What Net-Zero Emissions Without Nuclear Power Will Mean

Written by stopthesethings.com on December 2, 2021. Posted in Current News

There’s a new definition of insanity: trying to satisfy net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets without nuclear power.

Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison’s energy policy falls well within that definition, which probably makes this country one of the largest lunatic asylums, on earth.

Morrison headed off to Glasgow to join 25,000 virtue signallers, crony capitalists and rent-seekers and signed Australia up to a 2050 net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions target, simultaneously rejecting a nuclear-powered future for Australia, out of hand.

Instead, he and his Energy Minister, Angus Taylor have been trying to seel the ‘merits’ of squandering $billions on subsidies to ‘green’ hydrogen and CCS – capturing carbon dioxide gas from the flu stacks of coal-fired power plants and storing it; presumably, so it can be redirected into greenhouses to improve photosynthesis and thereby help plants grow better.

Neither have worked at scale, anywhere in the world; and the costs of both ‘green’ hydrogen and CCS promise to be astronomical. But, you can’t let the facts stand in the way of utopian ideology.

Because billionaire crony capitalists have hijacked energy policy under the guise of net-zero emissions targets, whether we like it or not, we’re stuck with them. For now.

The economic cost will be catastrophic; the effect on jobs and prosperity, penal.

Thanks to its net-zero target, Australia can kiss goodbye to reliable and affordable energy, not least because it still maintains a legislative ban on nuclear power generation, despite being the world’s third-largest uranium exporter. Although Morrison did sign up to nuclear powered submarines, which might be delivered by either the Americans or the Brits sometime before 2050.

After the climate jamboree in Glasgow wound up, the French and the British all began advocating for nuclear power. The French have ditched their previous policy of winding down nuclear power generation in favour of subsidising wind and solar and, instead, will not only keep their existing nuclear plants online but are determined to build half a dozen new ones as soon as possible.

The UK will also expand its nuclear power generation program, including building off the rack small modular reactors.

Much of the new-found enthusiasm for nuclear power in Britain and France is the result of the total collapse in wind power across Europe and the UK during September, much of October and into November.

It’s also a case of trying to have your cake and eat it too. If governments want to ensure reliable and affordable power is available to the proletariat and reduce carbon oxide gas emissions there really is only one game in town: nuclear power – the only stand-alone power generation source that does not generate CO2 in the process and that works 24 x 365, irrespective of the weather.

Back in May this year, Dr John Constable and Capell Aris took time to consider how nuclear power is essential to any net-zero emissions regime, laying out a model based on common sense and sound engineering.

While the French and the British are now full-steam ahead with nuclear, Australia’s PM continues to resist the tide. So, it’s worth revisiting their detailed piece of analysis to see what attempting to meet net-zero emissions targets without nuclear will cost you.

Realism or Utopianism? A proposal for reform of Net Zero policy
Global Warming Policy Forum
John Constable and Capell Aris
May 2021

Summary
This paper calls for root and branch reform of the UK’s Net Zero pathway to avoid intolerable cost and societal disruption. The alternative route proposed is a Gas to Gas-Nuclear programme.

As a matter of urgency, electricity generation policy must refocus on dispatchable low-emissions plant, which can deliver a secure and competitive electricity system as an enabler for the UK’s manufacturing industries.

The resulting lower electricity prices will facilitate some limited electrification of domestic and commercial heating and mobility, with potential for longer-term decarbonisation in transport and heating to be investigated via a medium-term nuclear programme, including the generation of hydrogen from high temperature reactors via the thermal decomposition of water.

The action points for reform are:

• Remove market distortions and reduce consumer cost without delay, by buying back all subsidy contracts to renewables at a discount, compelling them to operate as pure merchant plant, and institute a rolling program for closure of the wind and solar fleets to reduce system operation costs.
• License rapid construction of high-efficiency combined cycle gas turbines, perhaps fitted with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) if this proves economic. A variety of new approaches to gas turbines – for example Allam cycle turbines, may soon deliver zero-carbon electricity much less expensively.
• Use low-cost government debt to finance a new generation of nuclear plant, ideally of smaller scale than those currently envisaged.
• While reduced electricity costs will encourage adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles where economic, the government should investigate the use of high-temperature nuclear reactors to generate hydrogen to provide an alternative option, seeking close co-operation with the Government of
  Japan, which is already steering in this direction.

Current UK policies will struggle to deliver Net Zero by 2050, or ever, and run a high risk of deep and irreversible societal damage.

Because of the harms already inflicted, the programme outlined here cannot meet the government’s timetable either, but it will reduce emissions rapidly and sustainably without destabilising British society, leaving the option for further emissions reductions as technological development makes this feasible and economically attractive.

It therefore represents a realistic rather than a utopian decarbonisation model.

On the other hand, failure to reform along these lines will result in extreme costs, painful reductions in living standards for all but the richest, national weakness, societal instability and the eventual failure of the decarbonisation effort. The UK’s hoped for climate leadership will become only a stern deterrent.

The UK’s failing electricity sector
From 1920 to the year 2000, the UK electricity supply industry had a track-record of cutting emissions and prices as well as improving reliability, a record that was even maintained during the 1939–1945 war. This feat was achieved by increasing the thermal efficiency of generation, installing plant capable of removing specific pollutants (such as sulphur dioxide), and bringing nuclear power into the generation fleet.

Despite the UK being an island grid, the incidence of major power cuts has been low, and comparable to that for the much larger and interconnected continental grids. For the most part, these developments emerged from the realm of multi-disciplinary engineering, free from policy interventions.

Where policy did bear down, for example in the efforts to slow the adoption of natural gas as an electricity generation fuel, it tended to hinder emissions reductions and price cuts rather than encourage them.

However, since the year 2000 the UK’s policy has been to accelerate the rate of reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, with a near-exclusive focus on the electricity generation sector.

With increasing political, ideological and environmental inputs and little or no reference to sound engineering principles or economics, the UK’s electricity supply industry has become much more expensive and significantly less resilient – as witnessed by the nationally significant blackout of 9 August 2019 – yet it is delivering emissions cuts no faster than seen in the period prior to 2000.

These undesirable effects are the result of adopting thermodynamically incompetent generators such as wind turbines and solar panels, and (allegedly) low-emitting and extremely expensive fuels such as biomass. Subsidy costs to renewables are now running at about £11 billion per year.

The cost of balancing the grid, at nearly £2 billion a year, has risen four-fold since the early 2000s and will rise still more sharply as batteries are built to provide ancillary services. Transmission network costs are rising as the result of onshore grid reinforcement and the construction of subsea cables, such as the Western and Eastern links, which are introduced exclusively to support the renewables sector.

Detailed professional criticism of this mistaken policy direction has been ignored, and as a result the situation is now becoming critical. To put it no more strongly: The present evolution of the electricity supply system is failing, with increasing risk of deep societal harm through low productivity, intolerably high electricity costs and extremely harmful interruptions of supply.

See more here: stopthesethings.com

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