Why We Really Don’t Want Any New Nuclear Developments in UK
Stating the Obvious, to Avoid any Doubts
Firstly a disclaimer; this story is not a book review, despite the image above, I’m sure it’s a great book. But the question it asks is partly what I want to talk about here, the conversations and agreements in principle being made by the UK government and companies like EDF, to implement further nuclear power plants in UK, seemingly with the intention of making us more energy self-sufficient.
I can’t claim to have much of the specialist nuclear domain expertise of the authors of the book of my graphic. But I have worked in relevant fields since my first stint as a hardware Engineer in the commercial Electrical Power metering industry, in 1997, after studying Electrical and Communications Systems full time for ten years (I was a slow but thorough learner!). I began as a mature student in 1987, aged 24, having always been a tinkerer in Engineering. In the electrical industry I’ve gone as far as even registering, and being granted patents in magnetic transformer technology, and licensing those to third party companies, so I put my hands up to having done my bit towards capitalism.
It is part of my usual job to identify appropriate experts for each technical domain that a system might involve, and bring them into a project.
I have no doubt the authors of the book above are all experts and will have presented good information, as far as their professional positions can allow.
This is where I might have some advantage; I don’t have any professional position in the industry to defend, or other personal self interest in that direction.
My time in Medium has been spent mostly analysing the energy vs economy problem, which I’ve seen coming for a number of years, after realising on my own metaverse related PhD that we can never have a true metaverse fully benefiting all people, at profit.
I have done this around continuing to contract as a Chartered Systems Engineer, often in defence related Systems, often involving nuclear.
I’ve used the formal techniques and tools gained in that capacity to dig deep into the concepts of profit, what is it, how it relates to energy, and the way we think.
Right now we seem to be at something that can only be described as the end of days.
The more work I’ve done on it this subject, that I now call “Kardashev Engineering”, the clearer it has become to me that the way we handle energy, money, capital, debt, and most of the conventional financial instruments are all linked to our current course towards disaster.
Some other, much better known authors like the late David Graeber, of “Bullshit Jobs” infamy, seem to have been on the path to tracking down the energy connection, of not on it already.
To me it is patently clear that Bullshit Jobs, are mostly jobs in Bullshit Industries, which all exist for no good reason, other than to generate jobs.
There is no way around extinction if we can’t change course. I say that with 100% confidence. And I worry about it more for the sake of my only child (My daughter), and all of her generation, and all of the others that might have come after, than me.
There is only one actual source of energy, the sun. All others are actually stores of energy.
We have to get that simple fact very straight in our heads, to be able to see clearly the only way to fix things, the only way to make things finally sustainable.
Otherwise we are continuing a Grand Energy Ponzi, which ends with our extinction, very soon.
We might have thought even just a year or two ago, that we had a few decades left to fix things, but that has now come down to maybe just a year or two, it is that bad.
On our current path, if we don’t finish ourselves with a nuclear war, nature will do it anyway with heatdomes and other weird unpredictable weather events, floods, food shortages, and water shortages, and of course diseases, and all of them are linked by a deadly chain, our economy of capital, wielded as a weapon of scarcity enforcement, against our fellow humans.
With the way we handle energy by our economy, seemingly without realising it, we are literally wiping out all other life upon which we ourselves as a species depend for survival.
All life is a kind of energy, put there by nature using the energy of the sun, and we are depleting all of that energy.
The Nuclear Problem
Nuclear, like the use of fuels of any kind, is all about releasing energy from materials.
In the case of nuclear this involves putting together critical masses of radioactive materials. By that a reaction occurs, releasing the energy of the material.
In the case of utilities power, the sought yield of energy is slow, continued over a long period of time.
In the case of weapons it is fast, preferably instantaneous, to cause maximum blast effect.
Preparing materials for fast release, involves a period of “Refinement”, which is simply a period of slow release.
So it is natural to put to put those two processes together, to create firstly profitable power, from the process of refinement of weapons grade plutonium, sceondly to create profitable weapons of mass destruction using the refined plutonium.
It can be explained in many ways by those whose careers depend on being able to sell this technology to the public, but in essence, it is all driven by profit, and profit will always dictate the most profitable processes.
That is why there is so much concern over countries like Iran having nuclear power for utilities. The pressure to optimise that process towards weapons grade plutonium is overwhelming, both in terms of profit, and for what Iran most likely sees as its best chance of strategic defence against other nuclear armed countries which might be hostile to it.
The Effect of Nuclear Power on Nature, and the Environment
If we compare the Earth energy system effects of using nuclear to any other method of using fuel created by nature, we see no difference, the net effect is negative, a loss of energy of Earth, and of course there is always pollution when we do that.
In this, the EROI computation of any business case is extremely deceptive.
The computation of it for nuclear involves finding all of the financial costs of the lifetime of the nuclear plant, and comparing it with the sales returned from the plant, over its lifetime.
The cost computed for the fuel, is the cost of the industry required to extract and process all of the materials of it.
But the energy it took to create the material of that fuel is never taken into account.
We can compute that using Einstein’s E=MC² relationship.
Just try it, with even a gram of material. C² is an astronomically big number, multiplied by every gram of material.
Of course we don’t get anything like that number back out of the material, when we extract energy back out, it is only a tiny fraction of the energy that went in.
Since that process is less than perfect, a quantity of material is left, after we’ve extracted whatever energy we can from it.
The material remaining is pollution, which is deadly to all of nature.
This is what pollution is, all pollution. No matter if it is from nuclear materials used as fuel, or otherwise, all of it comes from de-creating materials that nature created.
Note that the energy which created any material is a positive process of creation; a kind of energy charging. So the process of extracting energy back out is the opposite, negative; a process of destruction. A kind of energy discharging.
So if we were to compute the actual honest energy EROI in terms of energy, as we should, using E=MC² for any fuel, we will see that it is always negative, without exception.
In other words the use of fuel, with one very special exception, is always negative, always discharging the energy of Earth.
Nuclear is not any kind of solution.
Unless we actually don’t want to survive, of course then Nuclear could be the final solution, and might well be.
The solution
Of course the solution is solar. We absolutely must move to Kardashev 1.0. There is no longer any choice in this.
A few years ago there were many questions on how to do it, often still used as justification for reasons not to do it.
The truth is all of the questions have been answered in my articles to date.
No-one has put forward any sensible reason or physical proof that it can’t be done.
It does not have to be gridded, with the inverter technologies we now have, there is no reason to have huge generators feeding whole regions via cables, all communities can be locally solar powered. Think of your house, your neighborhood, your city, all can be powered from locally collected solar. In the rare cases that there is not enough immediate real estate which can collect enough solar to sustain a community, then the neighboring communities can supply it with cabled power and/or fuel in the form of hydrogen, which functionally replaces fossil fuels with none of the pollution in either its creation or consumption.
Hydrogen is the special case mentioned earlier.
We can extract energy back out of it with no pollution, because we made it ourselves, using sunlight, just like nature created all things from sunlight.
That hydrogen is generated as a natural result, a by-product of overcharging fuel cells, which we would use to backup each solar installation.
Now consider further the controversial topic of cryptocurrencies.
Are we sick of the banks having control of our money? Of course we are.
Are the banks even sick of being dependent on our money for their existence?
Of course they are.
I’ve explained in the money-fuel Tree story how proof-of-work cryptocurrency is proven to have real physical intrinsic value, in terms of energy. Every token can be shown to have a fixed value in terms of Joules.
That is like having a gold standard again, but in terms of live energy, work in progress instead of capital like gold, which is work done.
Now the implications of it, are that we / the banks / our governments of all the world should be issuing free funds to all their peoples, reflecting the market value of the Joules received from all solar energy put to use in our countries.
Not doing that, results in our currencies floundering in markets.
The market instinctively seeks out the intrinsic value of all things, given that everyone is trading with freely received money in that market.
We saw this happen when oil prices went negative, the only time ever in history for any commodity, when $4Tn stimulus was issued in US, the equivalent of $10K for every person in the US, in one month, whilst the dollar went up, and bankrupt but still loved companies were rescued by their shares soaring (Hertz, for example).
What we / our governments / our banks should be doing right now, is allocating the bulk of defence spending that we normally put towards things like NATO (Now a busted flush?), to give to people, industries, projects for the purposes of implementing the required solar collection and power infrastructure.
It has become clear to me that there is no simple overall system view that can capture the entire system that needs to be implemented.
But, there is a way to identify what I would call the “Seed expenditure” required for a particular installation, given the key characteristics of the installation. I call that a Money-Fuel Tree. Another less controversial term for it might be a Kardashev Tree. Call it whatever, it is actual reality:
The amount of money required by a community, to put in place a self-sustaining, freely scaleable solar installation, which can be freely grown to meet the ultimate needs of the community, and replicated to other communities, with most communities being able to freely scale up to produce excess hydrogen which can be exchanged with other communities, can be computed with an appropriate model of the intended installation.
Of course implementing this would have profound effects on economy.
But those are all positive, there are absolutely no downsides to this, everyone wins from taking the free energy of the sun, and putting it to use.
The alternative is in the coming months, literally millions of unemployed people protesting and dying, and in the end, all of us, rich and poor, dying.
This summer we are likely to see some nasty surprises due to a war which is all about power / energy, and which is wasting obscene amounts of it, and which could end any day with a nuclear holocaust.
How much more should we be investing in that?
Please, UK Government, can we start to get sensible, and start to fix things.
Please can we switch funding from destruction, to constructing real defence against annihilation, the only way out, the only actual live source of energy, Solar, with no further delay.
We could take the lead in this by showing the world how to do it.
