You could probably standardise the power plants, but I'm guessing that spreading the love was only part of the reason 5 firms built them, I think that probably no single British firm could handle pumping out that many power plants. The reactors themselves are bound to change as new things are learnt.
AHC/WI: Large Commonwealth Civilian Nuclear Program
- Thread starter Delta Force
- Start date
Delta Force
Banned
The British government was encouraging industry consolidation in aerospace and shipbuilding. Why not a British Framatome/Areva?
Delta Force
Banned
I thought there were five architect-engineer firms that built the Magnox reactors, but looking into it things are even more complicated. Some British nuclear reactors had nearly as many contractors as the entire United States nuclear industry! Why weren't major firms such as Vickers, General Electric Company (no relation to General Electric ), English Electric, and Parsons at least the lead contractors with a role akin to the architect-engineer firms that built most of the nuclear reactors in the United States?
They kind-of were, in that the major electrical engineering companies headed up the consortia, then brought in boilermakers, civil engineers and so forth as they saw fit. The British government has an unhealthy love of single-purpose consortia organised for special jobs.
The absence of Vickers from the nuclear power programme is interesting, but I suspect that their work with Rolls-Royce on Admiralty reactors explains their absence. And, ironically, why they'd probably be up there with English Electric and GEC as one of the few competent contractors.
Uranium is at least 2 million times more energy dense than oil and thorium is about as common as lead. There is plenty of both in the US. The other places are cheaper but that doesn't mean the US (and virtually everywhere else for that matter) doesn't have enough uranium and thorium to easily run their entire economies.
What you wind up with a more developed nuclear power industry is cheaper energy, increased wealth and far less co2. Solar and wind aren't going to cut it folks. If you want a non-fossil fuel economy you need to go nuclear. There is no other substitute in the real world.
Yep, base load power generates waste, you either pump it into the sky and heat up the atmosphere or put it into drums and bury it hoping it doesn't leak. AT least with nuclear power you know where the waste is.
And if you reprocess it like the French you wind up with very little waste anyways. Also when you bury it, you can bury in the middle of nowhere well below the waterline. If you bury it a half mile under the waterline in the middle of the desert and it leaks, who cares? It isn't going to do anything.
Delta Force
Banned
Why wasn't there a consortium for the entire nuclear energy program? You're never going to gain economies of scale if you have different groups building designs that share only a core and a few characteristics in common.
Delta Force
Banned
It took a few decades for uranium's abundance to be recognized. Well into the early to mid-1970s many still thought there were only a few decade's worth of reserves remaining. That's why everyone rushed to develop breeder reactors and reprocessing instead of improving power reactors. Present reserves are sufficient until the 2070s at current levels of consumption, and available reserves of uranium should actually increase logarithmically as prices increase. It would also improve the economics of reprocessing and breeder reactors. Because fuel is so inexpensive it wouldn't harm the economics of nuclear power much at all.
The ideal solution would be to store the fuel in a storage/retrieval facility until reprocessing is economical. 95% of nuclear "waste" is fuel, and that could be reprocessed in the future at a significant savings.
Nuclear energy not only generates no air pollution or GHG emissions, but it is very heavily regulated and covers all of its externalities. When you purchase nuclear energy, you are paying not just for that energy but also for disposal of the waste, decommissioning costs that will return the site to green field status, and insurance in case an incident should occur. This is something that no other industry has to pay, and nuclear energy is still competitive under some circumstances while paying for all of its externalities.
At least in the United States, this doesn't exist for any other source of energy. Dam failure insurance is not required, and often the public pays for them through government or through the pockets of those impacted. The externalities of fossil fuels can't even be clearly seen, but it's estimated to be tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives per year in the United States alone, and fossil fuel emissions are regulated. Internationally it's estimated the impacts might be in the hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
They were looking for competition, not economies of scale, and British industrial policy at the time generally favoured spreading work out evenly across an entire industry. The theory didn't quite match up to reality of course; of the five consortia, only two were any good, and by the time that was realised there was barely enough work for one.
Delta Force
Banned
Wasn't the British government encouraging consolidation of the defense industry around the time Magnox started though?
I actually wrote a version of this the other day only for the browser to crash when I clicked Preview Post and lose everything so hopefully this one works.
The Atomic Energy Authority much like the Central Electricity Generating Board were creations of their time. Whilst technically answerable to the relevant Ministers they effectively operated as super Quangos headed members of the great and the good, back when the term was still used seriously, made up of industrialists or leaders who had run large programmes during WWII and it was generally understood to be bad form for Ministers to actually try and influence them so that their heads were left to get on with things by themselves. Sir Bernard Lovell makes a passing mention of the atmosphere of the period in one of his histories of the Jodrell Bank observatory in that scientists and scientific projects were held in very high standing in large part thanks to the very public contributions science and scientists made to helping win WWII. Things which nowadays would take years to get approved, if you could even get a comparable level of funding, were organised and implemented in surprisingly short timeframes.
Pretty much, it seems to have come out of that it was a brand new field with little previous knowledge so they thought that multiple firms were likely to encourage creativity and that the competition between them would help keep costs down. Of course they then proceeded to completely bugger the whole thing up by instituting a Buggins' turn scheme of spreading the available work around to try and give each of the groups a minimum amount of work to keep from going out of business and lost any of the advantages the original scheme might have brought.
Delta Force
Banned
That's happened to me a few times.
Even compared to the United States Atomic Energy Commission though, the Atomic Energy Authority seems to have had massive power.
There wasn't really any actual innovation in the approach though, since everyone was building Magnox type reactors. It would have made more sense to just have a few companies or one large consortium build a standardized design, or allow multiple companies to build many different designs. The United States Atomic Energy Commission funded the Power Reactor Demonstration Program and other initiatives that did a lot more exploration of various reactor types and ways of doing things. That allowed for more innovation, other than different ways of essentially building the same design.
I'm not sure about the Magnox era, but by the time the AGR came along tenders were invited that allowed alternative reactor designs. In particular, a BWR was a very strong contender for Hunterston B. Of course, the British reactor was always chosen - in the cases where the SGHWR was bid, the CEGB's preferred reactor won over the UKAEA's preferred reactor.
Archibald
Banned
For many years now you have been starting a number of threads on many, very different (always cool) subjects. I really, really want to see the TL you may write from all this material. Please do it !!
Delta Force
Banned
How did they decide which reactor to build? Shouldn't the UK AEA have had the most clout in making decisions about nuclear energy, seeing as it was literally the Atomic Energy Authority?
In a few months I should be finished with the requirements of academic writing and free to do what I want.
Oh don't get me wrong, it was a complete mess - for all of the reasoning they had they then felt unable to let any of them go out of business and spread the work too thinly. I think your idea of having English Electric and GEC, assuming that Vickers was busy carrying out work for the Admiralty, as central project managers has a lot to recommend it. Britain had a habit of having too many firms in an industry - aerospace, computers, automotive manufacturing, shipbuilding etc. - that meant they were too small and the markets too fragmented to compete with larger, often foreign, companies. That's why I've generally advocated that they should have gone for what I usually dub a 'twins' strategy - encourage consolidation in the various industries so that you end up with a pair of large companies - e.g. Hawker Siddeley and BAC, EELM and ICT, Leyland and BMC etc. - that are better positioned yet doesn't leave you with a monopoly situation and encourages competition.
Standardisation would probably have helped as well. Considering the links they had early on I've sometimes wondered what might have happened had the UK and Canada maintained closer nuclear industry links. With hindsight helping contribute to the partnership that eventually developed the CANDU reactors would have been a smart move as a potential back-up/alternative.
However the Central Electricity Generating Board was the sole customer which put them in a pretty powerful position. It's like I think I mentioned earlier, you had the clash of between groups such as the UK Atomic Energy Authority that were inclined towards new and interesting reactor ideas whilst the CEGB was solely interested in the most efficient and cheapest to run models.
Delta Force
Banned
France could have been an interesting country to partner with too, especially around/after 1956. Magnox and the UNGG were very similar and essentially convergently evolved designs. Apparently the British even referred to the French reactors as Magnox type in documents.
Did the UK AEA have any funds it could have used to fully or partially pay for the CEGB to do innovative things? In the United States the Atomic Energy Commission had a cap on how much power its reactors could produce without having a private partner, and due to various political issues that meant a lot of test and military reactors never produced power. However, it seems the UK AEA could have built a reactor using its research budget and then gotten the CEGB involved by pointing out that they could produce power quite inexpensively if they then added turbines to the reactor. That's the arrangement used for the only dual purpose reactor built in the United States, the N-Reactor at Hanford. The Atomic Energy Agency owned the reactor, while the Washington Public Power Supply System owned the turbines.
WPPSS is a nuclear energy story in its own right (it's pronounced "whoops").
The UKAEA did have power-producing research reactors - the Windscale AGR, both fast reactors, and the SGHWR at Winfrith were all connected to the grid, as well as the plutonium production reactors at Chapelcross and Calder Hall - the latter was hailed as the world's first nuclear power station! Grudgingly, the CEGB even agreed to allow the UKAEA to produce electricity from a commercial-scale (1000-1320 MWe per reactor, probably a twin-reactor plant) fast reactor, but flatly refused to put up any money or provide any land for it.
The UKAEA had responsibility for R&D and the fuel cycle, as well as nuclear weapons, but the power stations themselves were the CEGB's responsibility. Or the SSEB or NSHEB, since Scotland insists on being different. The CEGB was actually a very well run technocracy, and tried to make informed decisions on cost and technical grounds; usually, it got it right. In the case of Dungeness B, the AGR won by a nose over the BWR because of its' theoretical on-load refuelling capability. That turned out never to work properly, and in hindsight the BWR would have been more cost effective, but there was no way to know that at the time. Arguably, it could have been made to work if the technical organisation had been better.