What a silly post.

If there are fewer additional jobs from building nuclear power stations then the cost will be lower, won’t it?

Lower electricity generating costs means – other things equal – smaller electricity bills.

Hooray.

BobB says “hooray” – and I agree, not so much on the jobs point – a Brownish obsession: no-one sensible relies on such job projections – but because a substantial comittment to new nuclear build is the most sensible and least damaging way to continue to generate power with the least additional carbon emissions – but, Bob, don’t expect people on this site to be interested in sensible solutions to climate change concerns – supporting nuclear is only marginally less evil than being a denialist or preferring to eat babies medium rare.

Quite. Jobs are a cost. Fewer jobs, less cost.

If you start to think the other way around then you get to Caroline Lucas levels of insane. She’s actually said that renewables are better because they require more labour: and are thus more expensive.

Recent studies appear to suggest that, at current rates of usage, known existing reserves of uranium will dry-up in around 2013. If this is the case, the massive investment required to develop 10 new reactors will go the same way as propping-up the financial system.

“Recent studies appear to suggest that, at current rates of usage, known existing reserves of uranium will dry-up in around 2013.”

Erm, no. It is not true that uranium will run out in three years time. That is balderdash.

And yes, my day job is in the metals business and yes, I’ve dealt with nucelar materials and even had a uranium export licence.

Info update:

- Uranium is a relatively common metal, found in rocks and seawater.
- Economic concentrations of it are not uncommon.
- Its availability to supply world energy needs is great both geologically and because of the technology for its use.
- Quantities of mineral resources are greater than commonly perceived.
- The world’s known uranium resources increased 15% in two years to 2007 due to increased mineral exploration.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

“In France, as of 2002, Électricité de France (EDF) — the country’s main electricity generation and distribution company — manages the country’s 58 nuclear power plants. As of 2008, these plants produce 90% of EDF’s and about 78% France’s electrical power production (of which some is exported), making EDF the world leader in production of nuclear power by percentage.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

The French aren’t much bothered about having 78% of their electricity generated by nuclear power. Instead, they rather appreciate the benefits of low electricity costs.

‘…but, Bob, don’t expect people on this site to be interested in sensible solutions to climate change concerns – supporting nuclear is only marginally less evil than being a denialist or preferring to eat babies medium rare.’

So what’s your ‘sensible’ alternative – continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate – which means continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere while propping up totalitarian theocracies in the Middle East – or switching your lights off?

The fact that you desribe nuclear power as ‘evil’ rather than ‘hazardous’ illustrates how green concerns are increasingly driven quasi-religious dogma rather than science.

@Shatterface I think you just demonstrated a spectacular failure to grasp the sarcasm there.

PS: I’m Left-wing and I’m completely in favour of nuclear power. I’m just not in favour of private companies making a profit out of it and then turning things like waste disposal into externalities which the British taxpayer ends up footing the bill for.

I’m not bothered whether nuclear construction generates X jobs or X minus 50,000 jobs. For cost reasons, the fewer the better, but the UK should not be building anything in order to create jobs. Joseph Williamson’s tunnels under Liverpool are fascinating but serve no practical purpose. The UK needs to build nuclear power plants to generate power. That’s the reason for them; we need a more intelligent and honest political debate about the motivation for public projects.

Justin McKeating, original post: “It also assumes there will be no overlap between the people working on one reactor and the people working on another. Do we expect that there will be no transfer of skills between reactor projects especially in a time when nuclear expertise is scarce?”

Only a tiny number of those working on nuclear power stations are employed for their nuclear expertise. Most of the jobs are in digging holes, pouring concrete, erecting steel structures, running cables, installing instruments — the same tasks that are required at any power station, irrespective of the energy source. The work will require some very skilled machinists for the turbines and the reactor assemblies; again transferrable skills. The only nuclear experts are the people designing and installing the reactors and the direct infrastructure for running them.

There may be a Keynesian/New Deal argument argument for building nuclear power stations (for which there is a demand) now rather than in a couple of years, in order to keep a skilled workforce employed. That has to be considered against the argument that the skilled workforce may be working on other things. Alas, that debate is too sophisticated for our political system.

I think the ‘ jobs created ‘ argument is the most spurious argument advanced in favour of preferring one type of energy over another. Preferring renewable because it is renewable is a better argument than inane arguments about ‘ job creation ‘. Politicians like spewing this drivel because ‘ jobs created ‘ is an easy soundbite that they can use to confuse the public. Where is the offsetting jobs lost in other sectors of the same industry in the ‘ jobs created argument ‘? One often hears the same argument with Tesco creating more employment and this is assumed as a net good but we do not hear of the offsetting jobs lost in other parts of retail.

Even if certain types of energy could be shown to be net creators of jobs in that industry. If energy is more expensive then especially in a consumer spending society there will be job losses in other industries as consumers will have less disposable income. Overall sources of energy should be able to stand on their own merits in terms of cost, reliability of supply and long-term sustainability without recourse to the ‘ they are creating employment argument ‘. That puts me in favour of nuclear but also support exploiting our renewable energy sources that surround us as an island nation. Energy efficiency taking into account pollution externalities should be the overriding metric not ‘ jobs created ‘.

“Energy efficiency taking into account pollution externalities should be the overriding metric not ‘ jobs created ‘.”

Here here. Absolutely. Stick on the carbon tax of $80 per tonne (as both James Hansen and Joe Stiglitz have recently recommended) and we’re done. That covers the externality and the efficiency we can leave to the market.

Uranium is a finite resource and like oil has or is about to peak.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379

I agree that the fewer workers needed to provide us with energy the better, and I also thiink it’s hardly suprising to see a body trying to promote nuclear exaggerating the number of jobs created because they think that will appeal to people, but fair play to Justin, people should be called out on their bullshit, even if the bullshit doesn’t make much sense in the first place. As it happens I’m on the other side of the nuclear question to Justin, but I do think that organisations like nuclear reaction do a great job in digging up information and exposing industry bullshit.

oh and if you’re worried about finite fuel – fret not, Thorium is on the way. Unless it turns out to be another flop, which wouldn’t be the first time in this industry.

Or even:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Recovery_from_seawater

“One method of extracting uranium from seawater is using a uranium-specific nonwoven fabric as an absorbent. The total amount of uranium recovered from three collection boxes containing 350 kg of fabric was >1 kg of yellowcake after 240 days of submersion in the ocean.[37] According to the OECD, uranium may be extracted from seawater using this method for about $300/kg-U.[38] The experiment by Seko et al. was repeated by Tamada et al. in 2006. They found that the cost varied from ¥15,000 to ¥88,000 (Yen) depending on assumptions and “The lowest cost attainable now is ¥25,000 with 4g-U/kg-adsorbent used in the sea area of Okinawa, with 18 repetitionuses [sic].” With the May, 2008 exchange rate, this was about $240/kg-U.[39]”

Nuclear power makes (still makes) perfect sense at $300 per kg U.

Happy days, eh?

Re: Jobs

Rolls Royce will make the reactors should EPR be chosen:

http://www.themanufacturer.com/uk/content/8790/Rolls_Royce_to_build_UK_nuclear_reactors_with_Areva

And as one expert told me “the UK has been building nuclear reactors over the last couple of decades – and been putting them into submarines” ie RR Marine.

What this post does the issue is whether we have enough skilled workers and/or construction companies to build the nuclear reactors or whether we have to import them. Much of the construction boom over the last 15 years has been in housing and therefore we may not have enough skilled poeple to work in constructing nuclear reactors. What needs to be considered is that the UK has not undertaken much heavy civil engineering in the last 30 years.

Of course Salter in 1979 designed his duck to generate electrical power from waves. The NCB and the NUM campaigned against Salter’s Duck. If the UK had spent £50K on Salter’s Duck we would probaly haver arrived at effective wave generation b y now.

As for burying nuclear waste in suitably designed containment cells, the problem is more emotional than technical.

Then there are the jobs building the new high voltage power distribution links, the jobs preparing and handling the fuel and dealing with the waste when it becomes spent fuel, and the jobs dismantling obsolete power stations (oil/coal and of course nuclear). But I’m as sceptical as others about the 100,000 new jobs statement – unless we can see the source data and validate it, that is.

@16 “What needs to be considered is that the UK has not undertaken much heavy civil engineering in the last 30 years.”

Perhaps you should reconsider that statement. The tunnelling for the Channel Tunnel started in 1988 which is just outside your 30 year limit, but since it was completed in Dec 1990 and started operating in 1994, I think we can safely assume that there was at least one large civil engineering project in the last 30 years!

As to whether there is enough expertise, well when I graduated in Physics in 1986 the majority of people on my course shunned nuclear physics. Things have not changed much in the last 30 years (the government has a £6m budget to retrain scientists for the nuclear industry, but when I asked if they were interested in retraining 40-somethings with a PhD in Physics they looked somewhat quizzically at me, I guess that 6 million is only intended for 20-somethings).

“when I asked if they were interested in retraining 40-somethings with a PhD in Physics they looked somewhat quizzically at me”
IIRC the NII at its inception didn’t seem interested in mature people with good Physics degrees. Were we already into dumbing down by then, I wonder?

A large nuclear power plant produces about 25 to 30 tonnes of spent fuel per year. This is the famous Three Cubic Metres of waste. About 96 percent of that is uranium which can be reused in some types of reactor. Roughly 3 percent is fission products and about 1 percent plutonium which can also be used in reactors. About 0.5 percent is transuranic waste.

If uranium increased to $300 per kilogram, a PWR would only need about $9 million worth every year. A PWR produces about 1100 MWe for about 80 percent of the time. Say 300 days to make the maths simple. That’s about 7200 hours per year. I’ll round up again and say that’s about 8 TerraWatt hours per year.

From which I would conclude fuel costs are not irrelevant, but they are small.

Those figures suggest about 1MWHr per $ of raw uranium the first time that it goes through the reactor. Or less than a tenth of a penny per kWHr. (Tell me if my arithmetic is wrong)

21. dreamingspire – “Those figures suggest about 1MWHr per $ of raw uranium the first time that it goes through the reactor. Or less than a tenth of a penny per kWHr. (Tell me if my arithmetic is wrong)”

Yeah. It seems so small I figured something was wrong with my calculation. But the big cost in nuclear power plants is the plant, not the fuel. Fuel is largely an irrelevance. It doesn’t much matter what you need to do to it or with it after, it just does not have a big impact on the cost of the power. On the other hand, it is very sensitive to interest rates.

“What this post does the issue is whether we have enough skilled workers and/or construction companies to build the nuclear reactors or whether we have to import them. Much of the construction boom over the last 15 years has been in housing and therefore we may not have enough skilled poeple to work in constructing nuclear reactors”

We’ve got the skilled people to do the construction. What we probably don’t have is the nuclear engineering base (huge amounts of nuclear construction are pouring cement and then the same electrical stuff as any other large power station). A year ago I delivered some metal to a nuclear scientist at a university in the UK (strangely, Edwina Currie’s son in law but that’s by the by) and part of the general conversation was about a potential expansion of nuclear.

He was adamant that w simply don’t have the critical number of people to build and operate a new fleet of nuclear plants. And operation was his largest concern. We will have to import that workforce as the old one is all on the cusp of retirement.

He was also scathing about how entry requirements for the post grad training had fallen. Used to be top notch physics grads from top notch universities got in. Now it’s 2.2s from second and even third generation universities.

I’m very much a believer in nuclear being part of the solution but those little details don’t please.

I can understand the problem with recruiting quality for postgrad training – they have not for some time seen that there were serious career prospects. Why did so many science graduates go into the City, insurance, etc? That is where the money is (perhaps to some extent was), and the age of the meritocracy was stillborn as early as 1998. But operation of new nuclear will not happen for some years, so time to train people up – except that private sector will not do that soon enough. Didn’t I hear that public sector has been taking some initiative here?