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[10ebbor10]

I'm all for nuclear, but this seems suspicious

Anyway, the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant (under construction) is apparently guaranteed to be able to sell it's electricity at £92.50 per megawatt hour (Mwh), regardless of what the current market price is at the time, for 35 years. That's a long time, especially knowing that it's about twice the current electricity price, and that the plant is supposed to produce 7% of the UK's power.

Honestly, the companies behind this are going to make a killing out of that, even if the plant  ends up going 3 times over budget.

[Max White]

You know I'm becoming more skeptical of nuclear power... Not because of the science of it, that is solid, and not for the engineering. Engineers do a pretty damn good job in designing power plants, rather than time bombs that could melt down on any given day.
No, the problem I'm having is with the bureaucracy of it. There comes a point when a plant needs either a refitting, or to be decommissioned, both very expensive options. Often when the reports start coming in that it is time to look at your options the plant itself is still producing bucket loads of energy. It seems unlikely that an accountant is going to look at their reports and actually see an impending difficulty. The thing is still making money, so what is the problem? No need for an upgrade, it is still producing energy well above peak demand!

And that is how every nuclear disaster has ever gone. A well built plant fails many years down the track because nobody wants to pay the money to maintain something that is working well, or even worse decommission a productive asset. I guess if you want to go nuclear it better damn well be state owned, otherwise you will never get the level of transparency to ensure future safety checks are actually followed through with.

[10ebbor10]

Actually, in every major disaster* the fault has been present since the construction of the plant, and in many cases had been explicitly pointed out to the owners/ was known by the owners.

*Based on a case study of 2 civilian power plants**. Because that's how many serious accidents there have been. ((3 miles island is not a serious accident. Serious accident is INES 6 or higher)).
**There has been a third incident with a sovjet fuel reprocessing station which has been attributed to negligence.

Anyway, point is that refitting a nuclear plant doesn't cost that much money, ((Not compared to the cost, anyway)) and none of the main producers are old enough to need decommissioning yet. Also, the majority of nuclear power production increase in the last ten years (an increase of 10%) has been from precisely that. Refits and other modifications often increase output as well, as steam power turbines become more efficient.

[Max White]

Still, the same point applies. A fault was known, and nobody did anything because fixing it costs money, and that makes little economic sense when you are capable of producing all you need. While plants may not be close to decommissioning now, it will still come up down the track.

Anyway, I'm willing to back the engineers, I just don't trust the industry. I guess it comes from being Australian, it don't have a high degree of regulation here, things are allowed to go wrong far too easily.

[10ebbor10]

Well, one was a Sovjet reactor, and the engineers were practically told at gunpoint to do said test. ((Which were indeed, for economical reasons. They were intended to check if you could replace the plants expensive(wel, for Sovjets) safety system with a simple diesel back-up. They couldn't.))

With Japan it's more about maintaining a reputation. The Japanese Nuclear Industry was absolutely 100% safe. Hence why they weren't even allowed to prepare for situations were things would go wrong, because that would imply the possibility of failure. Really, a program to develop robots for use in case of a nuclear incident was shut down for that very reason. It's the same reason that Japanese power plants weren't required to do simulation of what would happen if a disaster would exceed design parameters.

And anyway; operators are almost always going to do refits if needed. The economic cost of having a power plant shut down by a regulator for not complying to safety standards is pretty huge.

Edit: So both times the problem lies (at least partially) with the government. ((The plant's operator also made several crucial design mistakes, but only because they were allowed too.))

[Loud Whispers]

... But... I'm Canadian... ; w ;

You're on the American tectonic plate so you're a Eurasian country now. Checkmate Georgians.

[Darvi]

Spoiler: I'm surprised that nobody has done this before. (click to show/hide)

[t. fortsorter]

A Scottish penguin. Lovely~
It's such a shame that the region they are known to inhabit is naturally mountainous, the rational sprinkling of a two kilometer or more thick layer of glacier even further exaggerating this quality. Imagine, if you will, the hills they could be able to charge down from shouting "Freedom!" or whichever language they should be fine with using~
Ah, I feel this subject to be exhausted already. Perhaps these articles will interest you?

[Loud Whispers]

Is that a helpful spambot?

[t. fortsorter]

Explain to me in unbiased terms what it takes to be a spambot and what it takes to be human. ^^
Maybe this is a question for the transhumanism thread? I believe a slight derail never hurt anybody~
Besides, I don't think you would be horribly financially drained by the BBC. You only need to mouseover the links to see where they lead, don't you?

[Loud Whispers]

Besides, I don't think you would be horribly financially drained by the BBC.

Is that a bet or a warning? Bloody ambiguously helpful spambots, Turing should have deleted you all :|

[t. fortsorter]

Tsk tsk. I obviously meant both!

So~ What do you think of the Eurozone banking plans? The UK have opted out already, although they are opting out of an almost disgraceful amount of duties an EU member has, and accept every benefit they possibly get from it...
Ah, never mind that! I greatly enjoy the fact that the Union has the slightest chance to become more centralized, for the more centralized we are, the less likely we are to fall under our own weight! It occurs to me that the title of the article regarding Russia and the Ukraine has changed to a more... obvious one. It had primarily regarded Putin's defending of a bailout for Ukraine before the edit.

[10ebbor10]

The EU banking plans help, but the funds that is associated with it is very much a compromise. It's fairly small, and separate from the dozens other funds the EU has to do very similar things.

We had a whole discussion on Ukraine before, and it's certainly an interesting situation.

[Loud Whispers]

So~ What do you think of the Eurozone banking plans? The UK have opted out already, although they are opting out of an almost disgraceful amount of duties an EU member has, and accept every benefit they possibly get from it...

It's one of the greatest centralizations of power seen since the birth of the Euro, the Bank of England already has its own stress-testing regime and a country whose wealth almost entirely depends on the finance sector would be foolish to give away control and regulation of the finance sector to European authorities. It would be on a higher par with trying to take away France's agriculture veto.

[Owlbread]

An excellent article on the Scottish independence issue written by Australian David Hayes, formerly deputy editor of openDemocracy. It's lengthy but it conveys the entire situation as it stands now beautifully in an eloquent, genuinely balanced way never seen in our own media.