2018 – Things Just Keep Getting Better

Lighten up Peeps. Things are getting better. OK? Yes really! 

Things ARE getting better (and better and better) as the years roll on. There may be dips and troughs. But really, things are getting better. Much, much better.

Relentlessly better.

You know - serious things – like infant mortality.

In 1917 infant mortality in the UK was 130 per 1000 live births. Now it is less than 4.

GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, England and Wales Dep through time | Historical Statistics on Life and Death for the Country | Rate: Infant Mortality Rate, A Vision of Britain through Time.

URL: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10001043/rate/INF_MORT

In 2014 it hit an all time low of 3.6 and has wavered around this figure ever since.

But here's even more good news. There is a significant strategic push in the NHS to get this down further so expect further falls in coming years.

Which brings us to the NHS.

What about NHS cuts? Closures?. Is it about to collapse? 

No. In fact it is all of the above are just a set of politicized  doom-mongering bollocks designed to frighten you.

It is true the NHS has a lot of strains. But it is absolutely nowhere near collapse. In fact the amount of money allocated to the NHS year on year has been going steadily up since the aftermath of the financial crash.

Expenditure in 2006/7 was £79Bn. This year it topped £120Bn. That is in real terms too.

Rather than a failing and diminishing service, last year there was an increase of 5.1% in people starting treatment in the NHS.

Read This Astonishing Document on the statistical performance of the NHS. Some things are up and to be fair, some are down but only by a little. The through-put is breath-taking.

People telling you the NHS is about to fold are lying through their teeth. They should be ashamed of themselves.

There is still a lot wrong with the NHS especially the almost random bureaucratic and automotive treatment of front line staff. We really need to treat front line staff better, and I do not just mean money. Some of the management practices in the NHS are incredibly damaging and demoralising.

Couple that to a raft of political appointees to top management roles who got there by entitlement rather than ability and you end up with the occasional horror like Staffordshire NHS trust.

But even so, this is NOT a failing service. To suggest it is failing is unfair and dishonest.

Crime has remained low. Again we have dips and troughs and nasty abominations but according to the independent crime survey (CSEW) it is going down.  Yes really! Look!

A deep injustice was (partially) righted with the release of Sgt Blackman. Now he deserves some heavy duty compensation in 2018.

Employment has hit an all time high and the economy is doing well despite all the doom-serring over Brexit.

Let us just remember the fear-mongering that went on before the EU referendum. Look at this. Today we can see the dark fantasy it was. (notice the "immediate impact of a vote to leave" - full Treasury document Here) 

Negotiations with the EU over Brexit have been unpleasant. But that is hardly our fault. I think it is beginning to dawn on many people that the best thing to do would be to just go to WTO rules and then afterwards maybe negotiate (or not) a potential trade deal with the EU. The new year will tell.

Energy-wise Hinkley C is doing well. While I've not heard of anyone who thinks it is the best reactor design choice, we are where we are and so it deserves our support.

It should be remembered that the last six commercial reactors built in the UK (2 each at Heysham 2, Torness and Sizewell B) were all built on-time and to-budget. So why shouldn't Hinkley C?

We've had more shenanigans from the wind fantasists with a clever yet illusionary piece of propaganda promising £57.50 MWh at Hornsea 2. The way it has been presented is in my opinion not far off pure fraud. So no change to the wind industries methods then.

Frankly, we are about as likely to get wind at £57.50 MWh as we were to get solar at £50 MWh. Remember all the hype about that? It has now been quietly dropped.

Finally I just picked up that Australia has licensed Golden Rice . This is a major step forward for combating Vitamin A deficiency that causes an horrendous level of childhood blindness among the poor in the third world. Its also one in the eye for the anti-humanitarians in Greenpeace. They have dogmatically fought tooth and nail to prevent Golden Rice development. They bear a heavy responsibility for the 100,000's young lives blighted by blindness in the last few years.

But anyway, its a new year! 2018 promises to be a a real roller coaster, but that will just make things more interesting!

Let us all saddle up and push things forward. After all, things only get better because we work to make them better. There is still plenty of work to do!

Happy New Year.

Love & Kisses

Billothewisp

Nuclear Power, Hinkley C and Sizewell B.

Today Europe is struggling to build two EPR reactors. To be fair, they are getting there. But progress has been slow and costly.

Today a third EPR reactor is planned for Hinkley Point in Somerset. To ensure Chinese and French backers stay with the project the government has given a £2 Billion guarantee against cancellation as well as guaranteeing a strike price of over £90 MWh

The mooted price for this one reactor is over £20 billion. Even at this eye watering price the government is desperate to see Hinkley C progress because it is the only viable 24/7 emissions free power generation available.

Even if they have to pay this ransom it is still cheaper than onshore wind and hugely cheaper than offshore wind, both of which need fossil fuel backup anyway. So the government has little choice but to pay.

But there is something wrong here.

The last UK nuclear power plant was commissioned only 20 years ago. Sizewell B cost £2 billion or about £4 billion in todays money.

Sizewell B came in under budget. The grid connection (planned in 1987) was for Christmas 1994. It actually happened barely one month late. The build took a mere 7 years. At the time it was lauded as a shining example of how to build large infrastructure projects. (See Independent article here)

But even so, Sizewell B is essentially a prototype. No commercial Light Water Reactor had been built in the UK before. So building to timescale and to budget is even more remarkable.

Eight "Sizewell B's" were planned. If they had been built the power supply outlook in the UK today would be entirely different. But due to extreme political fear mongering, opportunism and anti nuclear hysteria the other seven were canned.

The UK ended up relying on Gas backed up by the likes of DRAX and Longannet both burning vast quantities of imported coal for the next 20 years. The number of subsequent deaths and shortened lives from air pollution must be in the order of  50,000. I'll work it out properly in a future post.

(If you doubt this ball park figure of 50,000 dead read these two papers  by some of the worlds leading scientists and figure it out yourself. Karecha & Hansen and Markyanda & Wilson)

So I have to ask: Why is it that in a time scale of twenty years we have gone from  producing a nuclear power plant to budget and on time to a bloated massively expensive and chaotic shambles?

Don't forget the Sizewell B plant is an early example of Generation III reactor (See IMechE article here). As near as dammit Sizewell B it is as good as an EPR and at one fifth the price

I reckon we need to take a pause.

Instead of building horrendously complex and expensive EPR's maybe we should go back to the original plan and build a few more "Sizewell B" type PWR's. After all we still have the prototype - and it has been working for 20 years!

Then we can invest the money saved from not building the ludicrously expensive EPR's in Generation 4 nuclear prototyping and research.

This way within 10 years we can have a reliable cheap carbon free power supply from a proven designs and maybe working PRISM and/or LFTR prototype reactors coming
on line.

Well, its just an idea......

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Post posting note:

Thanks to @Davey1233 on twitter there are a few corrections I should add which, while not detracting from the achievement of Sizewell B do restore some of my faith in the EPR.

He correctly points out that Hinkley will be around 3 times the output capacity of Sizewell B and the true "todays" figure for Sizewell should be more like £5 billion not 4. Consequently comparing output power like for like the cost difference shrinks from a ratio of 1:5 to about 1:1.25

So maybe Hinkley C is not quite such a rip off - although I would still suggest the builders are being more than amply rewarded and have managed to secure this lucrative deal simply because the government is over a barrel.

In reality these decisions regarding the construction of nuclear power stations in the UK should have been taken 10 - 20 years ago. Instead the governments of the time simply kow-towed to the ignorance and hysteria of the Green lobby.

We desperately need nuclear power. Without it we could well end up slipping back into dependency on coal - just like they have in Germany. That is in nobodys interest.