A very small adventure

[fivemack]

It began, as adventures tend to nowadays, in the financial pages. National Grid offering a peculiarly-constituted bond: what for? What are they building? A mighty HVDC line from north-east Wales to Hunterston: but what's at Hunterston? A nuclear power station … a well-run nuclear power station … a nuclear power station with an open day on Saturday … an open day consistent across the British Energy fleet.

A quick call to the Press Office. Sizewell shut. Hinckley Point hard to get to, and shut. A glimmer of hope: Dungeness B. Discussions of railway routing; confusion over the three Ashfords briskly resolved, the new line from St Pancras to Kent eulogised, tickets procured.

An early rise, a hasty ride, an almond croissant; to Ashford International with a bicycle, twenty miles of Kent to cover and two and a half hours to do it in. Rain, short-lived but drenching. Impermeable not so. Romsey Marshes, their lack of charm. Lydd pie shop. The shingle flats, filled with the glaucous sea-kale.

Coffee and fine biscuits. An adequate pace procuring some time to enjoy them. Disaster: no plant tours available. An exceedingly safe presentation focussing on safety to the exclusion of the engineering magnificence that I was there for. EDF's pernicious habit of using 'terawatt' to mean 'terawatt-hour' on the false grounds that the different orders of magnitude make confusion impossible. The control room. Imprecation from local security that I not post my close-up pictures of the controls on the Internet. Yr correspondent's belief that obliging Her Majesty's enemies to decipher at great lengths the principles of operation of a kind of nuclear power station abandoned as uneconomic thirty years ago more to be considered a coup of the counter-espionage kind; yr correspondent nonetheless compliant. A promise that in 2012 it should be permitted to stand on top of the reactor vessel.

The sea-wall from Lydd-on-sea to Dymchurch, considered as an exceedingly fine impromptu velodrome; the sadness of lifting one's bicycle over an obstacle with one's thumb on the reset-trip-counter button. A frankly excessive hill in Sandgate. Sunset over south Kent from the train. The entirely useless stopping-train from King's Cross, discovered in time to catch a better one. Home via a purveyor of fine soups. Fine soup, and a warm bath. The adventure thus concluded.

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I had assumed it was for Hunterston C, but one of the (senior, well-informed, and generally ecstatic to have someone enthusiastic to talk to) staff at the Dungeness event pointed out that the Scottish executive was not at present prepared to have any new nuclear build in Scotland, and the interconnect was for wind.

Should I be saddened that it's clearly logistically easier to build the rectifier plants at each end and the line out at sea than to run standard pylons down the island against the objections of every nimby from Ayrshire to Cheshire, or is it not that much more expensive to build HVDC than standard transmission lines?

National Grid pays nice dividends and is moreover the single blue (IE worth more than when I bought it) stock in my ISA at the moment ...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Fine question; I don't know the answer and the Western HVDC Link web site (http://www.westernhvdclink.co.uk/) doesn't comment either way on the matter at the moment. It's possible that the solution may also have other benefits like lower transmission losses - no clue either way.