Man and Atom

This 1998 booklet [PDF, 18 MB] gives the impression that it was meant to accompany a video presentation, and we should very much like to know if that was so, and if so, whether anyone can track down the video.

The really odd part is at the back. The last few pages are dedicated to information about a specific power plant, leading us to believe that the booklet was produced in several versions, perhaps for distribution at the visitor centers of different power plants. But the information at the end of this booklet about nuclear power is about a hydro station!

It must be explained that the only inland nuclear power station in Britain was Trawsfynydd in North Wales, a 550 MW station which started up in 1965 and operated until 1991 — that is, it shut down years before this booklet was issued. Trawsfynydd nuclear station used for cooling the lake created in the 1920s to feed the 30 MW Maentwrog hydro station, which was thereafter operated as an auxiliary of the nuclear plant. And so the data pages of this booklet refer to Maentwrog, which is currently operated by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

This booklet came to us in pretty bad shape, with serious water damage.

From a 1980 pamphlet advertising the Central Electricity Generating Board’s speakers–bureau service and power–plant tours.

We would very much like to get our hands on the booklets and wall charts mentioned in this booklet.

Oldbury–on–Severn (?), Trawsfynydd, and Sizewell A nuclear power stations.

Blackpool again? My recent visit to a Nuklearia meetup, a degree of comeuppance for Gerhard Schröder, various recent industrial accidents, performance–enhancing drugs in sport, and an answer to a question from SDFer jlamothe about the possibilities of nuclear power for the Yukon Territory.

Under the conditions of the present day, the training regimens for champion athletes would kill or cripple most people. Indeed, it may be said that what makes a champion athlete these days is some physiological quirk which allows a person to survive that kind of training. Thousands break down under the strain, for every one who reaches the highest level of competition.

Things were different a century or so ago, before the “three–minute mile” and the “Fosbury flop”. But today, given that what are termed “performance–enhancing drugs” do not diminish, but rather increase the strain on the organism, there is room for doubt that the highest performance achievable with drugs is much different from that without. The main thing that the drugs can do is make the training go faster, making it even more debilitating.

Recent events in Romania once again lead us to question the notion of “economic efficiency”. Does it really make sense to re–define what we consider good to match the outcome of a theory? Also, further travel plans, and a stab at re–formatting the Man and Atom Briefing Book.

Here is the question that must be answered : is the purpose of an electric power system to supply consumers with reliable, reasonably–priced energy to support their activities, many of which are profit–making, while others are socially important in other ways? Or is it to provide arbitrageurs with an opportunity to skim off wealth?

If your answer is the latter, then the combination of generation which is not correlated with demand, auction pricing, and time–shifting storage is practically ideal. If your answer is the former, however, then the central–station utility model of vertically–integrated supply systems with rolled–in pricing has a great deal more going for it.

The genesis of the electricity–market model lies in the 1970s, when economists in the USA took great offense to the fact that the unit cost of generating electricity had monotonically declined since central–station power was first introduced nearly a hundred years before. This could not possibly continue, they said, and therefore pricing the kilowatt–hour based on the average cost of generation was inefficient and even unjust. Yes, so far, new generating units added to power systems had consistenly supplied power at a cost lower than the average, but when that stopped being true, the utility business model would collapse.

They also saw the very large investments being made in large generating units (to produce power at the lowest cost), distribution systems (to supply plenty of power to all consumers), and transmission and intertie systems (to improve both generator loading and system reliability), and said that these must be inefficient and a wrong allocation of resources. Pricing electricity according to the marginal rather than the average cost of supply, the cost of the last unit generated to meet the demand, would discourage wasteful and unnecessary electrification and therefore curtail these investments.

The fact that electrification was consistently associated with a more efficient use of primary energy, and greater productivity and profitability in industry, was irrelevant to these theoreticians. Likewise they either did not believe that engineers were prepared to continue driving down the cost of the kWh, or they simply did not care. And so their prophecy became self–fulfilling, because continuing to lower the cost of power depended on very large unit investments in large nuclear central stations, and particularly in breeder reactors (which virtually eliminate the resource cost of fuel, leaving only the processing and fabrication costs, which can be reduced with improved technology and larger scale), which vertically–integrated utilities could make, but generating companies in power markets could not.

Now, you may wonder how this was sold to the public. To a great extent, it required resentment of the electricity monopolies, which in the USA was stirred up by many of the investor–owned utilities themselves (notably PG&E) in their struggle against public power in the 1950s and 1960s, and stigmatizing nuclear central stations creations of scientific hubris. And then all it took was the promise of turning the tables by getting the power company to pay you for kilowatt–hours generated with rooftop solar or a backyard wind machine or whatever (in Germany, the case of a farmer who wanted to connect his tiny hydro dam to the grid was massively publicized), to spark the cupidity of the many people who cannot tell the difference between profiting because everyone is doing better, and profiting at the expense of one’s neighbour.