Hinkley Point Visit: Initial Reaction

Tom, Zach, Kash and Alice at Taunton Railway Station

Aakash, Alice, Kirsty, Zach and myself (Tom) today visited Hinkley Point nuclear power station, near Bridgwater, Somerset. The site itself is split into Hinkley Point A - a plant out of use and now owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency (NDA), in the process of being decommissioned by contractors Magnox South - and Hinkley Point B, owned by British Energy, itself owned by EDF and Centrica, and still operational. Both offered very different aspects of nuclear power, and were invaluable for us to see. I'll tease you with a few details about the visit, but a more complete post will follow.

Hinkley Point B is a massive station housing two reactors, powering one million homes. It employs seven-hundred people and provides a huge boost to the local economy, but as environmentalists and young people, we wondered at what cost? Although nuclear power has relatively low carbon emissions per unit generated, the lasting legacy of nuclear waste worried all of us - is it ethical to leave hugely hazardous waste for our descendants to deal with thousands of years into the future? Over time standards and spending may slip, and a catastrophic accident could ensue. The reactor itself appeared rigourously safe - we felt reassured that an incident like that at Chernobyl would never be allowed to happen - but can we guarantee some body will exist for thousands of years to deal with this waste?

More to follow shortly. We were not allowed to take pictures in or around the site, so photos are of us in the train station and taxi, unexcitingly!

Kash is worried about sprouting extra fingers if exposed to radiation before the visit, and Alice is disgusted at Kirsty's happiness.

A Beginner’s Guide To Retrofitting

On 27th September, Kirsty, Zach and I met up in trendy Notting Hill to visit a nice Victorian terraced house … with a difference. This particularly house has been stripped out inside and made as green as modern technology will allow.

Set in a conservation area (which means the outside of the house has to stay looking the same), Octavia Housing won government funding through Retrofit for the Future to convert the 170 year old property at 100 Princedale Road to PassivHaus standards. The grant was for £175,000 – but the house was uninhabitable and just to get it up to living standards would have needed £125,000, so this only needed £50,000 extra. The German system uses intelligent engineering to make the house virtually air tight – across the whole house, if you added up the minute gaps, you’d scarcely reach the surface area of a £1 coin. That’s quite small compared with draughty windows and letterboxes across the country!

So we went to take a look round (in really embarrassing high-viz jackets and hard hats).

This sealed approach means that there is a 94% reduction in energy needed to heat the house. 94%!!! That’s massive. And it means that there is an 87% reduction in carbon emissions. Amazing. It achieves this by insulating all the walls with a sandwich of chipboard, foam glass (a bit like fibreglass but looks like plastic foam) and plasterboard. It’s a serious 15cm sandwich. And that foam glass also covers anything like beams or supports leading to the outside and might conduct heat outside. It means that overall, less than 0.1 watts per metre are lost to the outside – normally it would be 0.35 watts lost per metre.

All sorts of clever technology inside reduces carbon emissions – solar water heater, and an air to air heat exchanger which heats (or cools in the summer) air coming in from outside and circulates the old air out and the new air in. That exchanger has a filter that needs changed every couple of years … it phones you when it needs changed! Everything is as simple as possible with one switch for the whole system, and cheaper than a conventional gas central heating system to maintain.

We were really impressed and all left wanting to live there. But the big hope would be that costs could come down, and incentives could be provided to allow everyone to retrofit their home. With that much energy to be saved, it has to be a good idea!

DRAX Power Station

Panelists Mairi McInnes,Zachary Confino & Michael Furey accompanied by the wonderful Kirsty Schneeberger visit Drax Power Station, Doncaster, 13th October 2010.

The Butterfly Effect

On Wednesday 8th September Unkha and I woke up early to travel into Bristol to observe a local planning committee discuss, deliberate and (I imagined) have heated debate about a recently approved application to develop a Biofuels plant in the City.

Bristol, being a City on the River Severn, has an old dockyard site called Avonmouth Docks and on that site the Council has granted planing permission for the development of a Biofuels Plant, or more specifically 'construction of Biomass fuel store and biomass fired electricity generating plant' (see the webiste for more info on consent 09/00506/K).

The Biofuels Plant is being constructed by Helius Energy Plc, a London listed company, and on 8th September the Planning Committee were discussing an application for 'variation of consent.' This means that the developers (Helius) wanted to seek approval from the committee to extend the amount of material (biomass) that would reach the plant by the existing roads, rather than by the river and dockyard. The Planning Officer to the Bristol Planning Committee recommended that the consent be given to the developer, with some conditions attached to it, and ultimately the committee approved this 'variation of consent'.

Youth Panellists at 'Start Young: for a Sustainable Future' Event

Youth Panellist Tom Youngman (second from right) participating in a discussion led by fellow panellist and event facilitator Luke Hughes (obscured, left). (View original on Flickr)

Youth Panellist John Northall, one of the event's facilitators. (View original on Flickr)

IBM, in conjunction with Prince Charles' charity, 'Start', held the 'Start Summit' - a nine day program of events for leaders in business, finance and energy, as well for young people. The fifth day of the conference was entitled 'Start Young', and brought together ninety young people from across the country not only to hear from influential figures such as Stephen Leonard, Chairman of IBM UK and Ireland and James Caan, venture capitalist and star of the BBC's 'Dragon's Den', but to have their ideas listened to and raised in front of senior representatives from business and government on the final day of the summit. The event took place in luxurious surroundings at Lancaster House, twice the host of G7 summits and the location at which Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia)'s independence from the UK was agreed.

Panellists Visit Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynnleth

Our visit to the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) began with a tour of the popular visitor centre. It focuses mostly on home solutions - so micro-generation was a key theme.

Micro-Generation
We looked at examples of solar arrays and were told about how they could be used in commerce. They can be inequitable, because the feed-in tariff for a £15k panel is equivalent to £1,000 a year, so it is a better investment than a savings account. It benefits the rich, contributing to the wealth gap, because only they can afford the initial capital investment.

Trains, Visits and Reports...

If there’s one thing that I’d like to gain from my participation in the DECC Youth Panel, it would have to be, for me, a finer understanding of how to catch trains successfully. Apparently, the machine which gives me my train tickets in Newcastle Central Station has a fickle mind, changing its rules on a whim, resulting in my having to purchase TWO return fares from Newcastle to London (which aren’t cheap).

I’m very glad I got that off my chest. However, despite the fact it bankrupted me, it was, of course, more than worth it to revel in the fun-filled shenanigans that comprised the Youth Panel meeting.

We started by being introduced to the rather dubiously named ‘Spreadsheet of Happiness’, an outline of the exciting site visits that are planned for the panel. We figure that it’s pretty important that we know what we’re talking about when we write a report outlining the young person’s vision of 2050, and so we hope that if we visit projects around the country that are already implementing skills and techniques that could play a part in that vision, the knowledge that we gain from these glimpses of the future may help us draw more substantiated conclusions.