alt Hacker NewsThis kind of makes the UK's double budget overrun Hinkley Point C new nuclear powerstation look even worse as a policy choice.
This was the best bet at the time when it was chosen, but it must be a good case of the sunken cost fallacy by now, given how long it's taken to build, and didn't follow an existing design*
As a risky policy choice, many distributed solar and wind farms with modern sodium-ion batteries would be a safer and more distributed (failure and weather resilient) modern choice.
*If the original design was defective, why are they using it in A and B?
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If we save money by cutting every single project and never delivering anything then we’ll save a fortune sure, except we won’t have anything.
And then you’ll have us buy Russian gas and Iranian oil to save money… and oopsie woopsie looks like we’re dependent on the evil countries again.
It was the third of its type in Europe built by roughly the same people, fifth if you include Chinese models built separately, so not a totally new design.
A was Magnox and B was AGR. A collectible set of British dead end nuclear technologies.
C is not a great idea but like HS2 failing to finish it would also be a disaster.
While I don't disagree, Britain is hardly in the sweet spot for efficient, year-round solar production.
The last chance to stop that particular albatross was lost under Theresa May, who was advised that it was already over-budget and wouldn't deliver value for money, and had to guarantee a pretty eye-watering price per kWh at the taxpayer's expense.
I can only think that the UK must need the reactor products for something defence related, because little else makes sense.
We need it all. All the low carbon sources: The cheap intermittent renewables, the expensive and stable nuclear, the biogas from organic waste etc.
Putting one clean tech against the other is a waste of time we don't have right now.