Why British Nuclear Energy Failed

[@myriri3687]

"A story of missed opportunities" Yes thats basically post WW2 Britain in a general context.

[@kerriwilson7732]

Really? I thought that was us 🇨🇦

[@MadAtreides1]

​​@@kerriwilson7732forgoe the monarchy, be truly indipendent and you may still be fine

[@hygri]

@@kerriwilson7732 Both of us I guess. Same head of state innit

[@rogerk6180]

Could have been a lot worse though. Empires rarely fare as well as the uk has once they desolve.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

I mean the fact that the entire planet runs on British CPUs, most of the world DSLs run on British DSPs and that's just a tiny fraction of our continuing achievements means nothing I guess. We've just invented flexible electronics. Including CPUs and batteries. This will, again, be Britain causing another global technological revolution. To my knowledge graphene was our last. We have the only viable design for liquid fuelled reactors too. From our _failed_ nuclear industry apparently.

[@Titot182]

This video totally resonates with me, since I've been in the industry for a good 15 years and is imaprtial and accurate. Currently doing office moves. I've still managed to locate my British Energy branded overalls from when I started, and old folders which still have CEGB and Nuclear Electric. The biggest problem with the AGRs is that no matter which way you put it, you don't have a common fleet wide approach across similar stations within the fleet due to how the contracts were awarded by CEGB when they were designed and constructed. Different consortia were involved for each AGR design. Furthermore, implementation of operational experience explains why you don't have cookie cutter systems like French PWRs for example. Remember that there was a good 15 year span between the construction and operation of Hinkley/Hunterston and Torness/Heysham 2... And the less you talk about Dungeness B, the better. It's like our version of Bruno... We don't talk about Bruno. Whilst your primary circuit might by and large follow the same principle of concrete pre-stressed pressure vessels, annular boilers (unless you account for the wonderful replaceable ballistic missiles that are pod boilers) and gas circulators, there are a lot of quirks in your conventional side and control and instrumentation system and emergency backups. Hinkley B and Hunterston had the same basic reactor design, but had different turbines and different backup generators, with HPB running RR Olympus and HNB with diesels. The differences don't stop there. It was rather mind blowing when doing all of my AGR systems courses back in the day, how political decisions and commercial factors influenced the course of reactor designs. Let's also not forget that our nuclear regulatory climate is rightly conservative and follows international best practice. It does make me wonder that if you tried to licence an AGR now, will it actually be economically viable? Nevertheless, as a metallurgist, we've learnt a lot about structural integrity due to the quirkiness of our different reactors and you can see the landscape very much shaping its way into more efficient, easier to produce PWRs, or even SMRs. But that being said, if any prospective licensee/vendor can push their design through a Generic Design Assessment, good luck to them!

[@RobBCactive]

I was a little surprised in the video at the emphasis on thermal efficiency as I was told in the late 80's, compared to coal the fission fuel costs were a much smaller part of capital and running costs. Also the French who built a large number of plants, not having significant coal & gas available, used a lower interest rate, which made the numbers wirk better on paper. Before then I remember an AEA publicity campaign about fast breeder reactors which were going to produce extra fuel as a byproduct of uranium fission. I wonder whether that was a scheme to make bomb materials 😁

[@samlee1291]

Very cool! I was hoping to find someone with real insight after watching this.

[@Titot182]

@@RobBCactive Pretty much a hidden agenda with the magnoxes. Certainly, the thermal efficencies of the AGRs were touted to be close to 40% and with operating temperatures just a tickle under the fossil fuelled stations, things like materials behaviour were transferrable... until you realised you had creep resistant steels that ended up lasting twice as their intended design life. But yeah, if you speak to the old magnox reactor physicists and fuel route guys about the stuff coming out of their fuel stringers, it probably tells a different story.

[@RobBCactive]

@@Titot182 subsequently I found much more info and the fuel reprocessing was concentrating plutonium from spent fuel rods, which could enrich fission fuels and be consumed. The anticipated uranium scarcity failed to materialise and the fortified fuel using reprocessed wastes was more expensive. The Japanese attempt to make a fast breeder reactor really work failed and the programme was cancelled. My interaction with the process suggested yet more bespoke politically palatable options and I really wondered why there was so much custom system design rather than using the French pattern who built and operated a large slew of reactors.

[@Withnail1969]

Concrete pressure vessels? Nuclear reactor pressure vessels are made of specialist steel not concrete as far as I know. Perhaps you mean the containment dome.

[@damonkowarsky]

There’s great footage of a scientist from the early days of Calder Hall talking about how often it sucked energy out of the grid rather than contributing to it. Which he noted wasn’t such a problem, as the plant was principally designed to produce plutonium with electricity as a secondary outcome. I can’t help but think the civilian nuclear power industry was a deft piece of accounting steganography designed to spread the enormous cost of producing nuclear weapons among the entire population.

[@gustavfenk4021]

I have heard it said that over its lifetime Calder Hall used more electricity than it actually produced.

[@damonkowarsky]

@@gustavfenk4021 also worth watching kzbin.info/www/bejne/nXzKYp9jrs54fZo

[@stefanodadamo6809]

It is. Think Italy, where we had some nuclear power plants but were forbidden from having nukes! They're still bombarding us with pro-nuclear propaganda despite not one, but TWO referenda barred it, in 1987 and 2011.

[@thereap5348]

@@stefanodadamo6809 Italy that is critically dependent on energy from their neighbors, especially France(nuclear)? It should/could be used as an alternative tool in a portfolio of energy generating resources. Referenda heavily politicized, and one done after Chernobyl(people were surely in the right mood to make rational decisions).

[@stefanodadamo6809]

@@thereap5348 Italy is less dependent on French energy exports than generally believed. Last summer's drought brought most French reactors to an operational standstill due to cooling issues and we barely noticed.

[@epicmits]

As a student of nuclear engineering, and a viewer who started watching your channel knowing nothing about the semiconductor field, I've loved seeing you discuss more and more interesting nuclear topics and bringing your fantastic informative and high quality style to my industry. Awesome work.

[@rickrejeleene8298]

I am interested

[@bobwatson957]

Great vlog. I spent a bit of time at Sellafield, putting in control software. This was in the late 90's when the industry was just privatised, but the place was really dingy and run down and getting new investment in. All of the offices were made of metal, it was really weird, metal walls. I don't know if that was to protect you against radiation but as stuff was old it continual hassle. You needed a security clearence to get into it, but I managed to get a tour from one of the older guys. I was a great place to wander about if you liked industrial heritage. Some bits were off-limit, too dangerous. It was absolutly truly massive, with tons of strange machinery everywhere. Its was great. Apparently there is 200 tons of plutonium stored there. Enjoyed the vlog.

[@jackfanning7952]

Britain estimates that it will cost $3 biilion a year just to maintain the Sellafield facility and over 100 years to clean it up. No one knows how much that will cost. I don't believe for a second that it will ever be cleaned up entirely, maybe not even partially. Nuclear rule #1 is privatize the profits and subsidize the risk. Nuclear rule # 2 is take the money and run.

[@wich1]

Perhaps look up what the word vlog actually means

[@jackfanning7952]

@@wich1 Perhaps look up what the phrase, "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel" actually means.

[@bobwatson957]

@@wich1 Look it up yourself.

[@wich1]

@@bobwatson957 I don’t need to, you apparently do and cannot take a polite bit of criticism, goodbye.

[@pauleohl]

Really surprised to learn that Thatcher was concerned about CO2 in 1980.

[@alamagordoingordo3047]

Thatcher was a chemist, so she was very advanced on enviromental topics, like ozone depletion on which she had lead the ban initiative on CFC.

[@TheDavidlloydjones]

Paul, I had a lunch with the Japan head of Mobil Oil in 1977 at which we discussed what the Rockefeller Oil companies as a group had been doing to head off -- really, genuinely to solve the problem, long term -- in California in 1967, ten years earlier. The actual laws needed, primarily cap and trade to ensure at least faintly efficient use of capital, should have been started in the 1960s. Here we are sixty years later. I'm 79 years old. And we still haven't gotten to step one. Oil company interests? Nope. The oil industry of 1967, or 1977, or 1980, has vanished. It's been totally replaced, as has all of all other industries. It's just that we decided in the past sixty years to replace the bad with the bad, even though the oil companies -- or at least the main ones -- knew "This is no good and we've got to replace it with something different" way back then.

[@chinguunerdenebadrakh7022]

@@alamagordoingordo3047 Angela Merkel, also a chemist, leading the charge on Russian gas deals, closing nuclear power plants.

[@D4NK1]

@@TheDavidlloydjones are you saying that the oil industry was pro cap and trade?

[@johnmasterman]

Global warming not CO2

[@PositionLight]

At about 6:00 you said the US Manhattan project used light water reactors. They actually used graphite moderated, water cooled reactors. The Magnox reactors were constructed with a low power density to be able to be air cooled even if all the CO2 leaked out.

[@thomasvandevelde8157]

Yes, I believe the X-reactor was even aircooled? But not sure, the B-reactor at Hanford was definitely graphite moderated and water-cooled. Problem was that "light" water absorbs neutrons a lot more, so the cooling canals of the B-reactor were just adequate for the job. At least that's what I read, didn't operate the thing myself though! :-)

[@robthegardener9631]

I think weapons grade plutonium can only be produced in graphite moderated reactors as otherwise it's too contaminated with non-fissile isotopes.

[@ericchawkes]

@@robthegardener9631 There is no such thing as a reactor that produces weapons-grade plutonium. All reactors produce some plutonium as a byproduct, along with non-fissile isotopes. Reactors that are designed for the purpose of producing plutonium try to minimize the non-fissile isotopes, but plutonium is still only a small fraction of the output. The use of graphite isn't really relevant to the isotopic content of the product.

[@tinto278]

This is one of those fake history channels setup by china. Its part of china's soft power. China is in a mess at the moment so expect to see more KZbin videos on how the west is ending, UK caused global warming, UK caused the dinosaurs to go extinct, etc. China are real mad about AUKUS.🤣🤣🤣🤣 Silly Chicoms.

[@chilebike6556]

What a delight to see informed and knowledgable comments - people with experience, not opinions. This and the presentation has to be the best of the internet.

[@Jim54_]

Humanity’s rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity

[@danielch6662]

The Nuclear Energy Agency is a group of 34 countries (Europe, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Argentina) that promotes the _safe and economical use of nuclear power._ The NEA has identified 5.5 million metric tons of uranium that can be mined, plus an estimated 10.5 million metric tons that has yet to be located but probably exists and can be mined economically. That is enough to supply the world for 230 years _at the current rate of use._ Right now, 10% of the world's electricity comes from nuclear. If we convert to near 100%, that 230 years goes down to 23 years. If we had increased the 10% to 50% in 1990, the 230 years becomes 46 years. We would run out in 15 years. Nuclear doesn't really solve anything.

[@neilhilton35]

That's one reason why fast reactors were being developed. To use reprocessed fuel and create more fuel in the process. However that technology and research was scaled back and subsequently decommissioned in the UK.

[@shaynewheeler9249]

Raspberry pie 🥧🥧🥧🥧🍡🥧🥧

[@ryananderson5202]

Too many leaks and issues to have the masses get on board. Until they have a better plan of what to do with the waste that is still also an issue. But, we are close to having people trust it again... Would you trust diversity hires around a power plant? BOOM! Woke will set everything back by generations.

[@1marcelfilms]

Listening to protestors is a massive mistake

[@NuclearSavety]

Hmmm then newer history is very missleading. 26:10 British Energy was not renamed into EDF, EDF is the french national power supplyer, buying up British Energy. 27:00 The EPR reactor is not of Chinese origin, it is the French-German common reactor design. It was built in Taishan, but also in Finland and is built in France. 26:50 The Chinese support the HPC project financially as junior partner, but the show is run by EDF. It is more a French project than a Chinese one.

[@Kylem6875]

The recent history part was a complete shambles to be honest, and completely glosses over some of the additional options (SMR's and Fusion) currently being explored. The omission of Chapelcross as Calder Hall's sister plant and the focus on Berkeley was confusing too.

[@john1703]

The Manhattan project did use graphite moderated, water cooled reactors at Hanford. This combination requires careful control, as the Soviets learned at Chernobyl. The Americans developed the light water reactor for submarine propulsion, then chose to develop that concept for civil power production. The British stayed with gas graphite into a second generation beyond Magnox, because of an indigenous industry. There were 26 Magnox reactors, not stations. The British military did not cancel TSR-2, the politicians did; and the F-111 did not come through. AGRs do indeed operate at higher thermal efficiency than Magnox or PWR, because of a significantly higher operating temperature. Their design is not fundamentally flawed, nor are they failures; they were simply not as cheap to build as PWRs in the USA at that time. The AGRs have lasted their intended 45 years. The French are unique in the world, making about 70% electricity by nuclear, so they benefit from economy of scale. More importantly, EdF is state subsidised. Now that the world knows the full price of burning fossil fuel, nuclear power might be seen as worth its price.

[@Lyndalewinder]

Hi - are you the same JM who used to be my favourite C&I specialist in the 1990s? Andy L

[@paul.alarner6410]

Years ago not long after chernobyle,i went on a tour of wylfa npp,a group of about 15 of us were led into a mobile classroom to be shown a few films one film was about 20 mins long showing how they built a machine to recover a busted piece of a bolt section with some threads showing screwed into a nut,the bolt had busted due to neutron enbrittlement,this was one of the bolts that held the steel pressure vessel together!,i asked the questions as is it not better to fix the busting bolts issue rather than say how good they are building a machine to retrieve it!,this caused a few raised eyebrows,i later asked the question when they said the reactor foundations were built on bedrock,i pointed out one reactor at another welsh plant was closed due to the refueling crane foundations crumbeling,i said if you cant build the crane foundations to last why are we to belive the reactor is any better!,with that i was led away to the chief saftey officer and given a lecture,this soon turned into an argument,i was led out at gunpoint and banned from any british nuclear fuels site for 5 yrs!,make of that what you will,the station offline due to bad refueling crane foundations was trawsfynyndd.

[@matthewmnorman]

Thanks for this! I think you’d find the history of the CANDU reactors interesting too.

[@Asianometry]

Can do!

[@johannesgutsmiedl366]

@@Asianometry In keeping with the theme of the channel, a look at China's civilian nuclear program would also be quite interesting, it is after all by far the largest in the world right now.

[@BitTwisted1]

The UK had a look at heavy water reactors, going as far as building a medium scale test reactor SGHWR at Winfrith. The CEGB came to the conclusion that it would only be profitable if the heavy water was supplied free of charge, probably half true but it was already invested in gas cooled reactors.

[@dvsmapple]

@@Asianometry please? I may even send you some maple syrup haha

[@oscarosullivan4513]

@@Asianometry Sellafield dumping didn’t help

[@PositionLight]

Another advantage of the AGR was that the steam could be plugged into existing British thermal plant steam generation and turbine equipment because unlike water reactors, the CO2 could reach higher temperatures and could generate dry, super-heated steam. The AGR is likely the only reactor design to achieve superheated steam, which is far preferable to saturated or wet steam.

[@housemana]

engineering/feature preference at what cost* is something that the industry as a WHOLE needs to grasp and keep in mind. Yea, sure, I far prefer things too that are wildly outside of reality or realistic positive outcomes lol what are we really saying at the end of the day kind of thing. Gotta think bigger picture than that.

[@Croz89]

There are some Gen 4 designs that operate at high enough temperatures for superheated steam, molten salt probably being the most well known.

[@charlesbridgford254]

And, the 660MW unit didn't require rotor cooling, making it simpler and exchangeable with thermal plants. We did this with the Isle of Grain's turbines in the late 2000's.

[@garyc3476]

@@charlesbridgford254 ?, Heysham 2 has IP shaft cooling but was a conventional coal station genset.

[@charlesbridgford254]

@@garyc3476 I was referring to the generator rotor. 660MW gross was chosen partly for the absence of generator rotor cooling up to this size, keeping the generator design simpler.

[@rairaur2234]

"Best times, worst times; The night is darkest before the dawn" and others I just want to appreciate your poetic touch, it lubricates the videos quite well. Just pleasant to listen to. Cheers.

[@Ben-gm9lo]

Thanks for a great video. One small correction if I may. Timestamp 13:35 states the UK government was reeling from the UK military cancelling TSR2. The UK military did not 'cancel TSR2'. This was done by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labour government. They can reel all they want, they cancelled the project and destroyed all the prototypes to prevent it being resurrected.

[@BrearleyTV]

Why did they do that, destroy all trace of it?

[@Ben-gm9lo]

@@BrearleyTV So that their decision was irrevocable. They didn't want 'the other party' reinstating the project at a later date. The same fate befell the Nimrod MR4 back in 2010, when the project was cancelled and all the airframes ordered to be cut up so they could never be used again.

[@leescott1775]

raf didnt have F1-11

[@Ben-gm9lo]

@@leescott1775 Quite right. But nobody in the above thread has mentioned that aircraft!

[@dcanmore]

No they didn't destroy them all. Two survive in RAF museums, one XR220 at Duxford and the other XR222 at Cosford.

[@sfodjknfwoa]

despite your channel name i love seeing your videos on the UK!

[@fallout560]

The UK is part of asia, technically (through the pitcairn islands). At least that's how the UK justifies joining the new Trans Pacific trade deal

[@shreyvaghela3963]

@@fallout560 how about we stop making dumb comments. few islands dont mean anything.

[@fallout560]

@@shreyvaghela3963 bruh it's a joke

[@housemana]

@@fallout560 looo

[@Croz89]

Just change the name to Eurasianometry 😊

[@wiicow]

Was interesting watching this. My grandfather actually worked for the English electric nuclear power group and you can read many of his white papers where he analyses the inefficiency of the Calder hall concept

[@michaelkaliski7651]

British nuclear power succeeded very well at what it was designed to do, which was to provide materials to produce nuclear weapons. The production of energy and isotopes for civilian applications was always a secondary function to partially offset the costs of producing materials for military applications. The ready availability of cheap high quality coal, North Sea oil and gas meant that nuclear power generation was not an essential part of maintaining the national electricity grid. Times have changed and the construction of nuclear power stations dedicated primarily to power production is now seen as essential moving forward. The prior military applications of nuclear power have resulted in challenges from environmentalists who just see all power stations as being a bad thing, let alone nuclear power stations. The UK is now moving towards the development of smaller, modular, standardised reactors and these will eventually be used to cover the base grid load which will be topped up as necessary by wind, solar and hydro power.

[@rafski123]

This reminds me of a British computer joke: "Why is there no major British Computer manufacturer?" ... "They haven't figured out how to make it use oil"

[@jonathantan2469]

Even funnier is the British did make computers in the 19th century (Babbage machines) & early to mid 20th century (notably Alan Turing's computers). And being mechanical & electromechanical systems, they needed oil.

[@agt155]

ARM?

[@err4071]

Do you mean leak oil

[@LZE.]

Never heard of Amstrad then

[@thelakeman2538]

Privatisation of nuclear infrastructure just sounds like a bad idea like no private company's gonna bear the capital costs to upgrade the infrastructure, take on the responsibility to deal with the waste, and do the required maintenance, no wonder they had to bail them out, it's one of those industries that is a good idea to keep with the government.

[@zhufortheimpaler4041]

well, the german nuclear plants are private run. guess why they close down now. the myth of cheap nuclear energy only works if 80% of the cost is externalised.

[@nvelsen1975]

@@zhufortheimpaler4041 Funny you'd bring that up as Germany's decision to shut down sustainable power and instead go for Putin and coal, is purely down to Germany's radical left being hysterical and generous 'donations' from Russia to people like Schröder.

[@zhufortheimpaler4041]

@@nvelsen1975 not quite. the decision to shut down nuclear was taken in 2002 and ratified as law in 2004. This went hand in hand with a massive renewable build up per law. if these plans would have been followed as set in law back then, germany would by now be 80% renewable and pretty much energy independant. But in between there were a few years (16) under CDU government. There first the renewable build up law got scrapped in favor of more coal and gas and then 2010 they scrapped the nuclear exit law and negotiated decades of runtimes with the providers. then fukushima happened, merkel seeing her pelts and gains flowing down the river made one of her 180 turns and reinstated nuclear exit, resulting in billions of penalty payments to the providers for the now lost guaranteed runtimes. At that point, the renewable energy industry (wind and solar) had been completely trashed by the neo liberals and conservatives, resulting in them closing down in germany and moving somewhere else or just dying (until then, germany was world leader in renewable energy tech and high capacity battery technology that was lost to china). to fill in the gaps the CDU pushed even more coal and gas. the end is what you see now. That is not the fault of the greens or left spectrum, but of neoliberals and conservatives fucking up royaly over and over again

[@nvelsen1975]

@@zhufortheimpaler4041 I love how you describe cancelling huge subsidies that wasted billions of taxpayer money, as 'conservatives destroying it'. Why is it so hard to admit the far left hysterically screeching "Chernobyl" over and over is what ruined it? Not to mention the pre-2018 EU anti-sustainability tariff against solar panels came from Schröders lobbying.

[@zhufortheimpaler4041]

@@nvelsen1975 yes thats right, at that time Schröder was for how long no longer in Office and a Putin bootlicker? 11 years. no what i call destroying the industry is not cutting subsidies (btw those were lower than gas and coal or nuclear subsides) but more or less stopping giving build permits and making the application for build permits a bureaucratic nightmare. How many pages printed out paper are needed for just one wind turbine? 35000-50000 pages. Thats about 10k € just wasted on printing shit. thats why applications for new turbines and solar ground to a crawl and cut the build up of new renewable energy by up to 90%.

[@pinnipes]

i love this video, it really is fantastic, but WOW, "[margaret thatcher] liked that it didn't emit greenhouse gases..." hit me like a truck. WOW. anyways consider me subscribed, love your stuff, you've got a fantastic talent for laying information out clearly

[@eastyyx]

Thanks for making this video it has been super informative!! Loving the comments as well

[@911gpd]

From a decommissioning point of view, it's a blessing that "everybody" switched from graphite-gas to water reactors. For example, in France*, the old graphite-gas reactors are an absolute nightmare to deconstruct (partly because of the massive amount of activated graphite). Some decommissioning projects are planned to end in the 22nd century ... for reactors that were built in the 1960-70s and stopped in the 90s ! *I don't know if there is the same issue with British reactors but I'm assuming so since it's the same technology. Correct me if I'm wrong :)

[@rolletroll2338]

I read that UK is in the same nightmare as France with the radioactive wastes coming from the graphite based reactors.

[@patriciaacevedo4429]

Wow!

[@jack504]

A few things to add: The UK didn't want to get into the uranium enrichment business for a long time, efficient centrifuge separation was not available in the west until the 60s. There wasn't the money or space for a facility like the k-25 gaseous diffusion plant (USA Manhattan project) in the UK. Hence plutonium production, which can be separated chemically. The magnox reactors used natural unenriched uranium, a huge advantage without enriched uranium available. As they lean on the plutonium production reactor heritage their waste contains a large proportion of plutonium compared with PWRs. This has left the UK with one of the largest plutonium stockpiles in the world, almost matched with Russia. When the UK successfully tested a fission bomb, it occurred around the same time as the US produced a hydrogen fusion bomb. The UK still wasn't taken that seriously at that point. They raced to produce a hydrogen bomb of their own, which when successful led to the Polaris sales agreement between the UK and US. This included the exchange of plutonium from the UK for enriched uranium from the US. By the time the AGRs came around they used enriched fuel to improve the fuel lifetime. While not a financial success, the UK AGRs have some advantages that PWRs cannot match: higher thermal efficiency (41% Vs 34%) and improved safety (following an emergency shutdown and loss of cooling power they take much longer to heat up and meltdown than a PWR, think TMI and Fukushima. This is due to the lower power density).

[@jack504]

Also, the last magnox reactor stopped production in 2015 and 4 of the 7 AGRs are still operating today

[@nvelsen1975]

I want to see an AGR take a top-10-in-history earthquake, then a top-10-in-history tsunami and remaining functioning better than Fukushima did. 😆

[@sethanix3969]

@@nvelsen1975 Fukushima had a lot of - in hindsight! - bad design decisions because nobody wanted to know, that tsunamis of this size can and have happened on the coasts of Japan. It was basicly a simple gamble on "the 1000 year"-tsunami won't hit during the ~50 years the plant will be operating. We know how that gamble went. Same goes for Devil's Canyon in California. With all probable cause It won't survive "the big one" in it's close vicinity - an event, where the question is not 'if' it may happen, but 'when'...

[@nvelsen1975]

@@sethanix3969 It did happen and almost nothing came of it. It's more 'dangerous' to work in a building made of granite than it is to stay within Fukushima the whole while. If anything Fukushima advertises nuclear safety. Why do you think (Russian-paid) luddites like from Greenpeace had to invent weird conspiracies about mutated monster fish showing up in California? Nearby here a guy nearly died when a wind turbine snapped and fell on his car. Applying your logic that means we must live in constant fear of all wind turbines and probably dismantle all wind turbines?

[@sethanix3969]

@@nvelsen1975 So you say, if a wind turbine 250km upwind topples over or burns out, you have to evacuate a city like Tokyo? You do know, that they had sheer, unsurmountable luck, that the wind blew almost constantly from inland during the almost two weeks the reactors spew radioactive particles, right? You do know that, right? And no, Devil's Canyon is not built to withstand something above 8.0 directly beneath it - and the San Andreas fault is totaly capable of producing one bigger.

[@mynameisjoejeans]

Also surprised you didn’t mention Tube Alloys - the British nuclear weapons programme which was gifted to the Americans to bolster the Manhattan project during WW2. Despite it helping the development of the first nuclear bomb, the Yanks refused to share any of the subsequent research with the Brits - forcing Britain to conduct their own independent research resulting in success in 1952.

[@gelinrefira]

The UK US relationship is like an abusive gambling husband who took all the money and lose it and come back home to beat the wife.

[@Dave5400]

Fair point here. It also didn't help that the Americans basically stole all of the top nuclear scientists from Europe during and immediately after WWII and basically left Britain in the dark before Britain had even realised. They then had the cheek to claim their Atomic programme was "American" despite the overwhelming amount of foreigners who had done the research, but that's another argument... As you say, this basically meant the UK was forced to go it alone whether they liked it or not which inevitably led to general mismanagement. Probably the reason it was so comparatively slow was that it was wholly owned and controlled by the government, who are not naturally profit-driven unlike the strictly capitalist interests of American private companies. Edit: I should also add that the UK is *significantly* smaller than most other countries, which makes it virtually impossible to build anything bigger than a few acres far away from populated areas. Unlike the US where there are just some areas of hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothing. Doubtless this hampered efforts just as much back then as it does today.

[@martthvdb9701]

Agree. That's were the real 'Beginnings' of the UK nuclear program.

[@JJaqn05]

@@Dave5400 The Uk is not smaller than most countries. Its bigger than most. Correct your false statement

[@Dave5400]

@@JJaqn05 I was talking about countries in a similar position as the UK (i.e. in a position to even think of developing large and complex infrastructure like nuclear power stations) as you well knew. Looking at this list, you can see that of the almost 200 countries in the world, the UK is 78th largest at 93,628 sq miles: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area Compare that with the US mainland which is a close 3rd to China at 3,677,649 sq miles. A quick calculation shows that according to this data, the US is over 39 times larger than the UK by square area. Taking into consideration what I said earlier, there is far more space in the US to construct something as secretive as a nuclear weapons facility than there is in the UK, mainly because there are just miles and miles of nothing in some parts of the US. This is why Los Alamos was built in the middle of a desert little under 100 miles from the nearest main population of Alburquerque by road; and Windscale (as it then was) was built on the edge of the lake district a little over 10 miles away by road from the nearest main population of Whitehaven. So, no. I will not retract my statement seeing as it was in fact true. You just read what you wanted to.

[@brendanpells912]

I was driving over to Sizewell B in early '90s and on the radio they were talking about a new gas-fired power station that had just opened in Corby. The build time, construction cost, and staffing levels were a fraction of what Sizewell B required and I thought then there was no future for Nuclear. In hindsight, how much better off would we be today if we had 7 or 8 replicas of Sizewell B up and running?

[@alexhayden2303]

@Gareth Fairclough The BAN on Fracking has been extended by Sunak! (Following Orders!) The Plan to make up the shortfall is to Import expensive US LNG. (Don't mention the Bunker Oil/CO2 problem!)

[@ThePurplePassage]

@@alexhayden2303 The head of Cuadrilla said that fracking in the UK was unlikely to be economic, in part due to geography. More north sea gas exploration would be a more promising avenue for gas production, but neither that nor fracking would produce more gas in the very near future. Depending on how long you expect the Russian invasion of Ukraine to go on and how long before Russian gas returns to the market then it might make sense in the medium term

[@PaulNaybour]

I started my career at CEGB and British Energy and worked at most of the plants mentioned in this video. The world could have been different if the plans for six PWR had gone forward. The cost pressures from gas-fired generators and Chornobyl made it impossible to justify the investment. But I still think we wasted the North Sea gas generating electricity, and now the UK is even more dependent on imported energy. I left the industry just after privatisation, like many others, to join the Rail Industry, but that’s another story. This video tells a very sad story of missed opportunities

[@gdutfulkbhh7537]

@@alexhayden2303 The Geology of the UK isn’t great for fracking, unless the price of gas goes through the roof. You need much thicker deposits of shale than we have. It works in the USA, but it’ll always be a difficult industry in the UK.

[@alexhayden2303]

@@gdutfulkbhh7537 Banning exploration seems to be an unnecessary move.

[@DraigBlackCat]

TSR-2 wasn’t cancelled by the military but by Labour politicians, we never got any F-111s either!

[@marvintpandroid2213]

TSR-2 was canceled somewhat because of the Americans and the push towards missile based weapons and spy satalites. TSR-2 was a great aircraft but just made for a job that didn't exist any more.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

@@marvintpandroid2213 Perhaps the Americans bought it. Shortly after it was destroyed an American fighter jet was produced that looked like a rip-off and the destruction of the TSR-2 was total, like a clean-up of a crime - leaving no trace. This was because the US did not want the enemies or even the allies to have what they got their hands on. Not sure what they bought it with. Perhaps it was a non-cash something for something deal.

[@marvintpandroid2213]

@@Andrew-rc3vh and what aircraft was that?

[@DraigBlackCat]

@@marvintpandroid2213 Not really, Satellite recon still needed SR71 Blackbirds up to 1998 and it is still supplemented by aircraft (especially in the ELINT role). Long range air superiority/interception roles were theorised as being replaced by missiles but low level interdiction wasn't and that mission has continually existed since - RAF used, Buccaneers, Jaguars and Tornados, hell even Vulcans, Phantoms and Harriers in that role. Losing TSR-2 and F-111 essentially meant keeping Lightnings in service until Tornado could replace them in an interceptor role, by which time they were nearly two decades out of date. The financial state of Britain in the 60s probably killed TSR-2, we couldn't afford the final planes (hence no F-111s bought) let alone the development costs. Things might have been different had the whole project been given to English Electric as the costs might have been kept down. Also we had planes that could already perform some of its intended roles, meaning there would be no capability gap. www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/cancelled-britains-high-mach-heartbreak-4036788/#:~:text=Dogged%20by%20technical%20problems%2C%20cost,after%20two%20dozen%20test%20flights. At that time Britain just couldn't afford TSR-2

[@zoidberg444]

It made sense to move towards Polaris.

[@EstOptimusNobis]

Thatcher needed to expand the nuclear power supply as leverage against the coal mining labour movement. This was a huge issue in the 80s.

[@stephendoherty8291]

The UK was also one of the very few locations where a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility was built. Even with the high fees from imported foreign countries to recycle it for new fuel, the cost was prohibitive and the engineering challenges were beyond UK industry. The result was a facility with constant radiation leak episodes and this technology was not exportable as a result. France had its own plant and European countries had big issues in moving any waste for onward shipping to the UK. The UK also was not generating any greater volume on waste fuel for reprocessing as there were no new builds.

[@jackking5567]

Another problem was from that process, a type of waste radioactive sludge was created. Development was ongoing during the plants life and gradually more systems were added to the sludge output in an effort to deal with it. Unfortunately, and never spoken of, it turned out to be impossible to deal with that waste sludge. Sure it could be concentrated but with that it became more potently radioactive. They were advertising a process that didn't actually deal with the problem!

[@stephendoherty8291]

@@jackking5567 Plus MOX, the recycled fuel has major problems- it can only be used once and never recycled again. Its waste byproducts are more lethal to any life and the recycled cost was not that much less than mined uranium which is more plentiful than originally thought. It may need a different type of nuclear fission design to make MOX or recycling that output as a more useful fuel but not the MOX waste currently made from the common light water reactor.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

​@@jackking5567 The waste from Thorp is dried and vitrified.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

​@@stephendoherty8291 Thorp didn't only produce MOX, it produced mox and uranium to be sold and manufactured into new fuel pellets.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

And apart from the leak 20 years ago I'm not sure there were "constant leaks" or it was "beyond our engineering" It operated successfully for 30 odd years and had one accident which was contained as designed. It just wasn't profitable once uranium sources became plentiful.

[@kek207]

These videos continue to get better. Previously it was all about chips but I really enjoy watching videos about these other topics

[@sunnohh]

Check out his deer episode

[@geedon1]

Well done good sir, quality work gain!

[@derekp2674]

Thanks for including the aerial view of UKAEA Culham Laboratory at 2:04. I can see the windows of two of the offices that I used while working there. Culham was established as the UK centre for research into nuclear fusion power and so had almost nothing to do with UK work on fission power reactors.

[@PaulNaybour]

I noticed the RACE fusion remote handling manipulators too.

[@Fozzymandeus]

Love the way you pass off Hinkley Point C’s EPR as a Chinese design because it’s like Taishan. It’s a French design based on Framatome N4 and the Siemens Konvoi reactor. Taishan is based on a European design, not the other way around.

[@philanderingwhitecollartra8281]

my grandfather worked at windscale.. one of the six who pushed the rods out..

[@JoacimNieminen-e6t]

Did he suffer from it, healthwise?

[@philanderingwhitecollartra8281]

@@JoacimNieminen-e6t figures it killed off the bad stuff if not for slips and falls in 2017.. burn scars on back of hands (weak spot of the gloves and slightly shorter deformation of bone density to the stance at which he stood .. but teeth are pulled to work in containment because the teeth collect radiation

[@AMD7027]

British ego killed an industry. I am surprised you didn’t mention Windscale…. I’m not going to reply to each individually, my point is Windscale happened during the early part of this period and it should have made them question their design assumptions overall. Yes it was designed to produce plutonium and not energy but many of the same people went on from Windscale to other parts of the program and apparently kept their hubris intact when it was uncalled for.

[@davidanalyst671]

nationalist ego kills industries every damn day. Why is all easy manufacturing done in china with cheap steel? what did that do to the cheap steal producers in every country on the planet?

[@sashimanu]

It was a military operation, so kinda out of scope for this video

[@sethanix3969]

​@@sashimanu Windscale (or Sellafield) is a shining example of why nuclear always has been a bad idea. It doesn't fit the narrative. That France is currently wishing it has a lot less nuclear is another point he glosses over.

[@rockets4kids]

@@sethanix3969 Windscale was never designed to produce electricity, it was designed solely to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Later reactors were designed to produce both electricity and plutonium, this turned out to be their downfall.

[@sethanix3969]

@@rockets4kids Yes, I know it was only used for Plutonium generation. But it doesn't mater why something is supercritical - released particels are released particles. It would have been a lot worse if John Cockroft hadn't insisted on installing the chimney filters. Nobody called them his foley afterwards...

[@AlexanderSylchuk]

José Antonio Bolseiro went to Manchester to work on his post-doctoral research under the guidance of Rosenfeld. He was ordered to go back to Argentina few weeks before finishing his british scolarship program in order to join the Huemul project. After his arrival back home he was one of those scientist who managed to convince Perón to stop the nuclear fusion project and switch to more realistic nuclear fission program. He later lead main argentinian nuclear research institute up untill his death. Interesting enough fist and only australian nuclear power plant was designed and built by argentinian organisation which was started partly because of Bolseiro, despite the fact that the first british nuclear bomb was tested in Australia. I should continue reading on this, it's interesting, brasilian nuclear program is also interesting but it also hard to find something about. One of my professors was actually building computers on soviet nuclear power plants. One funny story he told was about using the very first CMOS RAM in the Soviet union. The control room of power plant they was working on at the time was covered in nice red carpets, it looked really nice so he with all his colegues naturally took off their shoes and installed everything. The problem was that after assembly computers didn't work, the memory was dead. They had to make emergency delivery of that new memory from Moscow to Siberia (I believe it was somewhere near Novosibirsk). Only after killing the first batch of memory they realised that they didn't count electrostatic discharge from the carpet. They didn't knew at the time that the biggest vulnerability of that new technology was static electricity, since it was the very first practical use of CMOS in any soviet project (at least from his words, but I have no reasons to doubt it). When they got working memory they took out the carpets, installed everything, everything worked this time.

[@MrJ567]

I'm going to be honest, British nuclear energy failed because the British have never seen an idea that they didn't consider worth failing at.

[@OrwellsHousecat]

Cricket

[@seanm2511]

@@OrwellsHousecat Have you met Australia?

[@OrwellsHousecat]

@@seanm2511 colony

[@tf3st]

I wonder why Canada succeeded .. err seceded .. or ohh never mind ..

[@steveunderwood3683]

@@tf3st Because Canada approached this with a CANDU attitude.

[@JerryDLTN]

8/27/1956 The nuclear power station at Calder Hall in the United Kingdom was connected to the national power grid becoming the world's first commercial nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale.

[@jim9930]

Dec 1957 Shippingport in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh (Duquesne Light), first entirely commercial reactor.

[@DrFod]

I'm surprised you didn't mention the Rolls Royce SMR project which is attracting international interest. There may well be a renaissance of the Britsh nuclear industry.

[@hurri7720]

According to RR they need about 10 more years of development. " In November 2021, the UK government provided funding of £210 million to further develop the design, partly matched by £195 million of investment by Rolls Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited and Exelon Generation Limited.[9][10] At that point they expected the first unit would be completed in the early 2030s.". RR is far from the only company developing SMR. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_SMR

[@tomatofeind2019]

I work for RR. We haven't got our shit together, we are a mess of bullshit and nothing ever gets completed.

[@raypitts4880]

@@tomatofeind2019 sounds like to many commits, make a meeting to discuss a meeting

[@nadeemchaudhry6585]

Anything the British Government do, usually turns into a sh!t show, whilst ensuring someone has lined their pockets.

[@Freddie1980]

Like every other project governments get involved in. This phenomenon is not exclusive to the British.

[@xQKUg9S]

Love the video and channel. From your fellow Taiwanese viewer

[@HunterBitcoin]

Strange you didn't mention the Windscale fire, but regardless, please do one on the French nuclear industry next!

[@jackfanning7952]

Ah-h-h-h! The French nuclear debacle is even bigger than the British one.

[@NuclearSavety]

@@jackfanning7952 well, the french also bullshit a lot, but the electricity prices are great compared to rest of europe (considering UK still part of europe) ....

[@jackfanning7952]

@@NuclearSavety French electricity prices are fixed by the government in a complicated system and heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Pity the poor French taxpayers. Nuclear utilities are attempting to accomplish the same sweetheart deals throughout the United States. Problem is, the utilities in the U.S. must beg, bribe, or browbeat individual states one at a time to accomplish this, rather than the nation as a whole. That means there are a lot more state legislators that have to get a cut of the loot. So far, it has only been successfully in certain states. See Ohio Bill #6.

[@Elukka]

@@jackfanning7952 On the other hand they did manage to create a grid with drastically lower CO2 emissions with nuclear largely replacing fossil fuels.

[@jackfanning7952]

@@Elukka Massive quantities of fossil fuels are used to process uranium ore, build reactors and, if it ever happens, to decommission reactors and safely isolate the waste from all living beings for longer than mankind has been in existence. At what cost, no one knows. Nuclear energy, cradle to the grave, generates 18 times the CO2 emissions as renewables. Only electrical energy production from coal and natural gas produce more carbon than nuclear.

[@Andrew-rc3vh]

A couple of points: I read in Wikipedia somewhere the graphite control rods are dodgy, can catch fire and there was an accident involving this. Regarding economics, the Hinckley C claims to have the largest turbine in the world. Perhaps this is one way to go - to scale up and build big. The twin reactors can do 3.2GW so they are the same as more than ten old ones. In or political debates we often count in numbers of stations opened vs closed but it is worth pointing out the old ones were not giving us much power. The other sweet point in the economics seems to be the other way: to go smaller and make the construction in factories with component standardisation.

[@luc_libv_verhaegen]

Scale matters indeed, What is true for wind turbines, is true for steam turbines: the bigger, the more efficient. But one of EPRs problems is exactly its scale. You need about ~10k EUR/USD/GBP per kW for nuclear power generation, and these days they only come in the 1.6GW variety, so 13B GBP per reactor (Hinkley). Financing that it is nigh impossible without significant taxpayer backing. Financing for wind is easy. You are looking at roughly 1k EUR/USD/GBP per kW for onshore and 3k EUR/USD/GBP for offshore (where prices are only now starting to come down). And they come in sizes up to 3-15MW, so 3-45M GBP per unit. And that's just building the things, not running them, and not tearing them down afterwards. Guess which comes on top there as well.

[@ventrath]

Graphite-tipped control rods indeed contributed to the disaster at Chernobyl, but in Magnox and AGR reactors the control rods are boronated steel. In this video he's referring to the moderator, used to control the speed of neutrons rather than giving variable control of overall reactor power.

[@cdl0]

@@ventrath Also, graphite for nuclear applications is a nearly fully dense, manufactured form of the material, and not easy to burn.

[@Kylem6875]

AGR and Magnox were graphite moderated, not controlled

[@Kylem6875]

Would've been interesting to have mentioned how the UK went down the reprocessing route, (largely THORP), some of the issues involved with the decommissioning of Graphite-moderated reactors and its current waste disposal plans. Nevertheless, an interesting summary and high enough level not to scare off the average person.

[@CA_I]

Yes, that would be interesting. I can understand the need for reprocessing for the Magnox spent fuel, but why did they opt for THORP? I guess it was linked to fast reactors perhaps, but a video on the decision to opt for reprocessing would be interesting. What I dont understand is how they allowed such a large amount of Plutonium to be recovered, with no real use for it. It costs a lot to maintain that and store it safely, and securely.

[@Kylem6875]

@@CA_I Good points. THORP, unlike Magnox Reprocessing and the lesser-known Primary Separation Plant (which extracted the Pu for our first atomic weapon using BUTEX chemistry) was of course driven by a shift in government policy to commercialising reprocessing with the establishment of BNFL which became the licence holder for the Site under the impression that nuclear power was going to be the dominant generation source of the future. This, with the anticipation Uranium prices would increase massively as source became difficult to find (this turned out not to be the case with modern technology now securing enough Uranium to meet demand for 2,000 years). Pilot facilities in PSP which briefly became a head-end oxide fuel conversion facility for Magnox (prior to the violent reaction that closed the plant for good and contaminated the facility with Ru-106) went successful with our domestic AGR oxide fuel, and I believe this is where the idea of handling more oxide fuel and creating a state-of-the-art facility that could handle all this under one roof, combining receipt and storage, head-end, chemical separation and U & Pu finishing which were largely separate with Magnox and PSP. So if we could be the pioneers of reprocessing and do all the ‘dirty’ work, we’d get a pretty penny off other countries for reprocessing their fuel. And we did, the contracts were lucrative, the Japanese were by far the biggest customer and funded a lot of the project. The nature of the complexity of THORP’s chemistry and plant however didn’t take kindly to reliability and maintenance. It was not a cheap plant to run. It was disappointing the plant only lasted 24 years compared to its Magnox predecessor, which only became increasingly expensive to run with its sheer age. I think the impression was to turn the excess Pu into MOX, but the MOX plant was nothing more than an abject failure with poor plant design and derisory throughout. New plants are being constructed at the moment to repackage the Pu waste for interim storage until a final decision is made on what’s really happening with it.

[@greenbankrecords8863]

Reprocessing was part of the MAGNOX programme long before THORP although the motives for it changed over the years. In the beginning MAGNOX reprocessing was all about getting the plutonium but at the end it was more about managing the spent MAGNOX fuel which cannot be stored for long periods of time underwater in ponds without disintegrating into an unmanageable sludge. This is why MAGNOX repro had to continue for so long and why the folks that kept that plant operational for so many years were national heroes. The 60's MAGNOX repro plant was only shutdown just before the much more modern 90's THORP plant. Unfortunately there were periods during the miner strikes of the 1970s when it couldn't keep up with demand and some MAGNOX fuel did stay in the ponds for too long. As a result those ponds are in a challenging process of clean-up today and will be for some time.

[@Kylem6875]

@@greenbankrecords8863 You’re bang on. The initial construction of Magnox Reprocessing Solvent Extraction Plant (or if you really know your stuff, it’s the second primary separation plant) was around improving the BUTEX process (with PUREX) and of course, being designed to handle specifically Magnox fuel instead of pile fuel. The concept of commercialisation came from exporting Magnox’s design to Italy & Japan which included reprocessing contracts. With the lucrative nature of this, the original primary separation plant repurposed as an oxide conversion plant for oxide fuels from across the globe and the emergence of WAGR fuel coming from AGR development. The 1970 incident was what effectively led to the decision to incorporate the learning from PSP, Magnox Reprocessing, and enhanced reprocessing and engineering technologies for a standalone plant that would have all stages of reprocessing under one roof. Magnox Reprocessing’s last rod feed was in 2022 (after THORP’s 2018) with the first stages of initial decommissioning taking place today. Very fortunate to play a role in Magnox Reprocessing’s story as the true workhorse of British nuclear and chemical engineering, with many years of challenges that lay ahead despite the cessation of rod feed. Whilst one chapter has closed, a new one begins. All good things have to come to an end unfortunately! The sun has truly set on industrial scale reprocessing in the United Kingdom and it is heartbreaking the technology hasn’t optimised for the modern nuclear world to make scaling up any promising grouped actinide extraction methods financially viable. With the constant state of flux in the world and markets, who knows if a new age could come from the emerging nuclear plants in the 2030s and beyond. But for now, decommissioning and geological disposal should remain the primary focus for this era of Britain’s nuclear history.

[@Kylem6875]

@@greenbankrecords8863 You’re bang on. My points in my first reply explain the rationale behind THORP that BNFL lobbied the government to accept in 1979. Magnox’s Solvent Extraction Plant accepted its last rod feed in 2022, which was actually 3.75 years after THORP’s last shear. A workhorse of a plant that is now in its sunset years, although, many years of work remain of initial decommissioning prior to any real demolition. I’m very fortunate to have played a role in Magnox Reprocessing’s story. It is sad that the reprocessing era in the UK is finished and no significant grouped actinide extraction method has become financially viable to scale up. The reality is, however, the performance of both plants were plagued with highly technical and complex issues that significantly hindered their ability to output the volume the plants were built for. They were expensive to run, maintain, the chemistry had to be kept in tight balance, any downtime would see the plant shutdown for months at a time. THORP worked through its base load contracts but did not really live up to the revolution it was supposed to be, arguably having been plagued by more serious issues than its predecessor (e.g., accountancy tank leak being just one of the incidents). Direct disposal in the eyes of the investor is the safest and cheapest route. Whether industrial reprocessing will dawn again whilst we look to produce more Pu for our weapons programme, one can only dream. But Sellafield has no further part to play in Britain’s nuclear next-generation, but instead the shadow that remains of its complex and intertwined civilian and military legacy.

[@maybehuman4]

The UK's backing of it's own GGR reactor technology certainly contributed to UK's decay (lol yes, pun) of Nuclear energy, but I'd argue it wasn't even the major contributing factor. You would have to assume the world-wide Nuclear Energy industry is healthy anywhere in the world. It is not. It has been on a steep decline for decades, and the two common factors around the world are political pressure and economics. The political pressure is due to inadequate education on the risks of Nuclear. Even seemingly highly educated teachers, doctors, and professors are anti-nuclear simply due to the hysteria caused by Chernobyl. Most don't even know the other Chernobyl reactors worked fine for DECADES after the accident. It also takes about 10-15 years to build a Nuclear Plant, that is at least a decade before any power is produced. This requires a great deal of long-term planning and investment. What is the average term for a politician? Much less than that, and a change in administration often causes these projects to fail. Single-party regimes have a much easier time with this, but at the cost of becoming corrupt shitholes. The massive upfront investment and construction time also compare really poorly to natural gas or coal plants (2-3 year construction time), and they can be easily demolished and cleaned up. Regardless of reactor technology, Nuclear is reliable and clean and we just need to think more long-term. Or build smaller portable off-shore reactors that can be moved like an oil tanker.

[@gus473]

Except for the last sentence, yes, agree. 😎✌🏼

[@CRneu]

@@gus473 >modern< nuclear is really safe. i'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. The only real concern with nuclear is what to do with the waste which is a somewhat overblown concern when you consider the pollution we already put into the environment without proper storage.

[@irokpe6977]

@@gus473 I guess you're thinking the modern mobile "oil tanker like" reactor will be used by private shipping companies with bizzare behaviours.

[@joythought]

I remember the anti-nuclear hysteria in Australia starting around the late 1970s.

[@lc9245]

@@joythought can’t believe it lasts until today despite soaring power prices. For a country that has plenty of sunshine, wind, relatively dry, plenty of fossil fuel, both gas and oil and swimming in uranium, it cannot harness any of them at a cost effective level for local use.

[@housemana]

One of your best yet. Thorough, entertaining, enlighterning, and just the right reduction to such a fascinating and intricate tale of misdeeds and missed opportunities. Within the rubble, hope remains.

[@Agent-ie3uv]

Hmm

[@Coolsomeone234]

Another day, another quality video

[@jpajpaassi6614]

I worked at BNFL Sellafield site in Cumbria. The teams that were in direct contact with me were very ‘arrogant’ and seldom entertained any questioning by outsiders who had concerned. They basically bullied the contracted staff members as if there was no value they could add to any conversations. This attitude was felt to inhibit discussions and that eventually created a ‘us & them’ groups that were adversely contributing to several outcomes that could have been averted had the initial planning taken into account the questions by highly qualified contractors! It was as if the qualified consultants had only been hired to fill the vacancies and none of the advise of these consultants matter. The bunch of close knit clusters of managers and permanent staff always took decisions that were often contrary to the best advice of the consultants. There were instances when the consultants groups would clock in their presence and sit on he side-lines most of the day, whilst all the decisions were exclusively for the small group of individuals who rushed into dead-end outcomes. Only later, after the issues arose, the consultants were brought in to resolve several of the issues and start again. This was a circus that was so apparent to the consultants who could have been involved at the onset. Several issues had to begin from zero-point and rebuild the corrections into the system and components. I know this was our daily conversation between the consultants. None of us were surprised when issues developed and we were dragged in to resolve it on behalf of the resident team. Several of the senior managers I came to know personally were moved about from one team to the next, but they never got fired. They simply took their arrogance to the next level and in the next team the headed. The lower ranking permanent staff were really ‘The Yes’ men to these seniors. They were not interested in the outcome as they only were protecting their bread & bacon by agreeing to the senior who recruited them into the team. Ironically and very disturbingly, the junior members in the teams were always the fresh University graduates who had very little experience in the field or the expertise to which they were allocated. The team needed a ‘quota’ of BSc. qualified individuals. Their technical experience was not examined by any other team members. I often had to tutor and outline the basics of the technical issues. This apparently was the only training they ever received. The University education only qualified the juniors to a level of some ‘donkey’ who had to be lead & steered towards the design issues that had to have their signatures. The consultants were paid by the number of hours spent on the tasks. I filled my time sheets and waited for the money to arrive in my bank account. Often days were spent at the desk sitting out and looking busy. WHen the junior team members needed assistants, I would be allocated. I had to wait for the junior permanent staff to endorse the docket and get approval before I commenced my work. One simple step done, and then wait for the junior staff to issue the next docket. This was always after several hours of waiting. All the consultants were in the same boat! We just played the ‘game’ in the manner that the junior and his/ her senior whisked wished to. It was great fun! Getting paid for ‘waiting’. Eventually, after four years of working on several BNFL sites, I left the project. - fairly rich as well!

[@goldfox399]

I worked in the British nuclear industry for 5 years… I spent 4 year 11 months and 30 days banging my head against a brick wall. Loads of tax payer cash gets wasted on stupid projects that pretty much all get cancelled. “May as well burn the paperwork we produce… it would generate more electricity” was the running joke

[@jdlc903]

Whats the issue, projects are stupid or everything gets cancelled so no useful productive investment/innovation gets done

[@goldfox399]

@@jdlc903 There are a number of factors. I would say the main one is (in the UK anyway) over regulation. I wasn't an engineer so am no expert on this side of things. Traceability of materials was important so any component literally you could trace back to for example steel which mine the iron ore came from. The paperwork was ridiculous. We bought some bolts for one project which cost £15k where visually you could have bought the same from B&Q for £10. One of the most stupid was the emphasis on safety in offices which were hundred of miles from anything nuclear. You got a yellow card if you walked up the stairs with a cup of coffee for example as it went on the safety record if anyone had a papercut. On a nuclear site if you ate a banana the skin couldn't be thrown in a bin as it was technically radioactive and had to go to low level waste. One final point as there are many more but don't want to write an essay. There was also the mentality of people on decommissioning projects. Because we know more now we design things with their disposal in mind where as that wasn't really considered in the 1950's many of the nuclear sites are very remote and employ most of the local workforce. Once the job is finished and the site gone the community will collapse so doing the job faster is not in their interest of anyone and the job is stretched out. Tenders were designed to address issues like this by making components of the proposal how to create sustainability for the local workforce for example. Dounreay was a 2.5hr drive from Inverness which is hardly an economic powerhouse with thousands of jobs available. Then of course the private companies who win work see the whole thing as a massive cash cow.and tiny changes are unscrupulously expolited. I vividly remember being told to "behave" by my manager when I suggested things that could be done much more efficiently.

[@Crabby303]

It's weird how the UK went from an industrial powerhouse pioneer to a dodging industrial bungler post WW2 - aviation, nuclear, shipbuilding, auto... they're still trying to get back there, hence Brexit etc, but it's never going to happen, that UK is long gone now. It's Chicken-Hut-enomics all the way now, lol. But gleeful Irish schadenfreude asides, I'm genuinely saddened at the death of the UK's aviation industry, they knocked out some beautiful birds over the years.

[@Jake_5693]

Because every good idea we’ve had since WW2 hasn’t been supported or sold to the Americans.

[@Croz89]

Blame the city really. Britain worked out you can make more money moving other people's money around rather than making stuff. Ireland did the same, just a decade or so later.

[@fallout560]

well, they still make good jet engines

[@sc1338]

@@Jake_5693 who’s fault is that? Also you shouldn’t have any hard feelings towards Americans imo

[@greatwolf5372]

The merchants killed the industrialists.

[@lukeshacks]

As a Cumbrian it’s interesting to see Sellafield getting international recognition.

[@Croz89]

Interestingly, one bad decision that seemed like a good idea at the time was the British recycling nuclear fuel that led to a huge stockpile of reactor grade plutonium at significant cost. The UK in the early days took the conservative assumption that uranium ore was not plentiful, and there would eventually be a supply crunch and prices would skyrocket. Therefore, they began to reprocess the spent fuel to extract plutonium, which they intended to use in as yet to be fully developed fast reactors. Of course, it turned out that uranium ore was pretty plentiful, and the supply crunch never came. Many countries use a once through fuel cycle and just consider spent fuel as 100% waste. Recycling, as it turns out, just isn't economic at current uranium prices. The fast reactors that the British were expecting never really got past the prototype phase, since PWR's and BWR's did the job fine and the conservative and heavily regulated nuclear industry doesn't like to fix what isn't broken, it's not like a silicon valley tech company. In the end, the UK has been trying to chip away at the stockpile with MOX fuel which can go in existing reactors, but it'll take decades to get rid of it at current rates of consumption, and it's very expensive stuff to keep around. Some think it'll be cheaper to just dispose of it rather than wait for it to be used up. Anyway, I think the UK nuclear industry might not be completely dead yet. Rolls Royce is one of the frontrunners in the SMR field, and they've taken the rather sensible approach at seeing how big you can make an SMR while still being able to qualify as an SMR (can be assembled in a factory and shipped to the site in mostly one piece). This could be a good balance between the costs saved by factory assembly and the fixed overheads every nuclear power plant has. If the whole SMR thing takes off, Britain could be in a good position to capitalise on it.

[@widescreennavel]

They believed what the industry told them. The best one of them all is too cheap too meter. Never live that down, boys.

[@yoavzingher7670]

This is great, but around 11:12 you mention cost overruns being passed onto consumers as higher energy prices, then give some £/kw prices. Consumers don’t buy power, they buy energy, so the units should be £/KWh or MWh. £150/KWh is orders of magnitude too high. You may mean £150/MWh but that sounds too high for the time too. I would guess it’s £0.15/kWh but it would be nice to know.

[@EPICRANDOMGUY02]

I think he means the total site build cost per total output of the station? I might be wrong.

[@tariq_sharif]

Excellent video and accurate. I worked for Nuclear Electric / Magnox started in May 1997 until Jan 2016 (now with a contractor still in nuclear). Firstly at Berkeley technology centre (not the station) until and of 2000. Then 10 years at Hunterston A, one year or so at each Traws, Chaplecross and Dungy A. And from around 2000 decommissioning. Loved working there, great people, challenging work (except Trawsfynydd). Totally agree the pursuing gas cooled reactors was colossal error.

[@nigelbagguley7606]

The industry only "failed" if judged as a power generation system,the primary purpose was actually to generate plutonium for use in weapons at which it was successful.

[@cyrilio]

Request for a video about the support industry/suppliers of ASML. I’m very curious about how big this industry is and what they all do.

[@iyxec]

There's never an explanation as to why nothing works in Britain, its either over budget, delayed, or scrapped. Despite public being heavily taxed and so much money made available for each major projects. Britain as a pioneer in the industrial revolution should not be behind and relient on foreign energy supplies.

[@ADHJkvsNgsMBbTQe]

It is sadly ironic that coal ash contains a considerable amount of n.o.r.m.

[@jackfanning7952]

It is sadly ironic that uranium mining exposes 1 million tons of 0.1% naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs) to the surface to produce 7 tons of U-235. The average reactor generates 10-30 tons of highly radioactive fission products and 50-70 tons of low and intermediate radioactive waste per fuel cycle. The hundreds of radioactive isotopes generated by nuclear fission are thousands to millions of times more dangerous than NORMs. Prior to 1939, there was no known location in the universe of fission products except in minute, trace amounts underground in the Oklo mine region in Gabon from naturally occurring fission 1.6-1.7 billion years ago. That is considerably different than NORMs in coal ash. Not saying coal ash is not a big problem. It is. That is why it is concerning that utilities that own nuclear reactors are also significantly invested in coal-fired plants. They are threatening that if states do not increase already massive subsidies to nuclear energy, they will burn more coal. See First Energy's $61 million bribe to Larry Householder to pass Ohio Bill #6 and the bribe to Mike Madigan in Illinois to support nukes.

[@markcoughlin8229]

Fascinating thanks. Will need to watch it a few times to take it all in, mind...

[@PMA65537]

I worked 1990-1997 on nuclear power - nearly all of it life extension for Magnox stations. I see this video includes photos of UK stations but back in the 1990s the site police would not let you take photos.

[@Furudal]

The EPR is a french design. Based in part on technology from Germany that was sold to france. Still you have to give it to the chinese. They build this french design faster than anyone in Europe.

[@Cathal7707]

Need an idea for another interesting niche industry? take a look at Ireland's medical device/ pharmaceutical sector, its surprisingly well developed and it comes down to more than just tax evasion.

[@maxmagnus777]

I enjoy this channel. Are there any other that have this calm, informative balanced approach ?

[@bganonimouse2754]

Its not really balanced though and he comes out in favour of nuclear towards the end. A more balanced approach would involve just one line or two about environmental concerns among the public and environmentalists that held back nuclear, or a quick mention of the impact of Chernobyl had upon the nuclear power industry in the UK. I'd say it was softly biased towards nuclear, but by using a broadly fact based approach.

[@maxmagnus777]

@@bganonimouse2754 Yeah, you gotta take a stand at some point. As for the balanced I mean not hating anything or anybody. Internet is filled with "China will go bust next week" videos.

[@bganonimouse2754]

@@maxmagnus777 I get where your coming from. Sensible videos on youtube are few and far between these days. People prefer clickbait and nonsensical and unqualified youtubers to give them 'information'.

[@maxmagnus777]

@@bganonimouse2754 well they are just trying to make some $$. Problem is that they get promoted more than balanced and knowledgeable ones.

[@bganonimouse2754]

@@maxmagnus777 True, but its also true that they get promoted more because sadly people want to read screaming headlines and simplistic ideas. A world of grey without many certainties is much more scary for them.

[@diegoantoniorosariopalomin9979]

I have been gaining interest in chip fabrication because of your awesome videos. It would be really cool if you covered alternatives to EUV. There may not or not be better options, but with China losing access to the tecnology, they are pouring resources on workarounds that can at least work for them

[@diegoantoniorosariopalomin9979]

some of the tecniques i think they are researching for the short term include nanoimprint litography and complementing duv with multiple electron beam lito

[@HalfUtilitarianist]

He made a video about it

[@diegoantoniorosariopalomin9979]

@@HalfUtilitarianist do you mean the video about the first chinese 7nm process?

[@HalfUtilitarianist]

@@diegoantoniorosariopalomin9979 yeah, and the one about immersion lithography. You ment something else?

[@diegoantoniorosariopalomin9979]

​@@HalfUtilitarianist 193nm Inmersion litography is not an alternative to euv. I am talking about the ongoing and future developement to replace it with nanoimprint or suplement it with hight troughput e beam lito or the like

[@ThePurplePassage]

As a Briton this was a frustrating video to watch! If only we'd have done what the French did: they started with a graphite moderated gas-cooled unenriched Uranium design like the Magnox designed for production of weapons grade plutonium, but unlike us they switched from gas-cooled to light-water pressurised water reactor designs. Crucially, the French standardised on a single type and then built it en masse, instead of building a few similar but slightly different versions that were tinkered with each time. This meant construction procedure could gain from experience and economies of scale, with the cost and construction time overruns and cost per plant could all fall. The result is that the typical cost of electricity in France was approximately in line with that of other countries. In such a capital intensive industry such as nuclear, this kind of standardisation and scale is utterly essential for costs to be controlled. It would also help to use government backed loans, since the government can borrow at the cheapest rate, and the interest ultimately gets passed on to the consumer in energy bills.

[@caav56]

Hell, AFAIK, the thing about Magnox programme is that it was getting *good* , with 1GWe (still on natural uranium) unit projects prepared to be built at barely more price than original units, with industry having ironed out the kinks and ready to mass-produce them like hot cakes... right before the programme was downscaled and then cancelled.

[@Spacedog79]

Great to see you doing more videos on nuclear! It's sad that the Magnox was such a poor design, difficult to decommission and it is the only reactor type that can't be maintained indefinitely because the graphite core develops cracks and there is no way it can be replaced.

[@cdl0]

Magnox was good for its time. The graphite did not suffer from cracking, and the cores decommissioned thus far have been found to still be in near perfect condition. These reactors were eventually forced to close because manufacturing of the fuel rods had long-previously ceased, so they simply ran out of fuel. The graphite cracks in AGRs cracks owing to their higher operating temperature. At higher temperatures, there is a competition between radiolytic oxidation of the graphite by the coolant, resulting in loss of material, and stresses caused by radiation-induced dimensional changes. Allowance for cracking was foreseen and included in the original design. A combination of inspections, testing, and engineering models determine the safe limit and when it has been reached. Further details are available in learned journals and publicly available reports.

[@greenbankrecords8863]

This is the fairest account I have seen of the commercial side of the industry. I joined CEGB at the start of 1990s as a nuclear engineer. I am pleased to see acknowledgement of the engineers that recovered the AGR performance over that period and secured their future life later on. I agree the early economic failings of the 1st generation were understandable, the 2nd generation failings less so. It feels the CEGBs choice of the AGRs was politically driven. That being said the final 'factory built' AGRs at Torness/Heysham 2 did prove themselves. The final failure was stopping at Sizewell B after going through 10 years of public enquiry and a successful commissioning. Interesting to hear Thatcher thought the same. Sizewell B has gone on to prove itself but in the meantime Britain has long since lost the technical authority to manage the design, building and operation of commercial NPPs. Hence why GBN can only ever be an 'arms length' body not a rebooted CEGB.

[@reneverstraeten]

EPR is a (European) French design. The first one built but not yet finished because of construction setbacks, is near Cherbourg in the coastal town of Flamanville. The Chinese built their first EPR a lot faster than the French, so it is already in their power grid.

[@Hamstray]

the first EPR built in Europe is Olkiluoto

[@reneverstraeten]

@@Hamstray You could be right on this. Both reactors in France and Finland started at about the same period 20 Years ago. The finn's had their share of building problems too.

[@krashd]

I am fairly sure the E in EPR even stands for "European", so there was a major research boo boo there.

[@petitpoucet8113]

@@krashd Its like saying ESA was totally European when the core project was built alone by France

[@hypercomms2001]

11:53 Hey Bradwell Nuclear Power Station!! I actually got a guided tour of the reactor in 1986, just after the Chernobyl incident, and so the CEGB was keen to show to the British public how safe their reactors were... Bloody amazing, although by that stage a lot of technology was really old....

[@garretthaney9134]

Meanwhile the US is still running 50+ year old BWR/PWR reactors...

It's a rugged design. It has common principles with marine propulsion. It was a successful commercial adventure

[@krashd]

@ I believe Garrett was placing emphasis on the "50+ year old" and not the type of reactors used.

[@caav56]

@@krashd They don't have graphite moderator that can crack, so they can run for all those years and remain safe enough to get extensions.

[@TheBleggh]

PWRs and BWRs are a much more successful design than the AGRs - that's why they're still around.

[@McRocket]

My God, Man!!! Do you not sleep? You put out these long, complex videos, every few days!?! ☮

[@calaphos]

As always, great episode on the topic. Is there a similar episode planned on the french and/or german nuclear energy industry? Especially since the french side is so unique internationally

[@hughlion1817]

You know the Frenchies get an unduly bad rap for rolling over during WW2 (they were in a severely weakened state post WW1, so really I'm not surprised they did) but the country has a very interesting story overall. They were among the top monke back in the age of sail.

[@loloaqici82qb4ipp]

@@hughlion1817 ?

[@luc_libv_verhaegen]

France is heading for an economic disaster with their nuclear plants. The major of their nuclear plants (51GW of 61GW installed) are nearing their already twice extended lifespan in around a decades time. If France were to replace all of them, they would need to start building 34EPRs right now (and those things take 10-15ys to build -- with planning and site preparation included). With an EPR costing between 11 and 16B EUR, this would cost between 374 and 544B EUR, or between 5.5k and 8k EUR per capita, over the next decade. That's the cost of building the damn things, not the cost of running them, and definitely not the cost of decommissioning. You can install an insane amount of solar, wind and battery storage for that money. When i did my napkin math right a few months, 70% more generation capacity (100B EUR for each of solar, on and offshore wind and biogas) than with nuclear, with 20h worth of storage included (when using 100usd per kWh as a future storage cost -- easily attainable with lifepo4). Despite the insane economics of the lot, Macron has stated that they will continue down the nuclear path. The plan is to install 6, yes, S-I-X, plants, and the location and everything still has to be decided. Not the 34 needed to replace capacity lost in a decades time, and with locations still needing to be decided, these new plants will not come online before 2037. My feeling is that Macron was being somewhat blackmailed by the french nuclear industry this summer, with half of their reactors down, and that he stated this to throw the french nuclear industry a bone. But i find it highly unrealistic that France will go and spend that kind of money for something that will no longer be needed by the time it arrives, it is at least highly illogical.

[@hughlion1817]

@@luc_libv_verhaegen solid fuel nuclear plants are, and always have been, an immoral perversion of nuclear energy. They exist to make the existing nuclear cartel money at the expense of absolutely everything else. By employing solid nuclear fuel rods, each nuclear plant that is constructed will require the fuel rods specific to it which can only be produced by the builders of the plant itself: a razor blade business model. back in the early days, when places like Oak Ridge Labs were exploring different methods of nuclear energy production, thorium based liquid fuel reactor designs showed much promise but were mysterious scrapped in favor of the solid fuel fast breeder reactors. The reason is simple: the razor blade business model creates captive customers once the plant is commissioned and online and given the sizeable cost of decommissioning, its all the more reason to just keep it fueled and producing energy. however liquid fuel reactors are what nuclear energy always should have been and inevitably will become especially considering such reactors can be minimally augemented to accept the waste from solid fuel reactors as a supplementary fuel source, thereby serving as a true nuclear waste disposal option. And one of the many benefits of producing fission chain reactions in a liquid medium, in this case a molten salt, the only actual "waste" that doesnt completely fission and decay away is plutonium 238 which you can easily extract from the reactor and sell for many happy dollars to anyone building space probes and rovers and such, thats the fuel source we use for RTGs! in solid fuel, the uranium pellets buildup xeon 135 as the uranium decays away in the fissioning process which eventually lowers the efficacy of the fuel until it is deemed "spent" lol! what a bunch of retards! except all of this solid fuel non sense was contrived so people could lock customers into perpetual payments so question about the renewable option you proposed. First off, they wouldnt and definitely shouldnt replace their nuclear plants even if they had the money, solid fuel is a horrible SICK DISGUSTING JOKE. but lets say they did and did as you say, theres some important considerations i think you might've missed. wasn't there a cost analysis published in a journal some years back that basically stated the most significant obstacle to the adoption of wind/solar wasn't the cost of technology itself, which is constantly improving and getting cheaper, but rather the cost of the peripheral requirements. the biggest one IIRC was locality requirements. solar needs land and wind needs both proper conditions and distance from population which increases the cost to build and in the case of wind guarantees an amount of energy lost to resistance that can't be reduced by simply locating your energy plant closer. The generators within wind turbines produce huge amounts of ultra high frequency EM radiation. affects mood, disrupts circadian rhythms causing chronic sleep loss and so on. already costly examples of whole towns in an uproar about such a thing affecting them. Also how many more of them do we need to offset their inconsistent power production? batteries can offset the luls without question but im referring to the fact that since we know wind/solar never operate at peak power production, how many more to produce enough power to equal the average power output of france's old nuclear plants?

[@luc_libv_verhaegen]

@@hughlion1817 If you do the math, it will quickly become clear that nuclear is done for. 1) Batteries are 500usd per kWh of storage (expensive NMC based tesla megapacks). The cost of LiFePO4 cells should be able to get down to 100usd per kWh (on the pack level). Negligible running costs, millisecond range dispatchability. 2) Onshore wind is about 1k per kW (capacity factor 20-30%). Negligible running costs. 3) (Large scale) solar is about 1k per kW (capacity factor for germany 11%, 13 avg for france) Negligible running costs. 4) Offshore wind is about 1k per kW (capacity factor 50-60%). Negligible running costs. 5) Biogas is about 5k per kW. Capacity factor is near 90, and fully dispatchable. If you really want to reach that power figure, you will need to add a feedstock to the waste streams, and then running costs will be significant. A Biogas plant CHP power plant has full ramp up/down measured in 10s of minutes, but only 35% efficiency. But the smarter move is to make biomethane and have existing methane power make power more efficiently: some go up to 60%, but 50% is a good number. 6) Nuclear: in the order of 10kusd per kW, with significant running costs, and massive decommissioning costs. Capacity factor is supposed to be 90% but France in 2021 showed that it is more like 70% (so not much better than off shore wind). Nuclear is slow to ramp up and ramp down, and only good for baseload. For each kW of nuclear (0.7kW with capacity factor), you could build: 5 kWh of batteries, (500 usd) 2 kW of solar (2k usd): 0.22kW with capacity factor. 2 kW of onshore wind (2k usd): 0.5kW with capacity factor 1 kW of offshore wind (3k usd): 0.5kW with capacity factor. 0.5kW of biogas (2.5k usd): 0.25kW with methane to electrical efficiency. 0.225kW with capacity factor. So with the mix above, for each kW of nuclear, you could build out double the actual renewable generating capacity, with the ability to store 3.5h of that electricity in batteries on top, and 225Wh of that generating capacity is long term storable. Scientific research in nuclear and fusion should not stop though. And reforming long term nuclear waste is a noble goal as we need to clean up the sins of the past. But nuclear has no role in economical or ecological power generation.

[@MrLaizard]

Britains only british designed reactor on continental land, located in Petten (Netherlands) is being replaced by the most modern design in the world provided by argentinian state-owned INVAP

[@derekp2674]

Wasn't there also a Magnox reactor in Italy?

[@pdsnpsnldlqnop3330]

The "special relationship" played a part. After Three Mile Island the Americans needed to get their plutonium from somewhere. Hence in Britain the nuclear programme that did not make any economic sense but did make plutonium. Where else do you think the plutonium in those thousands of bombs came from? I visited Berkeley as a kid and I could not believe how primitive and antiquated the control room and other areas were. For the money I expected it to be with some veneer of futuristic modernity. I had a similar shock after visiting a British Leyland press shop, to see what people did for a living when it was not beyond the wit of man to replace such work with a machine. Nowadays Berkeley is a school or something. The miners strike, the dash for gas and so much else went on that was to do with the Thatcher mindset. To this day Thatcher gets people riled up, either hating or loving her. There has not been a PM since with an actual ideology. They are just managers of the country with no big goals for change.

[@andrewfrancis3591]

The price of weapons grade plutonium was never high enough to reflect the cost of producing it. The balance was being paid by British electricity consumers, as with all individual taxation it hit the poorest.

[@vylbird8014]

I don't want a PM with an ideology. A good PM should be boring - they should stick to being a glorified administrator. A PM with a Vision for the country is a most dangerous creature. Ideology is what leads to a new PM immediately announcing massive tax cuts, huge spending increases, and an unsustainable level of borrowing all under the assurance that 'growth' will magically solve all the obvious problems.

[@pdsnpsnldlqnop3330]

@@vylbird8014 I am certainly not defending Thatcher, it is more of an observation. Her days are gone and her legacy is well understood. If a leader came along wanting people to live free from fear with clean streets, clean air and clear rivers, is that an ideology? If a leader came along wanting to part ways with our militarist past, is that an ideology? If a leader came along wanting three years of maternity pay and free, meritocratic education, is that an ideology?

[@andrewfrancis3591]

@@vylbird8014 Correct. The problem is that everyone is an expert. A degree in chemistry is not a speciality in planning and development.

[@kyle3838]

Wasn’t plutonium in the bombs, was uranium. Which is a byproduct of putting plutonium into a nuclear reactor. Also tritium is another byproduct of u add the Right products but needs a lot more plutonium to make than u need to make uranium.

[@bassbatterer]

Brilliant video.

[@sebastiangruenfeld141]

Very informative video as always. Could you please do a video on why South Korean nuclear energy is so cheap compared to nuclear in other countries?

[@NaumRusomarov]

it's not really that cheap maybe 20%-30% cheaper. the koreans also had a series of corruption scandals where substandard uncertified equipment was being put into nuclear plants to save on costs.

[@sethanix3969]

Unsolved spent fuel depot, no dismanteling fund, bad maintenance, corruption, and until now a big amount of luck would be my guess. (as did Japan - minus the luck)

[@edwardcardozo8325]

@@NaumRusomarov South Korea nuclear cost around 1800 dollars per MW installed compared to the US 5000

[@supa3ek]

South korean companies are experts at hiding cost, because they are run by corrupt families with ties to the government. The south korean economy is reported to be propped up by false numeration !

[@markbanash921]

I work in the carbon nanomaterials field and Windscale is a cautionary tale. We are restricted in their use in outer space because of the Wigner defects created by cosmic radiation in the same way that the fast neutrons did at Windscale.

[@張博倫-r2j]

You state at :50 the UK atomic bomb test was a great achievement, given the U.S didn't assist. You seem to imply that the U.K started with a clean paper and didn't participate in the Manhattan Project, when in fact that the Manhattan project had evolve out of the U.K.s Tube Alloys Project. The U.K. had provided the template with the MAUD report. Also the "British" tests were in reality Commonwealth tests run by the British, when you look at the nationalities of the key people/scientists/engineers involved in it.

[@bjornnjurling7008]

The picture at 24:46 is from the interm storage for spent nuclear fuel in Sweden.

[@kokofan50]

Had an argument with a guy about economics of nuclear in the UK the other day, and I’ve been wondering why the British are so bad at it. I guess the universe provides.

[@dominic.h.3363]

Have enough subscribers, one of them turns up dealing with the same topic right before the video goes live. It's not magic, it's just the large numbers.

[@kokofan50]

@@dominic.h.3363 But it doesn’t make it any less lucky for me.

[@maxhill7065]

I had a couple ideas previous to watching this, public fear due to Windscale being top of the list, I'll find out for sure once I'm done watching haha

[@housemana]

@@dominic.h.3363 yea idk what your take is lol

[@ThePhiphler]

Power generation is just the first thing you want civilian nuclear power for, next you want to use the high quality heat for industrial processes, and next the low quality heat for district heating.

[@mururoa7024]

How ironical. Imagine being so obsessed with "private does it better" and "small government" that you end up selling a strategic piece of your energy network to EDF, which is under control of... the French government! I wonder how it feels like for the Brits to be paying their energy bills to the French. The Monty Python couldn't have written a better sketch. 😂👍

[@dominicestebanrice7460]

Agreed. It's pathetic isn't it. If you want another laugh, look into who owns the privatized 'British' rail companies; British train passengers indirectly subsidize rail users all over Europe by being charged ticket prices that would cause riots in France or Italy. The extra money the companies make from the British rail commuter means they can hold prices down in their home country!

[@-DSet]

25:00 So just as the plants start turning a profit they are privatized..

[@operationroot1816]

Great video as usual, BUT 11 mins in shouldn't those prices be per MWh rather than per kW? Assuming you are talking about levelized generating costs. Or is this the cost per kW name plate generating capacity as constructed? Assuming those were 1970s GBP for the cost basis? Thanks for clarifying if you read this, and keep up the great work. Most things I know about semiconductor manufacturing I learned from you ;)

[@raypitts4880]

yes iv just got here thinking the same wow 160 for a 1000 watts m watts only cost 20-30 p per 1000 now 22

[@snuscaboose1942]

Smart of the British to adopt the Chinese Taishun design. Especially after the Taishun reactor was shutdown in July 2021 due to radiation leaks detected in Japan and the US, re-opened in August 2022.

[@0deepak]

You should make a video on desalination.

[@rickjamesbiatchh]

I agree

[@zxil6]

Already did.

[@invertXtrogdor]

He already did

[@A_p_T53040]

He has already.

[@PaulJurczak]

@10:56 Electricity generation cost has to be expressed as the cost of energy, e.g. GBP/kWh, GBP/MWh, etc. It doesn't make any sense as the cost of power, as presented in your video.

[@sethanix3969]

There are a lot of things in this vide that make no sense because they are missing a lot of context. His videos on semiconductor and big corpos seem a lot better researched than his take on nuclear...

[@5c0ttyd]

10:59 you are using units of power (kilowatt) where you should be using units of energy, which for the price you are showing, should probably be MWh / Megawatt hours

[@raypitts4880]

same here

[@secondwave1111]

Photo at 2:12 is Joint European Torus at Culham, not UKAEA at Rutherford Appleton

[@AgentSmith911]

I wonder if a country like France has an advantage over the rest of Europe since they've got a large majority of electricity being sourced from nuclear. With a transition to low carbon economy and EV adoption, it might be easier for France, as they don't produce any oil or gas.

[@Twiggy163]

It also sets up a grid to be inflexible. Nuclear powerplants are slow to regulate, so they're less than ideal to process peaks and sags in powerdraw. When people get home in their EV en mass, that peak in power consumption can't be satisfied by nuclear powerplants because they take time to increase power production. So, like other nations, France too will need a pretty diverse way of generating power.

France began a transition from carbon sources in the 1960s. The peak coal was reached in the 1950s, and it wasn't very high (mire coal was extracted in Britain in the 1970s than in France at its peak). The french gas reserves are not comparable with the ones of the north sea (Lacq exists but it's small). When the oil shock happened, all was already put in place when the Messmer plan ordered all of the reactors that are running today.

@@Twiggy163 France hadn't any choice about being diverse. It was either go nuclear and hydro, or import gas and coal from abroad.

[@Twiggy163]

@ I'm not criticising France going with nuclear power. I think nuclear powerplants are a good choice. Just saying they're slow to regulate.

[@lawrencebishton9071]

Chasing 1 man round and torturing him is no way to carry on unless your trying to kill him

[@enthros5116]

looks like same old story with that rail system? maybe so or maybe no??

[@raypitts4880]

which one

[@BaKer312213]

not sure about the plutonium sell-on... I will need to check my network

[@keithammleter3824]

So, Britain, essentially bankrupt after World War 2 and needing to export something, by government meddling came up with a nuclear power station design that nobody would want. Yep, that sounds like Britain all right. They did the same with their lame aircraft industry created by a forced merger of various companies, some ok, some terrible, resulting in such things as the Bristol Brabazon, an airliner for which no market existed, and the BAC TSR-2, which was incapable of performing a mission. They did the same with their telecommunications industry - the government owned BT forcing manufacturers to make a telephone exchange (Highgate Wood type) nobody wanted even if it worked ok, which it didn't. And when their electronics semiconductor industry had trouble competing with the US, their government decided to subsidize - not Mullard, who were the most technology capable, well run, and very nearly could make it on their own, because they were foreign owned (by Philips). They subsidised the ones that had no hope, so money down the drain. The common problem in all this is the British Govt tradition of appointing committees to answer difficult questions. Expert committees are in principle good, because elected politicians cannot be knowledgeable of all things. But what they do in Britain is appoint old university professors and judges to chair and sit on their committees - these are the worst types to get a grip on commercial issues.

[@agt155]

Britain has a tradition of not state subsidising failing industries - Europe could learn a thing or two.

[@keithammleter3824]

@@agt155 : You must be joking. That's exactly what Britain has repeatedly done - ever since WW2. Sometimes they did by cash handout, sometimes by nationalising, and sometimes by State-owned enterprises eg RAF, BPO, awarding propping-up type contracts. They have a habit of subsidizing the most lame, as in the examples I gave in my earlier post. The most famous of the misguided British subsidising of lame industries was the spending of 1.5 billion pounds on developing most of the Concorde airliner. The funniest thing was the Transputer. When all the American semiconductor firms came out with microprocessor chips in the late 1970's, the remaining Britain based manufacturers saw that they had no hope of competing, and their market would die. So the British Govt decided to step in and subsidize. The cash was used to design a computer chip - called the Transputer. It was actually a clever design, but not likely to sell well as it was very different. So the government decided to have it made by contract. The lowest price tender was from an American company. So, British taxpayer's money was used to have a product, that practically nobody wanted, made in the USA - no benefit to Britain at all, except for a handful of boffins.

[@krashd]

@@keithammleter3824 If our market died why are there more British-designed processors in existence than any other at around 3:1? The thing you used to type this likely contains one.

[@keithammleter3824]

@@krashd :The "processor" you are thinking of is no doubt the ARM. The ARM company is a design house, which sells to chip makers and others the VHDL and instruction set license, essentially they sell the modern computer equivalent of a set of drawings for a mechanical machine. The actual implementations are made by other (non British) manufacturers. The device I typed this on is a Chinese-made laptop, which has an Intel processor and GPU, probably made by TSMC in Taiwan. I could have used my mobile, which has a Korean-made processor that is a not an ARM. The reason why the number of processors using the ARM design is so high, is not because it is used in the PC and personal device field, it is used in embedded controls - for example your bread maker, your coffee machine, microwave oven, washing machine may have an ARM design processor. More likely an Intel derivative though. The existence of the ARM company in Britain, although very successful, provides a minute amount of employment for Britons, whereas their car industry used to employ vast numbers, who paid, collectively, vast amounts of income tax. You know perfectly well Britain lost its' markets. Before WW2 there were ships carrying British made goods of all kinds, cars, planes, electronic parts, knives, forks, plates etc etc to the British Commonwealth countries and returning carrying wheat, wool, cotton, etc etc. Not any more.

[@ronalddavis]

yes but the old university professor went to cambrige.hes "one of us"" old boy.

[@TurboTimsWorld]

I have driven the Magnox scammell FLM 718C truck, just saying they would not let us have the trailer but we had the blue prints for it

[@JamesR1986]

It's wild that 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher was expressing concern about global warming, yet if you talk to your average Republican official, best case scenario, you'll get a "well I haven't done enough research on the topic"

[@mynameisjoejeans]

Thatcher didn’t care about climate change. Yeah she gave a speech about it in 1988, but so did many politicians at the time, without translating into action, she also wrote extensively about the problem of ‘climate dogma’ on the left in later years. It didn’t affect her policies of destroying our domestic manufacturing and coal base, meaning that they both had to be imported, with added environmental and economic costs; it didn’t affect her destruction of cheap public transport in favour of personal cars etc etc. Everyone is an environmentalist when they don’t need to do anything to back it up. She was also possibly the worst leader we’ve ever had in climate issues.

[@kerriwilson7732]

Thatcher didn't kill British manufacturing or coal That's pretending the undertaker is guilty of murder

[@mynameisjoejeans]

​@@kerriwilson7732 ofc she didnt single handedly destroy those industries. But she did epitomize the rationale that caused their decline, and enacted more policies securing their death than any other single leader. Britain's problems with promoting industry development goes right back to the empire and captive markets, but the free market fundamentalism that they encouraged reached its logical conclusion with Thatcher (and Truss lol). Thatcher made a concerted effort to destroy organised labour, which was most concentrated in those two industries - those recurring class divisions were what largely led to the downfall of british manufacturing and she stoked them more than anyone else, and struck the final blow.

[@kenoliver8913]

This is a typical "conservative" rewrite of history. Thatcher was the main driver in the foundation of the IPCC at the UN. Funnily enough, there was once a time when conservatism included a concern for conserving things, including the planet. And in those days it was the LEFT (especially the New Left - think hippies) which was often anti-science - a reversal of today. It is a terrible tragedy for the planet that commonsense concern about AGW has became a tribal marker for which side of politics you are on; who you vote for determines your beliefs about it rather than your beliefs determining who you vote for.

[@superskrub4209]

Fun fact: Hinkley Point C is currently the 2nd most expensive building in the world, at about 20 Burj Khalifas

[@nvelsen1975]

So Arabs using slave labour and skimping out on even adding sewers, can get a useless thing done cheaper than an extremely properly built sustainable power station?

[@WooShell]

French nuclear energy isn't going that well recently.. with EDF being about 60B$ in debt, the government considering renationalising it, half of their 60+ plants out of commission due to lack of maintenance, and France importing lots of expensive gas power from other countries...

[@CoreyChambersLA]

Nuclear energy did not fail. U.K. energy policy failed.