Re: Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing

We notice that you deliberately snipped all the evidence, proving yet again that there's none so blind as *WILL* not see!

I couldn't even understand what he meant.

David

Sure it works, for some value of "works". Here in the UK we just had a week when our 11,000 wind turbines could only produce 3% of our electricity requirement, and solar produced zero. Why? Because of a blocking high pressure area - this happens a couple of times each winter, giving a period when the gas powered power stations plus nuclear have to pretty much produce all the rest. And no one has a credible plan as to how to replace the gas component.

~~~~~~~

whose.

Do try to write correct English.

Mathematics and Computing doesn't cut it, I'm afraid. See my sig below. You're just a bean-counter.

You could always look at gridwatch.org.uk to see what is actually happening minute to minute with UK electricity - or French for that matter.

On 26/12/2021 22:38, TimS wrote:

That is not the only problem, There are more.

1/. Wind is a diffuse energy source. The environmental impact of thousands of wind turbines needed to even deliver the *average* of one thermal power station occupies hundreds of sq km of land or sea. 2/. The effect of intermittency is to mandate in the UK use of fossil fuel plant to co generate with wind, because we have no possibility of sufficient storage to guarantee grid resilience by any other means. The effect of wind turbines is to drive that fossil plant into modes of operation that are both high maintenance and low thermal efficiency, due largely to the slew rates imposed on it. Whilst drivoing it into a low profit duty cycle (capacity factor). That in turn leads to the deployment of lower efficiency gas plant to cover peak demands plant of such low efficiency (but low capital cost) that together with the poor operational envelope imposed by dealing with intermittency on good (efficient) plant, negates all the carbon gains the renewable sources might have made. This is about net zero with gas, and its almost certainly carbon positive when using coal, as Germany does. In short in Germany windmills produce no carbon gains at all. 3/. Wind turbines, solar panels and HVDC interconnectors do not feature phase synchronised rotating mass, they synchronise to the mains using electronic inverters, which have no inherent energy storage. This means that under short term fault conditions, these sources have no ability to provide sub ten second extra power if e.g. a line gets a lightning strike or a power station trips. Worse, if such a fault condition lowers the grid frequency below preset operating parameters, renewable generation itself will start to disconnect itself from an 'out of frequency' grid. leading to a cascade of trips and grid blackout. This already happened in the UK in a sunny and windy summer day when there was insufficient thermal power on the grid to prevent it. Several electric trains also shut down and did not reboot cleanly. It is the reason why so called 'grid scale' batteries are being deployed. Not to actually store significant amounts of electricity - that is impossible with batteries - to cover say a day of no wind, but to cover a sub 5 minute overload that would normally have been covered by generator rotational inertia., This problem has becomes so severe on continental grids that manufacturers are now installing rotary converters or their own inverters so that their expensive synchronous motors in the factories and the loads they drive do not get damaged by sudden shifts in grid frequency. 4/. Wind turbines are always sited away from populations centres, because that way people who are fans of them do not have to suffer the constant flicker and subsonic thumping and ground shake associated with them or the dead birds and bats lying under them. Unlike conventional power stations that are placed strategically around the grid near where the demand is, wind turbines are far away off the east coast of England , and Scotland. whereas the demand is in the centre of the country. This necessitates that the grid ceases to be a simple low power balancing arrangement between regions, with no large transnational flows, and instead becomes a massive connector capable of transferring gigawatts from e.g. Scotland to London when the wind blows, and lying idle and wasting its capacity when the wind dies not. The cost of this in cash and in carbon emissions is not covered by wind companies nor is it added in to their externally imposed emissions. (what is?). The cost however is reflected in the cost the National Grid passes on to its retail customers in terms of tranmsission charges, and it is responsible for up to 50% of the bill.

Where this leaves is, is that in the UK, because we have insufficient hydro we must balance wind with fossil. There is no way to build the storage required as anyone who does the basic sums can see when comparing what is needed to what it is physically possible to build. In addition the intermittency imposes emissions costs on the co generating plant and imposes an economic burden on it that discourages investment. Likewise all the other ancillary plant - high capacity long distance transmissions lines and batteries that are both mostly idle most of the time, but are needed to cover short duration conditions, represent yet more wasted resources, with the associated carbon and cash costs.

All this simply drives up the cost of electricity to well above even the most expensive nuclear plant ever built and still leaves us vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, and the spot price of world gas, whilst not actually reducing carbon emissions at all, overall.

I call that 'not working'.

I wouldn't build a car with square wheels and a complex suspensin designed to make it run smoothly, even if it was 'diverse'.

I wouldn't build a grid with substandard antiquated technology coupled to an unreliable power source beyond my control featuring vast tracts of the remote environment destroyed by its construction, needing massive maintenance (by dint of it all being outside in the rain and the wind and the salt spray) by fuel powered transports of one sort or another.at a price 3-5 times higher than the alternative. That didnt even meet the specification for its primary raison d'être, that of reducing overall carbon emissions.

Except of course that is not its primary raison d'être is it? No one has done the obvious thing to reduce carbon fuel use - raise its price via taxation until people find something cheaper.

All the legislation is carefully couched in terms not of carbon reduction, but of 'renewable obligations'. Why? Because that satisfies the two |*real* reasons for deploying renewables

- they are easy to deploy fast and they convince the hard of thinking that 'ssomething is being ione' to prevent 'global warming'.

They are massively profitable when subsidised by governments, so profitable that there is plenty left to go into brown envelopes to the commissioners in the corridors of power who frame the legislation mandating their use.

And what Exxon knew of course, that not only was climate change a proposition standing on extremely shaky foundations, but that windmills and solar panels would not - for the reasons described above - result in wholesale replacement of fossil fuels. In fact, the way the greens were directed to oppose nuclear and coal - the real competitors - was a stroke of genius. Who funds the eco movements, and why?

Big oil has every reason to.

Everyone knows that the real answer to all this heath robinson grid rubbish, the museum piece windmills, the massive grid extensions and international links, the batteries, the energy insecurity is to simply throw in nuclear power to replace all the fossil power stations.

There are no problems with nuclear that cannot be and have not been solved at one third the cost of the *overall* renewable solution - which doesn't even effectively work as it was supposed to anyway.

Nations with high takeup of nuclear power, especially with hydro electricity as well, have demonstrably te lowest emissions of any nations at all. France, Switzerland, Sweden,... low priced low carbon electricity and energy security for months.

Crony capitalism has taken over the west, governments are bought, one way or another - and put to use as legislation engines mandating the use of products that would otherwise not survive in a free market.

Look at Covid. And whose not for profit vaccine got 'cancelled' by scare stories while an inferior, but better connected vaccine prospered at huge cost to governments and populations, after bureaucrats 'approved' it. On it now appears in some cases, fudged clinical trials run by the manufacturer..

Look what happens when you turn up anywhere to actually lay out the issues. What happens? Massive ad hominem attacks and attempts to 'cancel' the message.

When I first wrote on this subject a decade ago, and linked to the text anonymously, I was amazed to discover that I was already a 'well known climate denier, who had been debunked completely by skeptical science'

I am not sure how that could be, since it was the first time I ever used my real name on the internet in conjunction with renewable energy - and I hadn't even made any comment about climate change at that point *at all*.

I think that was when I realised that something other than facts and science and a misunderstanding was going on.

And the now plonked java jive simply confirms it. It is, with him, not a matter of fact but of emotionally charged almost religious conviction. I must be silenced. Well, time will tell if I am correct or not.

I hope some people have got this far without a TL DR.

In the end facts must prevail. Jack Brabham once said of F1 racing 'when the flag drops, the bullshit stops'

The flag is dropping on renewable energy. It must deliver, or wreck the economies of those who continue to throw vast sums of money at a solution that can never work.

*Shrug*. I am old, and I have options. Just don't tell me I didn't try to warn you.

Experience shows that even presented with te facts people like him will pick a windy summer day and say 'look how well renewable energy is doing, we are almost there!'

And fail to look at 6pm on a cold winters night with a blocking high across the whole of NW Europe, with every mothballed coal plant , OCGT, diesel STOR plant, wood burners, nuclear and gas plant as well as all the hydro we can muster, exporting electricity to France to keep their lights on, despite that nice Mr Macron saying that we were 'dependent' on French electricity to function. No Mr Macron, arbitrage is not a measure of necessity., If it's cheap over there, we buy from you, its expensive, we sell...

And how any problems are simply showing the need for *more* windmills.

And engineering isn't really science at all. Its a collection of ways to work out what may in fact work to meet a given specification (and more significantly, what will not, like extracting usable energy from traffic moving over a road surface, and other 'green' perpetual motion machines), and then 'doing for 5 bob what any damned fool can do for a quid'. As Neville Shute remarked.

Mathematicians have computer models, trying to solve Napier Stokes equations by piecewise integration.

Engineers use wind tunnels, because the physics of turbulent flow is simply too difficult to model accurately in a computer.

50% of the heat loss from this planets surface, where we, the plants and animals, and the oceans live, is via turbulent convection. No climate models do more than put in a vague 'parameter' which is adjusted...to give any result you want.

Likewise the figures for 'positive feedback' which is presumed to exist

*because the models of climate change dominated by the physics of CO2 didn't fit the data*.

Now at that point they had two choices - admit that a lot of other stuff was dominating climate, or invent something to make CO2 sufficiently important to match the data of the short 3 decade period when the world did get slightly warmer. Along with CO2 levels rising.

They invented 'positive feedback' and have been looking unsuccessfully for it ever since.

Without it, if you match the long term warming to the long term data, as e.g. the well 'cancelled' climate scientist, Judith Curry, does, what emerges is a range of completely non scary climate change due to CO2 and some far greater effects from *something else*. Which *could* be no more than quasi periodic behaviour of what even the IPCC in the small print accepts is a fully chaotic climate system, probably with more than one attractor. One of which is a full blown ice age.

Being a mathematician and computer scientist is no real help in understanding the assumptions that underly the climate models. Even physics doesn't help because the non linear partial differentials of the Navier Stokes equations for the so important turbulent convection, are effectively insoluble.

And let's not go near clouds. An emergent property of the earths atmospheric hydrodynamics.

If CO2 can change the incoming radiation to the surface by 1-2%, clouds can change it by 400%.

And more.

Clouds are not modelled, simply 'parametrised' in 'climate models'

It doesn't matter a tuppeny f*ck how smart the maths is and the computer models are if they are not capable of modelling stuff due to incorrect, inaccurate or simplistic assumptions where actual precision really matters.

The people best placed to understand and analyse complex systems with multiple feedback paths and where the equations that cover behaviour are broadly insoluble, are engineers, although mostly they would look at climate and say 'I wouldn't build a system like that if I wanted predictable behaviour'

We can't even forecast the weather with computer models with any degree of accuracy beyond a few days.

In fact a skilled and experienced meterologist with access to satellite data and a general view of the jet stream can usually do as well if not better, simply by saying 'Ive seen a pattern like that before...' - the Piers Corbyn approach.

In reality the fragility and paucity of 'climate models' is hidden behind a great morass of hand wavey 'complexity' ("Trust us, because its too hard for you to understand, and we are Experts") and the faux principle of Bandar Log-ic ("we all say it, so it must be true") coupled with carefully orchestrated market research and advertising techniques ("97% of people agree .... "), and a smear and cancel and sack approach to any 'expert' who isn't 'on message' and has the temerity to point ou e.g. t that (mainly due to a hunting ban) polar bears are now so numerous they are a bloody nuisance, and that coral bleaching is a local effect, nothing to do with ocean acidity and in fact regenerates rather quickly...that recent weather events are absolutely precedented, nothing unusual and are in fact not arf as bad as they have been in previous centuries. Compare e.g. central European floods of 1342

with this years floods. No comparison.

But the Greta-esque emotional narrative of 'climate change' and renewable energy Thunbergs on..."why aren't you doing anything about it?"

Shh child! Because nothing needs doing, it's just an excuse to raise prices and transfer money from the plebs pockets to ours, and if you play nice like the Greens we will get you lots of funding...

We are however running out of abundant cheap fossil fuel , and something will need to plug the gap, and renewables cannot do it, so it will be nuclear.

It's all we have, that actually works...

Climate change it will be admitted is 'not as bad as we thought' because 'we managed to reduce emissions with nuclear power'.

In short the experts will claim they had it right all along.

You couldn't make it up. But they are.

It is an obvious and probably effective solution from a purely engineering perspective to the problem of "How do we get from depending on coal and oil for our energy to something else before the coal and oil become too expensive to use".

The trouble is of course that the engineering aspects of the problem are the smallest aspects. The real problems are social and political.

There is one problem with nuclear that you ignore, and for which nobody has yet found a solution - it has become increasingly difficult to site and fund a nuclear power plant ever since the Three Mile Island plant had troubles.

Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build at the best of times but when each and every one requires a decades long campaign to find a site there's no way we can ever get enough of the things built. Also CND did far too good a job of hammering home the relationship between nuclear power and nuclear weapons as it was then. As for siting a reprocessing plant - good luck with that!

Toshiba tried really hard with their 4S design to create a market for a commodity fit-and-forget nuclear power plant and failed.

If some bright spark invents a table-top fusion reactor with no output other than electricity and heat that costs like a microwave oven to build and produces a gigawatt hour out of a teaspoon of water ... they'd better not use the word "nuclear" when describing it.

Back in 1973 when the idea that there wasn't an infinite supply of cheap oil first started to rattle in people's heads there was a claim made that the UK did not have to worry unduly because there was enough coal under Wales to keep the UK in energy for the next three centuries - I somehow doubt it but it may in fact be true, and more to the point it may have been believed.

Starting from the rejection of nuclear power as the major player, at least in the short term, where do you go ? One obvious option would have been to build more and more coal power stations fuelled by a revitalised mining industry. I'll take the wind turbines, solar panels, gas generators and batteries in preference to that!

One day somebody may come up with a marketable version of nuclear power or a way to overcome the massive popular resistance to the idea. Perhaps one way is to first get rid of all the coal and oil generators aided by a huge wave of public opinion and build up a flaky concoction of wind, solar, hydro, battery and gas when needed that just about hangs together but clearly needs a little extra - and *then* bring in the new model safe and reliable nuclear plants - unless something better comes along in time to save us needing them.

Yes it looks just like your version - except that it takes in the "how do we get there from here" which you completely ignore because of course as soon as the engineering is clearly explained and the lies are revealed everyone will do the right thing. Do the sums, work out how many nuclear power plants need to be built in the UK to carry the base load and ask yourself how long a government would last after stating the intention to build that many plants.

Have you met any human beings ? In groups ? In *large* groups ? They're not an engineering problem - unless you mean social engineering which is a very different thing.

I seriously doubt that there's any grand plan or big conspiracy though - I think it's all just people winging it with whatever they can get to work today.

Not an issue really. plenty of stations have been built since. Ah you eman in te USA?>

Actually they are not., they are comparable with coal in terms of raw material and construction labour.

What costs is meeting yet more stringent regulations that do nothing for sfatey,

The greens have with massive assistance form the various fossil cule interest managed to make windmills acceptable. And demonise nuclear, It wouldn't take much of a reversal to turn propaganda against windmills and pro nuclear - in fact its already happening

Oh, and we already have an internationally famous reprocessing plant. In full operation

Well everyone is chasing the same basic design spec these days, small modular. Circumvent the site specific approval by going for factory assembled modules with type approval. And circumvent huge amounts of regulatory belt and braces by making the things small enough not to need coolant pumps when SCRAMMED.

So they cant do a 3MI or a Fuku.

There may well be, but getting it out may be so energy intensive as to make it not worth while.

The obvious answer to Maggie was gas, we had lots, with interest rates as high as they were an gas as cheap as it was, it was a no brainer. At that time gas was the obvious choice if you wanted to avoid a heavily unionised nationalised industry electing communists who ended up running the country.

They have oddly, It's called 'renewable energy'.

I was walking on the beach near Sizewell B when a family stopped me and asked me if I knew what it was 'UKs biggest and newest nuclear power station' They were almost interested, but soon went back to talking about Coronation Street. The anti nuclear faction is really very small. Justr very vociferous. Well one susopects they are paid to be,

Opinion polls being done across Europe are showing instead of 'lets ditch nuclear' a small majority support for it and the rest mostly 'dunnos' . Only Germany seems to be still rabidly against it,

We have already done precisely that in Britain. No oil has been burnt in a UK power station for 20 years & there are only I think three coalers left, we are utterly dependent on gas and nuclear for baseload, and nuclear will reach end of life in the next few tears.

It is as you say a question of political propaganda, not engineering. The short answer is that my wet finger shows that a government that does not *trumpet* its nuclear plans will in a couple of years become unelectable.

Actually they *are* an engineering problem, a complex system that needs the feedback paths carefully designed or developed to achieve stability. One of the mechanisms we have there is called 'democracy'.

No, its not even that. Perhaps the best way of looking at it is commercially and politically.

Climate change the way its currently being promoted is (almost) unprovable one way or the other,. It has become a metaphysical principle. As a commercial operator you realise that concerning climate change, your engineers and pointy heads that *you* employ say that in reality

*no one knows, but probably not an issue*.

Why fight it? climb on the band wagon and get paid to install windmills and solar panels that you know wont work, but it doesn't matter. people are prepared to pay for them anyway.

All consumer products are 'designed to sell, but not necessarily to work' Here we are - some of us - using Linux,which is mostly a pretty decent operating system that works, while the vast majority of people are sold the 'chrome and tailfins on a truck suspension', that is Windows. Nobody got sacked for buying IBM , nobody got sacked for buying MSDOS and then windows., We know that MS employed an army of online astroturfers to puff up its products and 'cancel' anybody who said it was crap.

Its just commercial marketing carried to immoral depths.,

And nobody cared, as long as they were personally making money out of it, and it didn't natter that much, because overall, it wasn't destroying society civilisation or the planet.

Big business doesn't have a social conscience. And if it can make money tossing cash to green movements, paying lip service to ClimateChange™ virtue signalling like mad to appease the dim bulbs in the eco box, why not?

The dim bulbs believe what they are told, Currently they are told that nuclear is a threat to civilisation and the planet and windmills are good. Once they are told that nuclear will save them and windmills are a big mistake, they will change positions in days. (claiming they had always thought that, all along).

Kipling's 'Bandar Log' move as a single unit, chanting 'we are the best, the most wise, the most clever people in the jungle, what we say today everyone will think tomorrow. We all say it, so it must be true'. But today they don't live in the Cold Lairs, they live in Islington, and in the Universities and University towns, and they are all marked by the same characteristic, they think they are more intelligent that they are

- they are, as IIRC Lenin said, 'useful idiots' - who listen to the BBC thing David Attenborough is so right about everything, and read the Guardian and so on.

The Chatterati, the Bandar Log...

But what is finally happening is that big business is beginning to realise that insteadof GreenCrap™ being merely profitable nonsense, it is actually raising even their carefully negotiateed electricity prices to unsustainable levels, and destroying their expensive manufacturing plant through frequency instability.

Emanuel Macron has done a complete U turn from 'we will dismantle nuclear' to 'we must build more' in France.

Of course its being spun along with the latest green fantasy - hydrogen,

78% of the Polish people allegedly support nuclear

The czech republic is quietly legislating nuclear IN

and in fact te whole Visegrad 4 are moving towards nuclear and are as likely to leave the EU as not, on account of the EU behaving exactly like te Soviet union used to.,

"Ministers from Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland (the Visegrad 4) met in Paks and agreed: ""Without nuclear power it will not be possible to achieve the goals of climate neutrality." They called on the European Commission to approve its inclusion in the taxonomy of sustainable investments."

Belgium is committed to a phase out, but its politicians are already understanding that it might be less 'lights out and goodnight, Vienna' as 'lights out and goodnight Belgium'. In short they are jostling for position and testing the political waters for a U turn from renewables to nuclear.

Because sustained spot electricity prices of €300 /MWh+ are politically unacceptable as is 3/4 of the retail electricity suppliers in the UK ceasing to exist practically overnight . In short the massive vulnerability to imported gas in a tight world market has made people realise that the game is up, they can no longer flog renewables as 'the answer' while secretly co-generating with gas.

And even if the useful idiots (well represented here) are dead against it , οἱ πολλοί , while in general happy to say they they support moves to combat climate change, are not happy if that means their electricity bills quadruple and οἱ πολλοί have more votes than the' useful idiots'...

In short the renewable lobby have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It was well understood back in the noughties - I have a report by McKinsey - that more than 30% renewables on the grid would result in a spiralling cost of electricity, and so it has proved.

So while I agree with you that the problems are in the end political and commercial and not technical, my assessment is that you haven't gone deep enough. In the end the balance between short term profit and long term disaster is not one of transitioning from fossil to renewables to SaveThePlanet™ It is one of transitioning from insane renewables to nuclear power, to SaveSoceietyAndCivilisation, because even the most bloated Green plutocrat doesnt want to live in a world where his flush toilet doesnt work, because the sewage pumps and mains water pumps have shut down due to no electricity. Cf the Great Stink that led eventually to parliament sanctioning their money to go into Bazalgette's London Sewer. That lies under the Embankment.

As Churchill once remarked, the Americans (people) can always be relied upon to do the right thing... ...after they have exhausted every single other alternative.

I and other are here to point out that when it comes to renewable energy it *is* exhausted and, no matter what any of us would *like* to have powering civilisation from fairy farts, to pixie dust and giant whirligigs in the sky, when it comes down to it, nuclear power is not an option.

No. nuclear power is the *ONLY* option. Civilisation needs a high value of per capita energy consumption. Without it, it's back to the stone age, literally.

Windymills and solar panels cannot sustainably supply it. Nuclear power or stone age (or realistically, being overrun by third world hordes you no longer have defence against, who then solve the problem of the chatterati by machete-ing them to death) are the realistic options.

Back to fossil? at today's prices its more expensive than nuclear would be. This winter has already seen wholesale prices rise to over £300/MWh and Hinkley point reactor, is due to open in 2 years committed to supplying no higher (and no lower) than £95/MWh.

Once people are aware that that is the case, well its a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it? Twenty years ago Windmills were a strange fad that, like Hula oops or the Frisbee, probably did no harm. Today they are a threat to civilisation, and people are slowly realising it.

And even the people who sold you the windmills are probably realising the game is up.

GreenCrap™ and ClimateChange™ have been huge fun and jolly profitable and millions have built careers and reputations on it, but the music has stopped. Its simply not sustainable.

The world of humans is far far more at risk from GreenCrap™ and RenewableEnergy™ than it is from ClimateChange™.

And once TPTB realise that, they will pour money into convincing people that 'the only way to really combat ClimateChange™ is nuclear power', thus doing a neat reverse weasel, and saving face and reputations while doing the Right Thing, although ostensibly for the Wrong Reason.

Only because of lies told by Greenpeace etc, aided and abetted by the media. Some media are starting to change and are remembering that no one died or was even injured at TMI or Fukushima, and that thousands *didn't* die at Chernobyl.

Is this the "it's got to get worse before it can get better" approach? Sadly there may be something in that. Plenty of us remember how it was well known in the 50s and 60s that the Unions needed a big-time kick in the nuts, but no one thought it was possible, until we had the Winter of Discontent, which Maggie was able to capitalise on.

Ah you spotted the point, well done. We couldn't have gone straight from coal to nuclear - there was too much opposition. Renewable energy OTOH was an easy sell and it might just be made workable (all it takes is a Shipstone grade battery to be invented and all the problems vanish - don't tell me how unlikely that is, I know) but if not there's always nuclear to fall back on and it will be a much easier sell with coal and oil firmly on the reject pile and gas in the "'ow mmmuccchh gggrraannnvvvillle" pile.

You're sig doesn't cut it, I'm afraid, your qualifications are more important than your sig.

You can't model the whole earth's system in a wind tunnel, which leaves only computerised mathematical modelling.

Where is your *EVIDENCE* for this claim?

[Snip a load of the usual wild claims because they aren't bolstered by any links to *EVIDENCE*, except this one:]

At any time there is always the possibility of extreme rare weather events. Stay in after school and write out 1,000 times: "Weather is not climate!"

PROVEN LIE REPEATED! Once again, let me remind you that:

- The world as a whole doesn't have enough fissile fuel (bottom graph: without 'Prospective mines' which is undefined but presumably means something like 'believed from preliminary surveys to exist' but which must therefore be subject to significant uncertainty, total current world supplies don't cover the 2019 Reference Scenario, which is their term for 2019, the most recently compiled, predictions of demand) ...

- The UK has bugger all of the above!

- That currently nuclear is by far the most expensive means of generation by source in the UK, about double the cost of the next most expensive, offshore wind.

And far from "It's all we have, that actually works", nearly all the important nuclear generating plants currently under construction are years behind schedule and/or massively exceeding budget, for example:

Hinckley C, UK

"When Hinkley was approved in 2016, EDF estimated the cost at £18bn. Today, the company puts the bill at nearer £23bn."

So half-way through the build it's £5bn, just under a third of its initial projected cost, over budget, can we assume that means it will be £10bn over budget by completion? I don't know, but I won't be surprised if it is.

Flamanville, France

"A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.[2][3]"

Olkiluoto, Finland

"OSLO, Aug 23 (Reuters) - The start of Finland's much-delayed Olkiluoto

3 nuclear reactor has been pushed back by a further three months, with full power production now scheduled for June 2022, operator TVO said in a statement late on Friday.

"Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO) has received additional information from the plant supplier Areva-Siemens consortium that the regular electricity production of the OL3 EPR plant unit will be further postponed for three months due to extended turbine overhaul and inspection works," TVO said.

First electricity production from the reactor, which has a capacity of

1.6 gigawatts (GW), is now scheduled for February, with regular electricity production to start in June next year.

Olkiluoto 3 was meant to be finished in 2009 but the project has been beset by a series of setbacks.

The Finnish Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) in March this year gave a permit to start loading fuel, supporting a plan to begin electricity production in October.

But TVO in late July pushed back the date to November to allow for extra work on overhauling and inspecting turbines, and now points to February as the expected startup."

<Imagine an unusually honest toast at the WNA AGM dinner>So, chaps, let's raise our glasses to: "Nuclear white elephants all round, and a stunning success for the nuclear industry in duping the world into paying for its continued incompetence!"</Imagine ...>

But doubtless you'll be lying about all this again tomorrow, or the next day, next week, next month, or next year, because that is your modus operandi, regurgitate the same old lies no matter how often they are debunked and proven to be lies.

Just because that's all it leaves, doesn't mean that it's going to work. And remember that models don't TELL you anything; they make predictions.

Except that so far, as already linked in another reply today, there isn't enough global fissile fuel to meet global projected demand for it and effectively we have none of that supply in the UK, the current round of new nuclear builds are all white elephants which are years behind schedule and/or massively over budget, and in the last big-freeze in Texas, both nuclear and, mainly, fossil-fuel stations were taken out as well as wind-turbines.

No, the real problems for the UK are that we don't have indigenous supplies of the fuel, nature has given us other sources of energy instead, and we have lost the know-how that previous generations had, and are having to important that from foreign firms at massive cost for a seemingly-not-very-good result.

AGAIN A PROVEN LIE REPEATED! How many times must you be told that nuclear generation in the UK has double the feed-in tariff of the next most expensive option, offshore wind?

We have approximately 200+ years of fossil-fuels in the country, along with lots of wind, that is what nature has given us, therefore that is what we must use, and must capture the carbon while doing so.

Well it's usual Jive illogic.

The point being that it *is* all you have left and it *isn't* good enough to decide whether to take Wellies on Wednesday, let alone spend a trillion dollars of taxpayer money on 'solutions' that don't actually solve a problem that may very well not exist.

On the other hand you can make a shitload of money doing just that if you have no social conscience whatsoever.

Windmill vendors are like anti-vaxxers, selfish and without any conscience.

Its very analogous. people let stuff happen because its too hard to fix and probably doesn't matter that much, then it all gets out of control, people realise it matters rather a lot and is serious, and suddenly, there is a sea change on public opinion and the the politicians are dragged kicking and screaming...

...and out of the musical chair comes a voice as some chancer says 'I can make the music stop' and people say 'well you have one chance.'

Once Maggie had f***ed the coal unions her party couldn't wait to f*ck her - job done, now let the establishment chaps run things...sign Maastricht...fill their boots leading to another outpouring of public sentiment that propelled the biggest see you next Tuesday ever to hold office. Tony B Liar, the Teflon coated lawyer who spent the next ten years destroying the country. Whilst racking up an impressive portfolio of properties that he then doubled the value of by slashing interest rates.

Its called insider trading.

Its a criminal offence. So is misleading parliament and lying to them about dodgy Iraq dossiers. And getting the whistle-blower killed.

Finally we voted him out in an outburst of common sense, but never again will be sign up for Glorious Leaders who *cant* be voted out. So bye bye EU.

No, democracy in the end comes through, but only after the vox populi threatens the politicians with the outer darkness.

Our job is to not to tell the plebs *wha*t to think - leave that to the moralising corporate owned Left - its to tell then *why* they need to think, and hope that they have common sense.

So that the truth outs a bit quicker than otherwise.

We could have and we did, but then the gas business stared to use the ecology moment to demonise nuclear and club it to death with scare stories over regulaton and interest rate rises finnaly killed it

No, renewable energy - like electric transport - always had to rely on a number of things that didnt and/or couldn't exist. It wasn't ever an engineering solution, it was always an emotional marketing solution to people who actually believe marketing.

It should never have happened. I blame gas and big oil - they used it to ensure coal and nuclear were politically unaccceptable and since windmills didn't save fuel it was a great way to keep product flowing and profits up.

Coal is understood to be if not dead, certainly very curtailed, Unlike nuclear, it does have a lot of genuine pollution (including more radioactive waste than an equivalent nuclear power station) . Oil is about transport these days, for fixed installation energy generation we rely on gas, gas, and gas basically.

The vox pop will probably be clamouring for new nuclear much in the way it clamoured to shut it all down post chernobyl and fukushima even though neither did any real damage in the sort of scale the responses justified,

Renewables are the Emperors new Green clothes. One tries to be the small boy...