Lingering Clouds

 

Being down that way yesterday [last night's post], I was pondering the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station; defunct but not completely decommissioned. A few stats: work started on the plant in 1959, and it started feeding power to the National Grid in 1965, being fully opened in 1968. It ceased production of electricity in 1991, entering total shutdown in 1993: a twenty-six-year working life. The cost of construction at the time was £103,000,000, equivalent to approximately £2.8bn today, or approx £106m per year of its operational existence. According to the government's Strategic Environment Assessment, published September 2014, Trawsfynydd's decommissioning process will be completed to the site's final clearance by 2083, some ninety years after its actual closure. Throughout, it produced electricity at only 31.5% efficiency.

This was due to its initial design brief: that being to produce plutonium for atomic weapons; with electricity generation a serendipitous by-product that conveniently allowed the establishment to sell the concept of nuclear power generation to a population already somewhat spooked by The Cold War and the threat - much expected by many - of nuclear Armageddon. "Too cheap to meter" was the mantra of the newsreels that covered the opening of the world's first commercial-scale nuclear power plant at Calder Hall in what is now Cumbria, by Queen Elizabeth II in 1957. By 1963, however, Parliament was being quietly informed that electricity generated by nuclear means was in fact twice as expensive as that from coal-fired plants, but the government of the day felt it expedient to continue with development and expansion partly in order to reduce the power and influence of the coal workers' unions, but principally to continue with the UK's nuclear weapons programme's expansion.

As to the waste it produced during its ridiculously short and expensive lifetime, that's anyone's guess, as the UK still hasn't yet agreed on a permanent plan, outside the vague acknowledgement that deep storage sites are being investigated. Somewhat short-sighted, given the lethal lifespan of much of the material currently held: ten thousand years or more into our far descendant's futures. Whilst listening today, to a 2015 BBC Radio Four programme [on BBC Sounds] about nuclear decommissioning and the problems thrown up by the industry, a rather fine phrase I'd never come across before was used: 'nuclear semiotic space'; put bluntly, how can we expect to convey the dangers of such materials stored well into future generations who will almost certainly not speak the same languages as today, or even use language as we understand it at all? Apparently, there is a whole branch of academia out there to try and puzzle out this intriguing issue. Think about it for a while: human language only developed written forms around five thousand years ago...