BBC turns a blind eye

Do you remember when the Today programme had Jeremy Leggett on and described him as a renewable energy expert, accidentally failing to mention that he is the boss of a big solar energy company?

They did it again the other day, when they had Ed Davey on to talk about the new EDF nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point. He was introduced as a former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, but BBC journalists strangely failed to have mentioned that Davey  now works for a PR firm that includes EDF among its clients. 

Ben Pile sent a complaint to the BBC:

Ed Davey was interviewed on the Today programme this morning. He was introduced as a former SoS for Energy and Climate Change, and was asked to defend the economics of the planned EDF nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point, which he was responsible for arranging while in office. The deal between the government and EDF is extraordinary on any analysis, and the project has consequently been called 'the most expensive power station in the world'. Your interviewer rightly brought up the fact of this expense being a burden that the bill payer and tax payer would have to shoulder for decades to come.

However, since being removed from office by the voting public, Davey has taken a position at MHP Communications -- EDF's PR firm -- as was revealed by The Times. Davey was given the opportunity to speak to your listeners to defend the deal he was responsible for, and his function as an interested party in EDF's business was not brought up in the discussion.

While it is conceivable that Davey's role at EDF's PR and public affairs firm is a coincidence, I believe the fact that Davey is engaged by the company which is in turn engaged by EDF to defend the very project Davey negotiated -- seemingly on the public's behalf -- would be of interest to most listeners, and would influence their understanding of the discussion on the programme. Davey now being a position to benefit financially from the decisions he made in office, one could reasonably argue that Davey's recent appointment may have been a reward for the deal that he secured for the benefit of EDF, at the public's expense. I believe therefore that the Today programme failed to introduce Davey properly, as an interested party, and has let the audience down.

The response from the BBC was rather extraordinary, even by their normal dismal standards:

From: bbc_complaints_website@bbc.co.uk <bbc_complaints_website@bbc.co.uk>
Date: 24 March 2016 at 13:26
Subject: BBC Complaints - Case number CAS-3742272-YHTBLK
To: Ben Pile 

Dear Mr Pile

Thanks for getting in touch. Apologies for the delay in replying. We do very much regret that we've not been able to get back to you as quickly as we, and you, would have liked.  We raised your concerns about the Ed Davey interview with the Today programme. They explained that the programme was aware that Sir Ed Davey is an employee of MHP but it took note of the agreement he reached with the Government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments which agreed that “…he would not have any involvement with EDF whatsoever in relation to their generating business prior to the announcement of a final investment decision in relation to Hinkley Point C.”

This deals with any issues of a potential conflict of interest in relation to MHP’s contract with EDF. It also means that questions about Sir Edward’s record regarding the commissioning process, for which he was responsible as the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, could be considered on the basis of his record in office not his current employment.

Accordingly, the programme did not refer to his employment with MHP.

Thanks for going to the trouble to let us know your thoughts on this. Your comments have been sent to the right people.

Kind regards

Lucia Fortucci

It's hard to avoid the impression that the BBC is giving its blessing to the revolving-door between politics and big business. It's very much part of the problem.

Oh no! It's DECC!

In Parliament yesterday, energy minister Greg Hands explained that DECC is organising a modular nuclear reactor competition for the UK.

Following the announcement made at the Budget, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched the first phase of a competition to identify the best value small modular reactor for the UK on the 17th March. This development builds on a previous announcement, made at Autumn Statement 2015, that DECC would conduct this competition to help pave the way towards building one of the world’s first small modular reactors in the UK.

Surely one of the most important advantages of small modular nuclear reactors is that you can have competition among many suppliers. Different niches, including "best value", can be found from the bottom up.

Why would we want a top-down process to find the best value modular reactor? And surely DECC are the last people on earth who you would want running it?

Modular nukes: coming soonish.

I'm a bit distracted today, so blogging is going to be light. However, I notice with interest that NuScale Power, a US firm that specialises in modular nuclear reactors, has been given permission to develop its first plant on land owned by the Department of Energy in Utah.

Commercial generation is scheduled for...2024.

A scrap of good news

There is some good news on the energy crisis front, albeit only a small scrap. This is the announcement by EDF that they are going to extent the life of Torness nuclear power station to 2030 - it was originally meant to close in 2023. 

That said, it's going to make precious little difference to the energy crisis that is currently threatening us, and may even overwhelm us next winter, as Euan Mearns sets out in this recent post.

I'm going to be on BBC Radio Scotland shortly to discuss what the Torness decision means. 

Update on Feb 16, 2016 by Bishop Hill

Well I didn't get a lot of airtime, but I'm not sure I needed to. The callers did seem to be mostly hostile to the green energy agenda.

Will fusion kill the climate debate?

I keep a weather eye on developments in the nuclear fusion field, although always with an eye to the oft-levelled criticism that practical fusion is just 30 years away and always has been. 

But last week I did start to get a bit more excited when I learned that the Chinese have managed to contain hydrogen plasma at  50 million degrees C for nearly two minutes. The shift from fractions of a second to minutes seems, to me at least, to bring about a change in perception. We are dealing with an engineering problem rather than a science problem.

Windfarms are already redundant - they have never been anything else - but perhaps they are going to be joined on the scrapheap by oil and gas much sooner than we thought.

Although of course we'll still have to deal with the green protests first.

Update on Feb 15, 2016 by Bishop Hill

In related news, the Chinese have a commercial-sized pebble-bed fission reactor ready to switch on next year.

About that tech solution to climate change...

I can still remember the early days of the internet, reading Junkscience.com and Numberwatch on all the bad things scientists got up to then. They still do.

I was therefore thrilled to see that a familiar name from those days is still fighting the good fight, although I haven't come across him for years, as my interests have been elsewhere. Wade Allison has been trying to point out the preposterous stringency of our nuclear regulations and the scientific idiocy of the linear no threshold model for radiation exposure for decades. He was recently the subject of an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford, has a more realistic idea for fighting global warming than any being promoted at this week’s climate summit in Paris: Increase by 1,000-fold the allowable limits for radiation exposure to the public and workers from nuclear power plants.

Click to read more ...

Wildlife thriving in Chernobyl

Updated on Oct 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Oct 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Pic Arctic Woof under CC licence https://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticwoof/7105477111To some extent, concerns over global warming have arisen as a direct result of environmentalists' scaremongering over nuclear energy. How much lower would carbon dioxide emissions have been if the world had gone nuclear in the 1960s?

That environmentalists were scaremongering is confirmed by a new paper in Current Biology, which reports long-term survey data from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Despite numerous earlier studies reporting that radiation levels in the 1600 square miles zone are above dangerous levels, nobody seems to have passed the news on to the wildlife:

Click to read more ...

A new fusion process

A collaboration between researchers in Sweden and Icelands claim to have developed a new nuclear fusion process. It's based on deuterium, and takes place in in small laser-initiated reactors. More importantly they say that they have already got it generating more power than it consumes.

The laser-induced nuclear fusion process in ultra-dense deuterium D(0) gives a heating power at least a factor of 2 larger than the laser power into the apparatus, thus clearly above break-even. This is found with 100-200 mJ laser pulse-energy into the apparatus. No heating is used in the system, to minimize problems with heat transfer and gas transport. This gives sub-optimal conditions, and the number of MeV particles (and thus their energy) created in the fusion process is a factor of 10 below previous more optimized conditions. Several factors lead to lower measured heat than the true value, and the results found are thus lower limits to the real performance. With the optimum source conditions used previously, a gain of 20 is likely also for longer periods.

Inevitably with nuclear fusion, a degree of caution is always advisable. Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, which can be seen here.

The Lords on fusion

Back in July, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee took evidence on prospects for commercial nuclear fusion in the UK, hearing from Steven Cowley of the Culham fission research centre and David Kingham of Tokamak Energy Ltd.

Reading the transcript, it's hard to avoid the impression that in the UK at least fusion research is something of a white elephant, but one that is being sustained by climate change alarm. As has always been the case with fusion, the timescales discussed run to decades and project managers try to justify themselves with talk of spin-off benefits. However, Lord Peston noted that there is something of a problem with trying to use global warming as justification for the vast expenditure:

Lord Peston: I am a bit lost again—as you can tell, I get lost all the time. How can technology that will be available in 40 to 80 years possibly influence climate change? If we have to save the planet in the next 40 years, we are doomed anyway. You cannot use the climate change argument.

It's interesting to wonder just how far spending decisions are being distorted by climate change alarm.

Click to read more ...

Cameron's great white elephant

Nuclear power is in the news at the moment. The Japanese have switched on a nuclear power plant for the first time since Fukishima, as the authorities realise the full cost of their knee-jerk reaction to the tsunami. Here in the UK, there is a growing concern over the cost of Hinkley Point, a project that increasingly resembles a fiscal black hole.

However, less commented upon have been a few apparently small developments in the nuclear market that may make for a better future for the industry.

Firstly, a US developer of small modular nuclear reactors has given regulators the heads-up that it will submit its first designs next year, ahead of possible deployment in 2023. An array of competitors are working on similar timescales and, encouragingly, regulators seem to be responding constructively too, aiming to have the new rulebook in place in time to keep the commercial operators moving forward.

Meanwhile (if somewhat less credibly), Revkin is looking at a claim that we could have nuclear fusion on stream in a decade.

If all goes to plan it is quite conceivable that Hinkley C could be a white elephant before it is even completed.

Greenery is national security threat

Windfarms and all the other bonkers attempts to green the electricity grid are not only an expensive and pointless gesture that encourages graft and sets neighbour against neighbour. It turns out that they represent a threat to national security too:

Security experts said last year that measures to make the electricity grid greener are boosting its vulnerability to computer hacking since new wind farms, solar panels and smart meters mean there are additional portals to be breached.

“The energy grid today is vulnerable from all degrees,” Slava Borilin, critical infrastructure business manager at Kaspersky, said in an e-mail. “Its electricity production is under threat of interruption and down-time from breaches of industrial control systems.”

Quote of the day, waste of money edition

It is important to recall that well over $1,700,000,000,000 ($1.7 trillion) has been spent on installing wind and solar devices in recent years with the sole objective of reducing global CO2 emissions. It transpires that since 1995 low carbon energy sources (nuclear, hydro and other renewables) share of global energy consumption has not changed at all.

Euan Mearns, whose latest post on the subject is a must-read.

Another 1% off grid margin

The Telegraph is reporting that the nuclear reactors at Heysham and Hartlepool that were taken offline because of cracking in their boilers are to stay out of commission for slightly longer than expected. However, more worryingly, when they do come back online they will not be running at full capacity.

The two twin-reactor plants at Heysham 1 and Hartlepool have been shut down since August amid safety fears following the discovery of cracks in one boiler structure at Heysham.

The ageing reactors are likely to be restarted in coming months at just 75pc-80pc of their usual output in order to prevent high temperatures causing further cracks, EDF said on Friday.

Both stations are in the 1GW capacity range, so we are looking at the loss of another 0.5GW of output, which could be as much as 1% of peak winter demand. Margins for winter 2015/16 were already expected to be as low as 2.5%.

I think National Grid are going to have to step up their efforts to get additional reserve capacity available.

Another capacity crunch in 2018/19?

The last 48 hours has brought news of yet more pressure on the electricity grid. The good news is that the year that is currently looking most likely to bring power cuts - the winter of 2015/16 - is unaffected. The bad news is that a second capacity crunch may well be looming in 2018/19.

The first piece of bad news came when the operators of the massive Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife suggested that they will not be bidding to supply electricity in 2018/19:

Scottish Power has decided not to enter the contest to supply energy generating capacity in 2018/19, arguing financial changes are needed to avert the threat of closure.

The National Grid said it had been working closely with the industry and Ofgem to review the charging regime.

Click to read more ...

The underpinning of energy policy collapses

UK energy policy has one key predicate, namely that fossil fuels are going to get inexorably more expensive. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the sine qua non of the whole renewables programme. Renewables, we are told, will save consumers money, and only if we dig much deeper might we discover that in fact we are actually being told that renewables are being forecast to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the future.

For years that forecast has looked ever more implausible, as all around us a revolution in unconventional oil and gas has caused fossil fuel prices to fall. Now, finally, the government has been forced to respond and to reduce its forecast prices.

Burning gas for power is currently far cheaper than electricity from wind farms, which receive billions of pounds in subsidies from consumers.

Yesterday however the Department of Energy and Climate Change released new forecasts slashing its power and gas price forecasts for later this decade by as much as 20 per cent.

But ministers have repeatedly argued that gas prices will keep on rising, eventually making green energy good value for money.

This is a bit of a nightmare for the greens in government, and it is hard to imagine that the government and its advisers are not going to have to reassess the whole renewables programme. No doubt it is not beyond the wit of the bureaucrats in DECC to come up with some plausible explanation of why renewables will get much cheaper in the future, but it will be interesting to see just how much they have to wriggle first.