The news that government is planning a levy on electricity bills to fund the new generation of nuclear power stations demonstrates once again the failure of 'free' - ie unsubsided - markets to deliver 'the best' outcomes.

Ministers - like John Hutton - have given repeated assurances that the private sector will bear the costs involved in the construction, operating, decommissioning, and waste management associated with nuclear power.  [2]  [6]

In support of that argument, it's also been suggested that the cost of generating nuclear power is competitive with other fuels, and especially gas.
[1]  [2]   [3]  [4]

However, the EU carbon trading scheme is being used to lever concessions out of the government.   [7]  [8]

The Guardian's report indicates the nature of the problem:

The Guardian understands that the Office of Nuclear Development ... has promised nuclear companies that the price of carbon under the EU emissions trading scheme – now about €13 per tonne – will not be allowed to fall below €30 per tonne, and ideally €40. According to the energy consultancy firm EIC, the new carbon levy would add £44 to the £500 annual electricity bill paid by an average household ... [10]

The long-standing issue surrounding waste is about to get much more controversial. Again.   [12]

It's too late to point out that the money would have been better spent on renewables.   [13]  

If you're demonstrating the Greenpeace way, watch out for the CNC.

UK 'subsidising nuclear power unlawfully'

The complaint, by the Energy Fair group, also says that the UK's carbon floor price and feed-in tarriffs amount to state aid for the nuclear industry.

State coffers would also have to meet cost overruns on nuclear waste disposal, they argue.

Dorte Fouquet of the German legal firm BBH, who drew up the complaint, said that EU energy policy was based on having an open market with a level playing field.

"The commission has repeatedly underlined that distortion of the market is to a large extent caused by subsidies to the incumbents in the energy sector," she said.

"This complaint aims to shed some light on the recent shift in the energy policy of the United Kingdom where strong signals point to yet another set of subsidies to the nuclear power plant operators." ...

BBC NEWS  20 Jan 2012    Corporate State Log    Energy 'Policy'

Britain's RMS Titanic Economy

New nuclear has 'lots of support' locally - EDF Energy

UK breaks promise on nuclear power subsidies

Energy Fair

UK taxpayers face extra £250m bill for nuclear waste clean-up

Nuclear Decommissioning Authority does an 'HMRC' ...

NDA income for 2012-13 is shown dropping from £867m to £717m, while expenditure is expected to rise from £2.88bn to £2.96bn, leaving the government needing to increase its total grant to the organisation, which oversees the dismantling of the UK's atomic legacy.

A spokesman for the NDA said the figures should not surprise ministers.

"We have been spelling out to government every step of the way and there is no question of any slowdown of our programme," he added.

The figures for the current financial year were flattered by a £157m one-off sale of land near Wylfa, on Anglesey, but the NDA has also been affected by the Japanese decision to announce the end to its future nuclear programme following the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

This in turn persuaded the NDA to shut down the Sellafield mixed-oxide reprocessing plant (SMP) in Cumbria, with the loss of contracts worth £78m a year.

The NDA declined to say how much the SMP plant had cost to run, citing commercial confidentiality ...

Gdn  25 Dec 2011    Energy 'Policy'

Nuclear waste

Mox plant U-turn by coalition stuns anti-nuclear campaigners

The obsession with plutonium goes on ...

The government has astonished the anti-nuclear lobby by outlining plans to spend £3bn of public money building a new mixed-oxide fuel (Mox) plant – months after announcing the closure of a similar facility that lost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds ...

Energy minister Charles Hendry said ... the government had gathered enough information to be confident Mox was the right direction and was now "preferred policy" ...

Douglas Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK ... said:

"This is crazynomics – the reality is that the nuclear fairytale is a nuclear nightmare.

Having announced the closure of a Mox plant because it was colossally inefficient and because there was no market for its service, the government now wants to build another one that will fast become a hugely expensive white elephant.

"This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity and then receive subsidised waste disposal.

"The only winners in this are the nuclear operators, already rich with their 18% domestic fuel price rises this year." ...

Gdn  01 Dec 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy

UK's faith in nuclear power threatens renewables

Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Environmental Protection Agency in Germany, who advises the German government, said:

" ... it is obvious that nuclear plants are too inflexible and cannot sufficiently respond to variations in wind or solar generation, only gas [power stations] do." ...

A new poll published on Friday suggests that globally, just 22% of people agree that "nuclear power is relatively safe and an important source of electricity".

However, the Globescan poll of 23,231 people in 23 countries showed that support in the UK actually rose from 33% to 37% since 2005.

That chimes with a British Science Association-commissioned poll published in September showing UK support for nuclear power has remained steady since Fukushima.

It found 41% of respondents agreed that the benefits of nuclear power outweighed the risks, up to 38% in 2010 from 32% in 2005 ...

Gdn  28 Nov 2011

UK urged to go for nuclear power

In a letter to the Chancellor, Sir William McAlpine, chairman of the pressure group Supporters of Nuclear Energy (SONE) describes the present energy policy as an imposition on consumers and industry and as failing in its objectives ...

"We find this difficult to understand when the Government is wrestling with massive debts and the need for growth and is privy to the facts about electricity supply costs.

"The sheer disparity between the cost of other sources - and especially offshore wind - and nuclear is startling when nuclear can reasonably be claimed to provide security of low carbon supply at affordable cost.

"We suggest this shows that reform of energy policy has a long way to go before it is in a position to achieve its declared objective ...

Ind  27 Nov 2011    Energy Policy    

UK 'complacent' on nuclear future

On extending nuclear plans to meet 2050 climate targets, chairman of the committee, Lord Krebs, said "there isn't a credible Plan A".

"It is though we're setting off on a long journey without a map, without a driver, and without anyone to fix the car if things go wrong," he told reporters at a briefing in London.

"We are in danger of placing ourselves in a position where we will be unable to ensure a safe and secure supply of nuclear energy up to 2050 ... the government's nuclear energy policy simply lacks credibility." ...

The committee says there is a serious danger of UK expertise being lost by this period, with the skilled workforce ageing and a lack of investment in training new people.

Lord Krebs suggested that the government, regulatory agencies and industry would find it hard to recruit trained and skilled Britons.

And relying on other countries to provide a talent pool was not a sensible strategy ...

BBC NEWS  22 Nov 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy

Nuclear power a costly failure

Mr Huhne has bought into the wrong mode: the future's Thorium, Chris

Britain is still paying for nuclear-generated electricity consumed a generation ago because of the hidden costs of an industry reared on the expectation of public subsidies, the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said yesterday.

He told the Royal Society in London that the nuclear industry and the Government should show that they have learned from their past mistakes if they are to retain public support for a renaissance in nuclear power.

"And some of those mistakes are not small," he said in a keynote address.

"Nuclear policy is a runner to be the most expensive failure of post-war British policy-making, and I am aware that this is a crowded and highly contested field."

Half of the budget of the Department for Energy and Climate Change goes on cleaning up Britain's legacy of nuclear waste, which includes the world's largest stockpile of civil plutonium waste, three Olympic-sized swimming pools of high-level waste, enough intermediate waste to fill a supertanker and even more low-level waste, he said.

"That is £2bn a year, year in and year out, that we are continuing to pay for electricity that was consumed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s on a false prospectus," he told the Society.

"The nuclear industry was like an expense-account dinner: everybody ordering the most expensive items on the menu because someone else was paying the bill."

Despite £49bn in nuclear liabilities, Mr Huhne said that it was important to press ahead with a new fleet of nuclear power stations to meet the challenge of climate change.

Ind  14 Oct 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy    Nuclear Power    

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium

Thorium

Thorium fuel cycle

Nuclear power a costly failure

Mr Huhne has bought into the wrong model: the future's Thorium, Chris

Britain is still paying for nuclear-generated electricity consumed a generation ago because of the hidden costs of an industry reared on the expectation of public subsidies, the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said yesterday.

He told the Royal Society in London that the nuclear industry and the Government should show that they have learned from their past mistakes if they are to retain public support for a renaissance in nuclear power ...

Ind  14 Oct 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy    

Peak uranium

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium

Thorium

Thorium fuel cycle

Ofgem vs the energy companies: an entertaining distraction

On the failure of the 'invisible hand' ... but don't tell the public

The politicians ... won't admit that they are essentially powerless to stop energy bills rising over the long-term.

The £200bn or so required to renew the UK's energy infrastructure has to be found from somewhere.

And, in the case of nuclear, the government will end up giving some firm-ish guarantees to the private sector since the City's instinct is to run away from a model that requires ten years of up-front spending before 30 years of healthy cashflows arrive.

So, while Chris Huhne and Ed Miliband talk about oligopolies and rigged markets, we have yet to see radical proposals brought forward to overhaul the structure of the industry.

Even SSE's move to sell all its generation into the day-ahead market has been dismissed as insufficient by small energy retailers -- it's the six-month and year-ahead markets they're interested in.

That's the backdrop for today's squabble ...

Gdn  14 Oct 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy    Falling Living Standards

Huhne will use Fukushima report to revive nuclear programme

Plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations date back to the Blair energy review of 2007, which was a u-turn from the conclusions of the 2003 energy review, which concluded that a new generation of nuclear power stations would not be commissioned

Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, is scheduled to release the final report by Mike Weightman, chief inspector for nuclear installations, into what lessons should be learned from the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan ...

An upbeat message from Huhne will be aimed at countering a series of setbacks in the energy sector as deteriorating financial conditions encourage companies to pull back from nuclear and threaten to abandon carbon capture and storage (CCS) programmes.

He will also want to convince critics that his Tory coalition partners are not trying to undermine the low-carbon agenda by arguing Britain can no longer afford it.

Greenpeace is already pursuing a judicial review for alleged insufficient lack of consultation on nuclear power, and has been further antagonised by a perceived lack of transparency over submissions made to Weightman.

Anti-nuclear protesters are infuriated that EDF, the French state-owned energy company at the heart of the UK's new nuclear plans, has started preparatory work on a facility at Hinkley Point in Kent ahead of the report's publication ...

Obs  09 Oct 2011

Nuclear industry presses sceptical Huhne over backing new reactors

... the coalition agreement with the Conservatives involved a new pledge to allow nuclear stations to be built with a proviso that they do not involve public subsidies.

Huhne has already followed this up with a commitment to make companies pay for all their clean-up costs after a nuclear accident.

Currently, the industry only pays the first £140m, with the government picking up the rest of the bill, which Huhne believes amounts to a public subsidy ...

The economics of nuclear power have already been hit by low gas prices and a weak pound, which makes it more expensive for UK-based companies such as Centrica to import reactor parts.

The government has also promised to introduce a minimum carbon price to help make nuclear economic, which the Liberal Democrats support. But the industry will want it to be at least €50 a tonne, compared with current prices of about €15.

Firms are also concerned that Whitehall cost-cutting could result in the programme to decommission existing reactors, which is funded by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), being slashed ...

Guardian  19 May 2010    Coalition Log    Energy Policy

'Going nuclear'

RWE reviews involvement in UK nuclear programme

Labour's love-in with the nuclear industry still blossoming

Lib Dem MPs set to rebel against nuclear power 'subsidy'

Nuclear power may become less attractive option

Government names eight new sites for nuclear power plants

Exercising Britain's nuclear options

Who will pay the bill for closing Britain's £200bn energy gap?

EDF ran secret lobbying campaign to reduce nuclear waste disposal levy

10 new nuclear power stations named

Scottish and Southern Energy abandons nuclear plans for wind

Is no one in the UK's energy industries is up-to-speed on Thorium?

The utility company will sell its 25pc stake in the NuGen consortium to its partners GDF Suez and Iberdrola.

NuGen is only at the very preliminary stages of an investment in nuclear, having bought an option to purchase land near Sellafield for £19.5m two years ago.

It would not have a fully completed power station for at least a decade ...

Alistair Phillips-Davies, generation and supply director, said "our core investment in generation should be in renewable energy".

Tel  23 Sept 2011    Energy Policy

Alternatives to Fossil Fuels    

China is leading the way with thorium

China enters race to develop nuclear energy from thorium

Thorium nuclear power

Closure of Mox plant leaves nuclear waste headache for Cumbria

The troubled Sellafield Mox Plant was built in the 1990s and designed to handle foreign, mainly Japanese, plutonium dioxide that had been recycled from spent fuel by the Thorp plant at Sellafield.

It was awarded an operating licence in 2001 after receiving what was supposed to be firm commitments from Japanese power companies.

Only one Japanese power company, Chubu Electric, signed a firm contract but it soon emerged there were serious technical problems in the Sellafield Mox Plant's production line.

Instead of producing up to 120 tonnes of Mox fuel a year, the plant was only managing a tiny fraction of that target.

An investigation by outside consultants in 2006 found the plant was dogged by about 6,000 minor equipment failures over two months, equal to 37,000 failures a year.

During a minor failure the entire production line would be halted for 15 minutes to an hour, while in a major failure the line would stand idle for several days.

A deal last year with Chubu meant the Japanese would pay for a huge upgrade of the entire plant, which would now be unable to fulfill its first Japanese order until the end of the decade.

But the Fukushima nuclear disaster threw the market for Mox fuel in turmoil, leading to the closure of the Mox plant at Sellafield and posing a big question over what to do with a growing plutonium waste mountain.

Ind  04 Aug 2011    Energy Policy

Melting ice caps open up Arctic for 'white gold rush'

New mining applications are being submitted for extraction - all the way from Canada through Greenland to Finland.

The Greenland government in Nuuk has just underlined its commitment to new ventures by repealing a law that prevented any kind of uranium mining.

The laws have been amended to grant exploration licences for radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium on a case-by-case basis.

This is happening at Kvanefjeld – said by the Australian-owned mining company Greenland Minerals & Energy Ltd to be "one of the world's most exciting emerging mineral projects" and believed to hold the world's sixth-largest uranium deposit.

There are also plans to open up uranium exploration in the far north of Canada, Russia, and Finland ...

Gdn  04 July 2011    Trashing the Arctic in Search of Growth

Arctic

Greenland

Lib Dem MPs set to rebel against nuclear power 'subsidy'

A large group of Lib Dems are concerned about clause 78 of the bill ... that asks them to support a carbon floor price.

This mechanism penalises fossil fuels but not low-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear and renewables, and the MPs believe it hands a large financial windfall to nuclear power – effectively a subsidy.

The government has admitted that because of the size of the nuclear industry, it stands to gain up to twice as much as renewables from the proposed carbon floor price.

In a written reply, the Treasury economic secretary, Justine Greening, said:

"The existing nuclear sector is likely to benefit by an average of £50m per annum to 2030 due to higher wholesale electricity prices.

"Similarly, the renewable energy sector is expected to benefit by an average of at least £25m a year to 2030." ...

Gdn  01 July 2011    Coalition Log    Energy Policy

Carbon Trading    Energy Bill

Call for Chris Huhne to resign over Fukushima emails

Families face nuclear tax on power bills

Government names eight new sites for nuclear power plants

The eight sites are: Bradwell, Essex; Hartlepool; Heysham, Lancashire; Hinkley Point, Somerset; Oldbury, South Gloucestershire; Sellafield, Cumbria; Sizewell, Suffolk; and Wylfa, Anglesey.

The plans were announced by Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, despite his own opposition to nuclear energy.

He has insisted that the new plants should not be subsidised by the taxpayer ...

Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, said:

"Around a quarter of the UK's generating capacity is due to close by the end of this decade.

"We need to replace this with secure, low carbon, affordable energy. This will require over £100bn of investment in electricity generation alone, twice what was invested last decade.

"Industry needs as much certainty as possible to make such big investments." ...

Ind  24 June 2011    Coalition Log    Pricing Carbon

Go-ahead for 10 nuclear stations

10 new nuclear power stations named

Ed Miliband paves way for most ambitious fleet of nuclear reactors in Europe

Families face nuclear tax on power bills

UK breaks promise on nuclear power subsidies

MPs have urged ministers to admit they are tacitly subsidising nuclear power despite promising that the industry would not receive such support.

The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee's report accused ministers of disguising the subsidy ...

BBC NEWS  16 May 2011    Coalition Log

Alternatives to Fossil Fuels    Energy 'Policy'    Nuclear Power

Coalition 'losing way' on green policies

'How Many Chernobyls Can the World Afford?'

SPIEGEL ONLINE:

The European Union and governments from around the world have pledged €550 million ($797 million) in aid for Chernobyl. You were present at the donor conference in Kiev. Has the conference had a positive echo?

Münchmeyer:

This is a schizophrenic event. On the one hand, this was about the international community providing money for a second protective shell. It is supposed to protect the devastated reactor.

At the same time, though, people are turning a blind eye to the actual roots of the catastrophe: nuclear power.

The second part of the conference is focused on the future of nuclear power. But in that regard it feels as if everyone is either deaf or blind.

Chernobyl is located only 90 kilometers (56 miles) from Kiev, but here one constantly hears that we need to stick with atomic energy and that it is entirely safe ...

Der Spiegel  20 Apr 2011

China is leading the way with thorium

China enters race to develop nuclear energy from thorium

China bets on thorium

Atomic Deserts

A Survey of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones

... disasters like Three Mile Island and Fukushima are not as rare as one would hope.

There have been plenty of atomic accidents resulting in significant radioactive leaks, spills and explosions.

And the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, for all the attention it gets, is far from the only nuclear no-go area on the planet.

A look at some of the worst incidents is enough to demonstrate just how high the price of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons truly is ...

Der Spiegel  12 Apr 2011

Windscale

The Unknown Catastrophe

Money will decide new nuclear's fate in UK

At a rough estimate, private sector companies are being asked to find £50bn to invest in new nuclear plants over the next decade in the UK.

They do so not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they expect to make a return on that money.

If they judge the return less likely to be delivered, they are less likely to make the investments in the first place ...

Independent  18 March 2011

British ministers 'spooked' by chief scientific advisor

Fukushima has revealed the dangers of the nuclear road

List of nuclear waste treatment technologies

Nuclear waste research needs more funding – transmutation still experimental

Nuclear alchemy

Thorium fuel cycle