Think it's Time to Start Drilling

[MissAustenMadeAQuilt]

Oil price rising fast which means energy, food, petrol costs, everything will rocket fast and jobs will be lost.

We have our own oil in our own back yard, which would give us protection.

AIBU to think we should grant oil licences and get drilling.

If not we're going to reach Net Zero a lot faster than planned and it ain't going to be pretty.

That is what I meant: "no new licences", not that old licences were rescinded. Drilling under old licences can continue, as can types of contiguous drilling. Sorry if unclear. The point stands that failing to develop gas on climate grounds, in favour of new wind+storage, is a very expensive way to reach net zero. Because much more for the environment could be done for the same cost with a different policy, environmentalists who care about outcomes should support a change of policy.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_mix_in_France.svg#/media/File:Energy_mix_in_France.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg#/media/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg

France Land Area : About 630,000 km2

England and Wales Land Area (as Scotland will probably not let us build any plants) : About 150,000 km2.

France gets about 30% of its power from 18 plants, so the guess that we would need 32 3.2GW HPCs to fully decarbonise doesn't look too far out (we could probably mitigate this with some renewables with a consequent effect on the baseload capability).

The two countries populations/power requirements are comparable. So we would need to build the same number of plants in 1/4 of the space. Nuclear plants of course have to go where there is significant water supply. In this country that means the coast. I could do a map with 32 red dots on it showing what the UK would look like with this number of plants, but I guess you would get the picture.

Building 32 plants. At the moment it is taking us about 10 years per plant. Even if we could double that to 5 years per plant it is still going to take 150 years to build them all.

These plants create a lot of waste. Yes the high level waste is a relatively small component of that, but the medium and low level waste also needs to be handled very carefully and stored somewhere.

Geological depositories are expensive and risky. See this and the mess that was created :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

The TLDR is that converting to nuclear from fossil fuels is either going to take a long time or be hugely expensive. Probably both. The faster we try to do it, the even more expensive it is going to get.

It's a huge problem if we intend to decarbonise, which is made even worse by the rate at which we are a) not building plants and b) not building enough of any infrastructure to replace fossil fuels, or c) ramping down fossil fuels in a more sustainable way than currently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

Interesting article on Uranium mining, where it comes from and whether we would be able to get enough Uranium to fuel these monster plants into the future.

Nuclear power plants are the answer - people don’t want to hear that though!

The U.K. going green isn’t going to change anything.
Have you visited spacious countries like the US or Australia. Everyone needs a car as everything is so spaced out- cycling to bus stops is not an option .Distances are huge. You barely get buses even in cities.
While we destroy our economy they aren’t going to change for decades. Why would they, they have cheap oil and gas. We might heat our little homes with air source heat pumps - but that will hardly work where winter temps are -16C.
We are being sold a pup and all the subsidies going to Chinese wind turbine builders aren’t going to our nhs or welfare payments

Yep - my siblings in Oz wet themselves laughing at the UK going green - how much sun do they have and solar is really not even considered as viable!!

Yes, Australia is doing very well out of shipping millions of tons of coal to China for their power stations.

The Scottish gov was going to ban coal use for homes but then couldn’t because of the handful of people not on mains gas who relied on it for heating - I mean why would you effing bother - but people fall for this environmental bs.

Australia is one of the leading adopters of solar power, it has over 40GW of installed power. It has the highest uptake of domestic and commercial rooftop solar of pretty much any country in ther world. The pavillion at the Adelaide Showground is literally classed as a power station due to the 1GW of panels on the roof.

As far as the UK is concerned, it's a cloudy overcast day here and we are still producing 5% of our load from solar, and 50% overall from renewables (mostly wind).

It's always interesting to keep an eye on the UK's power generation, and an eye opener for those who have been led to believe that renewables do not contribute significantly to the UK power supply using this dashboard: https://grid.iamkate.com/