Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...
Well, that covers the cost of building them, I guess. (Over a period of rather more than 30 years, or, at least 10 years too many)
The physical building time is 10 years. Hinkley point spent ~20 years worth of political arguments about if it should be built, how it should be financed and who should be involved.
Now account for the costs of handling and storing (short-, long- and very long- term) nuclear waste, and the costs of decommissioning the plants at end of life.
Oh comeon, even the Guardian says that's a cost to the operators.
edit: I should clarify, if it turns out we actually need nuclear power to supplement or act as base load for renewables in the long run, then we should use it. It's still a better choice than fossil fuels. But based on its track record so far, I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's ever going to turn out to be particularly cheap, in full life cycle costs. If newer reactor technologies can finally help with that...great. But let's wait and see.
You can use a website called Gridwatch to see what our current electricity requirements are, and how they are provided. It's live to the current minute. Previous data is stored in the graphs below in week, month and year.
The first and most obvious point is that the UK has 24+ GW worth of wind turbines. We have never generated 15GW worth of energy from wind, ever. It's noteworthy when we produce half of the nominal capacity of the installed wind capacity; eg 12GW. As can be seen by looking at the "yearly" graph wind turbines produce more than 10GW perhaps a third of the the year at best. No possible storage technology could deal with that sort of shortfall, even if you quadrupled the installed capacity.
When they are not working, which as you can see is effectively all of the time the capacity is generated by CCGT; combined cycle gas turbines. A strategy of generating power via wind turbines is nothing less than a deliberate policy choice to use gas turbines as the primary power generation and then using wind turbines as occasional partial load reduction on the gas turbines with the wind turbines used as greenwashing.
Quite why people thought wind turbines was a good idea eludes me; refitting every waterwheel in the country for electricity generation would have at least delivered usable power consistently and constantly as long as the water continues flowing through rivers; a more common thing in the UK than it blowing a gale.
As a policy choice though the existing strategy precludes mass adoption of electric vehicles because we don't and won't have the power generation available, and it prevents using existing technology to decarbonise heating by moving from gas central heating to electric heating which could easily be done with technology which was boring in the 1980s such as electric storage heaters backed up with fan heaters on a thermostat. This would work if electricity was cheaper than gas; which it won't ever be when the electricity is generated by gas and then has transmission costs added on top.
Denying this in face of the obvious facts is willful ignorance. There is no storage technology either invented or looking promising in the lab that can work on the scale required even if you increased the number of wind turbines by a factor of ten.
Therefore it is obvious that the only carbon free electricity generation we have on a workable scale at an acceptable price is nuclear; ergo if you want carbon free cheapish electricity to decarbonise EV's or heating without impoverishing 80% of the population (all of whom have a vote; and who will not vote for anybody impoverishing them) then there is no current workable alternative to building nuclear plants quickly and on a large scale.
If you are enraged by this logical statement of offensive yet irrefutable facts then consider a downvote in lieu of doing something constructive to help the situation, such as admitting the existing situation is absurd and supporting changing it. ;)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
