Sheffield Forgemasters (UK) To Install Press Suitable for Nuclear Forgings.

[NNadir]

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Nuclear_press_confirmed_for_Sheffield_Forgemasters_1703101.html">Nuclear press confirmed for Sheffield Forgemasters

A UK manufacturer will be able to supply ultra-heavy forgings for nuclear power plants after a strategic government loan announced today.

One of Sheffield Forgemasters' nuclear
components: a pump casing destined
for a Westinghouse reactor in China

The crucial addition of an £80 million ($122 million) loan was the final part of a two-year effort to finance a 15,000 tonne press at Sheffield Forgemasters capable of producing and finishing the largest reactor pressure vessels.


The government support, from the £950 million ($1.4 billion) Strategic Investment Fund, makes the up largest portion of the £140 million ($210 million) cost of the press. Other contributions came from reactor vendor Westinghouse and Lloyds Banking Group.


Sheffield Forgemasters already holds the 'N-Stamp' accreditation from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "enabling it to roll out production of the largest forgings within as little as three years from the press' installation," according to chief executive Graham Honeyman.

Apparently the UK has become a secular state, and no longer embraces the Gospel According to Saint Amory (1980) that announceth for all who seek enlightenment, that "nuclear power is dead."

Maybe they've started to embrace science there which is http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls">predictive rather than the kind of soothsaying (Gospel According to Saint Amory, 1976) where it is written that the nation of America, shall thus forth have 18 quads/exajoules of solar energy by the year 2000.

[Donnachaidh]

1. IIRC wasn't there just a big writeup as to how Blair is involved with nuclear in Britain?

He's cashing in on his contacts too.

[NNadir]

2. No idea, but if so, it's not like Blair Destroyed Infrastructure Talking Solar and Wind and Went to

work for Gazprom, a dangerous fossil fuel company controlled by a neo-Czarist.

This contrasts nicely with gas man Schroeder:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901755.html

And um, who is "greenie" Joschka Fischer working for these days. Did he, um, suddenly find a way to store dangerous fossil fuel waste, um, that from dangerous natural gas, in his backyard? Well, it is true that "wind and solar will save us" Joschka can afford a pretty big back yard, what with his new salary paid by the Russian gas pipeline company Nabucco.

Heckuva job.

[Fledermaus]

3. The Last Czar

VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdz1U-KBCM

[joshcryer]

4. I thought the UK abandoned nuclear?

[NNadir]

5. No. They shut a 47 year old 50 MWe reactor - the first commercial reactor ever - because it was

too small to be worth maintaining.

Despite having a gaggle of grotesque Greenpeace goons and gargoyles there, nuclear power has been a key player in Britain since the 1960's, where, essentially it killed no one.

Now it happens that Britain's reactors were basically unique, magnox types, gas cooled. The cladding was designed to fast recycle for the regrettable reason that the reactors were designed to be dual use. These were what might be called "Generation I" or at best "Generation II" reactors. They functioned fine and in fact were much safer than the crap Amory Lovins recommended in 1976, wildcat coal as "transitional" to the solar and wind Nirvana he said would come by the year 2000.

Thus question was whether to replace that nuclear capacity with Lovins' fantasies or with the reality that the folks across the Channel used.

(Britain never really abandoned coal. The filthiest electricity plant in Western Europe is the monstrosity at Drax, which has 12 cooling towers, not that there is ONE anti-nuke who gives a rat's ass about the thermal effects of coal, although all of them become concern trolls when nuclear also obeys the second law of thermodynamics.

If you push an anti-nuke hard enough, they will ALL announce their fondness for filthy, disgusting, earth ripping, IGCC coal, coupled with idiotic fantasies about billion ton waste dumps that they call, in an appalling euphemism, sequestration facilities. They do not care that dangerous fossil fuel waste cannot be sequestered for eternity. They don't give a fuck about the future.)

But we were talking about Britain...

Then there was the matter of that temporary load of North Sea gas the British burned in the 1980's and 1990's. I think now, everyone in Britain realizes that the gas was just that, temporary.

There is still genuflecting in the direction of the priapic kids' whirlies, of course, and billions of dollars in resources that could be better spent on nuclear energy will be wasted but the reality that has been true for many decades is beginning to stare Britain in the face, particularly as the gas fields are giving out.

At the risk of having an illiterate post - for the 9000th time - that idiotic paper from the equally idiotic Jacobsen, the British are coming to recognize that nuclear energy is the only reliable, cheap, sustainable, economical and most important, rapidly scalable form of energy is nuclear energy.

Everyone will come to that sooner or later, or else be impoverished or, equally likely, perish. The reason that this is the case, is that it is true.

There were a lot of announced nuclear phase outs in Europe, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany so on and so on, but only ONE, Italy, where the phase out actually occurred.

Italy - which has the world's oldest geothermal power plant - and recognized that it is screwed royally, and ENEL crawls around Europe trying to buy interests in Slovakian and French and even Romanian nuclear facilities, but mostly they buy Greek coal based power, French nuclear power, and burn other dangerous fossil fuels, mostly gas, that they import, themselves.

Lots of noise is being made even to reopen the shut reactors - although they cannot be because the infrastructure was allowed to rot to benefit the ignorant. More likely, Italy will finally concede that it must build reactors itself, particularly with the ups and downs of the Swiss and Italian glaciers, the failure of rivers like the Po, etc.

Almost every Energy prognostication in the last two decades - and if you look you will see that all energy soothsaying proves remarkable for being wrong - said Europe's nuclear energy use will decline. Bull. When the wolf is at the door - and he is - they will do the only thing that is possible: Build sustainable nuclear power plants.

What's going to be ironic as hell is that they may end up buying technology and fuel from India because they were so quick to bite the hand that fed them so well, their long history of commercial nuclear power. It's sad that the very first commercial nuclear power, Britain, is so far behind technologically. This forge building shows that at last, they get it. (India's reactor forges constructed its first FBR reactor head under budget and ahead of schedule. It looks like Britain will take three years to compare.)

[kristopher]

6. Sheffield is seeking market share and that speaks for "the UK"?

That's a pretty big leap isn't it?

In contrast to your fantastical dream that everyone is embracing nuclear, here is an actual discussion of the decision process underway in "the UK" right now as related by a Prof. of Technology Policy. Of course, he is obvious a Neanderthal with an irrational fear of nuclear power...
Professor Elliott was trained initially as a physicist and worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Harwell and then for the CEGB, Bristol, before joining the Open University as a Lecturer in the Technology Faculty in 1971. He has a BSc Hons degree in Applied Physics and a PhD in Solid State Electronics.
http://design.open.ac.uk/elliott/index.htm

Nuclear power - dead end or in with a chance?

The public debate and the government consultations in 2006 and 2007 on nuclear power were framed in the context of a replacement programme for existing reactors scheduled to close. On this basis it has been suggested that there was if not a clear consensus then at least a majority in favour.

However, subsequently the government began to talk about going beyond replacement. For example, in May 2008 Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented “I think we are pretty clear that we will have to do more than simply replace existing nuclear capability in Britain” while Secretary of State John Hutton said, that, although it was up to the private sector developers, he would be “very disappointed?? if the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear did not rise “significantly above the current level”. In August 2009 Malcolm Wicks MP, the PM’s Special Representative on International Energy, produced a report calling for a UK nuclear contribution of 35–40% “beyond 2030”.

The government has also indicated that it saw a major role for exporting UK nuclear technology and expertise. Gordon Brown has indicated that he believes the world needs 1,000 extra nuclear power stations and has argued that Africa could build nuclear power plants to meet growing demands for energy. In 2009 a new UK Centre for supporting the export of nuclear technology was set up with a budget of up to £20 m.

You do not have to be anti-nuclear to feel some sense of unease over the global expansion programmes being discussed, not least since they could lead much greater long-term risks for global security in terms of the proliferation of nuclear weapons making capacity and the potential for nuclear terrorism. There are other geopolitical issue as well. For example, uranium is a finite resource and, if a major global expansion programme emerges, based on existing burner technology, then there must inevitably come a time when there will beconflicts over diminishing high-grade reserves. That is one reason why interest has been rekindled in fast breeder reactors, which can use the otherwise wasted parts of the uranium resource, and also in the use of thorium, which is more abundant than uranium. But those options are some way off. For the moment, the programmes around the world are mostly all based on upgraded versions of the standard Pressurised Water Reactor, with passive safety features to reduce the risk of major accidents, plus in some case, higher fuel burn up, so as to improve their economics – though that wlll result in higher activity wastes, which could present safety and waste management problems.

There are also other operational issues. In the UK the various contenders – EDF, E.ON etc – have “reserved” a total of 23.6 GW of grid links for new nuclear capacity with National Grid. That’s about the same as the wind power capacity we are aiming to have by 2020, albeit with lower load factors. But as EDF have pointed out, there are operational and economic reasons why a major expansion of nuclear would be incompatible with a major expansion of renewable electricity generation – at periods of low demand you would not need both. So which would give way?

In addition, the renewables and nuclear will inevitably also be in direct conflict for funding. A major nuclear programme could divert money, expertise and other resources away from renewable energy and energy efficiency, which arguably are the only long term sustainable energy options.

It used to be argued that renewables were interesting but marginal. Now however, they have moved into the mainstream – with, for example, more than 120 GW of wind generation capacity in place around the world. And they are expanding. Last year solar PV generation capacity grew by 70% around the world, wind power by 29% and solar hot water increased by 15%. By 2008, renewables represented more than 50% of total added generation capacity in both the United States and Europe, i.e. more new renewables capacity was installed than new capacity for gas, coal, oil and nuclear combined. Interestingly, by 2008 China had installed as much wind capacity as it had nuclear capacity (8.9 GW) and there are plans for continued rapid expansion of wind, to 100 GW and beyond. However, there are also plans for nuclear expansion.

It is sometimes argued that you can and should have both nuclear and renewables – to ensure diversity. But, quite apart from the conflicts mentioned above, nuclear is not only one of the most expensive options, it is only just one option. By contrast, there are dozens of renewable energy technologies of various sorts, using a range of sources. It is true that they are at varying stages of development, but given proper funding, they seem likely to offer a more diverse set of options.

What’s the best bet for the future? An energy source with limited resource availability and major waste and security implications? Or a range of new technologies based on natural energy flows, with no emissions, no wastes, no fuel resource limits, no fuel price rises, and no security implications, unless that is we start squabbling over the wind and solar resource around the planet. ...

Open access article available here: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2009/09/nuclear-power---dead-end-or-in.html


If anyone hasn't read or seen "The Confessions of an Economic Hitman" you cannot possibly understand the push for nuclear power and be able to judge it on its actual merits.

Here is the google search with lots of choices for becoming familiar with this unique opportunity for insight into the operations of economic imperialism:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=confessions+of+an+economic+hitman+summary&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=Confessions+of+an+economic+hitman&gs_rfai=

And here is the author's website: http://www.johnperkins.org/?page_id=2