry, the fact that the nuclear energy industry is also eligible for its benefits has raised significant criticism.

The time and cost of constructing nuclear power stations was also in the spotlight, with special ire reserved for EDF's ongoing EPR reactor project at Flamanville in France, which is currently 4 years behind schedule and is projected to cost more that €8.5 billion despite initial estimated cost of €3.3 billion. Further, such time and cost overruns have been alarmingly common in Europe in recent years. The preferred configuration for new nuclear in the UK is similar to that of Flamanville, an EPR reactor administered by EDF. There were calls, especially from academics, for other options to be tabled.

Finally, in the wake of the Fukushima crisis, safety and disposal of nuclear waste are also raising considerable concern. With the commitment of Germany to a nuclear-free energy sector, the possibility of the UK following suit is slightly more likely. However, this will depend on how this change affects Germany's progress towards carbon-reduction targets. It's too early to say, but for now it appears as though the government will look to retain the status quo, renewing nuclear generation capacity without necessarily expanding it.  This leaves environmentalists opposed to nuclear energy in somewhat of a dilemma, as they must choose between supporting new nuclear energy, or siding with more carbon-intensive alternatives until renewable energy technologies mature.
Neeraj Oak

----------------------
Blog entry by Neeraj Oak
Bristol Centre for Complexity Science (BCCS)
Neeraj.Oak@bristol.ac.uk
----------------------  

Popular posts from this blog

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

By
This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment.  If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...
Read more

1-in-200 year events

By
You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...
Read more

Your Waste of Time: Art-Based Geographical Practices and the Environment

By
This blog post thinks through the themes of aesthetic interventions, sensing time and engendering response-ability using artistic responses to climate change. Here, these themes are drawn from one piece of art, Your Waste of Time, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. This performative showcasing of glacial ice establishes interactions and relations between human bodies and icy materialities- but what is at stake here and what potentialities could be created through artistic practices? These are questions that have arisen through my current dissertation, where I hope to explore artistic responses to environmental degradation through the materialities of ice and plastic. For the piece Your Waste of Time, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson transported several large blocks of ice from Vatnajökull, the largest and oldest glacier in Iceland, to the Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider (Eliasson, 2006). This glacier is almost incomprehensibly ancient, with some parts dating fro...
Read more