It would be sheer folly to do nuclear deals with the Chinese writes MAX HASTINGS | Daily Mail Online
August 4, 2016
A must read piece by Max Hastings in the Mail today.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
R4 Now 8pm doco about Hinckley with David Aaronovitch until 8.30pm
(The link shows A #BBCstopTrump episode was supposed to be on)
Now experts are talking the govs’s 80% Carbon targets ..intermittants etc.
Aaronovitch is showing he’s not au fait ..he doesn’t know what biomass is
Experts featured on The Briefing Room, and their verdict
Stephen Thomas (surely the Greenpeace professor, but this has not been mentioned as usual) total anti
Lisa Waters – too expensive she says
Malcolm Grimston (imperialcollege) ..yes it’s low carbon, and spade ready
Peter Atherton* (of Cornwall Energy strategic UK energy consultants) argued for many years that it is a very poor deal
..No mention of plans for Swansea Tidal lagoon ..cos it’s power is tiny
* Once said in @TheEconomist on @DECCgovuk #energy policy “calling it a dog’s dinner is unkind to Pedigree Chum”
Today’s Economist article ££ : http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21703396-hinkley-point-would-tie-britain-energy-system-already-out-date-when-facts?”>When the facts change…
Hinkley Point would tie Britain into an energy system that is already out of date
AOL/Reuters videdo report EDF ‘Knew’ of Hinkley Delay
EDF CEO Jean-Bernard Levy knew the UK government wanted to take more time to review the Hinkley Point nuclear contract before the French utility’s board voted to approve the investment. Axel Threlfall reports.
BTW Twitter has indication of a sock-puppet campaign by Greenpeace or GreenHedgefunds ..many accounts tweeting variation of
“I’ve just asked my MP to tell Chancellor @PHammondMP to drop Hinkley nuclear plant and choose renewables instead “
We all now live in an insane world, totally out of contact with reality.
This one-page summary of a paper to be presented at 11:30 am, 8 Sept 2016 at the London GeoEthics Conference on Climate Change may end seventy years (1946-2016) of deceit about the Higher Power:
Click to access HigherPower.pdf
Questions, criticisms or comments are encouraged and will be answered promptly.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
1-573-647-1377
omatumr@yahoo.com
olivermanuel36@icloud.com
At the same time the chinese are finishing an EPR in Taishan with a 30% participation of AREVA. It looks like it will be the first EPR to be completed (for the beginning of 2017). Maybe it would be worth looking at the fine print of that contract?
Osborne’s (and Cameron’s) infatuation with the Chinese demonstrates what happens when you let the kiddies loose to run anything important.
Since we now have a government of grown-ups (mainly; the jury is still out on Boris) we can at least hope that the long-term future of Britain’s security will be higher up the list than it has been to date.
I was, fortunately perhaps, not a fly on the wall while the Cabinet was discussing Hinkley Point (please note the correct spelling, stewgreen and others; Hinckley is a town in Leicestershire which I can assure you is increasingly pissed off at being confused with a nuclear site in Somerset) but all the reports are that May was not at all in favour and the majority of those charged officially with keeping Britain secure from all sorts of people who wish her ill were increasingly frustrated and in a few cases very worried at the extent to which the infants were not prepared to listen to what the grown-ups were saying.
It isn’t even solely a matter of security; the entire Hinkley escapade (to which we could almost certainly add HS2) is one over-sized, over-priced, unnecessary vanity project based on technology which may (or may not) work. Eventually. While proven technology could provide the same output at half the price and half the cost in half the time.
Many thanks to the ever-reliable Max Hastings for spelling out the potential consequences of getting this wrong.
Surely it is in China’s interest that the rest of the world does not collapse under the burden of renewable non-energy.
China RELIES on once-1st-world countries being able to buy is goods.
While we must all agree that any fair contractual arrangement should offer benefits to all participants, the mixing up of business and political views is nearly always damaging to business. The USA has caused world-wide social problems through its policy on Russia, which is born out of the remnants of the cold-war: not to mention wrecking Syria first through sanctions then by encouraging the civil war in its regime-changing policy. Europe is not so politically clean either (look to the cause of the Ukraine problem).
In my opinion, trade should be politics free, (apart from the arms trade and economic encouragement o exports of course), as the worlds politicians have proved their massive levels of incompetence over decades and continue on the same path.
Regarding nuclear reactor choice, Euan Mearns has a first rate article about the options on his web-site and there is an older article there that concluded that the price of nuclear is more what a country makes it than a selling price.
Surely ‘sheer folly’ is the norm in UK energy policy?
ok. enough already… just build a mix of fossil fuel plants and some smaller/ cheaper nukes and be done with it.
sarastro92 August 5, 2016 6:14 pm
“ok. enough already… just build a mix of fossil fuel plants and some smaller/ cheaper nukes and be done with it.”
Indeed! Governments can foster innovation and investment risk not by subsidy, just by ‘promising’ to stay out of the profit part! Many will fall for that scam, but this will be the corporatists, not us peons that still get to vote, for a while!
It would be sheer folly to build anything while offering a guaranteed price of £92.50/MWh for its output – before you even get your arm twisted to hike that to cover cost overruns and delays. That’s also all we need to tell the Chinese.
We still have a lot of old but first class coal fired power stations that could be generating cheap electricity and have their lives extended by 20 years easily, (See Germany’s generation profile for support).
Amber will not listen to such sense as she is an eco-carbon believer and cares not a jot about the real costs.