UKCCSC News 17 Jan 2008

Hi Folks,

There’s no doubt that the major energy news story since the new year is the decision of the UK Government to allow (encourage; provide massive invisible subsidies for?) private industry to build new nuclear power stations. There are no shortage of articles on this on the web, but as we are concentrating on CCS, you could try this one:

1) “Overthrow of New King Coal” Guardian Unlimited

“The decision to help revive Britain's nuclear industry may have been "tough", but it was also wrong. The right tough decision would have been to install carbon capture and storage on the recently announced coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/16/nuclearpower.energy1

2) Proposal development workshop for future university-based CCS R&D in the UK. The UKCCSC management committee is organising this event, in consultation with the Research Councils, and it is tentatively planned for 28th Feb in Central London, with 26th Feb as a likely alternative date to suit invited attendees.

I suggest that you put the dates in your diaries. Hannah Chalmers is doing the organising, she’ll let us know when the dates are finalised (hannah.chalmers02@imperial.ac.uk).

2) “Up for grabs” Guardian Unlimited Both Stuart Haszeldine and Jon Gibbins are quoted, guess who provided the following quote: “improvements in energy efficiency, though worthwhile, simply prolong the inevitable”

Hmmm. Going jogging and eating salad don’t confer immortality. They might just delay the inevitable though. The article is mostly noteworthy for a typo about the coal consumption of an large power station. It’s been partly corrected, but is still wrong. If you’re that interested, you’ll have to read the article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/02/2

3) Illinois gets $ 1.8 Bn FutureGen

“The FutureGen Industrial Alliance, Inc, a non-profit consortium of some of the largest coal producers and users in the world, was formed to partner with the U.S. Department of Energy on the FutureGen project.”

They have announced that a CCS powerstation will be built in Illinois.

http://www.futuregenalliance.org/

However, according to Scientific American, the US DoE isn’t too happy about the whole project.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-power-plant-may-help-coal-clean-up

‘The department, which is supposed to pay for most of the work, called the announcement on a location “inadvisable”’ New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/business/18coal.html?ex=1355634000&en=0e9a1555019f1ce2&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

4) Finally, the winner of this weeks competition to use as many words as possible while saying nothing much really, goes to Gordon Brown, as he ‘explains’ why we need new build nuclear:

“I said that this would be the year when we made the right long-term decisions for the future of the country and one of these decisions is that we have safe, secure energy.”

So there !

http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page14234.asp

That’s all folks, Mark