Why would we want to get rid of the cheapest and greenest energy?
But the Tories privatised all of our nuclear power stations so why do taxpayers pay anything?
> The nuclear power stations are owned by EDF Energy and provide much of the UK’s nuclear power-generated electricity, which makes up 16% of the energy mix.
Oh phew. They are owned by a private company (well French state owned) that runs them for profit and makes good money from their operation. The taxpayer is saved!
> The government has recently agreed that once the stations have been defuelled by EDF, which involves the removal of all the spent fuel from the reactor core and cooling ponds, ownership of the stations will be transferred to the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to complete decommissioning.
**WAIT WHAT?** Ah the ol’ privatise the profits, socialise the losses. EDF should be covering all the costs, including decommissioning, before they extract a single penny in profits… but I guess that wasn’t the deal the Tories did when they flogged the nuclear family silver.
That’s a lot of money. Probably means that the job will be given to newly formed companies with no experience in the field that just happen to be owned by Tory chums. What could possibly go wrong?
I don’t know how anyone takes nuclear seriously.
So cheap no one can afford to decommission it…
At least this particular delay is caused by the pandemic slowing everything down.
I did some basic back of a notepad calculations and got an updated figure of £37.22/MWh without interest, compared to £92.50 under the CfD.
What happened to reprocessing nuclear waste into fuel? I recall the UK used to do a fair bit of that in the past.
The Guardian is a rubbish paper, this article doesn’t really go into detail.
The EDF fleet are old. Old reactors are harder to decomission and were not designed with the end in mind and so therefore a lot of thought has to go into how to safely dismantle them, New stations are designed with decomissioning in mind and so are a lot faster and cheaper and predictable to take apart when they’re done with.
It makes sense for the government to pay part of the cost of decomissioning – the state built and operated them for part of their life. EDF has paid into a fund to decomission them as long as they have operated them. The sale of the government’s shares of what was British Energy has already provided £10bn that was put into the decomissioning fund.
The government own a company that specialises in nuclear decomissioning so long term it makes sense for them to do that, it also drives an economy of scale.
8 comments
Why would we want to get rid of the cheapest and greenest energy?
But the Tories privatised all of our nuclear power stations so why do taxpayers pay anything?
> The nuclear power stations are owned by EDF Energy and provide much of the UK’s nuclear power-generated electricity, which makes up 16% of the energy mix.
Oh phew. They are owned by a private company (well French state owned) that runs them for profit and makes good money from their operation. The taxpayer is saved!
> The government has recently agreed that once the stations have been defuelled by EDF, which involves the removal of all the spent fuel from the reactor core and cooling ponds, ownership of the stations will be transferred to the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to complete decommissioning.
**WAIT WHAT?** Ah the ol’ privatise the profits, socialise the losses. EDF should be covering all the costs, including decommissioning, before they extract a single penny in profits… but I guess that wasn’t the deal the Tories did when they flogged the nuclear family silver.
That’s a lot of money. Probably means that the job will be given to newly formed companies with no experience in the field that just happen to be owned by Tory chums. What could possibly go wrong?
I don’t know how anyone takes nuclear seriously.
So cheap no one can afford to decommission it…
At least this particular delay is caused by the pandemic slowing everything down.
[This article](https://medium.com/generation-atomic/the-hinkley-point-c-case-is-nuclear-energy-expensive-f89b1aa05c27) is outdated, but it shows that most of the lifecycle cost of Hinkley Point C is financing.
I did some basic back of a notepad calculations and got an updated figure of £37.22/MWh without interest, compared to £92.50 under the CfD.
What happened to reprocessing nuclear waste into fuel? I recall the UK used to do a fair bit of that in the past.
The Guardian is a rubbish paper, this article doesn’t really go into detail.
The EDF fleet are old. Old reactors are harder to decomission and were not designed with the end in mind and so therefore a lot of thought has to go into how to safely dismantle them, New stations are designed with decomissioning in mind and so are a lot faster and cheaper and predictable to take apart when they’re done with.
It makes sense for the government to pay part of the cost of decomissioning – the state built and operated them for part of their life. EDF has paid into a fund to decomission them as long as they have operated them. The sale of the government’s shares of what was British Energy has already provided £10bn that was put into the decomissioning fund.
The government own a company that specialises in nuclear decomissioning so long term it makes sense for them to do that, it also drives an economy of scale.
wind and solar never do that