Regarding the £700m figure for the fish disco, don't the £500 "low velocity side entry intake heads" sound like just a general part of a nuclear plant cooling system? Are we sure that's all extra cost specifically for the fish thing, or would the vast majority of it be part of the cost of building a nuclear power plant either way? I am absolutely not a nuclear engineer (!), and the other costs involved do sound ludicrous, but that jumped out at me a bit. Is somebody being a bit cheeky by lumping the entire cooling system costs together and blaming it all on the poor twaite shads? (or is the plural twaites shad?)
To be honest, I don't know the answer to this, and I suspect you might be right. But the report does specifically lump them together as an example of pretty excessive spending.
I suppose it's not always straightforward to separate these things out. I'd be astonished if that was all additional fish-disco-specific cost, but given that we live in a world of bat tunnels and fish discos at all, you never know!
All this guff about intermittent generation is depressing. It's just not a whole system mindset, you have to have energy storage (batteries or hydro/lakes) as part of the system. It's not complicated (in priciple, if not in construction/design etc) and you don't need those gas power plants that your guest is complaining about.
They've taken an argument from 2002 and think it's still a gotcha today.
Regarding the £700m figure for the fish disco, don't the £500 "low velocity side entry intake heads" sound like just a general part of a nuclear plant cooling system? Are we sure that's all extra cost specifically for the fish thing, or would the vast majority of it be part of the cost of building a nuclear power plant either way? I am absolutely not a nuclear engineer (!), and the other costs involved do sound ludicrous, but that jumped out at me a bit. Is somebody being a bit cheeky by lumping the entire cooling system costs together and blaming it all on the poor twaite shads? (or is the plural twaites shad?)
To be honest, I don't know the answer to this, and I suspect you might be right. But the report does specifically lump them together as an example of pretty excessive spending.
I suppose it's not always straightforward to separate these things out. I'd be astonished if that was all additional fish-disco-specific cost, but given that we live in a world of bat tunnels and fish discos at all, you never know!
All this guff about intermittent generation is depressing. It's just not a whole system mindset, you have to have energy storage (batteries or hydro/lakes) as part of the system. It's not complicated (in priciple, if not in construction/design etc) and you don't need those gas power plants that your guest is complaining about.
They've taken an argument from 2002 and think it's still a gotcha today.