Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 8.2.21

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'

Covid

Not so good news: The UK: Millions of people are likely to need a 3rd vaccine dose this year. NHS chiefs hope that the extra doses can be given at the same time as winter flu jab.

Definitely bad news: The scientist leading the UK’s Covid symptom app study has warned that large sporting events and big weddings with international guests will remain on hold long after the second wave recedes.

Better news: The Covid vaccine could come in pill form. This would help alleviate supply issues that have hindered the rollout in some areas of the world, including Europe.

  

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

I'm reminded by this article that, when I came here 20 years ago, it was considered bad to be only a milluerista. Even more so now, of course. Hence these sad sentences:  What once seemed an aberration has become a depressingly ingrained feature of Spanish life. If the term ‘mileurista’ years ago seemed a lament, it has now become almost a bitter aspiration. Many young people would kill to land a steady job paying that much every month. 

No wonder, as top-line GDP has grown and the rich have got richer, I bang on about the gap between the macro and the micro of Spain's economic development. And that we have a left-of-centre government with a 'far left' coalition partner. You need to read the full article to understand just how bad things are now for Spain's young folk. Storing up problems for the future?

Case in point - 20 years ago, the average price of an English lesson from a native speaker was around €15 an hour. Twenty years  on, it’s  . . . €15. Maybe €8-10 in real terms. 

To be more positive  . . . Inventions made or improved on in Spain can be seen in a virtual museum - The Comfort Museum. Sadly, only on Instagram. Here's a helpful graphic for those who, like me, don't bother with social media.  

Interesting to see the  monkey wrench called a llave alavesa. I've always seen it called a llave inglesa. This is the explanation, with an interesting note on the the alternative Spanish name for it: La llave alavesa (comercializada como 'llave vasca' fuera del mercado español)​ es una variante de la llave inglesa tradicional. Su principal aportación es que permite una apertura regulable apta para tuercas de grandes dimensiones; muy práctica especialmente para los profesionales de la fontanería.

Is the toughest post-Brexit transition still to come for Brits on the Costas? That's the question posed in this article. It's always a surprise to read that about  60% of Britons in Spain are below the state pension age. But 60% of what total? The official one of those formally 'resident,' or the vastly bigger actual one? The latter, of course, might well have sizeably reduced recently, as Brits who should have become resident - and so taxable - have fled 'home' before the Hacienda contacts them about their worldwide assets, under the infamous Modelo 720 law of 2012. Which you really need to know about, if you're planning to move here. And which I doubt many of the folk who rushed to buy here before the end of last year really do.

After so much rain here, I've begun to pray for some of the cold winds and snow that are hitting the SE of both Spain and the UK. But snow hardly ever falls here on the Atlantic coast, even when I can see it on the distant hills.

 

The UK

Below there's an intriguingly optimistic article from our resident Casandra on R&D into future power sources.

Good question: Why do dumbed-down broadcasters insist on giving us airhead celebs over genuine experts?

The UK and the EU

Can this really be true? One exporter has claimed that, when pigs go to the Netherlands, the forms must be filled out in a red pen; when they go to France, in a blue pen. Talk about 'non-tariff barriers'!

The Netherlands

It’s an ill wind . . Storm Darcy: The Netherlands has declared a ’code red' emergency as a rare snowstorm hits. But . .  It has raised hopes of the first traditional ice-skating marathon for 24 years.

 

Finally . . .

Here's a sentence I could never have imagined writing . . . What with the Covid restrictions and 3 weeks of pretty incessant rain, meandering around a supermarket or a large Chinese bazar has become the highlight of my week.

En passant, rain is forecast for 13 of the next 14 days as well . . . Not a great time to be deprived of social contact, other than on a screen.

THE ARTICLE 

The possibilities for the UK’s net-zero drive are tantalising: It may sound far-fetched, but research in Cumbria has found a way of creating power from radioisotopes: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

Imagine a nuclear battery in a little box that uses decaying isotopes to generate cheap and clean electricity around the clock for decades with no combustion, fission, or noise. It just sits silently and emits constant power. This far-fetched idea is becoming real. Vaulting advances in materials sciences are unlocking technologies that radically change the cost calculus of radioisotopes. Companies are springing to life with prototypes that could be on the market before the next general election.

As it happens, the UK is the world leader in the rarified field of isotope batteries. A British-Australian start-up with research operations in Cumbria has found a way to harness gamma rays from the radioactive decay of cobalt-60. Infinite Power thinks it can cut costs to levels that take your breath away. “It is the cheapest source of electricity on the planet,” says Robert McLeod, the chief executive.

The batteries can be used for anything from charging posts for electric vehicles to full-sized power plants for cities, generating cheap baseload electricity. This power can be used to balance the grid as intermittent wind and solar become the backbone of the system, but also switch to the production of “green” hydrogen from electrolysis at off peak-times.

Infinite Power is working with the UK National Institute for Advanced Materials, a hub of leading universities known as the Royce Institute. These are part of a flourishing British ecosystem in radioisotope technology. In 2019 the National Nuclear Laboratory launched an Americium battery on behalf of Nasa that can generate power for hundreds of years in deep space, the first of its kind in the world.

Scientists at the Culham Centre of Fusion Energy are working on tritium (hydrogen-3) and carbon-14 to make ‘diamond batteries’ from spent nuclear fuel. They have linked up with the University of Bristol on a man-made diamond that harvests the energy from carbon-14 isotopes and promises to generate power on a “near infinite basis”.  

A spin-off company called Arkenlight is working on the first commercial prototypes for microbatteries. “Ultimately we want to be producing millions of devices annually. It’s an extremely exciting project,” said Prof Tom Scott, the leader of the project.

Infinite Power is eyeing different segments of the market, convinced it can outcompete fossil-fuel plants for electricity on a gigawatt scale. The technology works in much the same way as a solar panel except that the energy does not come from the sun. It comes from the decaying isotope.

The normal vibration process in solar cells instead converts beta, X-ray, and above all gamma waves from cobalt-60 into electricity. “There is much more energy in a gamma ray,” said Mr McLeod. He estimates the “levelised cost” of electricity at $7-17 per megawatt hour, cheaper than thin-film solar ($36-44), gas combined cycle ($44-68), or nuclear ($118-192), once scale is achieved. The capital cost is under $300,000 per megawatt, a tiny fraction of the $6,500 average cost for the latest nuclear reactors.

If the company can deliver anything close to this cost the technology offers tantalising possibilities for the UK’s net-zero drive, and for wider global use. There has been a surge of interest from American investors since the Biden administration swept into Washington on an electrification mission.

Cobalt-60 is relatively safe with a half-life of 5.2 years, though you would not want it in your kitchen. The small pencil-sized sticks are placed in tubes, protected by 11in (30cm) steel in boxes. They are sealed in cement buildings when scaled up for serious power. They do not require the fortress architecture that make nuclear fission plants so expensive.

The batteries could be used in small power units in Sark, or rural Africa, or in warehouse-size power plants of 100 megawatts or larger for industrial hubs. “It is modular so we just add more boxes. Our plan is a one gigawatt plant within two years,” said Mr McLeod. The company has signed a letter of intent to build its first 30 megawatt plant in the UK.

Separating hope from reality is inherently difficult with new technologies. A bandwagon effect is creeping in.

One California start-up is raising funds to develop “a smartphone that you never charge” and EVs that never need recharging using a nano-diamond battery, allegedly at minimal cost. Sceptical British scientists roll their eyes.

The UK government has jumped on Infinite Power’s cobalt-60 battery to help solve an immediate conundrum: how to switch from combustion engines to EVs without breaking the grid, already under transition stress as it goes from being a 20th Century fossil-based system to a 21st Century flexible system of distributed green power.

The UK would in theory have to double its total generation to decarbonise just half of all road transport traffic, although a static analysis exaggerates the apparent difficulty: EV car batteries would themselves be part of the solution by charging at night and releasing power back to the grid at peak times for an arbitrage profit. Nevertheless, cobalt-60 is the answer to immediate prayers at the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. “We’ll be rolling out the first EV charging points within twelve months. The UK government is extremely positive. They see it as a way to promote export-led industry and rebuild trade links with Commonwealth countries,” said Mr McLeod.

Britain has a strong incentive to make use of spent nuclear fuel. It is sitting on the world’s largest stockpile of radioactive residue at Sellafield, listed today on government books as a giant liability but with the potential to become an asset instead.

Dr Tim Tinsely, head of the NNL’s radioisotope programme, said nuclear batteries kill two birds with one stone.“You would be repurposing a waste product into something of value, and contributing to a net-zero agenda,” he said.

The raw material for cobalt-60 is cobalt-59. This comes from mines in Canada, Australia, Zambia, and more controversially from the Congo. This standard form of cobalt is not scarce but nor is it cheap. It currently fetches $45,700 per metric tonne on the London Metal Exchange, driven up by the voracious needs of lithium car batteries. Demand will settle down as ways are found to replace the metal with nickel. Tesla is working on cobalt-free batteries. The larger issue is that cobalt-59 has to be converted in an industrial reactor by bombarding it with neutrons. There are 85 such reactors in Europe, some already producing isotopes for X-rays, scanners, smoke detectors, measuring devices, and so on. Others are scattered all over the world. They are crying out for business, especially in ex-Soviet states such as Armenia and Kazakhstan.

Mr McLeod said the isotope can be recycled again and again by putting it back in a reactor every ten years. By then the isotopes have partly decayed into nickel. There are almost no operating costs once the system is up and running.

Dr Tinsley said it was unclear whether there is a big enough global supply of cobalt-60 to produce power at commercial scale. Infinite Power says the market is deeper than it looks. “We can easily build a one gigawatt plant within current supply,” said McLeod.

Once the technology takes off, demand creates its own supply. It becomes commercially worthwhile to build small industrial reactors just to make the cobalt-60 round-the-clock. That at least is the idea.

Mr McLeod said the radioisotope technology has lain dormant because the world was not ready. He compared it to gasoline in the late 19th Century before the combustion engine. It was deemed useless by early oil drillers and tipped into rivers in Pennsylvania. A single twist in technology turned waste into liquid gold.

What is clear is that there are countless technologies emerging across the world that are changing the calculus on CO2 abatement faster than governments, economists, and commentators can keep up. Britain is the crucible where so many breakthroughs are happening, perhaps because the country never succumbed to the technology luddism of the precautionary principle, and perhaps because the grip of vested interests is relatively weak (the same thing).

The UK may achieve net-zero much sooner than widely-supposed, and at a nice profit.