Actually, I do have relations who report directly to Gordon Brown and Darling!- but I am the wicked uncle!:-)

A couple of questions...

Why would Sarkozy and France need or want a partnership with GB in the expansion of sales of nuclear power plants, since France has a most admirable record of safe nuclear power construction and operation?

Does anyone think this joint venture will turn out better than the SST (super-sonic transport), a boondoggle that even the wastrel US Government avoided?

"Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change."

Everywhere except Iran and any other muslim majority country that is.

The UK and France have already co-operated in exporting nuclear plant. After the 1956 Israeli invasion of Egypt, France supplied Israeli with the plant and the UK supplied the moderator -heavy water. Under the « atoms for peace » programme, Israel promised not to use the reactor for weapons production. Obviuosly the Israelis have kept their promise. Otherwise UK and France are obliged under international law to demand the return of the equipment and the heavy water.

Of course, it is well known that Gordon Brown's brother is employed by the French nuclear industry.

Great news about the Normandy plant, Alan!

I am less concerned than I was about Britain's ability to carry out a build, as reality finally seems to be dawning on the British establishment, as they are now talking about a 'partnership' with France.

There is no doubt in my mind as to whom will be very much the senior partner in this! - and that is no bad thing as the French have run consistently the most successful nuclear industry in the world, whereas the British industry has a long history of incompetence.

The French did their build in around 17 years, and at the start had nowhere near as developed an industry as they now have.

Another 18 possible sites have been designated in the UK, and a lot of the sites on the map also are OK for a single reactor, although the four most favourable can handle double reactors.

If gas prices go up as far as we think then this should rapidly become a rolling program of reactor builds, and the French would appear to have the capability to carry it out.

Although I agree with you about the desirability of wind turbine builds, sites on land are limited, certainly in England as opposed to the UK, and it now seems that off-shore wind is reckoned to cost around THREE times the price of the same actual average hourly output from nuclear - not the mere two times that I suggested to some controversy here! - in my view at those costs not a lot of it is likely to happen.

Dinorwig, the largest pumped storage scheme in the UK (and Europe for that matter) is designed to restart the grid from a black start. It can go from cold to 1.7GW in two minutes. Spun up it can achieve full power in 20 seconds. However it only has 9GWh of storage, about 5 minutes of peak demand in the UK. We will need a lot more storage than that if we actually achieve the 33GW rated power of wind turbines by 2020 the government hopes for. Denmark's experience is that it is not that rare for the total wind power output across the country to drop by half in twenty minutes. Either we have to have a lot more storage or we need a lot of gas turbines on standby.

We could back pump some of the existing hydro plants but there would be enormous public resistance to a flooding anymore mountain tops and there are not that many to flood. Given that such mountains as are suitable are in Wales or Scotland and the main user of electricity is England it would risk violent reaction to try and flood them.

Our best hope is that the Severn barrage, now coming back into political favour, will be built as a two basin system. This could provide up to 50GWh per day of stored power. This amount of stored power, build for fast control so that it could act as a balancing power source, would allow the hoped for wind power to be integrated into the grid.

I'm not quite sure what you are calling geothermal there, Alan.

Britain has fairly limited resources of geothermal, unless you go all the way to hot dry rock technology.

That is unless you are talking about geothermal heat pumps, which you don't really need in the British climate, the latest air heat pumps would do fine.

To give an idea of the figures at the moment, minimum electric demand is around 20GW, peak 75GW.

But you have to add natural gas burnt in combination boilers in the houses to that, which heats all but around 5 million of Britain's 24 million homes.

And then of course there is transport.

As against that efficiencies of things like insulation are very poor.

At a guess, given much better insulation and the use of things like heat pumps, and taking into account that electricity for transport is a lot more efficient than liquid fuels, at least from the fuel economy POV, you might need something between 100-150GW of power for the society, using figures appropriate to nuclear, where you would in such a society probably run them day and night, and produce hydrogen or charge up electric cars overnight for the surplus off peak.

I don't really go in for trying to sort out way ahead what the total energy mix should be - costs and availabilities and technologies can change too much - for instance, algae for fuel, possibly running on solar power and produced in the hot areas of the world would falsify any projections.

It is possible though to describe a system that we know would work at a fairly acceptable cost.

It might consist of perhaps 70-90 1.6GW reactors, around 10-30 more than France at the moment although more powerful.

That would be 'stretched' by the installation of proper insulation and air heat pumps throughout, giving you a multiplier of at least 2.6 for heating.

Wind power might be useful in the UK for peak load as it tracks well.

Other resources which might figure would include tidal power, with perhaps a 10GW resource available, depending on costs.

Hot dry rock geothermal would be useful if it proves practical in limited areas such as the South-West.

If high altitude wind proves practical then it should be so cheap that most other resources would not be worth exploiting.

In short, I would use whatever works at some sort of reasonable cost at the time.

As we have already discussed though, getting through the short term in the UK will be the really tricky part, and shortages seem inevitable. Wind turbines will help here as they have a short build time.

The Government needs to start managing energy in a statist fashion, instead of relying on laissez-faire.

Britain could up the fraction they get from nuclear by instituting dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing is also needed for wind and solar. Plus, dynamic pricing will provide the incentive needed to create hydro storage for electric power.

How hard would it be to develop a system that could dump electricity during a network failure so that nukes wouldn't need to go thru the days of delay for getting started up again you've noted after power failures and Scrams?

Two 1.65 GW EPR nukes (made by Areva),

Alan