By Barney Smith Amidst all the excitement of last week’s Budget, there was, perhaps, one encouraging sign for the longer term. There does seem to be a growing realisation that the nuclear future is not all large plants, which are typically both over budget and way behind timetable: there may, indeed, ought to, be room [...]
By Julian Singer Nuclear power plants currently generate about 15 per cent of the UK’s electricity supply. The government’s Energy White Paper, published in December 2020, predicted that nuclear would supply between 16 and 23 per cent of the total by 2050. In the same year the Climate Change Committee, an independent public body, predicted [...]
By Julian Singer On 1 October the government issued a Green Paper while launching a consultation on the regulatory framework for fusion energy. As a method of producing energy, it is well known that nuclear fusion is much safer than nuclear fission, but it does still present some hazards. It is also being developed by [...]
By Julian Singer As discussed in a recent Greenbarrel article on the Energy White paper, the government has reversed its earlier disinterest in small nuclear reactors and is now talking about putting the UK at the cutting edge in a field that it once led. The White Paper divides these reactors into two groups: Small Modular [...]
Work continues on Hinkley C, the latest reactor to be built on the site. Image: EDF This article, first published recently by our partner website www.climatenewsnetwork.net, is a second piece run by us consecutively on the prospects of nuclear power meeting 100 per cent of the UK's energy needs by 2050 rather than renewables by Paul Brown [...]
By Oliver Nelson-Dummett Nuclear fission is a controversial player in the push for low-carbon energy. It has historically been the largest contributor of such generation and is still a key factor: in 2018, nuclear power generated 28 per cent of global low-carbon energy, the second-highest source behind hydropower. A nuclear reactor house in the spherical containement sphere, [...]
Nuclear power stations bring to mind vast installations costing tens of billions of pounds to build. But what if they were small enough to be manufactured and financed like other systems? In a talk at the Oxford Martin School on November 14 Professor Steve Cowley outlined his vision for electrical power generation based in part [...]
There are now serious new doubts that Britain’s putative first new nuclear power plant in a generation, Hinkley Point C in Somerset in south west England, will ever be built. These doubts have arisen as the British government has delayed making a final decision on the most expensive infrastructure project ever contemplated in the UK, [...]
Germany’s nuclear problems likely to linger long after plant closures Germany has had a controversial and tortured relationship with nuclear power for a long time- since before the Second World War in fact. Michael Muller was a member of the Bundestag for 26 years for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and was from 2005 to [...]