Does he only open his mouth to put his foot in it?

There is a new nuclear power station opening near you! Will it be 24hour?

His next announcement will be to bring back 'National Service' and send all youngsters down the re-opened coal mines.

To be fair though, Lets' not hold our breath and expect the others that are waiting to come into power to do any better.

Anyone else want to have a shot at what he might announce next in the current energy fiasco!

When you asked the lib dems for their opinion, did you tell them which publication you are from?

There is no need to worry. I heard Darling on Radio 4 at lunchtime. They have been speaking to the oil companies in Aberdeen today about increasing production in the North Sea. Apparently this will bring the price of petrol down. Maybe they will make like Chavez and Putin and nationalise the oil companies. I feel sure Brown and Darling could make a better job of producing the North Sea than oil industry executives with years of experience....

watching a prog last nite bout how much the nuclear waste etc is going to cost to clean up store make safe (ha ha) and it went into £billions - so theres a gravy train of balls ups waiting to be ignited. Nuclear pwer - no thanks. The nuclear industry is economically a distaster but even if it made money i still hate nuclear power.

Economically the road tax issue is going to kill the countrys motor trade, lets not forget the balance of economy/environment. I am sure hydrogen fuel cells are nearer than we think if the powers that be could (wanted to) force the hand.

.

i'm all for Nuclear, and see it as absolutely necessary for the transition from fossil fuel based systems to cleaner renewable systems.
I'm not thinking tomorrow, I'm thinking mid-term. 5 - 25 years.

Nuclear power stations can be built in place of, or adjacent to existing facilities, and a modern facility is significantly more efficient than their predecessors, so a significant increase in energy percentage can be garnered from Nuclear plants without the need to build in new areas.

The waste CAN be dealt with, and it is worth spending billions on. Carbon scrubbers etc have yet to be proven to work, and these will also run to billions, so the financial argument doesn't really wash either.

Short term, Gordon can't do anything about the oil price. It is purely a question of supply and demand. Conventional oil production peaked in May 2005 at 85mbpd and demand is now 87mbpd and rising at 1-2mbpd a year. We're making the difference up with NGLs, ethanol and inventory liquidation. There have been new discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil but you are looking at 7-10 years to get any significant production. In the meantime existing field are delpeting at 4% per annum at least.

All the new discoveries are deep water and there are only about 30 deepwater rigs in the whole world. All of them are going full tilt and are costing the oil companies $700,000 PER DAY to hire, a ten fold increase over the last 5 years, and you wonder why the oil price is going up. It will be $150 a barrel by the end of the year and $200 by end 2009. The collapsing dollar is not helping particularly as sterling is going down with it.

As for speculators, they are out to make money, they don't care if the oil price goes up or down. Fact is they have seen the writing on the wall are are betting that it is going up. Most of the "speculation" is businesses, like airlines, hedging their fuel costs by buying oil futures. Governments like someone to blame for the mess they have sleepwalked into and "greedy speculators" play well with the public.

Long term, we've got to electrify the transport system. Forget about hydrogen and biofuels, batteries are the answer. Small electric vehicles plugged in over night and charged from the grid from new nuclear power stations, coal power stations with CCS and large scale renewables like offshore wind and tidal barrages. From a standing start this will take a couple of decades to achieve so we'll see $500 oil before 2020. This is going to get a lot worse very quickly. A supply crunch has been predicted around 2011 which will mean not just higher prices but rationing also. See this link for all you could ever want to know about oil:-

http://www.financialsense.com/asktheexpert/archive.html

Scroll down that page and you'll find an interview with pretty well everyone who has ever written a book on the subject over the last 5 years (saves reading them all).

Posted By: SimonHPeople won't want gas guzzlers and so their value will drop and they'll get to the recycling centre sooner than they would have done

As far as embodied resource/energy is concerned, and offsetting a great deal of its xs current (mpg) energy, the most eco friendly car you can buy is the one you already own. Not good for the planet to scrap all the serviceable ones that exist and build that many more new ones.

In the 70s/80s, when Conservation was the big thing, the huge Improvement Grant system was justified on grounds that it's economically (and embodied resource/energy-wise) best to modernise what exists, instead of demolishing to rebuild. I wondered then why the same logic wasn't applied to cars, lorries and planes. Why isn't it normal, today, to see 50s Austin A30s that have been steadily updated with bolt-on kits to bring up to near-new standards? What a fruitful industry that would be, producing the kits - always a new way to achieve more with less, more easily, that many small engineers and mechanics could come up with. My old boss Charlie Ware, art teacher, property tycoon, the single-handed saviour of Bath, first backer of Roxy Music, sponsor of Bath's Other Festival that was hand-in-glove with Glastonbury, now boss of the Morris Minor Centre and inventor of the 'Durable Car' concept, went down that road quite a way - I'm not sure whether they have a bolt-on hybrid kit under development.

The current round of 'Proposed' building of Nuclear reactors is to replace the currently being retired reactors of which the cost is proported to eventually be one hundred fold more than is currently allocated. There are only two companies in the world that build reactors and they have full order books and I heard that they can make 2-3 reactor vessels a year and already have order books of 20-30+

There is the secondary issue of 'Peak Uranium' where they say at current usage we have about 40-50 years supply, ramp up our dependance on it and it runs out quicker plus the mines are mainly in unstable areas of the globe.

Ignor the Nuclear solution, it is not an answer even in the mid term and will not be here in time for the short term.

For a bit of perspective, a few plus points on new nuclear build:-

1 You can't compare the cost of decommisioning of old reactors designing the 1950's and 60's with the decommisioning of the reactors they built today. Back then they never thought about decommissioning, now they are designed to make it easier and hence much cheaper.

2 If we don't replace the current reactor fleet then we are 20% down on low carbon generation right away. Where will we make this up from? Probably coal and gas.

3 There is lack of capacity in alternatives as well as nuclear and we haven't even done a demonstration plant on CCS. Where ever you look there are bottlenecks. That is no argument for dismissing nuclear power. There is no reason to think that it would take any longer to built 20GW of nuclear than 20 GW of renewables. Either way it will take, maybe, 20 years. The main obstacle to progress is NIMBYism.

4 There are a lot of people prospecting for uranium all over the world (try going to an investment show which are riddled with uranium exploration companies). Nobody has looked for it seriously for about 30 years. There could well be some big discoveries over the next decade. The longer we leave it the further back in the queue we are for the stuff. Most of the uranium is in friendly places like Canada and Australia.

5 We have to deal with the waste issue at some point, i.e. build a repository. Doubling the amount of waste won't double the cost.

I'd have thought CO2 emissions and reliance on foreign oil and gas are the main issues and we should surely use all means to get rid of the real problem which is burning of fossil fuels. I think nuclear can be part of that effort for some countries, perhaps including the UK, and, IMHO, there is a lot of scare-mongering rubbish talked about the issue by former "ban the bomb" people who would rather see us all freeze from lack of energy or fry from AGW than swallow their pride and admit they're wrong.

Did they not prove that Nuclear was not a low carbon industry, whilst the actual generation is its huge supporting industry negates the savings in CO2.

You are correct however I think it has been a political decision to shut down so many reactors at the same time to rejuvinate the industry. I would rather spend 20 years building up renewables than 20 years rebuilding our Nuclear capability to the current status quo.

The same fact that is true of oil exploration is true of any ore deposits, the large and easily accessable deposits have been found already which leaves only the smaller and harder to reach ones left. Who knows what will be found if anything of significant size.

Daz, re the low carbon thing, I seem to remember the Sustainable Development Commission coming out saying is was a low carbon technology but then dismissing it as an option because we could manage without it. I've seen a couple of tables which give a fairly low EROEI compared to conventional oil but in both cases the figure was better than for PVs for instance. It all depends whose figures you take.

I think 20 years doing both and also coal with CSS. I've never understood why any of these options are mutually exclusive and doubt we'll get to where we need to be by focusing only on one. To me, they are all alternatives to the uncontrolled burning of imported fossil fuels which is the real problem. If the French want to come over here and build us some new nuclear power stations, pay for then, operate them, decommission them and contribute towards a repository for the waste, what do we have to lose? They have a good track record in this area after all and EdF is part owned by the French Government so it's unlikely they are going to go bust and leave us with the mess the clear up.

I don't think the oil and uranium issues are quite the same. We've been scouring the globe for oil for 100 years. Every nation, hundreds of well financed companies, no expense spared. You can't say the same about uranium. The industry has been in terminal decline since the early 1980s. No one has been looking. You're right we don't know what is out there but I'd put my money on a higher percentage of the total economically extractable uranium (and thorium) resource still being underground compared to fossil fuels. Lower grade resources can be extracted through in-situ leach recovery, you don't even have to build a mine.

The feeling I get is that nuclear is dismissed because of fear of and lack of understanding of the technology and the potential for further enhancing that technology and that's a mistake in my opinion, given the tight spot we are in with energy and climate change.

What I want to see is a massive scale usage of Energy Service Contracts / Companies. ESCOs.

Instead of investing capital in building powerstations - the investment goes into PV (or other renewables). The PV is given free of charge, with a tail price for electricity at a FIXED RATE being offered to the homeowner. The return on investment can guranteed as the price of the electric will be known upfront. This may need support from the government to get to a rate higher than 1-2% which would then make the investment attractive. As PV costs come down this support could be cut.

Any surplus can be exported and sold by the ESCO to the grid. If necessary private wires network can be established to reduce grid costs and keep the power local to a street.

Bascially the homeowner is getting a powerstation built on their roof - and the ESCO gets free "land" to stick their powerstation on. The only thing needed is a right of way onto the homeowners roof to make it work in legal terms - and the bigget hurdle - public acceptance. It might make selling your house difficult if the new owner doesn't understand the ESCO contract - at least until it becomes commonplace.

However I think we'll still some Nukes - getting 25,000,000 houses installed with PV will take what - 20-30 years? I dunno though. We buy over 2 million cars a year, so that would imply there's private capital around to do it in just over 10 years!

Eco- towns: “the project is seen as another example of a prime minister who is refusing to listen. So much so that experts are now forecasting the project will be quietly dropped before it becomes planning’s equivalent of the 10p tax rate debacle."
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3114780&origin=BDweeklydigest
Gordon is New Labour's Alec Douglas-Hume - a place-holder fiddling around until the next public test can be postponed no longer. He has promoted himself beyond his area of considerable competence, and will be remembered as a non-entity Prime Minister, rather than as a highly successful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is hopefully the last of the old guard, believing that the old favourites of NHS spending and 1p off tax are what buys power with the British electorate, and that everything else gets 5mins of his 'any other business' attention. Maybe he's unfortunately right at that - or maybe the cost of fuel is finally reaching the part of the popular pocket where profound political attitudes are formed.