Back in March I commented on the government loan guarantee of £80m to the Sheffield Forgemasters in order to build a world-leading 15kt forge press that would enable Britain to become a significant player in nuclear manufacturing for decades to come. The cost to the tax payer about £20m over 5 years in opportunity cost (things that we could have done with the cash).

Well the recent announcement that this loan guarantee is to be cut shows exactly what our new government thinks of UK manufacturing – it couldn’t care a toss. What Nick Clegg thinks of Sheffield – he’d rather kick them in the nuts than stand up to his public school buddy. How far our new chancellor looks when he tries to balance the books – no further than two years out. How much influence that DECC has on energy system planning – zero. And how bloody stupid partisan government can be when faced with a choice that involves long term thinking.

The argument is that this loan constitutes a subsidy to the nuclear industry and the new govt has said no public money to that industry. They are still quite happy to pile cash into windmills, solar panels for the top of your house and subsidise coal and CCS, but building an export capacity that would bring in millions every year from outside our shores. Apparently thats bad news. Not to mention how long it will take to wait for any new nuclear build within the UK with the only other forge press in Japan booked up years in advance.
Even Chris Goodall at Carbon Commentry thinks its a bad idea.

I’m not prone to swearing, but this is a bloody stupid idea and if I were in Sheffield (or staying at my Gran’s old house 10 miles away) I would be demonstrating outside Clegg’s front door irrespective of whether he’s now in his grace and favour mansion or not.

Last year was full of hope. Openness and interdisciplinarity was part of the deal. Media exposure was integral to the design of the event.
This year the doors closed. Chatham House rules were imposed (and this report is composed under those restrictions). No media were there to report (though some did attend).

So what did we discuss at this exclusive event ?

Well. It became apparent that attendees saw the exclusivity as part of a wider trend (though they didn’t apparently see themselves as contributary to that trend). The phrase ‘decisions made in smoke filled rooms’ was one that was heard in more than one session. Speakers seemed less open to suggestions and there was a definite sense of ranks closing.

Partly this was put down to the relative success of the climate skeptic movement and the failure of COP15, but also to the new government’s policy set and approach so far. However, as a newcomer to this ‘scene’ I can’t help feeling this is the way that the regulars prefer it.

Fuel poverty seems to be taking a back seat with some kind of diluted concept of equitable apportionment of cost taking over. A greater focus on real politique and economics rather than innovation was evident. Argument rather than advance you could say. Calls for quick action, some action, any action seemed like a call to spend money rather than a call to change systemic conditions. Gone was the rhetoric of radical progress. In came the mumbled apologies of compromise.

Apparently HVDC is the only viable transmission system for offshore wind (which its not) but it suffers from being too expensive at short distances (which it does) and apparently AC doesn’t work under water (?!?).

Now, news aggregators like REF can’t check everything. Its simply not economic to do so. But when a press release starts with a direct contradiction to existing reality (quote “Underwater electricity transmission is not possible with alternating current”) you have to at least have a flirt with checking the source.

I couldn’t get a hold of the report that this press release is publicising. Frost & Sullivan don’t give away their “research” for free, but if the report is of a similar quality to the press release I don’t want to read it !

For the record ALL the UK’s current offshore wind installations use AC transmission. HVDC is hampered by its expensive transformer/rectifier costs which mean that you need to have a cable run over about 30km before it’s better performance in terms of lower transmission losses outweigh the extra upfront expense in hardware.

Yes, its true that with more installations that cost will come down, but it will always remain as long as the onshore grid is AC. If you take the extreme example of Scroby Sands, 2.5km off Gt Yarmouth’s seafront. That wind farm just plugs straight into the grid through a small sub-station with no need for extra rectification kit. If it were forced to use HVDC you would need a rectifier at either end to gain virtually nothing in decreased transmission losses over 2,500m of cable.

So Mr Frost & Sullivan. Your report is wrong. Your press releases are misleading. How’s business ?

Until the 1900s it wasn’t uncommon to see women working in the tin and copper mines of Cornwall. These Bal Maidens all but ran the above ground operations taking the ore from the kibbles (ore buckets) and running it through hand sorting and processing, right up to the point of smelting. A combination of legislation, geology, automation and metals prices eventually smothered the Cornish mines, but we should remember that only 100 years ago virtually all hard-rock ores were hand processed everywhere in the world.

I was amazed by the resigned comments of US recyclers that it was simply uneconomic to recycle e-waste in the US and decided to take a look at the state of the art, because as the Bal Maidens demonstrate, time and technology do move on. It turns out that China is publishing scientific paper after scientific paper on industrial scale e-waste reprocessing. Some of the techniques, such as the dissassembly of printed circuit boards using ultrasound, are already operating at industrial scale. Others, like the use of super-critical methanol or water to boil the components off circuit boards, are still in R&D. But there is a definite and conscious technological effort going on to recover as much of the metal from e-waste as economically possible. Judging by the science the Chinese are having a great time mining these new deposits and are looking forward to the forecast increase in trade.

And it is potentially a very substantial trade. The figures quoted in the NYT do not do it justice. Using some of the more conservative grades reported in peer-reviewed journals, every year 50 million tonnes of e-waste could produce as much copper as 19 Bingham Canyons (4.7 Million tonnes) and as much gold as four AngloGold Ashantis (8 Million ounces). That’s around $50bn worth of refined metal, just in copper and gold. That is not to mention the millions of ounces of silver, thousands of tonnes of aluminium, steel, tin, nickel and lead and the possible extraction of some of the more specialist metals like gallium and cobalt. A back of the envelope calculation shows that if you had all the e-waste in one spot and efficient technology to exploit it you could build a company comparable in size to Rio Tinto or BHPBilliton.

When we hear about e-waste it is usually in terms of pollution due to mercury, lead and cadmium that is vented into the environment from small artisinal workshops. What we should also remember is that it is currently economic to have an estimated 700,000 Chinese employed in informal e-waste recycling. Right now there are around 7,000 people employed in the whole recycling sector in the US, similar to the number of Bal Maidens employed in the Cornish mines in the 1850s, and they are (were) all using similar manual techniques. China has started automating e-waste recycling and cleaning up the process as it does so. What is stopping the rest of us ?

Maybe we are waiting until we have to start mining our landfills. Its not as far fetched as it sounds. London hosted the first ever landfill mining conference in 2008. Any concentration of metals should attract attention as prices rise and landfill was no exception pre-crash. With advances in bacterial leaching, as well as an existing and substantial knowledge-base in both acid and alkali hydrometallurgy the only real technical issue holding back in-situ landfill mining is the grade, which in comparison to e-waste is low.

Which provokes the final question; why would you dilute high-grade e-waste with municipal solid waste and make metals recovery more difficult and less profitable in the future ? It seems to me that by exporting the raw material we have the e-waste business upside-down and it is waiting for the same kind of revolution that the mini-mills brought for steel.

As far as I can tell these are the main rhetorical positions for and against the development of the nuclear mini-reactor. If I’m missing anything let me know.

Lets take a look at each in turn.

They are a proliferation risk – the argument is that by multiplying the number of nuclear installations, the number of nuclear-savvy engineers and scientists, and the amount of nuclear material transported around the world you are multiplying the risks associated with that material or its derivatives becoming accessible to ‘the bad guys’.
That makes absolute sense from a numerical, risk-based approach. No system is 100% reliable (that includes security and accounting systems), so doubling the volume should increase the risk by a commensurate amount.
But there is the counter argument that by making these reactors one-shot, non-refuellable sealed units the degree of risk drops when compared to the current macro-reactors. We should also consider whether building 50-year life-span installations is inherently more or less secure than building multiple 10-20 year installations that employ a restricted set of technologies.
There appear to be two main, credible proliferation risk points; fuel enrichment and waste handling/reprocessing. By centralising both to the mini-nuke manufacturers surely you are bringing together those risk vectors and making them more manageable.
There are some benefits to building strong communities around our critical infrastructure rather than commoditizing it. After all its got to be better to have thousand families worth of eyes looking out for security risks rather than a thousand pairs of eyes, who frankly should be concentrating on the work itself. Whether that is best done by centralisation of reactor manufacture or centralisation of power production I couldn’t say, but what I do know is that community support is necessary for either and it carries benefits past simply providing the workforce.
I’m afraid that the argument that some bad guys will come along and rip a mini-reactor out of the ground and whisk it away to play with is simply not credible for the majority of designs that are around right now. Most of the installations are still 50 tonnes plus for the body of the reactor and they tend to be surrounded by thick concrete walls.

They’re a cost-effective, low-carbon, utility-scale alternative to coal.
Well that’s just wishful thinking right now. Until someone gets their design through the nuclear regulators and actually builds one we simply can’t know that for sure. Certainly the 10-50MW size is a really convenient bracket to sell within, but local conditions and regulations will have a massive say in whether they are cost-effective or not.
For example a 30MW reactor in the Australian outback might be just what the mining industry needs in order to get away from using diesel to extract nickel, so reducing the full-cycle emissions profile of electric vehicle using nickel-hydride batteries, but Australia doesn’t currently permit civil nuclear power generation so to be the first company to take that challenge on will probably not result in black ink on the bottom line.
Alternately if we look at somewhere like Japan, where the civil nuclear industry is very advanced, why would they bother with tiny reactors ? Their electricity grid is advanced and ubiquitous. They have decades of experience in all steps in the civil nuclear cycle. They might want to develop mini-nukes as an export route but I doubt that they will be using many themselves.
So we need to be careful about blanket statements regarding costs, but that’s the same for all power generation.
Low carbon ? Well, that depends on who’s life cycle assessment you believe, but I think that it is credible that our current 50-year lifespan reactors are low carbon when compared to most power generation technologies, including renewables.
An alternative to coal ? It depends on your application. If you are a blast furnace that can site next to a remote iron ore mine, yes that’s almost certainly true. Reduced transport emissions alone will make a big dent in the total emissions pattern. But for an urban centre where demand is cyclical a nuclear reactor is not a good fit on its own, irrespective of the size. Nuclear reactors work best to provide a steady base-load because they can’t be switched on and off and back on again in the same way as coal or gas. They’re not alone here. Renewables have a similar issue with intermittency and both would need some form of back-up or storage to provide electricity with a domestic demand profile.

They’re unproven and dangerous.
It depends which design you are talking about here. Certainly some of the new modular mini-nukes are unproven. Bill Gate’s travelling wave reactor certainly is, but you can’t simply equate unproven with dangerous. You can equate degree of proof with degree of risk and I’d back you on that, but a rhetorical position that lack of proof of safety is proof of lack of safety is just nonsense.

They are old technology and a known risk.
Again it depends on which technology we are talking about. But simply saying its old stuff isn’t actually that reassuring. For example the Russians are proposing a simple re-use of nuclear submarine reactor technologies with a lead-bismuth cooling system. Apart from the number of boats they lost, that’s a really toxic mix to be using as coolant and it doesn’t inspire confidence. Its old and known, but unacceptably high risk to many people. Of course just using the word nuclear implies an unacceptably high risk to some.

They produce radioactive waste that is just as bad as any big nuclear plant.
No denying that.
Well, unless the newer technologies are used. The problem is that the fuel cycles used in most current commercial reactors are variants of the cold war fuel cycles designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Not all nuclear reactions that can be used to produce excess heat in a controllable manner from readily available fuels produce plutonium as an end-product and even those that do can be tweaked to produce more or less.
This is essential a question of perception. If you believe that all radioactive waste is equal then it doesn’t matter about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, or what fuel it uses, or what the waste products are and there is no argument that the size of the reactor is about as relevant as its colour. If however you apply a risk-based approach, then not all waste is equal (the current situation under most legal jurisdictions) and there is a valid argument that fuel cycles designed for purely civilian uses can be less harmful than in the past.
But you can’t have both. You can’t argue that some power-generating techniques are less risky than others (on the basis of emissions or pollutants, or economics or whatever) except nuclear which is just plain bad.

They have the potential to bring fresh water to arid parts of the world.
The water argument is an interesting one and one that makes a lot of people very nervous. Nuclear reactors use vast amount of cooling water in their current form and what is being proposed is that they are used for desalination in order to take advantage of this Hey presto ! You have a double-edged sword against poverty and hunger. Power and fresh water provided in areas currently without either. The big problem being that areas without power & water generally don’t have effective government either.
There is no doubt in my mind that the world needs more of both, but whether dropping a mini-reactor onto the coast of Somalia is the best way of achieving that compared with more conventional development mechanisms. I dunno. Historically its been big hydro that carried out this function, but the number of rivers large enough to make a difference is going down compared with the amount of disputes between upriver and down-river water users which seems to be going up.

So what have we learnt ? Not that much because until someone actually gets through licensing with one of these things we’re just not going to get a good look at the economics. Apparently the licensing will cost over $100m in the US. Separate for the EU and anywhere else that might want to buy one. If they are $25m a unit with a 10 year life whoever builds them is going to need a hell of an order book to build a self-sustaining business.

For what its worth I don’t think that mini-reactors will be cost effective in ‘normal’ urban or industrial environments, areas that have grid power already. What they could be really good at is driving down costs of things like mining or oil refineries so that we don’t have to transport dead weight three times around the world before we use it. We make the product or a semi near the primary resource and ship those instead.

Here’s what it needs to be successful;
A strong research department.

That’s it. Nothing else. Just a set of market savvy investment analysts to make sure that the technologies and projects that are being invested in are not complete trash. It won’t be able to afford the best brokers or indeed the best analysts, but then its aim is not to outperform the market. It would be good for the country if it did, home-grown profits count double in this game, but there is no shareholder imperative to work against (or indeed with) so fiduciary responsibility is replaced by electoral responsibility.

The analysts need to have cross-sectoral visibility so that they are not working against each other but apart from that nothing special needs to be in place, except some independent oversight to build confidence in the market that these are kosher companies with realistic chances of commercial success.

Of course if the worst happens and all its investments come to nought, that could be a lot of cash that the govt has to refund to the ISA holders, but presumably there will be some form of hedge against catastrophic loss.

We’ll have to wait and see what Labour’s equivalent looks like when the last pre-election budget is announced on Wednesday, but Reuters is reporting a £2bn investment fund with half from assets sales and half from private investment. I’m sure that there will be more detail than that, but if Alistair Darling’s announcement conforms to the leak, sorry briefing, then it really isn’t very imaginative. Its just another pot of cash with another set of criteria. £2bn isn’t enough to kick-start any major infrastructure projects (the super grid is estimated at around £30bn, the high speed rail at £30bn and each of the 8-12 new nuclear reactors is supposed to be around £5bn (very roughly)), so you have to ask where is this money aimed at ? We’ll find out on Wednesday I suppose.

The help is in the form of an £80m loan so we tax payers aren’t going to get stung for the full £80m unless Forgemasters goes bust immediately. We are effectively paying just over half the interest on the total loan by standing 57% of the total £140m required to build the kit. So, rough guess on a 5 year loan at 10% pa, the tax payer is taking £40m off the total bill that Forgemasters will have to pay. Its an opportunity cost to us, rather than an expenditure. Westinghouse, Lloyds and the European Bank are actually putting up most of the money. If you want a comparison the new windturbine blade test facility in Blythe is receiving over £25m worth of grants and supporting infrastructure, but then that’s a brand new capacity for the country and it deserves help too. I don’t know about you but I’d rather my money went into manufacturing than banking, maybe that’s just me

I have to say I don’t think that’s a bad deal with the nuclear industry going the way that it is and it is a big piece of the supply chain for the UK’s own new nuclear generating capacity. So whether you regard £40m as a speculation against later export revenue, an investment in reducing import expenditure, a way to retain some real, world-leading manufacturing expertise, or simply a way to create several hundred skilled jobs for the next couple of decades it can’t be bad news.
Right now 15kt presses are not exactly common with only Japan, China and Russia reported as having capacity on this scale, with South Korea and India both wanting to enter the field.

Other people’s comments;
The Dark Lord lays out the argument in this article from last year.
This article from the Institute of Engineers has a similar flavour.
The WNA’s view of developments.
Even the Guardian seems to accept the logic of the loan

There is a second interesting point within the funding announcement (its near the bottom) was that Forgemasters would be ‘overseeing’ development of Indian forging capacity in a £30m deal. That is a technology transfer deal, effectively to show the Indians how to forge the smaller components of nuclear power systems. So we gain access to their market at the expense of some of our older technology. Swings and roundabouts. The big money is in the big kit, but a £3m per year revenue stream from tech transfer is enough to pay quite a chunk of the loan interest without tying up too many resources.

Of course you could take the other view, that nuclear power is bad/unnecessary/expensive/foolish/dangerous whatever form it comes in and we shouldn’t help its development through taxpayer assistance, whatever form it comes in. Personally I can’t justify that opinion ethically or economically as long at we in the UK use medical isotopes and invest in other less proven energy sources, such as coal with CCS or solar PV. I can see the arguments, but I think that they are emotionally driven rather than empirically based. The argument against spreading nuclear power technology to countries that currently don’t use it is much stronger, but even there its not black and white.

So I think the Forgemasters deal is great for Sheff and good for the UK. Let’s stop fannying about and start building big kit. Don’t care if its 300m tall 10MW offshore wind turbines, giant steel sea snakes or nuclear pressure vessels, the sooner we start the better, then we can stop hand-wringing and get back to helping the last billion out of crushing poverty.

Science is media

That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.

So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !

Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.

So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.

For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.

Ownergy seems to have a business model eerily similar to one that I suggested last June in my post Energy Ideas Part Two. Not only is it going to do all the technical assessment, design and installation, but its also offering management and finance for the installations and will be covering all technologies that attract an FIT.

The guy who is running it, Phillip Wolfe, is a big cheese in the Renewable Energy Association and seems to have had a big hand in the design of the FITs in the first place, so I doubt that he’s a regular reader of this blog. Who says that only the major energy companies can capture government policy mechanisms