Ursula’s Nuclear Epiphany Marks a New Era of EU Desperation
We have discussed previously on these pages, Ed Miliband’s proclamation of Britain’s “golden age of nuclear”. This week, Miliband’s atomic chorus was joined by none other than European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In a speech to the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris, the leader of the conflicted Commission of the collapsing Union announced that “Europe needs homegrown, low-carbon energy sources”, and that “nuclear and renewables together have a key role to play”.
There has never been a meaningful proposal for “nuclear and renewables” for precisely the reason von der Leyen states: “Nuclear energy is available around the clock, providing electricity all year.” Europe’s and its member states’ energy policies were driven by fantasies of 100% renewables. And what would be the point of building intermittent generation capacity alongside 24/7 capacity, which is furthermore not well-suited to ramping its output up and down? Moreover, the green ideology that was absorbed into Europe’s political architecture was overtly hostile, not only to nuclear energy, which it claimed was too risky, but to all abundant and cheap energy – i.e., solutions that didn’t require immiseration. It was in response to the possibility of ‘clean’ nuclear power providing cheap energy that the green movement’s godfather, Paul Ehrlich claimed it would be like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
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People keep calling wind and sun “renewable”. Wind, sun and flowing water will always be with us for as long as the planet is viable, but has anyone studied how long the materials used to harness them industrially will last, based on current estimates? The same people who tell us that oil will run out Any Time Now have surely looked into this.
The windmills and solar panels needing regular replacement is an inconvenient truth they do not want to discuss.
Do you recall a few years ago the eco-loonies making a fuss about corks in wine bottles and how we should switch to screw caps to save the balsawood trees which were in danger of extinction… something.
Well… guess what those turbine blades are made from under their plastic coating.
Cork oaks actually. In fact we should be buying more corked wine to preserve the cork oak plantations and the wildlife that they support.
A big point to be made about windmills and sun temples is that nobody knows what to do with the old blades and panels, especially the toxic elements in the panels.
I’ve raised this point in various posts, e.g. in this to my MP (he didn’t reply): https://metatron.substack.com/p/climate-change-and-the-corruption.
“And if by some miracle your Net Zero “Nirvana” came to pass in Scotland in 2045 as supposedly “planned” by the inept SNP who have made a 10-year pig’s ear of the minor task of procuring two new “eco-ferries” (more here), and then all your short lifespan wind turbines and solar panels started falling to bits, you might care to ponder how on earth you would go about replacing them with net zero fossil fuels and no heavy mining, manufacturing and transportation facilities” (I should have included cement).
A very good summary
If one prefers not to tackle the “warming” nonsense, for now, then the killer argument is what you set out in your last section- though a busy MP who probably doesn’t do detail might be more likely to read a highly simplified version – and they would still have no answer
Thanks. I’ve never had a politician give an honest reply to anything I’ve sent them. The main target audience for my email was not my MP, it was my long bcc addressee list of friends, campaigners and publishers. It got posted on several websites and the one linked to above, the substack of my pal Joel Smalley, probably got many more views than its 276 likes (and 116 comments). I’ve since plugged it and later posts on comment forums such as this.
I’ve had I think three honest replies. Two from a local councillor, one of which accepted the double standards of allowing a “Black Lives Matter” event during “Lockdown” and another acknowledging that closing outside council facilities like skate parks and exercise stations during “Lockdown” was unconservative (he was a Tory). I think he was nearing the end of his career or maybe he was just unusually honest. Probably more likely to find such people at lower levels – people who have day jobs and are not invested in a political career. The third was from my local MP regarding Dominic Cummings breaking “lockdown” rules – she disapproved and completely missed the point of my email to her that he should not have been censured for what he did.
My usual starting point is “what happens when the wind stops blowing and the sun is not shining” and I maybe throw in that we get 10% ish from Nuclear France and others in Europe. People generally have no answer to that. I honestly think that even “educated” and “intelligent” people are lazy, in denial and dogmatic and will simply not read or listen to anything beyond a couple of sentences.
The problem with the Net Zeroids is they see energy production as purely an industrial, mechanical process which just needs some more technology to make it work, rather than a market system.
The latter relies on capital investment, return on that investment (aka profit… Boo!), revenue streams, cost containment, cash-flow management. The irony is, none of their “sustainable” electricity production schemes are sustainable businesses.
You missed out that we will have no money to replace the windmills in a bankrupt country.
Solar panels use approx 20 tons of silver per square mile, and Europe’s renewables lobby would like hundreds of square miles. The panels might be expected to last 25 years but hail, sand and “extreme weather events” can easily shorten that.
I’m sure they’ve done projections on requirements and supply of silver, recyclability etc
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can be transformed from kinetic energy (wind) into electrical energy, but the kinetic energy used cannot be “renewed”. There are no wind mines, or wind wells.
Coal, oil and gas supplies are renewable – just dig some more out of the ground to replenish.
That “substitution” trick is one to watch out for if the green blob uses it to inflate the actual supply produced by renewables. The primary energy metric is essential to understand the consumption of primary energy needed to produce our electricity but on top of that we need to relate that electricity supply, from whatever source, to the metrics of actual demand.
Ben is quite right to talk about “rubbish renewables”. The electricity grid has to cope with changing demand second by second and hour by hour but a grid powered only by renewables would also have the supply changing second by second and hour by hour. Nightmare.
I’d like to see the engineering/mathematical justification for Miliband’s claim that the grid can be 95% decarbonised by 2030. My gut feel is that he won’t get much above about 50% without provoking blackouts, and that will be a massive cheat by including dispatchable biomass with higher emissions than coal, and also electricity supplied via interconnectors which is also cheatingly deemed to be “emissions-free”. The cheat might also include the “substitution” trick.
“A problem shared is a problem doubled.” And, “… the likes of von der Leyen LARP as global statesmen in their wake…” Wisdom, wit and righteous derision, loving it!
I hope we’re each sharing with our ambit-normies.
We’re not allowed to call idiot children ‘idiot children’. They’re misunderstood or have special needs or are being brought up with different values. As such there’s nothing wrong with giving all children a machine gun each – subsidised for those from ethnic minority backgrounds. However, if they say or type hurty words their parents should be locked up.
“… “nuclear and renewables together have a key role to play”… Not epiphany, ignorance. Nuclear reactors are designed for continuous, stable reaction for constant output. They are as good as coal-fired power stations (but considerably more expensive) for this. They cannot be back-up to “unreliables”, because this requires constant adjustment up and down to the reaction rate, which not only cannot be done quickly but constant fluctuations will cause metal fatigue in the fuel rods (they buckle – Danger! Will Robinson) as was found in German reactors), and reduce the working life of the reactor. Spain has now stipulated 58% at least of its grid supply will be supplied by gas-generators to provide inertia and frequency stability to avoid the catastrophe that running it on 73% “unreliables” caused in April, and since this means operating a parallel system, electricity bills will be increased to cover the cost. There is no way to run a stable grid, with a continuous, dispatchable electricity supply without a parallel gas-generated supply to provide inertia and back up. It doesn’t matter how many windmills, sunbeam traps, and batteries are built – we still need a parallel gas Current Contract for Difference wholesale wind = £128… Read more »
Ursula Fond of Lying says on video that Europe is suffering from energy shortage “because Russia cut off energy supplies to Europe“.
How many people, even among the blue-pilled MSM addicted masses are stupid enough to have already forgotten that, central to the “sanctions from hell” package slapped onto Russia almost before it crossed the border, was the sanctioning of RUSSIAN ENERGY IMPORTS? “Nobody is allowed to buy energy from Russia OK?” was the war cry among western leaders. “This will DESTROY RUSSIA’S ECONOMY!”
So Fond Of LYING. So glad Britain is out from under the lies of these unelected, unaccountable, pretentious Euros. At least we have access to our own domestic liars, and they are regularly subjected to accountability. And we can throw them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLDi3e-Lfkw
…because Russia cut off energy supplies to Europe
Hmm, that doesn’t seem like the action of a friendly country. So Europe was relying on an unfriendly country for essential energy imports? When did UvdL realise Russia was not friendly to Europe? That’s a hell of a good reason not to close down your nuclear power stations or cut out more reliable trading partners.
That said, a great deal of the energy shortage is actually caused by relying on intermittent generators and relegating hydrocarbons to a ‘last resort’ option. Maintaining gas power stations but only running them from time to time is bound to raise costs per unit output. Raised costs means grids are less willing to pay for spare capacity margin. Less spare capacity means greater risk of shortages – more-or-less by definition.
Last but by no means least. Does UvdL really believe Russia cut off energy supplies to Europe? Surely the boot was on the other foot?
A bit of good news is that the World’s most evil man Bill Gates has shut down his ‘green’ innovation fund that was supposed to be funding all the pie in the sky/unicorn technology that will save Net Zero.
if you did your job as poorly as these two and brought your company to near collapse, would you still be employed? No, I did not think so.