Anyone who thinks nuclear “is just too expensive,” should read this article. South Korea, France, and China are not going to sit around wetting their pants over imagined nuclear energy fears. It’s time to get real.
Add India to your list and UAE. They are all building new nuclear reactors as quickly as they can. Saudi Arabia will be building its first reactors within ten years.
The scale and breadth of changes required to UK planning and regulation, both at a national and local level, shows just how politically challenging they would be to any government but also how relatively easy they might be to change (at least on a national level, local reform I imagine would be much harder to reform). The payoffs as you showed in developed nations like S.Korea are huge and we can't afford to miss them even more than we have done already.
Hopefully the day will come where I don't have to read another blog on the absolute shambles that is the UK planning system when it comes to... well, anything.
What are your thoughts on exactly _why_ the UK adopted such a terrible planning system?
I've seen a theory that it was related to the long-running economic collapse of northern Britain (which began about a century ago) as on-site steam engines were replaced by electric motors for industrial power. This meant that newer industries of the interwar era (such as electronics and aeronautics) were overwhelmingly concentrated in south east England.
By this interpretation, the Green Belts and 1947 Town and Country Planning Acts were an unsuccessful attempt to prop up northern Britain by making it as difficult as possible for workers and industries to move south.
Quite so.That started with Atlantic-Richfield in the mid-1960s providing lavish funding to turn the Sierra Club into an antinuclear organization. Sierra had previously been supportive of nuclear power because of nuclear power's small physical footprint, which meant more room for the natural environment.
The biggest challenge to achieving higher levels of human prosperity is convincing highly competent and QUALIFIED people to work in government. Today, they do not. Why would they? It's pretty obvious we have a competency problem when you have a former chair person of the U.S. House Science Committee Space Subcommittee who doesn't know the difference between the Moon and the Sun. We expect for these people to make decisions affecting the future of mankind.
Not enough. The Obama administration took a number of critical steps to try to increase the cost of building nuclear power plants in the US, to make them more difficult to finance, and more expensive to operate.
You also need to get radical leftist Democrat politics out of energy decision-making. There is utterly no justification for having a poorly educated ideologue of an idiot like Greg Jaczko being appointed head of the NRC. His only meaningful response to Fukushima in 2011 was creating public panic and sexually assaulting NRC staff.
Good reading. However, GDA has been achieved by 0 SMR. In reality, the 4 reactor designs that managed to get ONR approval are all large LWR: Westinghouse AP-1000, General Nuclear System Limited HPR1000, EDF/Areva EPR and Hitachi-GE ABWR.
It is true that currently only SMRs are being assessed.
Anyone who thinks nuclear “is just too expensive,” should read this article. South Korea, France, and China are not going to sit around wetting their pants over imagined nuclear energy fears. It’s time to get real.
Add India to your list and UAE. They are all building new nuclear reactors as quickly as they can. Saudi Arabia will be building its first reactors within ten years.
Zion, Great writing, with supporting facts. I posted it on LinkedIn to get more readers.
The scale and breadth of changes required to UK planning and regulation, both at a national and local level, shows just how politically challenging they would be to any government but also how relatively easy they might be to change (at least on a national level, local reform I imagine would be much harder to reform). The payoffs as you showed in developed nations like S.Korea are huge and we can't afford to miss them even more than we have done already.
Hopefully the day will come where I don't have to read another blog on the absolute shambles that is the UK planning system when it comes to... well, anything.
What are your thoughts on exactly _why_ the UK adopted such a terrible planning system?
I've seen a theory that it was related to the long-running economic collapse of northern Britain (which began about a century ago) as on-site steam engines were replaced by electric motors for industrial power. This meant that newer industries of the interwar era (such as electronics and aeronautics) were overwhelmingly concentrated in south east England.
By this interpretation, the Green Belts and 1947 Town and Country Planning Acts were an unsuccessful attempt to prop up northern Britain by making it as difficult as possible for workers and industries to move south.
Sufficient energy storage is not available and is way to expensive to backup intermittent power from solar and wind.
The fossil industry promotes excessive regulation on Nuclear Power so fossil power is needed to backup intermittent power.
Quite so.That started with Atlantic-Richfield in the mid-1960s providing lavish funding to turn the Sierra Club into an antinuclear organization. Sierra had previously been supportive of nuclear power because of nuclear power's small physical footprint, which meant more room for the natural environment.
Didn't various other oil companies invest massively in nuclear power though, and lose vast sums of money when nuclear flopped in the 1970s?
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/big-oil-and-nuclear-power
No.
I appreciate the details in this piece. Keep up the good fight!
The biggest challenge to achieving higher levels of human prosperity is convincing highly competent and QUALIFIED people to work in government. Today, they do not. Why would they? It's pretty obvious we have a competency problem when you have a former chair person of the U.S. House Science Committee Space Subcommittee who doesn't know the difference between the Moon and the Sun. We expect for these people to make decisions affecting the future of mankind.
Not enough. The Obama administration took a number of critical steps to try to increase the cost of building nuclear power plants in the US, to make them more difficult to finance, and more expensive to operate.
You also need to get radical leftist Democrat politics out of energy decision-making. There is utterly no justification for having a poorly educated ideologue of an idiot like Greg Jaczko being appointed head of the NRC. His only meaningful response to Fukushima in 2011 was creating public panic and sexually assaulting NRC staff.
Which companies are best positioned to stand up SMR’s for data centers?
Good reading. However, GDA has been achieved by 0 SMR. In reality, the 4 reactor designs that managed to get ONR approval are all large LWR: Westinghouse AP-1000, General Nuclear System Limited HPR1000, EDF/Areva EPR and Hitachi-GE ABWR.
It is true that currently only SMRs are being assessed.
Source: https://www.onr.org.uk/generic-design-assessment/assessment-of-reactors/#:~:text=The%20Westinghouse%20AP1000%20reactor%20design,completed%20GDA%20in%20December%202012.