100percentrenewableuk and smrs webinar21 02 2024

Experts talk about how the UK House of Commons should focus on the feasibility of 100percentrenewable energy rather than promoting fantasy ‘small modular (nuclear) reactors. David Toke from 100percentrenewableuk introduces the webinar followed by Professor Mark Jacobson from Stanford University talking about 100percentrenewable energy – then Alison Downes from the Stop Sizewell C Campaign and then Professor Steve Thomas from Greenwich University who gave a careful and detailed analysis of proposals and prospects for SMRs

Can I open now this 100% renewable UK webinar on the subject of 100% Renewables and smrs which has been organized in the in the wake of a terrible piece of political lobbying and Domination by the nuclear industry who who of course have captured the British government for a long time about the

Last 70 years really but it has been particularly pentious recently in the environmental audit commit Committee of the House of Commons where they organized a terribly one-sided hearing on small modular reactors which which suggested to us in 100% renewable UK to organize this seminar calling on the House of Commons environmental audit

Committee to have a hearing about feasibility of 100% renewable energy which we which we regard as being evidently feasible but of course we’re open to ideas on the subject as opposed to smrs which are as we know technological and political fantasy and our speakers are going to talk about

These themes I think Mark Jacobson um will head off in a couple of minutes but for uh talking about these particularly 100% Renewables but also a few comments about small modular reactors but I am going to start off by giving a little bit of a policy introduction

And I’ll run through as quickly as I can that sort of title expresses what I’m talking about quite neatly and just to stress that we need urgent decarbonization of the heating system we can have a 100% Renewables on the electricity but in order to turn it into

100% Renewables for all of energy we need the heating and of course in California you’ll be more used to of course air air cooling systems um run through electricity uh they they usually are there of course but we want heat pumps there well because they’re much more energy

Efficient than current systems and as you see Canada and the US actually featuring the heat pump Stakes as far as installations per 100,000 population being roughly in the middle of course terrible UK is next to Hungary H we won’t say too much about Hungary they’ve got sort cozy relationship with um guy

Called Putin in in in Russia for natural gas so maybe there’s some excuse for them all kned as the case may be but of course no excuse for the UK and their terrible record on heat pumps but the isn’t it significant that the coldest countries have more most heat pumps like

Norway Finland and Sweden therefore so we we ought to get to them quickly and I I actually talk about this just by coincidence I happened to talk about um uh mentioned my book which is coming out in May energy revolutions profiteering versus democracy um so anyway I just

Thought i’ mention that and next nuclear is getting priority in the UK Sewell C which Allison is going to be talking about is is getting shedloads billions of tens of billions of pounds of subsidies from the energy consumers meanwhile the oil and gas people are making massive profits incredible eyew watering sums

More than most small countries making a year and they’ve been doing this year after year year after year about3 billion pounds a day every year it’s amazing and but as you see um you can see uh the chart about how uh renewable energy is going way ahead of nuclear power in today’s world

Generation and how if you had um continuation of the last 10 years of Trends about how um renewable energy would fulfill all total world energy Within by 20150 on current Trend so it’s only if they have the right policies which we don’t have in the U in the UK as you see they

Banned on Shore wind and and onshore solar even offshore wind isn’t going ahead as quickly as it should be and meanwhile their Energy Efficiency policies have been incredible they Clos virtually closed down the insulation Energy Efficiency policies not doing much about heat pumps either uh but we’ve we’ve done some work modeling 100%

Renewable energy with the help of Lut University who did a comparison between what 100% renewable energy would cost compared to what the government’s alleged policies towards net zero would cost and we found that 100% renewable energy would do it much more cheaply and also that you would get

Much lower carbon emissions as a result as you see from this from this graph much cheaply as well that’s some of the energy shares and you can see some shares of um fuels used in renewable energy you see no nuclear but mainly solar with lots of offshore wind

In in um the UK some wave power if it develops otherwise offshore wind and that will do the do the trick there’s some promising developments in tile stream and so on and maybe Geo some geothermal as well and there’s more about this in uh in my book which I’m

Shamelessly promoting I would if I own who else will and but this is a quote here from from an American activist Paul G I’m sure Mark Jacobson was heard of Paul G um who who said who said yes tote boldly goes further calling for a revolution who gets to develop an own

Our renewable of future he takes on the E on the axis of Evil re a of evil Regan factorism and their distructive Co Cult of neoliberalism well there we are I’ll stop my I’ll stop my stop there but um we’ll carry on now with our main with

The main speaker of uh uh uh uh today the best known anyway which is of course David to no no it’s Mark Jacobson Mark J Professor Mark Jacobson right I will hand over to you and if you would like to share your screen I’m sure you can do

It much better than I have just done it and well thank you David um so no actually I’m not gonna share my I don’t have anything to share I’m going to just talk about this issues and give you some numbers so so I’ve been working on transitioning energy infrastructures for countries and states

For I don’t know 15 years now and looking at climate and air pollution problems and their solutions to them for about 35 years and in that process we’ve actually developed an energy plan for the UK and so I want to First pause it that it is possible to transition the UK

To entirely 100% clean renewable energy and storage for all energy purposes uh at much lower cost while creating many more jobs than are lost while using minimal land while keeping the grid stable while eliminating air pollution problems in the UK and eliminating climate problems the climate related

Emissions and so let me just start by giving you some numbers so you know so first of all I look at it from not only a climate point of view but an air pollution and energy security point of view and when you look at it from all

Three points of view you find very clearly that a transition to clean renewable energy is the best way for any country or region or continent even and in the case of the UK I mean they’re about 15,000 deaths per year from air pollution and based on statistical cost

Of life and morbidity and other impacts this is about a cost of $140 billion dollar per year to the UK as a social cost on top of the estimated climate costs in 2050 in the UK would be another about 200 and 50 $250 billion do per year so we’re

Talking you know we have a huge social cost on top of that um it’s a huge social cost on top of the energy cost which is another $230 billion per year in 2050 so the total social cost is over $600 billion doll uh a year if we do not transition our energy

Infrastructure if we transition to clean renewable energy we eliminate the health costs we eliminate those deaths and all the millions of illnesses associated with the deaths and that $140 billion a year cost associated with it we eliminate the emissions associated with climate change and the corresponding cost of

That and we reduce our energy cost substantially so let me talk about that for a second so with fossil fuels and bioenergy when we have combustion we’re wasting a lot of energy because of the loss of energy in the heat that’s resulting from the combustion and if we actually Electrify

All energy and provide the electricity with clean renewable energy in the case of the UK our energy requirements go down about 60% that’s for five reasons one is the efficiency of electric vehicles electric transportation over internal combustion engine Vehicles the efficiency of electrifying industry over combustion industry for high temperature processes

The efficiency of electric heat pumps over gas and oil and wood based heating combustion heating the and end ending the energy used to mine transport and refine fossil fuels in uranium worldwide that’s about 11% of all energy is used just to mine transport and refine fuels and then endu Energy Efficiency

Improvements Beyond business as usual when we add all those up that’s about for the UK that’s about a 60% reduction in energy requirements simply by cleaning up our Energy System and that means the cost per unit well on top of that’s even so even if the cost per unit

Energy is the same in a clean renewable energy system versus a conventional system you have 60% lower annual costs because you’re using so much less energy but on top of that the cost per unit energy of f renewable energy is now lower than that of fossil fuels so we estimate about a

63% or 62% reduction of annual energy costs by going to clean renewable energy in the UK so that means going down from $228 billion per year energy cost to about $80 billion per year of energy energy cost on top of eliminating the $140 billion per year Health costs and the

260 billion dollar per year climate cost or sorry $250 billion per year climate cost so that’s a an a 62% reduction of energy costs and about an 80 uh 87% reduction in the social total social cost of enery energy and given that The Upfront cost in the UT would be about

$880 billion that’s about a six-year payback time for energy cost and a less than a one-year payback time for total social cost so this is a no-brainer I mean you can transition the energy eliminate health and climate costs reduce energy cost substantially and create on top of that about 500,000 more

Long-term full-time jobs than lost use less than you know on the order of 2% or less of the land area because you’re gonna have offshore wind as well so that’s where some of these uh you have a lot of offshore wind turbines for example that but the most it’ll be

Onshore wind offshore wind utility scale PV rooftop PV that’ll be the dominant uh sources of energy plus uh of course you know battery storage other types of storage heat storage cold storage and we’ll have Imports of energy and exports of energy as well to balance the grid so

We’ve done simulations of balancing the Grid in the UK as if it were an island I mean it is an island but I mean an energy Island not connected to EUR rest of Europe and we find we can keep the grid stable in isolation every 30

Seconds for multiple years in the UK and but it’s cheaper to interconnect and but the costs are not that different but it is a little bit cheaper to interconnect so we can keep the good stable we can keep the cost the costs are much lower health benefits are much higher climate

Benefits are enormous jobs are created we don’t use a lot of land we eliminate the fossil fuel infrastructure we don’t need it anymore for energy that is and so and this creates energy security as well because these are all stable energy sources for a long time to come now in

Terms of do we need small modul reactors it’s not even an option we need to solve 80% of the problem in six years that’s by 2030 and 100% by 2035 or soon after new nuclear power I mean conventional nuclear reactors in Europe and the US they do not take less than 17 years

Between planning and operation and up to 21 years and the cost is like in the United States only two reactors have been built in the last 20 years at one at the same location in Vogal the Vogal plants in Georgia $ 35 billion for about

2.3 gws it’s you a little less than $16 a watt new wind or solar $1 a watt and they don’t compete on cost and they take forever to build you cannot plan even if you plan today they won’t be ready till 2041 which is way too late so it’s not even option

Ignoring the uh risks associated with them the energy security risks such as meltdown risk weapons proliferation risk underground uranium mining lung cancer risks the radioactive waste storage risk and the fact that they emit 9 to 37 times the carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour as wind when you look over their

Entire life cycle and account for their opportunity costs is while you’re waiting around for those new nuclear reactors to be being to be built you have coal and gas and bioenergy spewing out pollutants and greenhouse gases on the grid so there’s a huge emission associated with nuclear due just to the

Delays in addition to the fact that they emit direct heat they emit water vapor greenhouse gas and they require energy to refine and M uranium they’re not zero emissions small Mia reactors they have similar problems they’re going to even be likely more expensive because you’re using more materials for a smaller

Volume and other issues associated with them that I’m sure others will talk about but they’re already being you know they were promised to be ready by 2027 then 2028 then 2029 then 2030 now 2031 so and you know the there in the United States the one react small modular

Nuclear reactor company that was furthest along they had they had a an approval from the nuclear Regulatory Commission for design they basically lost their main customers it was way the expenses went way too up or way too high they’re now delayed another several years till in the 2030 sometime their

Stock crashed they were then sued for fraud and so other other POS problems associated with that that type of um uh that company and also other similar companies just not even have designs approved so we don’t even we cannot rely on this technology when we know it will

Not be commercial before sometime the 2030s if ever and that’s what we need by 2030 we need 80% of the problem solved we need to focus on what works and that’s clean renewable energy in addition you don’t eliminate these other energy security problems with small mod modular reactors in fact they increase

Weapons proliferation risk because they are so modular I mean I saw this department of energy video where they’re showing these reactors being shipped around on a truck you know if you can ship around a nuclear reactor on a truck you know what’s to stop it from being

Trucked to some other country and that wants to develop a weapon secretly under the guise of Civilian nuclear energy programs so they don’t necessarily reduce the risk of meltdowns because they’re different design types those that can reduce the risk of um and Al that well they all they’re those that

Reduce the risk of weapons proliferation uh because they uh they have some other designs to try to reduce well I me let me back up there’s there’s so many issues that do not disappear with small modular nuclear reactors uh that we have with large reactors so let

Me just stop there I think I’ve taken up our time already but happy to answer questions but the conclusion is that we have the ability to transition the UK to 100% clean renewable energy and storage for everything the transition’s already ongoing the clear thing is to focus

Deploy deploy deploy as fast as possible and and and keep our eye on the ball and do not get distracted by Tech by technologies that will not help us such as new nuclear power whether it’s small or large uh and this also goes for carbon capture direct air capture blue

Hydrogen which are basically constructs of the fossil fuel industry and also this bioenergy which is basically just increases air pollution increases greenhouse gas emissions and uses huge amounts of lamp so with that I’ll stop and happy to answer questions some point okay can we have some questions on the

Chat line please questions on the chat line to Mark Jacobson Allison can you hang around for a couple of minutes did did you say you have to be gone by 6:30 is that right yeah I’m all right for a little while Dave no problem okay so questions to Mark Jacobson anybody got any

Questions like to give any um any well I I’ve got one if nobody nobody else has checked in anything how how far do you think the IRA is getting now the British audience that’s a little scary because it stands for um Irish Republican arm me but of course in

America it’s the inflation reduction act which has boosted various forms of of energy well I’ll let you do a do a conclusion on that one Mark well it’s a mixed bag so I would say 60% of the money in the inflation reduction Act is going to useful Endeavors such as a wind

Solar battery storage heat pumps Energy Efficiency electric induction cooktops battery electric vehicles and you know other types of storage but 40% is really going to these Technologies are not helpful so small modular nuclear reactors keeping existing nuclear reactors alive uh also carbon capture Direct air capture blue hydrogen electrofuels which relies on carbon

Capture and keeps fossil fuel basically it’s a replacement for fossil combustion fuels and also bioenergy is getting money as well so these are 40% is going to what I call useless Technologies so that’s not helping at all but 60% is is going to use full Technologies right so we’ve got um we’ve

Got Frank Bolton you made a comment the Trade union movement in the ukcs Renewables I’m not sure they do not the ones I know but anyway I don’t uh but what’s the attitude how do you find trade unions React to what you’re saying Mark sorry can you repeat that how do

You find trade somebody just made a comment about some trade unions the Renewables as a threat to jobs how how have you found Trade union attitudes to R well it’s different I mean some places like when we actually looked in New York in 2013 and trade unions were 100%

Behind behind uh transition to of New York to 100% Renewables and that’s in fact that helped there’s a law in New York to go to 100% Renewables in fact 20 US states and territories have laws and many of these are supported by unions now there’s some unions that you don’t

Like Renewables but I’d say most of them do because there are they create jobs I mean Renewables increase the number of jobs in most places I mean the places where they’re decreasing are really heavily really heavy fossil fuel producers but worldwide we calculate 28 million more long-term full-time jobs than lost

Certainly in the US there’s more jobs created than lost in the UK as well so my experience is most trade unions like it not all trade unions like this but most of them do okay F another question from Ace Ace Hoffman how much nuclear waste per kilowatt will SMR supposedly create

Compared to say vogul that’s a nuclear plant in the Georgia and USA and but yeah that’s a bit bit technical I my answer to that would be the smart answer absolutely none because we’ll never have any anyway you got a on that Mo um yes

So what I was trying to say and I was fumbling my words before was that you know they different designs of small mod reactors been proposed and some claim that they’re going to have less waste but reason they have less waste is because they keep refining the uranium

They keep reusing the re uranium and refining it to a higher degree so that just increases the risk of weapons proliferation by creating closer to weapons grade uranium so there’s a trade-off you can either create more weapons grade uranium and less waste or you have more waste and less weapons

Graded uranium so I think you lose in both situations next from Nigel dogger what is the expected requirement for short and long-term storage and how quickly does this need to be ramped up I mean we have long-term storage today uh I mean batteries can be C concatenated together in series and you

Can have as long as storage as you want or you can use them in parallel and you get high peaking rates because you need storage for two purposes one is for peaking and one is for long-term storage now in fact we just did a study that just published a study looking at well

What’s better just using batteries for All Storage not all storage but I mean with Hydro well first of all every country has some Hydro so that’s going to be in the background anyway but should we use just battery hydro and batteries or hydro and batteries and hydrogen fuel cells because the

Advantage of hydrogen fuel cells is even though they’re pretty expensive for peaking power they’re less expensive for long-term storage so we found that batteries and hydro work everywhere but adding some hydrogen fuel cells actually reduces the cost of storage in many places not everywhere some places all

You need is batteries and and hydro and hydropower but adding hydrogen fuel cells in some places with batteries can uh make it cheaper to keep the grid stable so so we found the simulations we’ve done for the UK and everywhere in the world we look at long-term storage

In longterm we do simulations every 30 seconds for multiple years and we never found a place where we can’t keep the grid stable with 100% Renewables based on based on basic storage like batteries hydrop power and now and there later study adding fuel cells to that I’ve got a question

Here it’s a bit specific about the UK and T smrs on T side uh and this claim that it’s going to be privately funded I’ll leave that to Steve Thomas Le to might know something about that but the next one um from Peter Sten he says hi Mark what do you see as

The principal barrier to moving to 100% renewable future in the UK well right now I mean we have so short of a time and and hi Peter thanks for great question um uh the thing we have so such a short time we really need to focus on what works so the problem

We’re having is there’s so many competing Energy Technologies trying to get funding for you know the available funding to for for a transition so in the US as I mentioned we have the fossil fuel companies pushing carbon capture direct air capture blue hyrogen electrofuels we have the bio enery

Companies pushing or the agriculture companies pushing bio energy that’s biofuels biog gas biomass and we have the nuclear industry pushing small Modio reactors big reactors and keeping existing reactors alive so this I think is a really big barrier to having all this competition for limited funds uh

When you have technologies that are will either will not be available or just don’t work or don’t help or maybe help a little bit with one problem but cause damage Dage and the other problem so it’s our inability to focus and stick on the topic and stay on and focus on what

Actually works and what can be implemented quickly I think that is the main issue and also then people are also being there’s a misinformation campaign about Renewables that still continues so that’s you know one thing I mean there are some practical issues like well I

Don’t know if it’s so much of an issue in the UK but getting getting transmission lines implemented in for example in the US that takes a long time for just permitting purposes it’s not a technical or even economic issue it’s a permitting issue and and there is nimm

Not you know nobody wants to build anything okay so but you have to pick put something you have to pick something so the question is what is the least of all evils and the because nobody wants like you know any energy technology but would you rather have a nuclear power

Plant near you or a wind farm or a solar I that’s kind of what it comes down to for a lot of people in addition to what are the other impacts so yeah there are barriers that do face us um but I think if we keep focus and keep our eye on the

Ball and really examine what are the benefits of such a transition we see that the benefits are so great to just focus on clean renewable energy that you know it just makes no sense from a social point of view from a society point of view from a country or a

State’s point of view why do anything else that’s this is what’s working this can be implemented we can solve the problem this way so I I think that really has to be emphasized going forward couple of people asking whether you’ve got a UK specific paper you can share for the UK

Figures perhaps you can send that on later yeah well I’ll give this summary here I I can actually share this uh because what we did was there was one paper where we looked at Europe and all indiv like trying to keep the grid stable in individual countries in Europe and then

Joining them together in different configurations to see how that would change the cost of keeping the grid stable so in that study we actually did an GD UK in isolation and this is the result I just put on the chat but let me actually share the paper as

Well um right so yeah great if you could do that yes um but then a more recent paper on because that that was part of um a few years ago then there’s a more recent paper which includes the UK as part of the European grid so it doesn’t actually

Isolate UK so the first paper isolates the UK the second paper is more recent but it’s has UK combined with the rest of Europe so there’s a couple papers there great great Eric says this is a essential to use 100% Renewables but the existing inverters are making the grid

Less stable we also need to add grid stability systems so what do you say about inverters Etc well I mean first of all batteries should help a lot to keep your grid stable I mean California now has about eight or nine gigawatts of batteries on the grid their 4our batteries and just

To put that in perspective I mean except for summer the peak Demand on the entire California grid is you know somewhere between 25 and 30 GW so you know we’re close to a third of the peak power can be supplied by gret batteries for four hours and there’s you

Know this is just in three years and that’s I mean amazing growth and so I think and we haven’t had grid stability problem there was like 2020 there were some blackouts but that was nothing to do with the Renewables on the grid had to do a lot few other things

But there hasn’t been a blackout and batteries respond so quickly 10 to 20 milliseconds for a response to a drop in power whereas natural gas takes five minutes to get to 100% from zero power so I mean I mean even you combined even open cycle gas turbines which are used

For peaking power they take five minutes batteries take 10 to 20 milliseconds hydrop power takes 15 seconds this is why batteries are so good I mean they respond so quickly to a drop in anything on the grid so they can be used to regulate the grid quite well so we

Haven’t had this issue with that at least I’m not aware of this issue occurring where I live in California but so I think it I think that any of these things you know there if there a problem does arise there are solutions it’s just takes time to implement them sometimes

But it’s not a I don’t think that’s a technically difficult problems to solve we got a couple of questions about nuclear bomb and nuclear weapons and smrs and so from Andrew lman and Nigel dogger perhaps the connections between Rolls-Royce and smrs can be again can I shuffle that one later

To Steve who can Steve Thomas who can who talks specifically about UK and smmr sorry about that we going to move on um Ibrahim boroa says what transitional approach would would uh would advise regions like Subs Safar and Africa that relied on fossil fuels as sources of income in relation to their development

You’ve done a lot of international studies Mark haven’t you yeah we’ve done for many countries in Africa we’ve done studies for them not all the countries because we don’t have data for every country but most of them we have data for and we’ve done have

Plan and in fact so I can share there’s a um this link has actually all the individual plans you can click on an individual plan um for all the countries we have so far at least well that’s actually we have some updates to that but they just

Not yet published so I don’t don’t actually have official numbers for those yet but we find everywhere in Africa yeah we can we can get 100% Renewables keep the grid stable with resources in these countries most in the most recent study we did we broke up after into four

Regions and looked at connecting them interconnecting those regions and we found good stability at low cost I mean each region has different set of resources I mean each country has a different set of resources but that’s a nice thing with clean Renewables there are many sources there’s you know combination of wind

Solar and wind is very complimentary to solar and then Hydro is very good for backup and you know that’s going to you know those are going to be the backbones of the of any clean renewable energy grid and Africa is no exception right I’m just running through

I’m conscious of time here so I’m running through the rest of the questions to try and look for stuff we haven’t covered so much recently this is a now this is a this is a difficult question for you mark do you have a view on the German dstat University iron based energy storage

Project clean circles is this iron air batteries or I’m not really sure what that is yes must be I mean there are multiple types of batteries being proposed and trying to be commercialized and um you know anything that works is great so you know electric lower cost batteries that can

Be used for I mean there’s different you’ll need for vehicles you need very highdensity batteries but for stationary electricity storage where there’s a huge demand for storage you we can afford to have bigger batteries that are you that are less dense so as long as they’re low cost and can be implemented quickly

That’s great I’m supportive I don’t know you know how far along that is but uh a lot of different battery Solutions I’ve heard of sound great just question I’ve got a question from Paul Dorman given Renewables will do heavy lefting for next zero can nuclear economically practically load

Follow uh no well there are only two countries in the world that even try to load follow with nuclear France and Belgium I believe and they but they load follow to the extent it’s like I mean I mentioned open cycle gas turbines take a five minutes to go to 100% in

Those cases I think they take like 20 to 100 minutes to go to 100% so they can’t you know they can slowly gradually follow load but they can’t get PE they can’t meet short peaks in demand I mean you need batteries or Hydro or in the

Worst case open cyc gas turbines to meet the short Peaks and demand so nuclear absolutely cannot do that so they do need backup on top of that but when they’re running in this load following mode then they’re generally their capacity factors are much lower so in France you have low capacity factors of

Nuclear in fact last a year ago is like 52% not only because of I mean it’s normally been low but then it went lower because they’re so old all those reactors are so old so you to tradeoff if you want high capacity factors you pretty much have to run them at base level

You can ramp up load following like they do but still that doesn’t meet peaks in the demand and so they still require backup just like other forms of energy do okay thanks well you’ve given us nearly half an hour now um I run through most of the questions that haven’t

Repeated themselves at least so perhaps and Al I know Alice and DS has just got to make a beline to talk to those European commission officials I just know just waiting for us so or whatever you’re doing Alis just joking there and so perhaps we ought to go over

To her and thank you very much for that Mark I know you you’ve got a lot of pressure on your time it’s been really fantastic for you to join us thank you very much so uh so muted muted Round of Applause for you thanks that’s great that’s great thank you thanks everybody okay

Over to you Allison you’re going to talk about Sewell sea the great monster that awaits us at the end of some people’s Garden at least I certainly am um thank you Dave I don’t want to disabuse you though and uh claim that I’m here for S

Well I’m actually here to um talk about human rights issues to do with my old job but um thank you for um it’s nice to see everybody um I I just obviously your focus is is mainly on smrs but I just want to give you a sort of quick summary of where

We’re at with Sewell um and um I actually want to start with Hinkley Point um which seems perhaps an place to start but really my message this evening is to try and sort of debunk claims that EDF is making but somehow seze well is going to be an improvement on Hinkley

And that somehow the sort of learning from Hinkley point will mean that siis W will be uh quicker and cheaper to build because I think there’s plenty of reasons why that isn’t the case um I’m sure you’re all familiar with the figures but obviously in the last couple

Of weeks we’ve learned that the cost is up to 35 billion from 17 in uh from 18 uh in 2015 money uh 46 billion in today’s money um and the delay is now between four and six years since construction began um obviously if we count the Christmas turkeys in 2017

We’re talking a lot later than that um but uh really you know as we know every epr project has been late between six and 14 years late and least double the budget where we know about what those costs are and hinley is fifth and sixth

Of a kind of epr rather than the first of a kind that EDF is is uh claiming and these cost um and schedule uh updates have been happening for a number of years now you know the first in 2017 just a year after construction began and this strongly suggests that there was no

Learning from the four previous CPR projects I mean obviously okoto in Finland was 14 years late um flamville in France uh is not due online till later in 2024 and it’s at least 12 years behind schedule and four times over budget but it’s interesting to note and

Steve Thomas reminded me that this was the case that the cost of um one reactor at flamville may have escalated to 11.2 billion in 2015 money but that’s still 11.2 billion for a single reactor whereas hint is lik to cost 17 a half billion pounds for a single reactor so

You know on that basis replication seems to increase cost rather than reduce it um so you know these these sort of failures you know are very indicative of um a much wider problem and really you know the the most logical conclusion is that that it’s the technology uh to

Blame you know not just poor execution of these projects although I’m sure that’s played a part um and again I’m sure those on the call will be very familiar with the words of former EDF CEO Henry poglio who told the French assembly uh last Christmas that the epr is too complicated almost

Unbuildable um and really no amount of replication is going to change a complex technology into a simple technnology and as we know France is not going to build any more of this type of reactor um in that their country but proposes to construct six of the simpler epr2 reactors um gdf describ as

Simplification and optimization of the design of the epr um so the only cost that his taan um which itself was uh late and took uh twice was twice the budget and the problems at taan are sort of broader than than just their delivery because taan one has been off for the

Best part of two years uh with fuel failure related problems which um the French regulator has prompted the French regulator to call for design changes um to be implemented um in flamville at some stage um really when we come to seis well um the only cost that’s in the

Public domain is this 20 billion pounds um and which is so out of date and it’s um quite extraordinary uh that the night before the hly point uh announcement update was made which ministers clearly knew about it because they said things to us which Jolly well showed that they knew Hinkley

Was going to be considerably delayed um they chose to put uh double the taxpayers investment in size we see so it’s now up to two and a half billion pounds and along with the billion pounds that EDF has already spent you know this must make it the most expensive nuclear

Project to have not yet reached a final investment decision in the history of the industry um it’s quite extraordinary and also just a little anecdote I don’t know who thought it was a good idea for Andrew the minister in the center to use the same Spade that David Cameron had

Used to break ground at hinley point in 2013 but as omin Go I mean it must be a fiasco really because obviously hinley is a dreadful role model and furthermore it took another three years from David Cameron wielding this same spade for um hinley to reach a final investment

Decision so let’s hope it’s three years uh for size well um if not never which would be our preference clearly but just in terms of this kind of replication argument it doesn’t matter who pays the size we see um EDF of the people who would have to build and Supply it um and

There is this legitimate question with EDF sort of wanting um France wanting EDF rather to concentrate on domestic priorities whether the company would become very overstretched um and skills wise there is a problem as well because the original intention was to limit the gap between hinley and seis well to

About two years so that workers that finished uh one stage of the hle project could then move on to Sewell and begin the same stage of work there and that gaps now about eight years so it’s understandable that uh EDF would want to drisk the project but that’s no use

If those workers had to go off and find jobs elsewhere and are not available so the solitary Silver Line in um with the the hle SE project is as the government points out that the overruns and over spends are the responsibility of EDF but this presents the government with

Something of a problem because the intention to use a regulated asset based model at siis well c means that when that project overran and overspent as it inevitably will the responsibility is going to be on taxpayers and on consumers um so I think another key sort of reason to debunk this claim that

Somehow sizw well will be easier and quicker and cheaper to build than hinley point is that you can’t replicate the project location it’s not a case of taking Hinkley point and just dumping it size well and it’s been described by an O official as an expensive site to

Develop um and the same person also said that any savings a project might make with above bound round replication were likely to be completely absorbed by difficult groundwork so you know it is a complex site it’s more and more constrained it’s got protected habitats all around it um it’s

In a water stressed area it’s um right next to the minsmere Nature Reserve um and it also is on one of the fastest eroding coastlines um in the UK uh so s David King for example said that seis would be very difficult to prevent from flooding and there have been huge

Controversies around the significant Coastal defenses uh that would be needed so in terms of sort of thinking of what so sorry quick map of of how Sewell might be an island in the future um taken from official sources so just assume of the um in terms of the impact

Of implications of all of this from consumers as I pointed out you know it would be consumers through the Tariff that would pay if seis Will C were to cost more than that was predicted um and to overrun we’d be paying during construction anyway we’d just be paying

Longer and more money um depending on what the schedule for size we C was um and we were pleased to see that citizens advice published a robust response uh to the government’s consultation recently um saying consumers need to be protected from this risk and the UK science and information technology committee

Innovation yeah Innovation and Technology committee also said that a headline cost lower than hinley points not justified if the risk is too great so all of this also has you know policy implications you know the labor party want to decarbonize the power system by 2030 for the current government it’s

2035 he Sewell is not going to help either of those two policy objectives so you know an electricity system has to be developed that is going to lead to a decarbonized grid by by those dates and it’s just inconceivable that um whatever is put in place could not be scaled up

Rather than this extraordinary investment that would be required in siis Will C and I think what what is really uh important to note in the context of what Mark just been saying about battery storage is that the government is relying for its full business case for seis Will C on a power

Sector model that’s incapable of modeling long-term storage so they the government does have a new model it is being introduced at the moment and they do plan to rerun their 2050 um net seral modeling in a year or two but why make a final investment decis decision on a

Hugely expensive project like Sewell if in a year or two you’re going to redo the modeling and find that you don’t need it so as Mark has pointed out you know this the speed of delivery the cost of electricity is going to be more expensive than would be otherwise available um you know

Potentially as well would increase rather than reduce system costs um and you know they’re also all the non monetized benefits so-called benefits that um the government has to assess when it’s looking at a project like this um so you know for examp example the number of jobs that would be available

Locally is minuscule comparison to the jobs that would be available in other other strategies like Energy Efficiency um so I mean I think there’s an awful lot more I could say as you’ll appreciate but I think given the sort of General um focus this evening um on smrs

I probably would be best to leave it there to allow time for questions before we go on to hear from Steve okay great right so have we got any questions for Allison any questions uh you were quite quick Off the Mark asking for questions there so so for a

Little taster for a little taster how about who’s going to pay for all the cost overuns of size Will C then which will inevitably occur well um we don’t don’t know what the risk sharing allocation is being proposed for for size we see I mean what’s definite is that consumers will

Pay during the construction of size well C whether it overruns or not you know that’s that’s a given because this funding model that is being proposed uh would give any external investors and we don’t know if there is anybody that’s really interested but you know there few

Seem to be sniffing around an immediate return um and you know if there are cost overruns then it seems very likely that you know at least a percentage of those will be passed on to Consumers there’s nothing in the um proposed modifications the Si’s generating license that says

That the consumers will be completely protected from any overruns at all right and Paul Dorfman has asked the French government won’t touch current design of the European pressurized reactor known as epr1 for their new nuclear power stations that they are planning whenever they happen does that imply anything something for the

UK’s Current epr Designs that have been approved by the regulatory system well I you know obviously you know the the general design assessment uh for the pr was was given um by the office for nuclear regulation sort of you know Steve will remember the exact date for that but I mean it I

Think it just suggests that the UK is being taken for fools to you know continue to plug away with a technology that is so obviously riddled with with difficulties um I mean it is also telling that officials when they talk about the Civil nuclear road map um have

Made it clear that uh they are going to look at a third gigawatt project I mean it’s a very uh it’s a very sort of sketchy commitment that they’re making to just explore another gigawatt project but they’ve made it clear that they’ll be looking Beyond EDF and the epr well

You know that suggests they’ve had their fill of learning um but why they would then continue to back size we see when they can clearly um appreciate that you know hinley is an absolute Fiasco is just just beyond us um and you know the the French government are now trying to

Get the UK to help stump up to finish hinley and I think this is sort of punishment because it was a the UK’s insistent that China was booted out of size well and decided to flounce off in a huff after putting in its contractually um agreed amount at hinley

Point C but you know maybe this is an elaborate ploy to get out of of of size Will C because you know they do really want EDF to sort of go back home and and um get their own house in order but um it it’s all very murky and uh you know

I’m afraid we don’t know exactly what’s going on behind closed doors yeah I hope it’s elaborate ploy myself and um I’ve got a question from guy Nicholson what’s the role of off gem who are supposed to protect consumers from high costs and the size well RAB

Saga well um if guy guy’s interested and I’ve got his email I can send him um some off gen guidance on on how they think they would they would manage the size of generation license um it’s certainly more accessible than the government’s own uh consultation documents on on the modifications um

There are all sorts of incentives that uh are supposed to keep uh size well in check you know they they’re supposed to sort of you know get penalties if they mismanage the project but since the ultimate uh motivation to finish a project on time on on budget is if it’s

Coming out of your own pocket hasn’t worked at Hinkley it’s it’s impossible to see how any kind of uh structure where you get paid um you know even if you’re not doing brilliantly uh will will have an effect so yeah I can’t see any evidence that RAB is going to somehow make edf’s

Ability to deliver size wellc much more effective Pete roach wants a little clarification did you say the government model can’t model any storage or just long-term storage so the dynamic dispatch model which is the power sector model that the department currently uses cannot model storage that is greater than 24 hours

Duration righty Ho by the way for those uninitiated or in America for instance Raab means regulate regulatory regulated asset B and um it was used in a slightly different form for the desas illustrous building of plant vogle in Georgia and also the abandoned scheme in South Carolina but

With a different twist in the UK in of course that instead of the consumers stumping up for all the money as the plant is built the consumers just pay for the interest and profits on Equity the shares whereas magically some all the money that’s build that’s borrowed to build the

Project somehow floats away somewhere of course the consumers I say are going to have to pay for this in the in the long run big time as well that anyway that’s me saying this but perhaps but perhaps um if there’s no more questions Allison that’s been really really um great um I haven’t

Got any more questions I can see at the moment On’s probably missed so thank you now I do apologize that I’ve got to leave as well but um thank you very much for inviting me that’s that’s great thank you very much Allison you shown a lot of light on a tricky subject and

Right on time actually I told Steve Thomas you’ll be on at 6:30 and it is now almost 6:30 so one of those rare occurrences where my planning has proved to be correct uh by accident probably so here we have Professor Steven Thomas from greenich University talking to us from

Brighton this is hattens who is going to be talking about small modular reactors he’s done a quite a lot of academic research and public dissemination on this including a a report to the House of Commons environmental audit um committee which they may or may not have read to a

Greater or lesser extent anyway Stephen you have control over your presentation which is you say longer so I’ll try and um circulate it later but anyway over to you Stephen you’re still muted Stephen no I’m not I’m all right I don’t think so I’m just trying to uh uh share

My screen and there it goes great right um all of you will be aware of the vast amount of uh publicity that is being uh put out for small modular reactors and we may some very extravagant claims are being made for them they’re cheaper and easier to build less prone to cost and

Time overuns they’re easier to finance they’re safer some called meltdown proof roof walk away safe they produce less waste and because they they’re smaller they’ll be easier to site and they’ll create large numbers of new jobs I mean a lot of these claims are down to the very poor quality of the uh

The media which uh reports um Pious hopes of the nuclear industry as if there were facts they say smrs will be cheaper and easier are cheaper and easier to build but we haven’t built any yet so how on Earth do we do they know that but anyway as a result of this

There is a WID spread impression that there are large numbers of SMR orders being placed and are being constructed all around the world and these claims are just wrong uh they’re at best they’re unproven they’re misleading there are no modern SMR designs operating there are three under construction China Russia

And India so of no relevance to us whatsoever no current design has completed a full safety review by an experienced and credible regulator and until that’s been done until you know what the regulator is asking for you don’t know what the costs are going to

Be so no smas are available to order now even if you wanted to so what are they well the term SMR covers such a wide range of sizes and Technology as to be essentially meaningless the conventional definition of an SMR is that there are reactors between three sorry 30 and 300 megawatts there

Is a smaller class of reactors up to 30 megawatts which are generally called micro reactors to try and make a bit more sense of them you you can divide them into two different categories uh one category is the uh are smaller versions of the types that are the main version main reactor designs

Operating in the world so these are pressurized water reactors like Cel B inkly Point C and boiling water reactors bwrs we haven’t built any in this in the UK yet but uh they were proposed for wilver and albrey uh but that those those proposals collapsed the second category is

Advanced uh what what the UK calls Advanced modular reactors these are not new technologies they’re technologies that have been around for 50 or more years uh in some cases they have been built as prototypes or demonstration reactors for example sodium fast breeder reactors like the dun Ray reactor on the North Coast of

Scot Scot all of these prototypes and demonstration plants were unsuccessful some of them are reactor designs that have been talked about for a long long time but never built so we have things like the molden salt reactor they’re called Fast reactors there was an organization called The Generation 4 Forum set up to

Promote these Advanced modular reactors uh in 20 2001 2002 when they were set up they said uh these would be commercially available by around 2025 their latest projection is they will be commercially available around 2050 at the earliest so in terms of climate change they are just an

Irrelevance the UK is pursuing just one particular type of advanced modular reactor the high temperature gas cooled reactor because of the hope that they can be forced to operate at up to 900° Centigrade which opens the way to for them to be used to uh allow the

Efficient uh production of hydrogen by a thermochemical process it seems It’s it will be a a stretch to make them work at that level um and in fact the the British government itself says they’re not very likely Beast are not currently aware of any viable fully commercial proposals

For htrs that would can be deployed in time to make an impact on Net Zero by 2050 then they say basically we’re going to put money into the British reactor design industry and that will that will solve things well if you’re relying on the BR British reactor design industry

Whose last reactor design was Advanced gas cooled reactor about 60 years ago then you really are desperate so let’s move on to the designs that are at least plausible we know that pwrs and bwrs do work to the extent that they generate electricity although the the definition

Is 3 30 to 300 megawatt they are all much bigger than that there is one design that is 77 megaw the one that Mark talked about in in the United States uh they’re just about to go bankrupt all the rest are 300 megawatts or more if you read the publicity of our

Smrs you will think that there are small bits of kit that an Ikea Lorry will deliver and bolt down on the edge of an old site the rolls rice design is 470 megaw it’s talked about as being uh possibility for the transv vanth side 470 megawatt would make it twice

The size of the transv vanth reactors about the same size as an AGR so Rolls-Royce smrs are smaller than eprs but they are not small by any other criteria there is also talk about the uh improvements in the designs and again the Press is guilty here for assuming

That a feature in one design occurs in all designs so some designs claim improved safety by passive safety and what passive safety means is that instead of relying on for example an emergency core cooling system to kick into action when you’ve got a meltdown uh natural process like uh con

Natural convection will cool the plant down others talk about the reactor being integral and what that means is that instead of the just the reactor being in the reactor vessel all the major systems are contained in the reactive vessel and it is assumed that because they are in

That much stronger vessel they’re much safer safer some reactors are are proposed to be built underground uh and uh built underwater and again you can see that this might have some safety uh features the rolls rice SMR has none of these features it’s just an old school pressurized water reactor just like size

Will be only smaller in October uh the mythical Great British nuclear selected six designs uh which could bid for money uh for government money to develop those designs so that was rollsroyce G Hitachi htech Westinghouse prome and new scale rolls-royce’s design is already undergoing review by the uh office of nuclear

Regulation uh G Itachi and haltech have just been given 30 million quid of public money each to uh start a review by the onr Westinghouse has just applied for that process for for its reactor the results of this contest will happen will come out in Spring uh of

This year uh the contracts in the summer we don’t know what the amount of money available is all the uh government documents say is there’s a budget up to 20 billion to be spent by the mid 30s to design and build SMR so that they’re telling us nothing

So let’s look at the the claims for them and and the biggest claim is is on scale they are smaller therefore they’ll be cheaper which is contradictory smrs uh the original reactors were smrs or small reactors they were reactors like Bradwell and Barkley were about 140 megaw Cal the

Hall and Chapel cross about 60 megaw the size of reactor has increased consistently since the 1960s and it’s and those it’s pursue scale economies because the economics of the existing reactors were so poor and you can easily see what those scale reactors might scale economies might be, megawatt reactor

Vessel weighs less and costs less than 5 200 megawatt reative vessels so this scale economies clearly exist the problem is that they have never been observable because other cost factors seem to be going up much faster than the scale economies were bringing them down you would guess probably that

That it’s the additional safety features that have been necessary because the reactors weren’t as safe as we thought they were so the other big claim from smrs is that they will be largely manufactured in Factory they’ll be loaded on the back of a lry and bolted together at site on

Site so that instead of all the site work that we see at places like Hinkley and Sewell it would happen in the much more controlled uh at uh environment of a factory but of course if there are savings they will have to counter those lost scale economies and the question that’s never

Answered is why a reactors so difficult to build is it because they’re large or is it actually because they’re they’re more they’re more complex than they used to be why would a small reactor be any less complex than a large one unless you’re going to take things off it are you

Going to take away some of the safety systems that a large reactor would need and of course the the nuclear industry has having its own little argument about whether large reactors uh cheaper than small reactors but actually that’s not that’s not what what it’s about uh it’s about whether they’re the

Cheapest option low carbon option and very clearly they are massively more expensive than Renewables such as offshore wind onshore wind uh even solar in the UK very interesting cases the the history of the Westinghouse AP designs you’ll some of you will remember that the Westinghouse AP 1000 was

Proposed for the moride site in uh just uh on the edge of the um cellfield site uh that that proposal collapsed when Westinghouse went bankrupt in 2017 but the history is that the ap1000 came from a a previous design the ap600 and when Westinghouse announced it they said they’ look for scale economies

And larger reactors but there were none so it sent it to the US nuclear regulator uh committee for approval and after five years that approval was given but by then it was it was clear that it was uneconomic so the Westinghouse never tried to sell the reactor what they did

Was to scale it up to uh 1170 megawatts the ap1000 to improve the economics they said look it’s just a scaling up uh so regulatory approval will be will take no time at all they submitted it to the US regulator in 2002 and it took another nine years to uh get regulatory approval

So scaling up and down is not a trivial process as far as a regulator is concerned China built four of the AP 1000s decided they were too expensive so it scaled it up again to 1,550 megaw so about the size of an epr now Westinghouse has scaled it down

To 300 megaw this design was only announced in May 2023 so it’s at a very early stage yet so we have this contradiction that that whenever a design proves to be uneconomic westing house either scales it up or scales it down and it CLA whatever it does it claims it’s going to reduce

Costs one of the features of the AP series was that it was supposed to be Factory built that it was modular and it had passive safety all the big design features that are supposed to make uh smrs uh attractive and I think the best you can say about the record of the

Ap1000 is that it may be marginally better than the epr but probably not very much so what about production lines uh Factory manufacturer and so on uh modular uh building and production lines you’re supposed to get the image of a Model T Ford with uh vehicles moving moving

Slowly down the production line several hundred per day uh and that’s misleading because the Rolls-Royce production line would produce between two and four reactors per year and that’s not really uh what I recognize a production line the logic of production lines is is clear that you set up some Machinery

Standard Machinery that does the same repetitive job again and again they’re expensive to set up and they’re inflexible and they’re only cheap if you can fully load them so you can spread out those extra costs of setting them up if you haven’t got a flow of orders

And this is important for the British case then you need to close them down on Mo board if the design needs to be changed then you’ve got to retool the whole process rolls rice wants to make its first reactor on a production line to to prove the economics you can understand

That because if the economics uh are are are low are good because they’re made on a production line if you don’t make them on a production line you don’t prove anything but once you’ve got a production line you’ve got to keep it fed and if if the production line is

Producing only two reactors per year if the reactor takes six years to build then you’re going to have 12 reactors in various stages of construction before first kilowatt hour of electricity is generated so before you know what the costs are before you know if it’ll even work

Reliably so rolls rice is asking for guarantees of orders for something like 12 or 15 reactors before it will go forward you can understand that but it’s a huge gamble of public money to uh Place orders for perhaps 15 reactors 30 billion pounds worth of equipment before you know it would work

Before you know it’s technically viable all reactors require a mixture of factory work and onsign S assembly claim from smrs is simply that the balance is a bit more towards off-site work you’re still going to have to dig holes in the ground you’re still going to have to

Pour concrete you’re still going have to weld steel the the difference might is is is just in F emphasis so what about the other claims waste well all things being equal a large pwr bwr will create less waste than the same capacity of small reactors Allison McFarland the former nuclear Regulatory Commission

Commissioner uh claim that smrs will increase the volume complexity of waste by a factor of between two and 20 and and if you think about a reactor vessel with a radioactive material in it the smaller the vessel the more it’s going to get re radiated so it’s going to produce more

Radiation in terms of safety well each design has its own safety features but if we look at the main features passive safety integral design subsurface designs they’re not necessarily safe safer they just produce different safety issues the big unanswered question and the one that will only be answered when

Uh the regulatory bodies complete their their reviews of the designs is are they small reactors going to be allowed to get away with small with fewer safety features than large ones and and until we know the detail of reactor designs like the Rolls-Royce then we won’t know

If they’re trying to get away without say uh a core catcher to to stop a meltdown going into the Earth aircraft protection which will protect it if an aircraft is flown into it what about jobs people talk about jobs and EDF talked about 25,000 jobs being created

At hinley Point C this is very misleading what they meant was that there would be 25,000 people working on the site over its construction period typically for a year at a time so this is not 25,000 jobs this is 25,000 people working there for about a year they have typically specific skills

Not going to be found locally so these are going to have to come from other parts of the country or more likely even from abroad and they’re going to be very shortterm very disruptive uh and you’ll find as is happening at inkley point that holiday camps and hotels are being taken over to

To accommodate the workers course if smrs are actually cheaper and easier and quicker to build and large reactors that actually create fewer jobs and over a shorter period you the more money you spend uh the more jobs you create so hly Point C is a great job Creator because it’s going on

So long and so much money is being spent if factories with production lines are efficient they’ll need fewer workers than uh than on-site assembly and if we import the designs we’re not going to get those factories if J GE Hitachi uh exports reactors to the UK

Those factories are going to be in Japan or the United States so there’ll be no jobs Course once you get to the operating phase that’s relatively few permanent staff you uh probably in hundreds maybe there’ll be a few more if you have three reactors rather than one

But again you’re not going to be creating work for the the population so final slide what are the conclusions well SMR development is reliant on on public money in the past you could rely on utilities building nuclear power plants now they have no interest in building nuclear capacity

Because things go wrong it’s their shareholders will pay not their consumers reactive Enders always over State how close to availability their designs are and if you look at publicity from Westinghouse you would think they were ready to start building to tomorrow they’re not going to be ready to build until a comprehensive safety

Review has been done and that will be in the case of rolls rice that will be more than two years away uh case of the other reactors in the UK four or five years ago producing new reative designs is risky and expensive and it takes a long time

Uh Mark talked about the new scale Design This is the 77 megawatt uh design that was going to be built in the USA it took 20 years to get to that stage and about a billion pound of money including large amounts of US public money so vendors are not going to be

Investing their own money if we’re going going forward with smrs it will be public money and guarantees of orders that will bring them to the market who’s going to produce those designs well there’s actually two different categories there’s traditional vendors the vendors that have produce the reactors we have like Westinghouse framatome

Gachi they don’t they are small companies Westinghouse and framatome went bankrupt about seven or eight years ago so they don’t have the money to develop new designs the cheap way for them to do it is to scale down their failed large design so the Westinghouse design ap1300 is a scale down

Ap1000 the gachi bwx 300 is a scal down es bwr 1500 megawatt reactor that so uneconomic it was never offered for sale these were uneconomic so why would scaling them down make them any better the new companies lack credibility companies like htech and uh X energy and all the other small

Companies that appear to be coming forward don’t have need Public Funding they are small companies they have no resources and they have no credibility because they’ve never built a nuclear power station so they will need to team up with someone with that credibility if they’re going to sell

Reactors i’ probably overrun I’m sorry if I have but I hope that was uh useful thank you well thanks Steve yes well that was extremely useful I like your quote you when you say the cheap way to produce smrs by these long established but bankrupted companies is to scale

Down their failed designs yes that’s just about says it’s all and they’ll actually produce more nuclear waste well I didn’t realize that but well can’t be a plus can it and people have been asking questions about that in the past so so there’s an answer to that and you’ve also answered some previous

Questions about private and public money it’s going to be public money I don’t know where these people come from with this stuff this is going to be built on private by private money well anyway there we are so um but there’s couple other questions later on that people

Have asked vits from South Africa says according to the local South African protagonist Dr cam the Pebbles he’s talking about Pebble reactors um he’s asky about that could you say something about the feasibility of the South African Pebble bed reactors in SMR my SMR guys apparently all ready to be

Up up and running in five or six years are they just well I’ll added my own penny with they just scale down versions already fail designs um said according to the South African protagonist Dr Kem the Pebbles get fed in in one end and the spent Pebbles come come out the

Other and the whole reaction is under full control during the whole cycle of Pebbles going in and coming out so what do can you Enlighten us more on on that Steve yes I mean it’s a useful and interesting example because the uh the design that’s most likely to be pursued in the

UK If high temperature gas cooled reactors are pursued is very similar to the design that was uh pursued in South Africa the pebble bed modular reactor the history of that is that from 1987 onwards the South African uh nuclear industry was uh had taken a German design which they licensed and they

Tried to uh uh turn it into a South African design uh which would uh be economic and would uh win markets all around the world after more than 20 years they finally abandoned the whole process in 2010 uh because and they after more than 20 years they still didn’t have a design

They had no customers uh the whole thing was was a public spending disaster in terms of the design I mean I know Kel I know of Kelvin cam he talks about feeding in the uh the pebbles at the top of the reactor and then taking them out at the bottom the problem is

That when this was tried uh in Germany with with the with the uh prototype reactor and they tried to operate it at 900° C the uh the Pebbles stuck uh and instead of gradually working their way down the uh the column in which they housed they stuck and they

Overheated and the best guess is that they hit around 1500 degrees C which meant that the fuel started to disintegrate uh the reactor is now closed and it’s full of uh Radioactive uh fuel dust and radioactive uh graphite dust and it’s a horrendous mess so you know that I think that

Is I think the South African experiment is going nowhere they they put more than 20 years of public money in it got got nowhere Kelvin Kem will never give up on it but it’s uh it’s dead in the water you’re muted Dave thank you for somebody pointing

That out for noticing that my mouth was moving sound coming out anyway V says we expect Renewables to cost about 20% of today real cost in a decade how are smrs going to be a similar cost by then well they’re not I can answer that one but

Going on to next one Maru says some many nuclear Advocates argue that overregulation has made smrs and nuclear in general economically unviable efforts are underway to streamline an internationally harmonize safety regulation any views on these claims and National International streamlining efforts Steve I feel like I’m in in a Time walk

With this that that that what I was hearing 50 years ago that that what we needed was to was to to bring on the new designs because they’d solve all the old problems we need to streamline planning and we need to streamline uh regulation we need to cut tape it’s never worked in

The past so I can’t for the life of me think why it would work now and given the history of nuclear power with uh significant number number of major accidents like Three Mile Island like chernil like Fukushima uh and like now the Ukrainian reactors which did fortunately have not

Led to an accident but these were all events that Reg that the regulatory bodies did not anticipate as being feasible have we finally gone through all the sequences uh of events that that could lead to Serious accidents I think it would be very optimistic to think

That I think all experience says we we need to make regulation a bit more rigorous not less rigorous uh I mean the the regulatory bodies have always been a uh favorite Aunt Sally of the nuclear industry to blame all their ills on you you will probably have seen that that

EDF tried to blame uh the regulator for the uh cost and time overruns at hinley Point C saying they needed masses more concrete and steel than than was needed in France and they for once the British regulator moved quickly and said no we don’t recognize those at all that is just not

True so I think you know looking for regulation to uh as the the source of the problems is just wrong thank you you for that we’ve got guy Nicholson asking hi Steve where smrs originally like submarine reactors and at that scale no they’re not like submarine reactors I mean people get that

Impression because of rolls Rice’s history in uh supplying reactors but you know a reactor that will F fit in a nuclear submarine has very different design criteria to one that has has as much space as it needs on a on a on a land site so I think there is no uh they

Are very different beasts I mean the submarine reactors require quite highly enriched uranium they have to be very Compact and so they are very different beasts we’ve got questions about the allegedly to be built with privately funded money the tside SMR and any have you any view on the

Role of community nuclear power which is mentioned in connection with the deal westing house is supposedly Str I’m trying to stop myself from laughing here but anyway scory carry on yes no you’re right it’s it appears to be a laughable uh announcement they have no site they have no contract to sell the

Power uh they have no regul approval for the design the regul the westing house has applied to the government for it to undergo generic design assessment government uh assesses that uh that request takes about a year the regulator then carries out the generic design assessment this has never taken less

Than four years so we’re looking at about 2030 before the design is in a state where it could be uh where it could be uh ordered and built so I think there must be something more to it than there is on on the on the face of

It Community nuclear projects is a shell company it was created about 18 months ago with capital of of A1 pound it appears to have no staff it has just has three directors so I think my best I mean I can only think of conspiracies here really that I mean Westinghouse is

Clearly very happy with the publicity it’s getting because it knows that lazy journalists around the world will report this as Britain uh placing firm orders for three AP1 ap300s as for Community nuclear project maybe they think they can take this proposal to a certain level and then

They can sell it to the government because they don’t have the capability to carry through this project you know think a shell company is not going to be licensed to build an operate a nuclear power plans so I think it’s I think it’s frankly just a laughable proposal and I

Think will it will disappear thank you Andrew lman says what is the payback energy into to energy out I think it used to be less than one now one to 10 that’s not exactly your field um Steph but I don’t know if you got anything on

That I think I mean I I think nuclear power plants clearly are net producers are of electricity then I think if you go back a very long way uh and um Dave Elliot might remember this that um some research at the open University suggested that the French nuclear power

Program would be building so many reactors at the same time using electricity to make the concrete and the steel that actually more en Electric would be used building those reactors than the one or two reactors that were actually operating I don’t think there is any any any risk that nuclear power plants

Won’t be net generators course if you start to uh start to use very poor quality uranium then then then much more energy is going to have to go into mining that uranium processing it and making it into fuel but I think we are not at that

Stage yet okay thank you very much I haven’t got any further questions on the chat line but I don’t know if anybody if if if Stephen would like to add anything else as a final conclusion before I do the ultimate wrapup no I I I don’t think so I mean I

Think the next thing to watch out for is this announcement of the competition for for M British taxpayer money to subsidize the development of these six reactors that Great British nuclear has has uh selected how much money is that going to be um I think going back to Allison’s um

Presentation the time Target is 24 gaw by 2050 and that means seven more project big projects after uh size we’ll see there aren’t any other projects so they can’t allow size Will C to go down and smrs may be the best bet for follow on stations because the large

Reactor designs just simply aren’t credible anymore well that certainly looks like a story of a sinking nuclear ship if the best they can come up with is the smrs is my completely unbiased comment and I think that concludes today’s session which has of course been much more balanced than the environmental audit

Committees uh considerations of smrs and 100% renewable energy since they didn’t have anything on 100% renewable energy which we want to have and I refer you to our petition page where we’re still open for a few signatures before we send it off to the environmental audit committee and try and Lobby individual

Members to have a good inquiry into the feasibility of 100% renewable energy so thanks to you Stephen for coming along and presenting your very clear presentation and of course thanks to earlier contributions from Mark Jacob Jacobson and Allison DS so um as people are saying thank you very much and I’ll

Try and get this recording put on the when I’ve got rid of all the times that I was speaking without any sound probably exceeded the clarity of some of the times I have been speaking with sound to be honest but there we there we are with that with that thought

Thank you all for coming and good night