Corbyn's days (very) numbered?

[Tolls]

It's not another issue.
It's the key issue.
If you're drawing power off the grid then you are (currently) drawing from fossil fuels. If we are to move electricity generation away from fossil fuels then something has to provide the baseload. Currently the only thing we have that would work in this country is nuclear power, which Jeremy is opposed to (as far as I can make out).

 

[The Don]

Cars have to be charged from baseline supply? Where is this idea coming from? And there are no storage proposals intended to address this issue?

We are talking about the replacement of fossil fuels by batteries in cars. That is feasible. This baseline stuff has been introduced as another issue, and is being repeated ad nauseam in response to every observation, so that anyone concerned about fossil fuels can be depicted as a student loony.

You're talking about the replacement of fossil fuels by batteries in cars, I am talking about the wider implications of Corbyn's preferred policies.

The "banning the sales of petrol cars" policy is however an example of the challenges that Labour under Corbyn faces:

• Energy proposals that fly in the face of current technical reality
• "Magical thinking" that has cars being recharged from renewable sources - with other demand being met from other sources - and ignoring that demand will rise as a result
• Proposing a policy which will is currently very popular among Labour activists but very unpopular with the electorate at large

 

[wobs]

Nuclear seems to still be a ludicrously expensive way of providing base load. There's still some doubt whether the new Hinkley Point power station will ever be completed. Even if it is, it will be many years late and we'll most likely need to build temporary gas-fired power stations to fill the gap as existing aged nuclear stations go off line but the new one isn't ready to operate. There's also the ever-present risk of accidents. Nuclear professionals keep telling us that such accidents are one-in-a-million-years rare, but so far we've seemed to suffer a fairly bad one every twenty years or so. The disasters haven't resulted in that many deaths so far - but the costs are staggering. Look up the latest estimates of cost and timescale for cleaning up after the Fukushima disaster.

Please point to any known risk that the UK faces with regard to its new nuclear plant(s). One that is comparable to the risks regarding Fukushima.

The long term handling of the nuclear waste is one of those 'not invented yet' technologies. If we don't come up with a cheap and safe way of disposing of the waste then the true cost of nuclear stations is staggering and unaffordable in the long run. Imagine that we were still today having to devote sites, personnel, equipment, and power to handling the waste left over from building the pyramids or Stonehenge - those are the timescales over which high level nuclear waste have to be stored and monitored. A power station with an operating life of thirty years, followed by a decommissioning phase of thousands of years is clearly an economic joke.

This is so wrong I hardly know where to begin.

You do know that they are actually building deep geological disposal in Scandinavia for their nuclear fuel don't you? And that theirs is a once through process, meaning that it will be more hazardous. I also have reports from other parts of the world such as Switzerland who have pilot sites, which have been studied for years. This is hardly an unknown.

If we continue to re-process our nuclear fuel here in the UK, it offers us some interesting options in the long term, which would provide further energy extraction from the material, and make disposal more palatable:

So the options for used fuel are:
•Direct disposal (after storage) to a geological repository. The material has very long-lived radioactivity, and will take about 300,000 years to reach the same level as the original ore.
•Aqueous reprocessing to remove only uranium and plutonium. The material then only takes about 9000 years to reach the same level of radioactivity as the original ore.
•Advanced electrometallurgical reprocessing which removes uranium, plutonium and minor actinides together for recycling in a fast reactor. The wastes then only need 300 years to reach the same level of radioactivity as the original ore. This is not yet operational on any commercial scale.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...lear-wastes/radioactive-waste-management.aspx

This is idea that we will have to use energy to manage the waste for the whole of this time is bizarre

 

[wobs]

If there were no practical zero emission cars on the road I'd completely agree but based on the progress made in the last few years it seems a sensible deadline, electric cars and vans are on the roads and have reasonable range and price points, it seems reasonable to assume that development will continue, obviously the rate of development may increase or decrease but the imposition of a deadline would be a spur to developers. Surely it's better to plan ahead for this change and have a plan for putting infrastructure in place?

If Labour won in 2020 and immediately passed this legislation on day one it would still be 2030 before the deadline for new sales, that's ten years in which legislation could if necessary be amended if it became obvious that the target could not be realistically met. It is also not as if on day one every petrol or deisel engined car disappears, it's new car sales only that are effected, cars and vans bought the day before will still have their working lives in front of them.

Also I think it's worth clarifying that the proposal is that all new vehicles would have to be zero or low emission, not specifically electric cars, I don't know what the low emission threshold would be, but it may include clean producing petrol engines.

I've just been out on my bike, and noted how impractical a banning of petrol/diesel engine cars would be. Without at least hybrid vehicles, it would be unworkable, owing to the restrictions on parking. I'm lucky, in that we have a garage where we actually put the car in over night. We only have one car (unlike most others I know). Most households I know have two cars and few can use a garage for their car.

There are many houses near me where they just don't have that option, and must keep the car on the street well away from the house (especially if Hull City are playing and they return home during a match).

But as regards the battery issue - I'll say again, just because there have been advances, does not mean that further advances are guaranteed in the future. Longest range I've seen on line suggests 250miles. But at what speed? There are many who drive that sort of distance regularly, such as reps. I meet many such people at work, who say they have come from some other part of the country and are visiting a couple of sites in our area, but are about to drive back home down South. They do some serious mileage.

Now I'm sure prices can drop with popularity, but they must still be workable.

 

[ceptimus]

Please point to any known risk that the UK faces with regard to its new nuclear plant(s). One that is comparable to the risks regarding Fukushima.

You're joking right? I could post ten such scenarios and you'd just dismiss them all as vanishingly unlikely or impossible.

And if I'd been prescient enough to predict the Windscale or Chernobyl or Fukishima disasters ahead of time you'd have dismissed those just the same.

 

[wobs]

To be fair to Corbyn (lets try to keep OT), there is another nuclear plant under consultation, which is good news:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-38289939

 

[wobs]

You're joking right? I could post ten such scenarios and you'd just dismiss them all as vanishingly unlikely or impossible.

And if I'd been prescient enough to predict the Windscale or Chernobyl or Fukishima disasters ahead of time you'd have dismissed those just the same.

Windscale (now sellerfield) no longer has a reactor.
Chernobyl was a known problem for years before it happened.
Fukushima was an outdated plant. Outdated, because such flaws had been identified and designed out in later models before the incident.

Modern plants are researched in great detail. Risks are assessed, with tools such as flowcharts and simulations to look at foreseeable scenarios. Process safety has come a long way in the time since these plants were built.

Such opposition is a largely emotional response. While there are risks, they are manageable, and are in no way comparable to living in a major earthquake/tsunami zone.

 

[Craig B]

You're talking about the replacement of fossil fuels by batteries in cars, I am talking about the wider implications of Corbyn's preferred policies.

The "banning the sales of petrol cars" policy is however an example of the challenges that Labour under Corbyn faces:

• Energy proposals that fly in the face of current technical reality
• "Magical thinking" that has cars being recharged from renewable sources - with other demand being met from other sources - and ignoring that demand will rise as a result
• Proposing a policy which will is currently very popular among Labour activists but very unpopular with the electorate at large

I think that is quite false. The replacement of petrol cars by battery cars is perfectly possible. Your attitude is a common reactionary one. A perfectly feasible suggestion is declared to be "typical" of an impossibilist utopian one, and the resulting fantastic idea is denounced as an example of whatever it is one opposes. If I were to say, lets eliminate deaths from hypothermia among older people in the next ten years, or something of that kind, you could equally say, "this is typical of fantasists who want people to live for ever". It's like finding the Elixir of Life.

Replacement of petrol cars is feasible, while some other desirable things may be beyond current practicalities. But let us strive to do what we can, when we can.

 

[ceptimus]

Windscale (now sellerfield) no longer has a reactor.
Chernobyl was a known problem for years before it happened.
Fukushima was an outdated plant. Outdated, because such flaws had been identified and designed out in later models before the incident.

Modern plants are researched in great detail. Risks are assessed, with tools such as flowcharts and simulations to look at foreseeable scenarios. Process safety has come a long way in the time since these plants were built.

Such opposition is a largely emotional response. While there are risks, they are manageable, and are in no way comparable to living in a major earthquake/tsunami zone.

Drivel.

Before any of those accidents occurred, the nuclear professionals were saying that accidents would be extremely rare - and they were wrong.

I've no doubt that safety standards are higher now, but the current estimates of safety are surely over optimistic. If the safety estimates were correct we should expect that there's only a vanishingly small chance of another similar accident occurring in the next thousand years - and no one really believes that.

One of the main problems is human nature. If plants run safely for many years it leads to complacency. There will always be political and commercial pressure to reduce costs - and then corrupt or incompetent plant operators will cut corners to make those savings: "No one will know that this safety system hasn't been operational for the last few weeks - and anyway, there are another five independent safety systems that mean we don't really rely on this one."

We're seeing this sort of thing at the moment with the ever-delayed closing of our existing advanced gas cooled reactors. They're suffering from cracks in their graphite bricks that they were never designed to operate with - some of the bricks that may be cracked are in positions where they can't even be monitored. If the cracks are bad enough they can prevent the reactor from being shut down in an emergency situation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-37789654

 

[The Don]

You're talking about the replacement of fossil fuels by batteries in cars, I am talking about the wider implications of Corbyn's preferred policies.

The "banning the sales of petrol cars" policy is however an example of the challenges that Labour under Corbyn faces:

• Energy proposals that fly in the face of current technical reality
• "Magical thinking" that has cars being recharged from renewable sources - with other demand being met from other sources - and ignoring that demand will rise as a result
• Proposing a policy which will is currently very popular among Labour activists but very unpopular with the electorate at large

I think that is quite false. The replacement of petrol cars by battery cars is perfectly possible. Your attitude is a common reactionary one. A perfectly feasible suggestion is declared to be "typical" of an impossibilist utopian one, and the resulting fantastic idea is denounced as an example of whatever it is one opposes. If I were to say, lets eliminate deaths from hypothermia among older people in the next ten years, or something of that kind, you could equally say, "this is typical of fantasists who want people to live for ever". It's like finding the Elixir of Life.

Replacement of petrol cars is feasible, while some other desirable things may be beyond current practicalities. But let us strive to do what we can, when we can.

Another argument constructed entirely of straw.......

Where have I argued that the replacement of petrol cars by battery cars is impossible ?

What I have argued is that the proposed policy of the enforced cessation of "the sale of petrol cars" is symptomatic of the disjointed thinking at the heart of the Corbyn Labour Party:

• It ignores the fact that if some future Corbyn government is also successful in getting rid of nuclear power then there will be increasing reliance on fossil fuels for the baseline generation that will be required to power those cars
• The be successful in its aims, to eliminate carbon emissions for the economy as a whole, without using nuclear power, requires as yet unknown technologies
• While popular among Corbynistas, it's not a policy which will attract support from the electorate in general
• In fact, worse than that, it may service to harden opinions against electric vehicles where a "softly, softly" argument like that adopted in Norway where people have been encouraged to use electric vehicles through benefits and subsidy may yield better results

 

[wobs]

Drivel.

Before any of those accidents occurred, the nuclear professionals were saying that accidents would be extremely rare - and they were wrong.

I've no doubt that safety standards are higher now, but the current estimates of safety are surely over optimistic. If the safety estimates were correct we should expect that there's only a vanishingly small chance of another similar accident occurring in the next thousand years - and no one really believes that.

One of the main problems is human nature. If plants run safely for many years it leads to complacency. There will always be political and commercial pressure to reduce costs - and then corrupt or incompetent plant operators will cut corners to make those savings: "No one will know that this safety system hasn't been operational for the last few weeks - and anyway, there are another five independent safety systems that mean we don't really rely on this one."

We're seeing this sort of thing at the moment with the ever-delayed closing of our existing advanced gas cooled reactors. They're suffering from cracks in their graphite bricks that they were never designed to operate with - some of the bricks that may be cracked are in positions where they can't even be monitored. If the cracks are bad enough they can prevent the reactor from being shut down in an emergency situation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-37789654

Speaking as someone who has worked on both sides of a regulatory system (albeit in a different industry), I can tell you that today's regulatory systems are far more strict than they were in the 70s, /80s. Management systems, questioning of operators, managers, and directors are all reviewed, not just plant conditions, and so all of the things you bring up should get picked up.

In fact, the link you provided shows just this.

There is a reason that Hinkley C is so expensive: The UK heavily regulates these things.

The opposition to nuclear power is based upon fear. And nothing else.

 

[wobs]

What I have argued is that the proposed policy of the enforced cessation of "the sale of petrol cars" is symptomatic of the disjointed thinking at the heart of the Corbyn Labour Party:

To be fair to Corbyn, a lack of joined up thinking is symptomatic of much of UK Government policy in general.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Firstly, the policy being proposed is "only zero- or low-carbon vehicles being sold after a set cut-off date" not "ban petrol cars", I'm sure that the envisioned result is a vast majority of people switching to electric cars but 'low carbon' could also potentially include hybrid or alternative fuels for those who need them.

Secondly, surely the point of a policy like this is to get manufactures and suppliers looking at the practical problems and trying to address them, the current status quo is heavily entrenched and will need impetus to change an imposed deadline could help provide this but at the end of the day it is legislation and not divine command, if hitting the target proved impossible the deadline or criteria could be adjusted accordingly.

However, to give one example, where people don't have off street parking. This is pretty much always a problem in urban areas which is also where I'd expect to see public charging points springing up as electric cars become common.

 

[Garrison]

As to how to balance out the ebb and flow of renewable sources well there is an intriguing solution being developed:

Cryogenic storage offers hope for renewable energy

 

[Archie Gemmill Goal]

Another argument constructed entirely of straw.......

Where have I argued that the replacement of petrol cars by battery cars is impossible ?

What I have argued is that the proposed policy of the enforced cessation of "the sale of petrol cars" is symptomatic of the disjointed thinking at the heart of the Corbyn Labour Party:

• It ignores the fact that if some future Corbyn government is also successful in getting rid of nuclear power then there will be increasing reliance on fossil fuels for the baseline generation that will be required to power those cars
• The be successful in its aims, to eliminate carbon emissions for the economy as a whole, without using nuclear power, requires as yet unknown technologies
• While popular among Corbynistas, it's not a policy which will attract support from the electorate in general
• In fact, worse than that, it may service to harden opinions against electric vehicles where a "softly, softly" argument like that adopted in Norway where people have been encouraged to use electric vehicles through benefits and subsidy may yield better results

My understanding is that even if electric cars were powered by coal generation they'd still be more green than each individual ic engine. I take your point that the policy isnt joined up but I applaud it on the grounds that at least its not about immigration for a change.

 

[wobs]

Firstly, the policy being proposed is "only zero- or low-carbon vehicles being sold after a set cut-off date" not "ban petrol cars", I'm sure that the envisioned result is a vast majority of people switching to electric cars but 'low carbon' could also potentially include hybrid or alternative fuels for those who need them.

Secondly, surely the point of a policy like this is to get manufactures and suppliers looking at the practical problems and trying to address them, the current status quo is heavily entrenched and will need impetus to change an imposed deadline could help provide this but at the end of the day it is legislation and not divine command, if hitting the target proved impossible the deadline or criteria could be adjusted accordingly.

However, to give one example, where people don't have off street parking. This is pretty much always a problem in urban areas which is also where I'd expect to see public charging points springing up as electric cars become common.

I agree with much of this. Good post.

I agree that such policies can be good for the development of green technologies, but the move for ICs to electric is tricky, as electric really does have to hit the ground running.

However, the only issue I have is the idea that those without off street parking could have public charging. Yes there will be public charging, but it wouldn't enable those people that don't have off street parking to rely on them. Many areas currently struggle to accommodate parking as it is. Can you imagine someone coming home from work hoping to leave their car for re-charge only to find there is no spare ones, and/or they have been vandalised, or someone has parked their IC car next to a charging point. This is the sort of consideration (or lack of) I regularly see, and so the best those without off street parking could hope for is to own a regular hybrid.

The density of some housing areas makes this a real issue.

That said, it could be good for the value of my house, as we have a garage big enough for our car, and a power point. So it could make our house more saleable in the long run.

 

[wobs]

My understanding is that even if electric cars were powered by coal generation they'd still be more green than each individual ic engine. I take your point that the policy isnt joined up but I applaud it on the grounds that at least its not about immigration for a change.

According to here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-cars-are-not-necessarily-clean/
Areas predominantly powered by coal power stations would result in an increase in carbon emissions if we went to electric cars.

It would improve the air quality locally of course, but unless we get off coal there is no point in going for plug in cars.

The UK's announcement to phase out coal is a good start in this issue of course. Let's just hope it plays out, and things like this get built:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-38289939

 

[The Don]

According to here:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-cars-are-not-necessarily-clean/
Areas predominantly powered by coal power stations would result in an increase in carbon emissions if we went to electric cars.

It would improve the air quality locally of course, but unless we get off coal there is no point in going for plug in cars.

The UK's announcement to phase out coal is a good start in this issue of course. Let's just hope it plays out, and things like this get built:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-38289939

If Corbyn has his way, we'd be rid of nuclear power stations as well as coal-fired power stations.

Absent some new technology, renewables cannot provide for the UK's baseload requirements. Storage may provide some of the answer but we'd probably need the capacity for several days' requirements.

Gas turbines are expensive things to have on standby on the off chance that they may have to be used.

 

[The Atheist]

Secondly, surely the point of a policy like this is to get manufactures and suppliers looking at the practical problems and trying to address them, the current status quo is heavily entrenched and will need impetus to change an imposed deadline could help provide this but at the end of the day it is legislation and not divine command, if hitting the target proved impossible the deadline or criteria could be adjusted accordingly.

Nailed.

Doing something is infinitely better than where most governments are right now: doing nothing.

It constantly amazes me that people will argue against something crucial to the survival of the species.

 

[The Don]

Nailed.

Doing something is infinitely better than where most governments are right now: doing nothing.

Only if the *something* will actually help the situation and not make it worse and only if there is some chance of actually doing it.

It constantly amazes me that people will argue against something crucial to the survival of the species.

I'm not sure that anyone is arguing against electric cars but there are two very pertinent points here:

• As it currently stands, and in view of the fact that Corbyn also wants rid of nuclear power, this measure would tend to increase reliance on electricity generated from fossil fuels, putting the "survival of the species" into greater jeapordy
• The policy itself appeals only to those who already support Corbyn. One of the main jobs of the leader of the Opposition is to provide an effective opposition to the government of the day. This proposed policy merely reinforces the media stereotype that he is a hippy-drippy, weirdy-beardy, Islingtonite completely out of touch with the British public at large. If he continues to propose policies like this, the Labour Party will be out of government for a generation