Why are you even asking the question ?

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Seeing as EDF are paying for it they are calling the shots.

If you want them to use the British one then write to your MP

Quite simple – Hinkley C has become a "vanity" project. It has become too large, too expensive and has too many interested parties. Such projects are hard and costly to stop and even harder to control. Britain seems to do these very well; two enormous aircraft carriers and HS2 come to mind.

Before considering alternatives it is worth remembering that the ERP nuclear power station (same design as Hinkley C) being built in Finland was hailed on British TV as being cheap, on budget and on schedule ten or so years ago.

It should also be remembered some massive projects, Crossrail for example, do get built close to schedule and cost.

JA

Edited By JA on 03/09/2016 14:52:38

Edited By JA on 03/09/2016 14:55:21

Edited By JA on 03/09/2016 14:56:31

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Those were the days !!

Electricity would be "too cheap to meter"

[which was, of course, on the basis that the electricity was a by-product in the production of Plutonium]

MichaelG.

Just an observation – Rolls-Royce's Small Modular Reactor, the subject of the Daily Telegraph article (one of Vic's links), produces about the same amount of power as La Rance tidal power plant. It might cost a little bit more though. La Rance cost about E600M at 2009 prices while the SMR is around £1.4 billion at today's prices.

JA

My brother and I went to the Winscale Sellafield visitor centre over 35 years ago We found it intriguing that in all the diagrams of the reactions various isotopes were produced and then used/disposed of in various ways, except that there was always 1% of plutonium that never seemed to find a use…

Ironically, it does seem that nuclear power will be an important part of dealing with climate change and even FoE are no longer fundamentally opposed to it, though they still have concerns about cost, decommissioning and safety.

Neil

I am not of the view that renewables can provide the balance of energy that we need to keep going.

Core energy supply has to come from somewhere. Especially here in England, at our latitude. We will always need a way to get through the cold winters. We often get them. At a gentle extreme there is staying warm and comfortable. At a more harsh one, there is the need to keep sanitation – nee life support – for our cities going. In extremis they represent a burden for the nation, irrespective of our future willingness to feed them with energy.

I remain a supporter of coal, of which there are still considerable reserves. Coal will not run out in your grandchildren's lifetime. Obviously CO2 is an issue with fossil fuels. Although carbon sequestration is being explored it is not easy or cheap.

We should expect to pay more for our energy; This is not so that some Oligarch can extend his yacht.

Nuclear fuel is readily recycled and reprocessed. Although high grade waste is intensely toxic, unlike CO2 it doesn't escape you. It hangs around. I find it absurd that people see this as a bad thing. Indeed it makes the problem of our hunger for energy manageable. To my mind nuclear energy is ideal. It is honest.

It seems to be a part of the human condition to betray responsibility for our environmental impact. With Nuclear energy it is impossible to hide that impact of energy use without a structured, methodical approach to storage of waste.

I personally do not relish the Chinese input to the work being carried out at Hinkley. To my mind Chinese quality control, and indeed outright integrity, is not satisfactory for the standard of work we require in a flagship Nuclear reactor. If Hinkley as it stands today does not complete I will not be sad.

What I am sad about is that we know we need nuclear power. Indeed we need nuclear engineering. We need nuclear engineers. We have chosen not to invest in nuclear technology. Yet again in the UK we have failed to manage the pipeline of expertise and preserve capability, underwritten by integrity and quality.

Stupidly, we now expect other nations to provide excellent solutions to intensely difficult problems. At the same time, we expect those nations to deliver at the level of integrity and quality that we always did in the past. It isn't really surprising that they fail to meet expectations.

"If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well."

"If you want it done well, you'd better do it yourself."

Edited By Andy Ash on 03/09/2016 20:27:50

My father was the local area 'explosives' man & worked very closely with the geologists.

Two major things puzzled him when 'she' shut down the mines :-

1. There is 300 yrs worth of coal down there at 1980's levels of consumption.

2. What will happen to the water table? The shut down wasn't planned for, nobody knew & it was nobody's job to think about it . . . But what will happen to the water table?

Phil Whitley,

While I agree wholeheartedly – more renewables and lots of storage required (pumped, battery, hydrogen and any others) – do remember that those 30 turbineswill not be running at full power, most of the time they are turning. Installed (maximum) power needs to used for sizing the connections to the grid, nothing else, really. Land based turbines, on average, produce about 25- 30% of that maximum figure. They are put up knowing that utilisation factor, and that at times they may even be stationary due to insufficient or excess wind power.

One problem with distribution, especially for off-shore wind installation, is that of curtailment – the grid being too weak to distribute power in the opposite way than historicaly (think here heart/arteries/arterioles/capillaries analogy, where one cannot have a heart feeding directly into a capillary).

As regards coal and leaving it in the ground – good. Dirty, polluting and inefficient (60% + of the energy is lost in the total process, making it inefficient and more polluting. Than other fuels.

Nuclear is uwanted and potentially disastrous. I just remember the fire at Windscale, but only because the milk was poured down the drain and strontium 90 was at the top of the news agenda. Think tsumani, affecting rhe south west only a few hundred years ago! Look it up. It happened.

Borrowing the money from the French and Chinese, at a huge monetary cost for our children and their children, is the typical ploy of politicians. ''Borrow now, pay extortionately after I've left office'' is plainly idiotic (yes, politicians are idiots!). Thatis withoutthe potential cost of clean up, after itceasesto operate!

Renewables are here to stay. We need far more, before transport and heating fuel are replaced by renewablly sourced energy, but it will come. And the sooner, the better – for all.

I always thought that nuclear is a complicated way of boiling water but what do I know ?

Roy

Quote

"I suppose you haven't heard of clean coal burning technology? The Chinese picked up the trail where we left off and now they are the world leaders."

How come they are still a major polluter then?

Yes, clean coal technology, google it, not the sort of changes that make the headlines.

Michael W