Could every UK town have a small nuclear reactor?

Small modular reactors [credit: ANS Nuclear Cafe]

Climate News Network reports on a possible alternative to the mega-sized nuclear plants of the last century.

The nuclear industry sees the UK as a springboard for its plans to expand in the next 20 years, especially as a pioneer in the deployment of a new breed of small reactors.

Despite the UK referendum vote to leave the European Union, the industry is confident that many small reactors will be built in Britain and that the country will become a showcase for the industry and an exporter of the technology. The ideal is for each town to have its own reactor.

Clouds high in Venus’ atmosphere reveal features on planet’s surface

Sci News reports scientific findings that ‘winds, the water content, and the cloud composition – are somehow connected to the properties of Venus’ surface itself’.

Using data from ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft, European planetary researchers have shown how weather patterns seen in Venus’ cloud layers are directly linked to the topography of the surface below.

Venus is famously hot. The average temperature on the Venusian surface is 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius).

Mixed response to Scotland’s air passenger duty plan

Glasgow International Airport

What’s this – business before enviro-correctness? Shocking to some perhaps. Could be fun if Scotland’s air fares undercut England’s by a significant margin. BBC reporting.

Plans to cut and replace air passenger duty (APD) in Scotland have been met with a mixed response. The Scottish government wants to replace APD, with the tax to be reduced by 50% from April 2018 and eventually abolished.

Hinkley on hold: Decision off until Autumn

In a surprise move, the UK govt has put the brakes on the Hinkley Point nuclear power contract. Yesterday, there was anticipation in the media that the directorate of EDF would approve the scheme. In the event, the vote was 10 to 7 in favour, though one director resigned beforehand.

Maybe the depth of the split on the EDF board has given the new UK government the jitters. In a brief two line statement this morning, the business secretary, Greg Clark, said the government would now examine all components of the deal and decide in the Autumn whether to go ahead, or not.

Temperature Variation Due to ENSO

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Useful comparison of ENSO and (supposed) CO2 influences on climate by kenskingdom. ENSO correlations look significant, whereas CO2 – nothing to report really.
H/T Climate Depot

kenskingdom

In this post I use the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) supplied by NOAA at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/index.html and lower tropospheric temperature data supplied by UAH to show how much of temperature variation over the past 20 years is due to ENSO and how little is due to CO2.  I will keep words brief and let graphics do the talking.

Firstly, here is the MEI data from 1950:

Fig. 1:  Monthly MEI from 1950

As an aside, this is how it compares with SOI data.  The SOI is inverted and both are scaled for comparison.

Fig. 2:  MEI compared with SOI inverted

Now compare scaled MEI with Global UAH:

Fig. 3: MEI (scaled) and UAH

Notice tropospheric temperatures appear to lag the MEI by some 5 months:

Fig. 4: MEI advanced 5 months and UAH

Notice both datasets are noisy, and there is a clear discrepancy in the early 1990s.  12 month running…

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Hourly data store

Tim writes,

Figure 1, hourly data collected from Met Office Datapoint over two years for Heathrow, one of many stations with data.

I’ve succeeded in collecting a massive data store from Met Office Datapoint, hourly data for many UK stations, known errors in the supplied data excepted. Some data is missing, such as the week when I went into hospital and in error had powered off the automatic data collection computer. The poor air, blue tinged when I realised.

I could upload the whole lot as CSV files inside an archive but the sheer size of this is a disincentive unless there is genuine demand. 40 or so MB, 230 MB uncompressed.

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/series-2016-07-27.zip 43MB (Megabytes)

There are also daily plots as PDF, a mountain of data. What do people want if anything?

No Salvation: South Australian Businesses Being Crushed by Wind Power Costs

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“I think it’s fair to say there is a growing awareness of the need for stable back-up.”
– Spark Infrastructure’s new chairman, Doug McTaggart

Well, yes. But you could have read that on amateur blogs at any time in the last few years. Somehow it takes leaders with supposedly smart advisers an age to see the obvious, especially when they don’t want to see it.

STOP THESE THINGS

Arrium Steel’s Gerard Mahoney: SA’s power play the last roll of the dice.

***

South Australia’s unfolding energy calamity, has drawn all sorts of self-professed experts out of the woodwork; desk-bound boffins, who all seem to have ready-made answers to SA’s self-inflicted power supply and pricing disaster.

However, most of their “solutions” involve spending hundreds of $millions more of other people’s money.  We’ll hand over to The Australian, as another power market dilettante, Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute (a Labor-left think tank) struts his stuff.

Green push risks power price surge, distorts national market
The Australian
Rick Wallace & Michael Owen
21 July 2016

Energy crises in South Australia and Tasmania have shown that unilateral state-based renewable energy measures were distorting the national market and could trigger damaging price surges in eastern states, one of Australia’s leading energy specialists has warned.

The head of energy policy at the Grattan Institute…

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Tony Thomas: The Clintons and Their Corruptocrats

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, attend church service at Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church in Waterloo, Iowa.

Australian governments’ $85 million aid to the Clinton Foundation is a bit surprising, given that ex-President Bill and presidential candidate Hillary are synonyms for financial and personal sleaze. That total sum was paid by both Coalition and Labor governments over the past decade. Coalition and Labor have also despatched and committed $460m to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education,  chaired by our ex-PM Julia Gillard. Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop threw Gillard’s show a lazy $140 million of taxpayer money in 2014, no questions asked. That aid was in the teeth of Gillard’s lusty presidential campaigning for Hillary against Trump.

Ostensibly charitable, the Clinton Foundation is the centerpiece of the couple’s amassing of a vast personal fortune.  Bill was president from 1993-01. Hillary was Secretary of State for Obama from 2009-13.

In Hillary’s term at State, every variety of wealthy crook, influence-seeker and tyrannical government rushed to “donate” millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or  vague combinations of all/any of them. Lots of those crooked donors later scored disgrace, convictions and/or gaol on unrelated matters. Amid the sleaze, of course, the Clinton Foundation did manage to do some genuine charity work.

Christine Lagarde to be Roasted, Toasted, Fried and Grilled by French Courts

#Brexit and climate scaremonger and soon, we suspect, not to be IMF chief, Christine Lagarde is to stand trial over a 404 million euro payment of taxpayers money to controversial tycoon Bernard Tapie, who supported former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Lagarde, who famously said we’d all be “Roasted, Toasted, Fried and Grilled” by global warming, more recently boosted her reputation for chronically incorrect exaggerations by predicting that a Brexit vote would be “bad or very bad” for the UK economy. The FTSE100 reached a new record high yesterday.

Expect updates on this one folks.

Elite merchants of #Brexit doom expose their own pre #EUref lies

Post referendum analysis from Rodney Atkinson at Freenations.net

One of the most obnoxious features of the post Brexit climate is that the biggest liars and doom mongers in political history – the Remain campaigners – now accuse Leave Campaigners of lying! This has been picked up in continental attacks on Boris Johnson who, if anything, was rather kind and accommodating given the damage done to people, banks and businesses by the Euro corporatist elites. Now those liars are exposing their own lies:

THE IMF

Before the Brexit vote the IMF head, Christine Lagarde (whose appointment was avidly supported by George Osborne) said that the impact on the UK economy of a Brexit vote went from “pretty bad to very, very bad” and that there could be a recession.

Today the IMF says it has a “benign” view of the Brexit effect on the UK economy, there would be no recession and their revised forecast for UK growth is the same as their revised forecast for USA growth (-0.2% for 2016). Their forecast for UK growth in 2017 is 1.3%

RSPB finally gets serious about bird chopping turbines.

From National Wind Watch:
Credit:  BBC News | 20 July 2016 | www.bbc.co.uk

A former energy minister has claimed “offshore wind in Scotland is pretty much dead” after a legal challenge against four major projects.

A judge upheld RSPB Scotland’s challenge to consent for turbines in the Firth of Forth and Firth of Tay.

Brian Wilson said the charity now “hold all the cards” over the schemes, which were to include hundreds of turbines.

Hottest June? Not According To The Satellites, Roger

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36841072

Roger Harrabin has been up to his tricks again, with another idle piece of desperately one sided propaganda:

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and the 14th straight month that global heat records were broken, scientists say.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says global sea temperatures were fractionally higher than for June last year while land temperatures tied.

Its global temperature records date back 137 years, to 1880.

Most scientists attribute the increases to greenhouse gas emissions.

They also say climate change is at least partially to blame for a number of environmental disasters around the world.

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June was 0.9C above the 20th Century average of 15.5C, the NOAA said in its monthly report.

Last year was the hottest on record, beating 2014, which had previously…

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Brize Norton, 33.5C

Quickie Post by Tim

This must come as a disappointment to the Met Office, desperate for globules of warning. BBC say 34C

UK extremes
Parameter Location Value
Highest maximum temperature Brize Norton 33.5 °C
Lowest maximum temperature Lerwick 16.3 °C
Lowest minimum temperature Resallach 8.3 °C
Highest rainfall Fair Isle 4.4 mm
Sunniest Wattisham 15.2 hours

Issued at: 0002 on Wed 20 Jul 2016

In the surface stations list, yep

WMO03649, Brize Norton

DECC is dead: Its ghost now haunts the Business, Energy and Industry Dept

Statement from Greg Clark following his appointment as the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

I am thrilled to have been appointed to lead this new department charged with delivering a comprehensive industrial strategy, leading government’s relationship with business, furthering our world-class science base, delivering affordable, clean energy and tackling climate change.

Who is Greg Clark?

He’s been MP of the safe Conservative seat of Tunbridge Wells since 2005.

Clark was appointed to the front bench in a minor reshuffle in November 2006 by David Cameron, becoming Shadow Minister for Charities, Voluntary Bodies and Social Enterprise. Shortly after his appointment he made headlines by saying the Conservative party needed to pay less attention to the social thinking of Winston Churchill, and more to that of columnist on The Guardian, Polly Toynbee.[5]

In 2007, Clark campaigned to save Tunbridge Wells Homeopathic Hospital.[11] In October 2008, Clark was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet, shadowing the new government position of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Important new paper from Robinsons and Soon available here

US Republicans vote down funding for global climate fund

Credit: energyefficientsolutions.com

The Buy-a-Climate delusion gets the thumbs down in the US. H/T GWPF

The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday voted down a Democratic push to allow federal spending on an international climate change program.

Rep. Nita Lowey (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, proposed an amendment to the House’s State Department and foreign operations spending bill that would let the federal government contribute to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund (GCF). Republicans have looked to block that funding.

Robert Craig: Triggering Article 50 Does not Require Fresh Legislation

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Robert Craig offers opinion on the ability of the executive to trigger Article 50 without needing fresh legislation.

UK Constitutional Law Association

Introduction

Considerable public interest has recently been focused on the ‘trigger’ mechanism for exit from the EU which is set out in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Expert opinion has divided between those who believe that the power to trigger Article 50 rests with the Executive using the legal authority of the royal prerogative from the Crown with no further parliamentary involvement necessary and those who argue that fresh legislation is required to confer statutory authorisation on the Executive to do something which could render nugatory rights under the European Communities Act 1972 (‘ECA’). An ingenious third way involving section 2(2) of the ECA has also been suggested.

This note suggests that no fresh legislation is required and that the power to trigger Article 50 rests with the Executive but for very different reasons to those suggested by what might be termed the ‘prerogative’ camp. The live question…

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Committee On Climate Change Admit Wind Power Is Dearer Than CCGT

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Some real world numbers from the CCC on Gas Vs Low Carbon energy costs.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

You may remember claims a few weeks ago from Renewable UK, the lobby group for renewable energy, that onshore wind isnow the cheapest form of new generation in Britain.

As I showed in this post at the time, the claims were simply bunkum. The cost of onshore wind in reality is currently around twice the price of CCGT.

It seems that John Gummer’s Committee on Climate Change agrees with me!

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Estimates of comparative costs for weather dependent Renewables in Europe

Introduction This article is concerned with the two main forms of weather dependent Renewable Energy, Wind Power, (Onshore and Offshore) and Photovoltaic solar power.  In the UK this amounts to ~75…

Source: Estimates of comparative costs for weather dependent Renewables in Europe

Cameron spends our money like water

From the Gov website, another example of undefined squandering of huge sums of money by Cameron and his Energy Minister Amber Rudd. This one slipped by while I was helping run the Paris Climate Challenge last year.

UK joins new international clean energy initiative

From:

Department of Energy & Climate Change, The Rt Hon David Cameron MP,The Rt Hon Amber Rudd MP and Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street

First published:

30 November 2015

Part of:

Climate change international action

Today in Paris, Prime Minister David Cameron joined world leaders to launch Mission Innovation at the UN Climate Change Conference.

Mission Innovation is a flagship international initiative which aims to accelerate clean energy investment and innovation in order to provide reliable and affordable energy for all.

The Prime Minister attended the launch event alongside Presidents Obama and Hollande, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, ministers and 16 other heads of government as well as Bill Gates.