An end of year whimsy

It’s that time of year when editors seem happy to let a few dubious stories through. Most of the media ran with this one on yet another nuclear fusion breakthrough- this one at the Lawrence Livermore labs in California, at the National Ignition Facility. Well, with the climate change threat looming, non-fossil energy is a big issue just now-  and its certainly cold out! So is help at hand? Well no, not for some time at least. And at unknown cost. Even if this laser based system, which was designed primarily for replicating the physics of H-bomb ignition, can be made to deliver energy on a large scale reliably and safely, it’s going to take a while- it’s a very long shot.

An equally familiar but arguably much more welcome newspaper article was this one on energy saving. As seems to be said almost every week now, saving energy saves money.  And it’s available now. But no one seems to notice. Energy conservation is just not sexy. Not like high tech fusion or  hydrogen- which also these days regularly gets star billing.  Well hydrogen may have some applications, but in a wide ranging critique, Michael Liebreich, BNEF founder, says not that many. It’s not the wonder-fuel it’s been billed as. He is not happy: ‘we are going to waste huge amounts of money on the wrong use cases for hydrogen and the wrong infrastructure in the wrong places’.

Few seem happy either about the proposed new coal mine in Cumbria, but support for solar farms seems to be missing in Tory UK, although, in the EU, there seems to be support for putting solar in space…What an odd world.  With Russia still calling many of the shots: according to a new Parliamentary Briefing Note, ‘it is currently the only country capable of commercially providing the more enriched fuel needed for Advanced Modular Reactors’, which some look to the replace the current type of nuclear technology.  

However, the POST briefing does also note that, in the UK, renewable’s share of electricity expanded from 3% to 39.6% between 2000 and 2021, so, if we continue to accelerate along that path, maybe we won’t need Russian help- or to see if Small/Advanced Modular Reactors will be any use. 

PWR-type SMRs have been much hyped of late, but, perhaps predictably, estimates for the expected cost of power from NuScale, the US SMR leader, have recently shot up by 60-70% to around $90-100/MWh. Most new renewables of course are heading the other way - to $50/MWh and below for PV solar and wind. You do have to add balancing costs, but they too should fall as storage technology improves (including the use of hydrogen) and we develop a more flexible power system. I know which I would  rather have near me- and it’s not mini nukes or any sort of nuclear, small or large. The latest BEIS survey seemed to suggest that most people in the UK feel the same as me about renewables- with 88% in favour. They were not asked about nuclear this time, but in the 2021 survey only 37% were in favour. 

Ah well, we will have to see what happens next. Meantime, seasons greetings to all…