Boris Johnson’s plans for a nuclear energy revolution are facing a fresh hurdle after the Austrian government officially raised concerns about the safety of a new reactor design.
In a letter to the Business Department, Austria’s energy ministry raised the spectre of “severe accidents with high releases” at the Sizewell C plant to be built in Suffolk.
The warning, made under the Espoo convention in which nearby countries are allowed to comment on nuclear projects, raises the prospect of legal action to derail Sizewell and will be considered by the Government as part of a planning decision in coming months.
We spent 5 years rolling through the design. 5 sodding years. At which point the Austrian Greens – and they’re terrible, really – stick their oar in again. Sigh. Just build the damn things.
They sound almost as bad as the Greens in Oz. Who have naturally done well in the latest election.
I especially liked the one where the Greens blamed the coming rise in electricity prices on us burning our huge reserves of coal.
That escalated rather quickly from “raising concerns” and “allowed to comment” to legal action.
I saw this over at Paul Homewoods’ site yesterday and thought ‘we’re fucked, there’s just too much money being ploughed into the climate crap’.: https://youtu.be/IwvGlF9_fpw It’s 24 minutes but well worth it.
Then I watched Neil Oliver and a sense of hope returned: https://youtu.be/mS2iU1cqqYU
The entire Austrian political establishment is anti Nuke. They are. Onstantly whinging about the Czech nuke Temelin, the Cz’ers just tell them to bugger off as should we.
My latest hobby horse is that near to where I used to live under a town called Poysdorf is enough shale gas to provide Austria’s needs for 30 years. Successive govts have refused the state oil firm OMV a licence and so it was abandoned. Guess from where Austria has to buy its gas and using which currency ?
Greens are merely the latest incarnation of the CND. And we know where they got their funding from…
Addolff,
“I saw this over at Paul Homewoods’ site yesterday and thought ‘we’re fucked, there’s just too much money being ploughed into the climate crap’.: https://youtu.be/IwvGlF9_fpw It’s 24 minutes but well worth it.”
All it’s going to take is blackouts and every dippy woman with ideas about bucolic eco idylls (and the green movement is overwhelmingly about women) will switch. They might like their pretensions of living that existence, with organic milk and eco-friendly cosmetics, but deliver them the real bucolic existence, good and hard, with no flushing toilets, no Netflix, no working internet router, and they’ll be begging for nuclear power stations.
These powerful influencers can only work because there’s a population gullible enough to buy it. The moment that goes, the influence doesn’t work.
I can remember when Continental environmentalists claimed that the pollution from British coal-fired
power stations was killing trees in Scandinavia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and, for all I know, Austria.
It proved to be the usual lies.
Austria is nearby? And yet the French who are nearer have a much bigger nuclear fleet.
All energy requires energy to extract and deliver. In the case of LNG about 20% goes on compression and liquefaction. The Yamal – Frankfurt gas pipe requires 14 compressor stations at intervals, and then another 10 for distribution in Germany, so (guessing) about 10% goes on transport.
So compressing gas (by burning some of it) pollutes the planet with deadly CO2.
Offshore gas may also require intermediate compression. To build a modern equivalent of MCPO1 (Mid Point Compression Platform 1) which was half way between the Frigg field and Shetland would cost several billion quid in today’s money.
By contrast fracked gas could be spliced into the domestic network at relatively trivial cost.
The Greens are planet destroying lunatics.
BonM4, just saw one your ‘dippy birds’ on the ‘Jeremy Vile show without Jeremy’ (extra or whatever it’s called, saying we shouldn’t re-open coal fired power stations, we should just insulate everything and our problems would be solved.
Storm ‘we should all stop using fossil fuels for luxury trips trips to far away places with strange sounding names now that i’ve had my honeymoon in the Maldives’ Huntley, pointed out that that would take years and we need a quick fix now.
Dippy bird was unmoved.
If all those who dislike fossil fuels stopped using the fucking stuff there’d be more than enough for the rest of us with no increase in carbon footprint……
@dearieme That was actually true… Acid rain, and its effects, were quite real. And for a while it did a number on nature in general, mostly in north/norhteastern europe.
The problem there wasn’t the coal-fired plants themselves, but the fact that they used the dirtiest, cheapest coal possible and as a result tossed out tons on sulfur oxide that landed as sulfurous acid Somewhere Else.
If the chimneys would have been a tad shorter, it’d have landed mostly in the UK. Which is why they built them so tall..
Because the UK already did have an acid rain problem as-was from the short stacks of the foundries and steel mills in the past. The engineers and politicians knew exactly what they were doing, and were playing Murdered Innocence on the issue.
When the use of proper desulfurised coal/exhaust washing was… highly encouraged… the acid rain problem quickly went away. So much so that people have mostly forgotten about it.
But the problem was very much quite real, and peeps were quite right to complain about it.
“ ideas about bucolic eco idylls (and the green movement is overwhelmingly about women) will switch. They might like their pretensions of living that existence, with organic milk and eco-friendly cosmetics, but deliver them the real bucolic existence, good and hard, with no flushing toilets, no Netflix, no working internet router, and they’ll be begging for nuclear power stations.”
If it gets as bad as some usually sane commentators are saying they’ll be taking a low profile and trying to hide from the lynch mobs.
@ BoM4 – “All it’s going to take is blackouts”
Today (Monday) much of the MSM is running the claim that “Up to 6 million people face blackouts this winter”. I sincerely hope cuts do take place, because every winter the grid scrapes through allows the scam to gather further momentum, so the sooner reality bites the better. In any case, I want an opportunity to test my back up systems for real.
Selfish? Moi? You bet…..
@Grikrath
Doesn’t the hun burn lignite for power, generally considered the least “environmentally friendly” form of coal?
Why don’t they go and dictate there? Austrians have a record of doing that in the fatherlad.
@Mark Yes they do, in the old GDR plants. You know, the ones from Before the Anschluss..
And they used to cause trouble here, and even in the UK with easterly winds. Then again, it’s established the old “Socialist” regimes did Flippeth the Finger at the Evil West in those days..
The plants that still do burn lignite should have exhaust processing installed by now, but it’s still….Eastern Germany, so ymmv.
And Austria does complain to the Huns about this and other stuff. Generally their complaints get the same attention as those from the Special cousin. A good example for the UK in this case.
I would much prefer to live downwind of a nuclear plant, (or even a dirty coal plant), than live near a major city after a five day blackout. (And if the grid goes down, there are very reasonable scenarios which postulate at least five days to bring it back up.)
A bunch of south londoners with no fuel, no food, no money, (our shopping, banking, transport, communications, etc. systems are totally dependant on electricity and often the internet), foraging forth into Kent and Surrey might shake up the locals a bit.
You certainly wouldn’t want to live downwind of a major city during a major grid failure..
Both water and sanitation pumps will shut down, and all the old methods to get rid of the “night soil” of several 100’s of thousands of people have been…discontinued… with no backup…
Within two days any major city would literally turn into a shithole.
‘tossed out tons on sulfur oxide that landed as sulfurous acid’
Thank you Grikath. You’ve pointed out how the good old days stopped global warming.
You’d better tell the Greens that going back to burning lots and lots of smoggy, smoggy coal is the way to deal with their concerns.
“You’d better tell the Greens..”
You can’t tell the Greens anything. They won’t listen.
I actually think they’re physically and mentally incapable of understanding anything that doesn’t fit in their narrow world view.
And like any religious fanatic they sure as hell are hell-bent on forcing everyone to comply with that world view.
I’ve started to refer to them as “Nugganites”, much to the chagrin of the ones that actually read PTerry.
I’ve started to refer to them as “Nugganites”
I think that is a good name for them – with the loose-leaf holy book of Abominations
@Boganboy
+1 We’ve only got 300 years of coal reseves left in UK
Start bloody using it instead of blowing up power stations and reverting to C18 wood burning
Having lived near a major steel works in the 70’s and the quality of car body work and paint of the time I can certainly attest to the existence of acid rain. There’s a good reason a lot of them changed cars regularly.