On 11/5/2016 8:05 AM, harry wrote:
This bears a look at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanc...eactor#History

The lies about nuclear power economics that only came out when they were appraised for privatisation.

Nuclear power has a whole history of lies about it's true costs.
And have seen the end of this by a long chalk.


"The CEGB conducted a detailed economic appraisal of the competing
designs and concluded that the AGR proposed for Dungeness B would
generate the cheapest electricity, cheaper than any of the rival designs
and the best coal-fired stations".

Except, of course, that the CEGB was told by its masters which answer to
chose. It was public knowledge *at the time* that calcs had to be
presented to the third decimal place before the "edge" over PWR was
apparent. No engineer would claim that such figures were "real". And of
course the commercial AGR was a very large extrapolation from the
Windscale prototype.

CEGB chairman Arthur (megawatts) Hawkins said later of Dungeness B words
to the effect that "This was a mistake we must never make again".

What matters at the end of the day is not the forecasts and the
rhetoric, but the out-turn costs.

Magnox was never expected to be commercially competitive, but it turned
out to be very much so, in part because inflation discounted the capital
costs, and partly because of the long lives achieved.

I have not seen an equivalent calculation for the AGRs, but the people
running EDF are not stupid (and no longer under UK government dictat),
they are investing significantly in life extension safety cases because
they are confident of making money out of current and future generation.

Going back to privatisation, potential investors in National Power
played hardball with the government over nuclear because they were not
just greedy, they were *very* greedy. The last CEGB chairman, Gil
Blackman, said that Cecil Parkinson and the civil servants ran rings
around the CEGB. Well, the bankers ran rings around the Tories.

And, of course, admittedly after a lot of hard work by Nuclear Electric,
the AGR fleet *was* privatised.