HPC

[Moxi]

Hi Mart,

I'm a bit removed from the front line these days but yes those figures seem to resonate with my personal understanding, I did a fag paper exercise a while back to see how the power produced by a 1st generation nuclear station stacked up against its original costs, operation and decommissioning costs - it got a bit vague at the point where you had to account for costs for fuel reprocessing etc and I had to abandon any reasonable accuracy when I tried to account for spent fuel and waste storage costs - needless to say the cost of the electrical power produced was sufficiently high as to make the case for having any nuclear power generation a strategic government level decision which in the case of the 1st gen plants was not wholly down to civil power production demands.

As I have said before it would be good to see how a large hydro, tidal or pumped system capex costs stacked up against the cost of Hinckley C to see if we are missing an option in our low carbon power production program ?

Keeping it with Wales for the moment (because I know the area) but can you imagine the benefits of reopening one or two of the old slate quarries, mining rock that is then used to form an offshore barrage and then flooding up the worked quarries afterwards to form pumped hydro units ? I would think the employment benefits alone up here would be enough to get general local approval, add in the power generation and durability factors and re-use of brown field industrial sites and it starts to look very interesting as a concept. but maybe this is getting to be a digression from the subject?

Moxi

[Mart]

Many thanks Moxi. I think the figures for the Swansea tidal lagoon were similar to HPC, but Cardiff may be half the cost (per MWh) as it's 10x the size, but only about 5x the barrage wall. [Double the circumference of a circle and you quadruple the volume.]

Slight aside, but as a young child I remember we visited a slate quarry musuem while on holiday with friends from London. The route up was so steep, that the clutch on the Vauxhall Cavalier burnt out.

Single(ish) track road, so quite an issue. But friends used their early big box Volvo to push us all the way up, utilising the great big bumpers they had.

Funny the stuff you remember, and I was totally taken by the giant German Shepherd that was in the recovery truck that had to come up and get us. Must have been pre 1980.

Long way up that mountain!