Dave's nuclear letter
From Energy-Experts
Chairman of BBC, Mark Thomson – the controller, Head of BBC News, PM, Today, World Service, Roger Harrabin, etc
And the proper newspapers as copies.
Dear Sir
On the 8th Jan you interviewed Dr Grimston on PM, about nuclear power where he was allowed to raise unchallenged the assertion that only nuclear energy could provide “baseload” energy and that therefore this ruled renewables out for producing large amounts of power.
This was based on a letter, purportedly written by him and 6 of his colleagues who all have an interested in nuclear technology, unlike members of this group who are unaffiliated. (in the main) In fact this is a lobbying letter being pushed by the nuclear industry and there are various versions of this doing the rounds.
This assertion is technically incorrect – see the letter (Lisa – date please) below which was previously send and to which I have had no reply.
Could you please advice if you will be able to correct the bias permitted in regard to the base load “red herring”, presented by a partial group.
I am sure you will agree we need a fully informed debate and not one driven by partial informant.
This group is happy to provide unbiased and peer reviewed comment on all aspects of the very complex energy issue.
Kind Regards
Dave Andrews Secretary Claverton Energy Group
Dear Editor
(Lisa – put the date we send this in please, and insert it above)
Here is a contribution to the debate from the Claverton Energy Group of 160 independent experts.
I think that the draft has 3 clear messages: · the only nuclear power can meet base load argument and rules out renewables is wrong, and · wind and nuclear power as proposed in the John Hutton “ mix of energy sources” argument, is a poor combination. · Nuclear itself requires MORE fossil back up and interconnectors than wind and renewables
You may wish to edit it down to a 1 page letter or make it into an article.
I can provide full references if interested and full signatures from up to 160 group members.
We are an independent group of scientist and experts - so I cannot claim that all members sign up to this particular letter but the majority have argued about it on line for the last several week and I have done my best to present a coherent collation of our fairly clear views, with one or two notable exceptions who are vehemently pro nuclear.
Details about the group generally at: http://energydiscussiongroup.wikispaces.com/ Members and qualifications of group: http://energydiscussiongroup.wikispaces.com/Members+Profiles+%28thumbnails%29
Kind regards
Dave Andrews
Secretary Claverton Energy Group
The Red Herring of “ only Nuclear Power can meet base load “ - in fact wind and renewables can meet baseload just as well.
By Dave Andrews, secretary of The Claverton Energy Group. http://energydiscussiongroup.wikispaces.com/ and http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/claverton/
Wind power and renewables can perfectly reliably meet the UKs base-load and peak demand for power, indeed wind power can meet a lot more than the baseload, (whereas nuclear cannot, due to its inflexibility) and Malcolm Grimston and his seven colleagues (Letters, Guardian Jan 7th 2008) are misleading about the operation of electricity grids and power stations when they claim that it can’t by raising the spurious distinction (in this case) of base load:
"For base load power - the irreducible minimum electricity use, which runs to more than 20,000MW in the UK - intermittent sources of power, including most of the renewables, are ineffective." They then go on to imply that, accordingly, base load power must and can only come from continuously running (ie base load) stations such as coal or nuclear.
Serious study suggests that both their premise and conclusions are incorrect. During inevitable low wind periods – ie week long anti-cyclones, the National Grid would do what it did this Christmas when half the nuclear power stations in this country were out of action – and still are, - they would simply start up existing coal or gas stations (already built and paid for or their necessary future replacements), which are held in readiness for this very purpose to back up nuclear or other large power station loss.
Other techniques, all used already to a greater or lesser extent in this country and around the world, routinely deal with the sudden loss of power stations, or with TV programme load surges (FA Cups, Royal Weddings etc). The lights do not go out. Standard every day methods used by National Grid include: automatic shedding of non urgent loads (steel works, cold stores), energy storage (immersion heaters and night store heaters), use of tariffs and smart meters to influence consumer consumption patterns, ripple control of customers loads by the utility, inter-country and inter-continental connection of power grids (W Europe is linked to Russia), and surprisingly little known perhaps, in France, USA and UK the calling up of vast numbers of small diesel generators, already owned for private local emergency use (hospital, water works, cold stores) and all these methods mentioned can be readily extended to deal with any increased uncertainty due to a large amount of wind generation or other unreliable renewable generation.
In fact the largest potential cause of sudden power loss in Great Britain is Sizewell B nuclear power station, and it is the size of that station, 1.3 GW, compared to a maximum demand of 60 GW that sets what is known in the trade as the Fast Reserve Generation Margin. So nuclear power simply is not base load as asserted - these nuclear power stations must stop both in an emergency and for regularly planned reasons and therefore themselves need back up.
In the theoretical but nevertheless technically possible case that an otherwise close to 100% wind power regime were substituted for during low output periods by the already existing fossil fuel fired power stations and the other energy management techniques outlined, carbon and other emissions would be cut to a very low fraction of present levels.
Furthermore, in the long run, it is perfectly possible to provide all the UKs energy, ie that needed for heating and transport in addition to electricity, from wind in a reasonable time frame – several decades - , but this cannot be done with nuclear due to the slow rate at which nuclear power can be built and its inflexibility.
A recent Irish study (2008 All Island Grid Study. Study Overview, Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment) has shown that close to 50% wind generated electrical energy is possible, and that is for a relatively small country, without grid inter-connectors.
A theoretical 100% wind power case is discussed here because wind is a proven technology, and is growing globally at 25% per annum, with world capacity for the last three years being 55 GW 70GW and 90 GW and we understand the costs, and 100% wind would be the hardest to integrate reliably into a grid system, but nevertheless this "worst case" could be perfectly feasibly done so therefore can any lesser fraction.
A more optimal approach, one advanced by people who have studied the issue properly, would be to also bring on other renewable generation such as tidal, wave, biomass, roof top photo voltaic, tidal lagoon and pumped and other large scale storage (but not the Severn Barrage), and biomass powered combined heat and power (CHP), in tandem with a massive programme of energy efficiency measures to cut demand.
Studies by Dr. Mark Barrett at University College (http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/markbarrett/Energy/Energy.htm) and ( http://energydiscussiongroup.wikispaces.com/Green+light) has spent years modelling in detail the yearly operation of the entire UK energy system, with real hourly weather data, and modelled inter connector flows, hour by hour using the above technology mix (and assuming only a 8 GW inter connector, only 4 times the size of the present connection to France) and these indicate that it is technologically possible to provide up to 95% of UK electrical power from a mix of renewables at the reasonable price of about 5p/kWh.
In a Radio 4 Interview (P.M 8th January) Grimston, presumably knowing that wind power proponents point out the usefulness of inter-connectors in allowing renewables to provide a continuous supply (but they are also installed to increase security of supply generally), repeated the misleading base load argument and went on, by citing the fact that we already import power from France via inter-connector, which happens to be nuclear, to wrongly imply the use of inter connectors as advocated by renewables promoters demonstrates that inter connectors necessarily implies nuclear a wholly fallacious conclusion - the existing French inter connectors and others planned from Yorkshire to Norway and UK to Holland can equally well bring in and balance non-nuclear power. In fact France often imports power from us when it's nuclear capacity is short and we are connected by France to many non-nuclear countries. Incidentally a recent Chinese inter-connector under construction, non-nuclear is 3000 kM in length.
What he also failed to say is that nuclear is so inflexible that at night the French reactors, which can't be readily switched off or adjusted, must export surplus power to neighbouring European countries like UK, Germany and Belgium to keep the lights on. He also failed to mention the 3000 x 1.6 MW emergency diesel generators in private hands in France that operate alongside the special EJP tariff that encourages consumers, 16 days per year, at half hour notice, to switch off their demand from the French grid when it's nuclear power stations are unavailable. Even the Giant CERN nuclear particle accelerator is influenced to do this.
He also failed to mention that due to nuclear’s inflexibility, the enormously expensive pumped storage station at Dinorwig was built, and the hopeless and expensive night storage heaters were inflicted on the population – both to mop up surplus night-time nuclear generation.
It is widely recognized by experts that interconnecting Europe properly will greatly increase the reliability of power and make renewables dispersed over the continent able to meet both base load and peak power in all participating countries.
The fact of nuclear inflexibility is another reason why nuclear is the wrong road to go down. Malcolm Wicks' notion of "a diversity of energy sources" that must include nuclear is technically wrong and unachievable. If we want to have a large amount of renewable electricity, then the fewer large inflexible producers like nuclear the better - the two technologies simply do not mix – and vice verse. The correct approach is to retain enough existing fossil stations for managing peak demand especially during infrequent periods of widespread low wind, and or replace them as they age or are outlawed due to their poor emissions, (something that will happen with our without large scale wind by 2016 due to EU regulations), massive expansion of inter-connectors and electrical storage (new pumped hydro, NaS, VRB, vehicle batteries, compressed air, and others), - all of which technologies exist. The cost of keeping a fossil station idle, but ready to run in a few hours, as most of them are in fact throughout the summer, is very low, since by far the biggest cost of operating a power station is the fuel.
We can easily do better than the pitiful 4% saving in C02 that the proposed nuclear programme could deliver. In parallel with a massive wind programme, we could construct city wide and town wide combined heat and power district heating schemes as is common throughout sensible Denmark and Germany as promoted by William Orchard Partners, an advisor to the Select Committee on Energy. We know not only that these CHPs can be built rapidly, but they can halve the overall need for UK gas by replacing the very large fraction of the gas supply that today in this country is used solely for heating with the otherwise wasted heat from power stations.
This quantity of wasted heat is equal to about 1/3rd of the energy we quite stupidly additionally import purely for heating. The reason we don’t do this is, that with energy policy being driven by the energy companies and the power companies, they would see there markets significantly reduced. CHP technology, unlike nuclear, will work very well in tandem with a massive wind programme. If we look further ahead to a time when gas or any fossil fuel is getting scarce, wind derived electricity could substantially help fill the energy for heating gap by feeding energy into the district or community heating infrastructure so constructed.
The concept of base load is thus a red herring in discussions of this sort and the eminent professors should know better.
A further point that remains unsatisfactorily answered by those who promote nuclear energy is that of the remaining reserves of uranium ores. Not estimated stocks, calculated from what we may expect to find - past over-optimism on oil and coal should have taught us the danger of doing that - but what is known to be there and which can be economically extracted. A recent New Scientist editorial, though suggesting that we should not entirely discount nuclear, noted that worldwide supplies of cheap uranium are unlikely to last more than a few decades and that a less centralised and more efficient approach to generation based on renewables will be the future.
This letter is a fair distillation of years of debate by over 160 energy experts (not whom all agree on the points raised here, it has to be said, but most do), and this is how the energy debate should be conducted – newspapers and media should not merely print the opinion of clearly highly biased experts no matter how eminent.
Yours faithfully
Dave Andrews
Secretary
Claverton Energy Group
