UKC

With the General Election just days away, what might party promises mean for the outdoors? We've studied the manifestos and consulted the campaign groups, to find out who's saying what.

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Green Party = Green Party of England & Wales I assume, what about the Scottish Greens ?

As a Scottish voter and generally quite politically aware, I had no idea the Greens were separate entities north and south of the border (independence-related?). The fact I didn't have a clue suggests their messaging may not be cutting through to the electorate at large.

Adding them might arguably be tokenistic since they're both a very small party (now-defunct power sharing perhaps a high water mark in terms of likely influence in the near term?) and geographically self-limiting, hence making themselves close to irrelevant in a Westminster sense. But I'll give their manifesto a browse. If we can include 'Reform' UK then anything is fair game.

Well done for doing that, a necessary but I suspect tedious job.

It's obvious that some words and phrases carry different meanings.  "Responsible" may mean very different things to different people when placed in front of "right of access", just as I suspect that "the country way of life" means something very different to conservative landowners than it might to others reading the Tory manifesto.

I think it's fair to say that in the prevailing circumstances, access to and the betterment of the natural environment is no one's priority beyond stopping shit flowing into watercourses.  Whomever represents your constituency on Friday week will need badgering about this.  Get your stripy noses on and get busy!

T.

Thanks! Yes it is one very full Tuesday of my life I shall not get back.

You're right of course, the country is in such a state that fixing the basics is arguably more essential than waving around inspiring big ideas. Still, I can't help wishing we had a bit more ambition for access, National Parks, and habitat restoration. And a lot more long-term and honest thinking about the energy system.

Great piece of work, Dan! 

An excellent and thorough bit of work Dan, bit disappointed to see my area of employment (small modular reactors) cited by Reform as justification for their incompetent energy policy, although I seem to remember they are mentioned in labour and conservative manifestos too.

Thanks. I need a lie down in a darkened room after all that.

SMRs look amazing! Please hurry up and get them out there.

Reform are promising to "protect country sports". I'd like to know how that might affect right to roam, but I don't want to waste a moment of my life finding out.

What do any manifesto promises/pledges mean. Absolutely nothing. All parties will change their minds after the election, or delay decisions.

There are lots of people working very hard on it!

Labour will form the next government.

The current Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is Steve Reed. He's got a strong local government background but I can't really find out much about his policy ideas for the environment, access etc.

I guess there's a reasonable chance that someone else will eventually take over this brief in the cabinet.

A slight sidetrack, but out of curiosity, how small are we talking here? Would one fit in my Delorean, say, or would they be more house-sized?

And what happens to the spent fuel (assuming these reactors are nuclear)?

How has this got five "dislikes"? My very first thought was that all these promises are meaningless. These are politicians!

Si.

Because it's a counsel of despair and, worse, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people act on the assumption that all politicians and parties are the same by disengaging from politics and refusing to hold politicians to account then we will only get exactly the kind of self-serving, cynical, incompetent politicians that they claim are the only ones that already exist.

Well said.

And even if you did think they're all cynical, dishonest, self-serving and incompetent - an understandable viewpoint, if not one I share myself - you surely have to accept that there are degrees of better and worse?

Would you vote Reform if you thought they had the best outdoor policies?

Not in a million years. Would you? Speaking for myself, what parties say about subjects that affect the outdoors is important to me, but not the only consideration. I consider their other policies too. In the case of Reform, enough said.

SMRs are "small" compared to current nuclear power plants but not exactly car sized! They are nuclear reactors and the waste is still a good question, maybe the new government can finally force a GDF to be build, but thats another story.....

SMRs don't look any good at the moment, worldwide. Bloated – almost all the current projects have since doubled or tripled in thermal power from their initial promises of small and modular, some even nearing traditional reactors in power (meaning they are no longer small and economical, but big and uneconomical and take a decade or two to build). Costly, bloated, slow to build. Pick all three.

Nuclear is simply dead in a renewable world, mostly for economic reasons. Traditional NPP even more so, as Hinkley C so aptly showed.

Any money spent on them would be much better spent on upgrading the grid and adding more renewables, storage and PtX systems that all start actually working much sooner.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/03/small_modular_reactor_criticism/

You can't really cycle NPPs – even SMRs – according to grid demand. Not just for technical reasons (some exist, depending on design), but also for economical reasons. If your SMR only runs in the evenings on demand, your costs just doubled or tripled. They need to be run at 95% capacity, all of the time. Yet they can't compete with renewables most of the time. Which means they need a 20 year or so fixed price electricity contract for ROI, saddling their consumers with higher bills as more and more cheaper renewables are installed.

I'd love to see SMRs deliver on their promises, as I am a huge technical geek, but as it is now, they don't.

Any politician talking about resurrecting nuclear is basically a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry.

They love to see more talk of new NPP projects instead of renewables, as they well know that it would mean just more fossil sales for them in the coming decades, with the inevitable delays of all such projects. It's a nice smokescreen for them.

Unfortunately, despite utopian promises to the contrary, running a net zero energy system off renewables alone is a non-starter if we're relying on wind and solar (and there's no other game in town at present at scale and economical). It's simply way too intermittent. You've gotta smooth the spikes and cover slack periods and darkness, and we're simply not set up to do this adequately.

We can build some sort of European super-grid, arguably that needs to happen, but we can't magic away the limitations of our current wind and solar-based green energy even if we cover truly vast areas of land and sea in turbines and panels (which would not be cheap).

Current energy storage solutions are orders of magnitude too small for projected need. Batteries now available won't get us that far, and pumped storage has a simple problem of not enough geography by a long way - we could dam every glen and corrie in Scotland (funny how no one seems to be proposing the Lake District for these things), we'd still be nowhere near, and the cost would be absolutely astronomical. Reliable base load is needed. That's nuclear or gas, and it's clear we absolutely shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels for energy. As I see it that leaves only one option.

I think it is utter negligence that Governments could have figured all this out years ago, but have chosen to fudge things and keep kicking the can down the road simply because nuclear is a hard sell and expensive. There are no cheap options when you factor in the entire system change needed. All this is not news, so we ought to have had a far more determined and resourced nuclear programme on the go for at least the last decade or two, not the ad hoc crap we have.

Also worth noting - as a member of a community very much on the receiving end of mega energy projects - renewables are not without their paid shills and naive political cheerleaders too. It's all big business when it comes down to it, in a system that is rotten and unaccountable and needs to be held to a much higher standard of openness and democracy. 

Good well researched and well-balanced article - chapeau!

I am all in for renewable energy solutions but there are some major gaps particularly around recycling turbine blades and solar panels, see links below. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68225891

https://www.independent.co.uk/advisor/solar-panels/solar-panel-recycling

Use of lithium-based batteries for energy storage, transport etc is similarly problematic. The extraction and refining of lithium carbonate have huge detrimental costs both human and environmental. 

https://earth.org/lithium-and-cobalt-mining/

Green energy solutions such as wind, solar and battery based are anything but green or sustainable.  There are incumbent technical challenges with such technologies that still need to be overcome. Modern small-scale nuclear and ultimately fusion maybe hold the answer and our current “green technologies” are no more than a bridge to get there.

This is an important multi-faceted debate that unfortunately gets hijacked by lobbyists, certain environmental groups and a uniformed political elite describing “net-zero” without actually considering what the phrase means.

Agreed (mostly) wind generated electricity is only economically viable because gas generation is available as a back up on non windy days or weeks. Providing sufficient storage to make up for this would be economic fantasy and science fiction. The cost of operating and financing a nuclear station is the same whether at full or zero output, so using them as standby for renewables doesn’t make any sense. The most pragmatic solution may well be nuclear for base load and a partnership of increased wind generation and gas, with some demand side management ( control of car charging and freezers etc) for the variable load that sits above the base. Of course many on UKC would be upset about more pylons crossing the Scottish mountains spoiling the view (NOT the environment!). This wouldn’t get rid of gas but it would greatly reduce it.   Also a significant proportion of wind energy would still be wasted on very windy days. Proposals to store some of this energy as hydrogen suffer from inefficiency. Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is only around 30% efficient.
 

Regarding SMRs I understand the main benefit is faster build times and possibly simpler planning? I also understand that they are less efficient than full size reactors due to lower steam pressure and temperature? would they be refuelled like conventional reactors, or left with the same fuel as in submarines?

Rolls-Royce have been getting the SR bit out there for a very long time in the nuclear subs coming out of Barrow. The M bit is coming along nicely in Derby and also the NAMRC in Sheffield. However, the government contract is not guaranteed and I think it will be difficult for an incoming government to square the circle without raising further revenue.

Apologies, but you don't get it. To paraphrase you a bit:

"Unfortunately, despite all Nuclear industry's utopian promises to the contrary, running a net zero energy system off a significant nuclear base‑load alone is a non‑starter if we're relying on nuclear power that costs double or triple of the initial quoted project price and takes double or triple of the initial projected time to even achieve its first criticality."

In other words, new NPPs are too costly and too slow, and all Western SMR projects have so far been as well. How does it help de‑carbonise the grid ASAP if some currently started 40 GW capacity nuclear project only achieves its first criticality in 2050 at 200‑300% the projected cost?

You could be meanwhile ramping up renewables and storage deployment all of that time. Their prices have been falling down all the time.

Battery storage is certainly viable – why do you think even such conservative states like Texas are installing so much of it? And there are other means of storing excess power than your dumb FUD example of "damming every glen and corrie in Scotland".

Batteries are getting cheaper all the time. With excess renewables, even green hydrogen starts to make some economical sense, however energy inefficient and nonsensical is it normally. You can economically make synfuels for industries that can't readily decarbonise (air transport, shipping) or green hydrogen for steelmaking, instead of using coke.

And please tell me how our communities wouldn't be affected by a bunch of big concrete SMRs. It's not like it's an invisible reactor, you know – with some current SMR projects now bloated up to 0.5 GW capacity to make them barely economical, that's one SMR around 1/6rd the size of Hinkley C site at best, and likely more, as the other infrastructure around it doesn't scale down with capacity.

Sorry, you are just parroting most of the fossil fuel FUD about renewables, even if you mean well.

Please tell me what's better for the environment from now on:

20 years of easily building more renewable capacity with their costs decreasing all the time (even is more slowly than up to now), while building up utility‑level grid storage, while figuring out the last decarbonisation bit, even if having to fire up our current fossil peakers the few consecutive days of the year there is zero sun and wind and zero sun in the UK and wind in Spain and zero hydro in Norway, but still utilising the fossil peakers less and less each and every year?

Or 20 years of building up less renewable and storage capacity more slowly, while waiting for that 40% NPP future capacity to not start producing any power til 2044, subsidised by the state (loans and interests on 20‑year megaprojects aren't easy), while running our current fossil peakers at full capacity to make up for the missing rest? The fossil execs love this scenario.

Heck, if right now existed a magical SMR or other NPP design that didn't had any of the issues with always increasing costs and build delays, I'd be all for it. But there isn't.

Their much‑touted "economies of scale of manufacture"? Doesn't really happen til you manufacture lots of them, which is a chicken and egg problem. Even then, you might have issues with making them in parallel at scale, meaning at several different facilities – just look at Boeing's factory woes.

PWR SMRs already have problems of economy of scale, the Rolls‑Royce one is bigger than many existing PWRs already. The 300 MW electric SMR designs are as big as existing PWR blocks.

TMSR SMRs are almost like fusion by now – each year only a few years away...

HALEU‑using SMRs pose a nuclear proliferation hazard – 20% enriched U is already 90% of the way to weapons‑grade uranium for a rogue state actor, and just a tonne of 20% HALEU can be theoretically fashioned into a crude, but effective 15 kT bomb.

HALEU‑using SMR designs have some really big fuel acquisition problems now, as outside of Russia, there simply isn't enough Western capability to produce it at the scales needed.

Batteries can be great for riding out short term (hours at most) peaks in demand or shortfalls in supply. But no chance when there’s a winter blocking high pressure over Scotland for a few days 

Your position relies on storage technology that is as far away as fusion

A plain lie.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/new-recycling-method-makes-solar-ce...

"Part of the misinformation is pure nonsense. The primary ingredients of most panels are silicon, aluminum, and silver, none of which is a major environmental threat. Solar panels also have a useful lifespan of decades, and the vast majority of those in existence are less than 10 years old, so waste hasn't even become much of a problem yet. And, even once these panels age out, recycling techniques are available."

The BBC link you posted clearly states that recycling of old turbine blades is already ongoing. And turbine blades last around 15‑20 years. Again, nothing environmentally harmful in them, and the BBC article clearly states the decommissioned ones are just waiting in a scrapyard to be recycled later.

A plain lie. Current batteries like LFP used in electric cars and grid storage projects are entirely cobalt‑free. In addition, sodium‑ion batteries are even lithium free. Sodium‑ion batteries are perfect for grid storage, as there is less need for high energy densities of LFP, unlike electric cars. You know where sodium is mined, globally? Seawater.

Ah, the usual FUD. You are just plain lying. You got all the "fossil fuel industry shill Bingo" points in just one post!

To paraphrase and correct your lying bullshit:

"Fossil‑fuel and other unsustainable energy solutions such as coal, gas and nuclear as anything but green or sustainable, as they either release massive amounts of pollutants (radioactive coal ash and NOx from gas), release massive amounts of carbon and other GWG during their manufacture or production (CO2, methane from coal and gas, CO2 from all the concrete and energy needed to manufacture a nuclear plant)".

Debunked, move on.

This is an interesting and useful site for seeing the UK’s current generation mix over a range of timeframes

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Your winter blocking high pressure over Scotland lasting a few days is also causing zero wind or sun in England, Wales, Ireland, plus a drought in Norway and clouds plus zero wind in Spain and France, right? And how often does it happen in a year that you can't fire up some hydrogen (or even methane, Sabatier is still much less carbon intensive or even almost neutral if capturing industrial carbon) peakers with all the excess hydrogen you produced with last week's renewable excess?

Please address my negative points about NPPs and SMRs directly and in a technical manner. Please address my points around grid storage, interconnects and P‑to‑X directly and in a technical manner.

Otherwise this discussion is moot, as you are just rehashing the same old "arguments" against renewables without the actual numbers. Because guess what, the various academic scenarios for EU‑wide net zero by 2050 already address that with numbers.

And what would nuclear help there? Before any new NPPs or even highly experimental SMRs are ever deployed in a few decades, you are just burning even more fossil fuels daily, unlike in my scenario.

you’ve moved on to a super European grid with orders of magnitude more capacity than the existing interconnections between UK and Europe. Which by the way allow the UK to benefit when France has a surplus of nuclear capacity. Nevertheless even with greater connectivity between the European countries there is still a high dependence on Russian gas and German coal and lignite 

i’m not qualified to comment on the nuclear issues but interested to learn more hence my questions in my first post. However I do have first hand experience of the technical and economic limitations of electricity storage and demand side management etc having 40 years’ experience of helping energy intensive organisations achieve substantial reductions in energy use, cost and CO2 emissions and the challenges of becoming “hydrogen ready” One of my client sites has a 3MW wind turbine which provides around 60% of its electricity (after the consumption savings I achieved)

By the way I agree with your debunking of the anti wind and solar environmental impact. However the embedded CO2 in construction of a nuclear power station is very small compared to its lifetime electricity generation, a bit like wind turbines. 

Thanks for writing an intelligent and unbiased debunk using only substantiated facts backed by receipts and language devoid of vitriol.

You claim my statement that “extraction and refining of lithium carbonate have huge detrimental costs both human and environmental” is "a plain lie" and intimate that lithium is becoming redundant. You quote use of LFP based batteries in electric cars as cobalt free. LFP is lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4). This is made heating iron and lithium salts with phosphoric acid. Those iron and lithium salts are dug out of the Earth. Phosphoric acid is produced by either the “wet” process by reacting a phosphate rich mineral (also dug out of the Earth) such as calcium hydroxyapatite with sulfuric acid.  Sulfuric acid is made using the Contact process, you learn about this in high school. It involves burning sulfur in oxygen to produce sulfur dioxide which is then oxidised to sulfur trioxide by heating over vanadium pentoxide (this comes from Titaniferous magnetite, uranium ores or believe it or not fossil fuel deposits). The trioxide is then absorbed into concentrated sulfuric acid to make oleum which is finally diluted with water. The “dry” phosphoric acid process requires huge quantities of energy, it involves reduction of phosphate ore using coke in an electric arc furnace to produce elemental phosphorus which is then burned in air to make phosphorus pentoxide which is added to water to make phosphoric acid. None of this processing can be considered green or environmentally sustainable.

LFP’s still require lithium ore and, as I’ve highlighted above, many other ores and minerals. The extraction of these, especially in an exploitative World of commercial greed is wreaking havoc in terms of human health, human exploitation and environmental impact. I’ll repost my earlier link that your post appeared to neglect!

https://earth.org/lithium-and-cobalt-mining/

As stated in my original post, I highlighted that "gaps" exist with solar, wind and battery-based technologies and each have technical challenges that still need to be overcome. Your eloquent debunk addresses how some of the gaps are being filled but I contest, irrespective of your views and foul language that these gaps are significant and current. 

France simply won't have that much surplus nuclear capacity since with global warming, their old NPPs hit even less capacity factor numbers than ideal. Due to the peculiarities of their grid, they are running at around 80% CF on the average by now, which is not only quite inefficient, but also quite costly.

Which will only get worse during the even worse heatwaves in the future, as their coolant water temps increase. They already had to shut down a few during the summer heatwaves – when the demand was the highest – as the coolant water was just too warm. Thermodynamics are a bitch, and NPPs are all just heat engines in the end.

Yes all true but irrelevant to the point I was making, that the UK sometimes benefits from surplus French nuclear, eg in winter when UK demands are greater

Aren’t they currently building some new ones? 

Frank R has been restricted from posting within this thread following the tone of his now removed message. 

As always, we encourage debate, but only when it's done constructively - rude, aggressive or abusive posts will not be tolerated.

Shame Fred lost his rag, I think he makes some good points a little too strongly.

It's hard to pinpoint where SMRs will end up but prospects do seem to be looking a bit worse by the year because of increasing costs (US link below). I have no issue with expensive base load if cheaper alternatives are not available at the right level of security.

https://ieefa.org/resources/eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-nuscale...

I think grid investment should be the key priority and while we wait for nuclear (or whatever) we should return to more gas storage to smooth large price changes and supply issues in times of trouble and war.

Hydrogen production comes very cheaply when wind or solar generate excess power the grid can't take. The Orkney experiment has worked well. 

https://www.orkney.com/life/energy/hydrogen

I'm not going to claim that any of them are magnificent shining examples of benevolent superheroes who are going to lead us to a glorious future. But saying they're all the same is patently absurd. Can't you see how dangerous that way of thinking is? If you think better politicians are unavailable, what's the point of pushing for them?

I was disappointed by that as well. But it would be a more potent charge if they were actually in government rather than in coalition. The public didn't vote them in so they didn't get to implement all (or even many) of their policies. That's democracy.

Hardly fair to accuse them of having worthless election promises when they've loudly backed away from the policy before the election even started. Whether or not you agree with the change, the justification for it in terms of the changed economic landscape was pretty clear.

An exception in the sense that he never got chance to let anyone down because he never got any power, yeah. I'm pretty left-wing and liked a lot of Corbyn's policies. I also recognise that he was a hopeless party leader (as well as being hopelessly undermined by voices from within his own party and a media that was terrified of him).

See above. They don't.