Hinkley Point C in doubt after British government delays approval (nuclear power)
The government said ministers would now conduct another review of the controversial project and make an announcement in the early autumn about whether to give it the green light.
The announcement surprised EDF, the French energy company leading Hinkley Point C. EDF was preparing to sign contracts with the government on Friday but has now cancelled press interviews that it was planning to hold with Vincent de Rivaz, the boss of its UK arm.
Greg Clark, the business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, said: “The UK needs a reliable and secure energy supply and the government believes that nuclear energy is an important part of the mix.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/28/hinkley-point-c-to-go-ahead-after-edf-board-approves-project
This really has astonished everyone. EDF had a controversial board meeting yesterday, which voted 10-7 to go ahead (with one director resigning over it), and they had everything ready for a signing ceremony today. Now they're taking down the tent, and the Chinese investors are flying back to China. The British government is refusing to say anything more than you see in the article.
"EDF shares rose as much as 8 percent in Paris"
= new reply since forum marked as read
just 4 days ago:
By TristanCork | Posted: January 25, 2016
The final decision on whether the controversial new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is expected to be made on Wednesday in Paris – with French energy firm EDF wrestling with last-minute jitters over the project.
The uncertainty over whether Hinkley C will get the 'Final Investment Decision' (FID) go-ahead looks like going right to the moment the board of the state-owned French energy giants meet tomorrow, with conflicting developments even in the past few days.
Read more at http://www.somersetlive.co.uk/hinkley-point-c-decision-expected-wednesday-edf/story-28599133-detail/story.html#q2PbBSgUtg8tSyMh.99
Sunday 17 April 2016 12.11 BST
France will go ahead with construction of the £18bn Hinkley Point nuclear power plant in Britain and will begin agreeing technical details in the coming weeks, the French economy minister has said.
...
“Now we have to finalise the work, and especially the technical and industrial work, very closely with EDF, with the British government, to be in a situation to sign in the coming week or month.”
...
Earlier this month, the French energy minister, Ségolène Royal, said that a postponement of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power project was still under discussion.
Macron’s views also appeared at odds with the message that EDF unions took after meeting him last week, when he reportedly said he had not yet decided whether to go ahead with the nuclear plant and that a final investment decision would be taken by early May.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/17/france-go-ahead-hinkley-point-macron-andrew-marr-show
By Kamal Ahmed
Economics editor
24 July 2016
...
No project better sums up how investment in major infrastructure projects is now a global issue than Hinkley Point, the £18bn plan for a new nuclear power station in Somerset backed by France's EDF energy company and one of China's main nuclear suppliers.
Mr Hammond said that the government still supported the project, and that a final agreement would be signed "hopefully over the next few days" after an EDF board meeting to agree the details.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36877573
It really was a complete surprise for the UK government to hold things up.
While renewables are delivering a quarter of UK electricity - in 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 - 35% of those renewables are biomass, rather than solar (9% of renewables over the year, and 6% in the 1st quarter of 2016) or wind (about 50%). And that biomass is largely imported wood (eg "Compared to 2015 Q1, generation from bioenergy increased by 18.0 per cent to 8.3 TWh largely due to an conversion at Drax Power Station to high-range co-firing (85 per cent to 100 per cent biomass)"
. I'm not really convince importing ever more wood is sustainable in the long term, so it would take a huge increase in the wind generation to replace nuclear and coal by 2025. Or gas.
BY JOE ROMM JUL 28, 2016 12:05 PM
<snip>
The transition to a carbon-free grid has begun and is unstoppable
Most people, including most opinion-makers and journalists covering energy and the environment, are not up-to-date on the “miraculous” and game-changing revolutions that have occurred just in the last couple of years with such core enabling climate solutions as solar power, wind power, LED lighting, batteries, and electric vehicles.
That’s why I launched my ongoing series “Almost Everything You Know About Climate Change Solutions Is Outdated.” As I wrote last week: If it surprises you that U.S. solar has jumped 100-fold in the last decade — and prices are now under 4 cents per kilowatt-hour — you should read this post.
I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve already written on this, especially since Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has repeatedly made the same point, as has the International Energy Agency (IEA), as has Goldman Sachs. But I haven’t written much about Goldman Sachs’ findings yet, so here’s their core conclusion from their new July 20 report, “The Low Carbon Economy: Our Thesis In 60 CHARTS” (emphasis in original):
In a debate that is often dominated by strong views on what should or could happen in the future, we let the numbers speak for themselves. In our eyes, a relatively clear picture is emerging from the data: Select low carbon technologies are rapidly taking market share in a number of sectors and are changing the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed across the global economy.
These technologies are now at a scale and growing at a pace that they deliver carbon emission savings at the gigatonne scale, but they are also transforming the competitive dynamics in industries like lighting, power generation and autos.
Renewables, efficiency, and electrification of transport have emerged as the big winners in the race to find the most affordable, scalable, carbon-free sources for power generation and travel. Many core technologies are growing exponentially while cost and performance steadily improve.
Here is what Goldman Sachs expects to happen just over the next decade:
The result of this revolution, they conclude, is that “On our wind and solar numbers, emissions in IEA scenarios could peak as early as c.2020, rather than 2030.”...
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/28/3802326/nuclear-power-renewables-cheap/
They will shout their stupid refrain that "nuclear energy is too expensive" and "it takes too long" without any explanation of the fact that using technology from the 1960's and 1970's the world built 440 nuclear power plants in countries still enjoying some of the lowest electricity rates in the world.
That's been explained many times, you don't understand it but you call us "stupid".
There is no hell deep enough, hot enough, cruel enough to absolve them of the consequences of their fear and ignorance. Future generations, should they survive this ignorance of their forbearers will not forgive them, nor should they.
Yes, we are all-powerful evil demons from hell, we used our evil powers to stop Bush's godly Nuclear Rennaissance and Nuclear 2010 programs!
Last edited Sat Jul 30, 2016, 10:01 AM - Edit history (2)
"Demons from hell" perfectly describes these ignoramuses.
Nuclear energy has saved, as published in an unequivocally stated and researched paper in one of the world's most prominent scientific journals, written by one of the world's most prominent climate scientists, 1.8 million lives that otherwise would have been lost to air pollution.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, New York 10025, United States. Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The paper has almost continuously been on the "most read article" list in this important scientific journal since publication.
One wonders of course, how many more lives might have been saved were it not for the prattling ignorance of giggling anti-nukes with no sense of ethics or morality, but what is done cannot be undone.
If anyone doubts that fear and ignorance are powerful forces for destruction, one need only look at the Republican ticket, but of course we have very, very, very evil fear and ignorance types on our side, and regrettably, their fear and ignorance is pretty damned deadly.
Of course, the giggling "demons from hell," the dumb shits in the anti-nuke ignorance squad couldn't care less about what's in the scientific literature, because 100% of them are scientifically illiterate.
They think that it's perfectly OK for 70 million people to die every decade from air pollution because they hate the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, nuclear energy.
They thought it was perfectly OK for the world to squander two trillion dollars in a single decade on their stupid and ignorant so called "renewable energy" scam, a scam that by the way, relies heavily on mining increasing rare and toxic metals under unbelievably environmentally and ethically appalling conditions.
The result of this squander - this on a planet where two billion people lack basic sanitation - is written in the planetary atmosphere, where the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is now accumulating at the fastest rate ever observed:
I note that the last ten years represented at the right - 2016 will certainly blow away the worst year ever observed, 2015 - occurred at the precise time when stupid anti-nukes had their way, at blowing away two trillion dollars to do, nothing for humanity.
"Demons from hell" is in fact a rather light description of the way I personally regard the uneducated, unenlightened, dogmatic, morally vapid anti-nuke morons who have worked so hard to destroy the future for all generations that may survive their ignorance. I am proud to despise them at a level that "demons from hell" is inadequate to address, but I'll take it.
Regrettably, the world is not just. The people who are responsible for this tragedy, bourgeois brats all, will not live long enough to suffer the consequences of what they have done. They will all be dead when the ignorance of their "by 2050, 100% renewable" or "by 2100, 100% renewable" garbage will have obviated, at the expense of living things that may be on the planet in 2050 or 2100.
I have my flaws, certainly, but at least I saw through this ignorance, and while I proved powerless to stop it, just as James Hansen has proved powerless to stop it, I did what I could.
The malignant assholes who caused this tragedy, and continue to cheer for it, will giggle on, but history, should history survive, will record them through the ages for what they were, and what they are now, and, since they are illiterate, they will certainly always be. I suspect the future historians will record them in terms worse than "demons from hell."
An appreciation of the awful power of stupidity.
Have a nice weekend.
