Is this finally the moment for UK tidal power?

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Welcome to the podcast of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on Thursday, the 3rd of April, 2025.

Hello, I'm Tom Whipple, and coming up this week...

Why Physics is disrupting the world of baseball.

How the geoscience equivalent of a sonic boom might help explain why the recent earthquake in Myanmar was so devastating.

And science journalist Caroline Steele is here.

Like the tightly focused beam of an extremely expensive particle accelerator, she has been probing the week's other science stories.

What have you uncovered for us, Caroline?

So we've got a new blood test for Alzheimer's.

We've got a potentially massive super collider that CERN may or may not be building.

And a new way to identify which bees are most hygienic.

But first, currently at Hinkley Point, we are spending billions building a nuclear power station.

It is a cathedral to modern science.

It requires mastery of the atom itself.

But it's pricey and complicated.

Beside it, on the 7est3, every day, several Hinkley points worth of energy goes up and down, up and down, and isn't complicated.

It is clean, predictable, and so long as the moon keeps in orbit, it keeps going.

Harnessing it doesn't require atomic physics, it requires a wall and a turbine.

It is, of course, tidal energy.

Would it be a good idea to think about using it too?

Yes, according to the 1981 Bondi Commission that estimated it could provide 7% of UK electricity.

Another Commission in 1994 agreed.

There was a third in 2007, a fourth in 2010, and a fifth in 2017.

Now, another Commission has concluded that yes, tidal energy is a good thing.

The chair of the Seven Estuary Commission is Dr.

Andrew Garrard.

Hello Andrew.

Hello.

Andrew, this stuff isn't a new tech.

There's been tidal mills since the Middle Ages.

Let's start at the basics.

What is tidal energy?

So tidal energy is the energy contained in the water that's moved backwards and forwards by the moon and the sun.

So it's very predictable, which sets it apart from other renewables.

There's an awful lot of it, particularly around the UK coast and in particular, of course, in the Seven Estuary, where we have the second largest tidal range in the whole world.

And so, well, let's talk about the Seven, because looking through all these other commissions, they've all looked at the Seven.

There's been sort of 27 different schemes, I think.

So, why this one place?

Why is this one particular place where we're looking?

Well, as a sort of freak of geography, I suppose.

So, the water is moving backwards and forwards, and it actually hits a resonance in the estuary.

The shape and length of the estuary interacts with the dynamics of the tides and enhances them.

So it's both the tides and the shape of the estuary.

And it's, I think, the tidal range is, what, 14, 15 metres?

It's one of the biggest in the world.

Avonmouth, it's 14 and a half meters, so pretty much in Bristol, and that's the second biggest.

The biggest is in Canada.

And you recently won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

You won it for your work on wind turbines.

Now, this stuff is as clean as wind, and as you alluded to, it doesn't stop.

The tides never stop.

So, why aren't we doing this?

Everyone thinks it's great.

I think that the two reasons really why nothing has happened to date because all the findings of all these different commissions, the findings have been the same, that it is feasible and it should be done.

It's not been done for several reasons.

One is it's a huge project.

So, if there were a barrage across the seven, that would be of the order of 30, 35 billion pounds.

A small lagoon is a couple of billion, A big lagoon is maybe 10 billion.

So it's a lot of money.

And the other thing is that it does impact the very special environmental conditions in the seven.

So those two things together have been the main obstacles, plus the fact and previous commissions have all recommended a barrage, which we have not.

So our findings are the same, but our recommendations are different.

A barrage would also badly disrupt, possibly close the ports of Bristol and South Wales.

So economics, environment and money.

And a barrage, just to be clear, so a barrage, you completely block off a section of it.

The tide comes in, it goes over it somehow, and then you slowly release it through a turbine.

Yeah, so a barrage comes right across the estuary.

A lagoon goes from one point on the coast to the same coast at another point.

So it doesn't block the estuary.

Otherwise, in principle, it's the same.

There's a wall with turbines in it.

The basic principle is you trap the water and then you let it it out through a turbine.

It's actually very conventional, pretty old-fashioned, beginning of 20th-century technology.

So we know very well how to build a marine wall.

And the sort of turbines that are being used are standard turbines that are used in big hydro plants all over the world.

So the risk associated with this sort of development is really not engineering or technology.

It's the size and also the length of the construction period.

The special thing that sets it apart also is its asset life.

So the design life is at least 120 years.

A typical power station is 30 years.

Hinkley is 60 years.

Typical wind farm, 30 years.

This is four times that.

And it's easy to say 120 years.

But if Queen Victoria on her deathped had ordered a tidal lagoon, we would just now be thinking, well, shall we dismantle it or not?

So it's that sort of scale.

It's not just us who hasn't built these things.

I think there are two very small working schemes in the world.

Do you get a sense why the world has been, not to denigrate your career, been faffing around with wind?

They have not been faffing around with wind.

They've been doing a fantastic job.

38% of our electricity last year was produced by the wind.

That's not bad.

Well, you're right.

There are two projects.

One, Laurence, in Brittany, which is a 240 megawatt project.

It now produces France's cheapest electricity.

The other one, 250 as opposed to 240 megawatts, in South Korea,

about 15 years old.

You have to have a couple of characteristics.

One is an appropriate place, and the other is a big tidal range.

The reason why our recommendations are different to previous recommendations is because of the context.

We have a government goal to double our electricity supply by 2050.

That easy to write down, but gobsmatically difficult to actually do.

At the top of everybody's agenda now is climate change and then energy security added to it and predictability.

So those two sort of political criteria are different to the past.

And I think that's actually why our conclusions or recommendations are different, plus the fact that we've taken a different approach.

We've put the environment of the seven front and centre

in our commission.

We have seven people on the commission, two of whom are pretty heavyweight environmentalists.

So we've had a lot of constructive tension in the commission's discussion.

And we've come up with

the approach that this needs to be co-designed.

It isn't just something that an engineer produces and plonks in front of an environmentalist and says, okay, now object.

It's something you do together.

So you design the thing together.

And we followed the same route with the Commission.

We had proponents, engineers, financiers, and environmentalists all sitting in the Commission trying to work together to produce something on which we could agree.

And what we've agreed upon is a lagoon.

It's not just a little demonstration.

It's a significant generator of low-carbon energy.

But I think the fact we've recommended a lagoon rather than a barrage means that something will happen now, whereas previously, well, I did an interview outside the houses of parliament when we released it, you know, on that famous place where everybody stands in the rain.

And I was asked that question, why have you done this?

And I said, well, if we had recommended a barrage, you would be interviewing somebody in 10 years' time in this same place.

They would be presenting you with a report saying you should build a barrage

So all those inquiries you've talked about all had the same findings and absolutely nothing has happened.

What we've come up with with a different approach, different conclusions,

different system of debate is something which I believe can actually be achieved.

And just talk very briefly, so the the lagoon that you have recommended, how much do you think it would cost and how much would it generate?

Well a small lagoon would be a couple of billion, a large lagoon would maybe be ten billion, a ten billion one would generate about 2% of the UK's electricity.

Thank you very much, Dr.

Andrew Gerrard.

And the Bird and Wildlife Conservation Charity RSPB Cymru has also said, We welcome the Commission's conclusions that a barrage crossing the estuary would be environmentally unacceptable.

However, tidal lagoons also present significant risks to nature that have not been overcome so far and must not be ignored.

Now, Earth scientists around the world are trying to understand why the 7.7 magnitude earthquake, which struck Myanmar last weekend, was just so devastating.

In Myanmar itself, more than 3,000 people are confirmed dead by the military government at the time of broadcast.

In Bangkok, more than 1,000 kilometers away, buildings collapsed.

One theory that Earth scientists are discussing is that a seismic event called a super shear took place, a phenomenon that's been dubbed the earthquake equivalent of a supersonic jet.

Joining me now to try to understand what that exactly means is Dr.

Ian Watkinson, structural geologist at Royal Holloway University.

Welcome, Ian.

Good afternoon, how are you?

Good afternoon.

What is a supershear rupture?

First of all, if you imagine the fault during an earthquake is rupturing a little bit like a piece of paper that tears along its length.

So it starts at a nucleation point and then it propagates out from that point.

And the speed of that rupture is controlled by various factors along the length of the fault, particularly how straight it is.

What happens with a fault like the Sagine Fault in Myanmar is that it's very straight and there seem to be relatively few discontinuities along it and that means that the rupture can accelerate and propagate very fast along its length.

Let's talk about this supersonic jet analogy.

So Concorde goes faster than its own shock wave as I understand it.

Is there something like that happening here?

That's right, yeah.

So Concorde travels faster than

the sound of speed can travel in air.

And so there's a kind of a build-up of waves behind Concorde, which are then superimposed, they start to multiply, and you get a stronger sound wave, which is effectively a boom when that passes, a little bit after the plane flies by.

In the Skyned Fortis example, what happens is that the rupture passes through, those waves are again superimposing and amplifying behind the

propagating rupture.

And as they then reach the surface, they enhance the ground shaking effects that would already be happening.

Is this an explanation for why it was quite so high on the magnitude scale or is it a different does it feel different does it behave differently as an earthquake?

Sure, yeah, no, it's a good question.

It does behave differently.

So you can have a large earthquake like this that isn't super sheer and that would of course produce a lot of damage.

That damage would be related to, for example, the depth of the earthquake,

obviously whether people were living nearby, what the substrate was, whether the buildings that were nearby were built on rocks or loose materials.

But when there's super sheer involved, it it can multiply for any given sized earthquake the ground shaking effects.

So does this mean, could this have caused more damage yet in Myanmar?

I think so.

So these sorts of earthquakes are relatively unusual.

The process of supershear has been sort of identified I guess since the 1990s, maybe a little bit before that.

And there are not many very well confirmed super shear earthquakes.

This might be one, but it's yet to be confirmed really.

I think some of the big factors here will be one, the super shear possibility, two the construction style in Myanmar and whether that led to weaknesses in the building stock and perhaps vulnerabilities there.

The great length of the rupture, so the rupture even for its size, magnitude 7.7, it seems to have propagated longer and further than we might expect, perhaps up to 300 kilometers in length, which would obviously have exposed more people to that shaking.

You mentioned that we're not sure if it is this sort of earthquake.

Is the political situation in the country making it harder to actually understand what's been going on?

It is.

So there are teams on the ground of course in Myanmar who are attempting to work on this and try and understand some of the detail.

A lot of work can be done remotely using satellite imagery, for example looking at the difference between satellite images taken before and after the earthquake.

There are seismic arrays around the world that can be used, obviously the waves that are produced at the focus depth below the epicenter radiate out from that point and they they can be received by seismometers around the world.

And the information that those seismometers produce can be used to try and understand whether this was really a super shear rupture.

Thank you very much.

That is Ian Watkinson, structural geologist at Royal Holloway University.

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Now, baseball fans are getting cross.

Or delighted, depending on what team they are fans of.

The New York Yankees matched a major league baseball record in their opening three games of the season by scoring 15 home runs, which for cricketers is like a six but bigger.

Why the crossness?

Well, because they did so using a new kind of bat called a torpedo bat, and it is engineered to hit harder.

For those who sport the Yankees, this is marvellous.

For those who don't, the accusation is that this is just not cricket, or whatever the baseball version is.

Here to tell us more is Steve Haik, professor of sports engineering at Sheffield Hallam University.

Hi, Steve.

Now, first of all, tell us about the bat.

If I saw one of these alongside a normal bat, what would look different to me?

Well, to be honest, to the uninitiated, you might not notice the difference immediately, but a baseball bat in American parliaments is just a piece of lumber.

It's basically a single piece of wood.

You stick it in a lathe and you start machining it down.

So at the end, it's just a cylinder and then it tapers down to a handle until it ends up with a kind of a bit of a knob on the end so that your hand doesn't fall off when you swing it.

So this new torpedo bat, it's slightly different in that the end, rather than being a cylinder, is slightly tapered towards the end, a bit like a 10-pin and 10-pin bowling.

So it seems to have a fatter middle and a slightly narrower end to it.

And why?

What's it doing?

Well, the science behind it is about a thing called the sweet spot.

You have these on cricket bats, on tennis rackets, on baseball bats, anything that you're going to hit a ball with, you'll have this sweet spot.

And really, basically, it's the center of percussion.

It's the place on the bat that when you hit it, you get very little sense at the hand of any of any large forces.

Now, this is actually at the center of mass.

So if you can hit the ball at the center of mass, that's where it feels very good.

And that's where you get the largest transfer of momentum from the bat to the ball.

And what they've done is they've manipulated the shape by bringing the mass down towards the center of the bat where you seem to hit the ball.

So you've got more mass behind the ball and the ball probably goes a little bit farther.

And presumably, I mean, they have rules about bats, I guess, and I'm guessing this doesn't break them.

Yeah,

the rule.

The rule is very minimal, actually.

I've got it in front of me here.

So it shall be smooth, a round stick, not more than 2.6 inches in diameter and no more than 42 inches in length.

And it should be one solid piece of wood.

So it's pretty minimal.

So as long as it's not too long and it's not too wide, then that's it.

You can do whatever shape you like.

And I think what's surprising is that they've not tried this before.

I was going to say, I mean, there's billions of dollars in baseball.

We've all, you know, heard of the money ball thing where they're hiring statisticians to get very marginal gains.

It is astonishing if this genuinely is making a difference that nobody thought, hang on, what about the bit that hits the ball?

Yeah, I mean, the idea has been around a while.

And I think one of the things you have is, you know, you've got these professional baseball players.

They get paid millions of dollars per year.

And they have their favorite bats.

They have their kind of swing style.

And the bats are probably customized for them, particular weights, a particular balance point etc so if they're going to change anything they've really got to make sure they get it right and and you know and and professional sports people are quite superstitious so any change can be quite psychologically damaging if they're not careful um talking more generally i mean this is far from the first time that a new technology has turned up in an old sport we've had those bouncy running shoes the night vapor flies we had those shark skin suits briefly for swimmers going back further i think you know just the introduction of the starting blocks in the 100 meters made a difference.

So when is technology good and when is it bad?

And why aren't we all just doing it naked like the Greeks and just sort of sticking so we've got a proper proper scientific baseline?

Yes, that's true.

That's true.

So most ruling bodies like technology, but just not too much of it.

And so you mentioned the shark skin suits back in

the 2000s.

These suits were created where we went from the 1980s where it really was minimal sportswear minimal um swimsuit wear and these kind of tiny speedos which are the smallest things ever and i think the manufacturers realized that actually you could get them if you made them bigger that you could reduce drag you can improve performance and performance would increase rapidly in the 2000s up to about 2009 at the rome world championships when 23 records were broken and that was just far too many because then people going whoa hang on is it the swimmer or is it the suit and what we want it to be is we want it to be the swimmer.

Now, the ruling bodies then banned those suits.

So we have some old records that are still yet to be beaten.

And what they should perhaps have done is just said, well, okay, we've made the decision to allow the suits.

We'll just let them continue to be used.

And what would have happened, as has happened in many, many sports over the years, you end up with this equilibrium.

The increase in performance would have dropped off until it would have just leveled out because everyone would have had the same suits.

And then it would have gone back to this kind of stable equilibrium, which is what we're seeing in most sports now.

Thank you very much.

Steve Haik, Professor of Sports Engineering.

Thank you.

So Caroline Steele has joined me in the studio to run through the science news stories of the week.

Caroline, how are you at baseball?

Bad.

My hand-eye coordination is terrible, but I want to give one of these torpedo bats a go and see if I'm any better.

Yeah, maybe.

Who knows?

First up, let's talk about another controversy, not a sporting one, but a science one about particle physicists getting crossed this time, which is probably more traditional ground for us.

Explain what's going on.

So earlier this week, CERN released a feasibility study for a £13 billion

future circular collider that would open in 2070.

So the Large Hadron Collider, which is there now, is set to shut down in 2040.

So this could be the future plan.

Four committees are going to review these plans and if it's given the green light, construction will start in five years in 2030.

So pretty soon.

Give a sense of the scale.

So Large Hadron Collider, really big hole in the ground with lots of magnets, 27 kilometers round.

27 kilometers.

So yeah, pretty big.

But this would be 91 kilometers in circumference.

So that's about three times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider.

It would still be smashing protons together, which is...

what the Large Hadron Collider does now, but they would have eight times the energy.

So hopefully they would be making new, potentially bigger particles.

But the tech to reach these sort of super high energies isn't actually there yet.

So what would happen is the tunnel would be built first.

Then a simpler machine would be put in at around 2045, which would collide electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, together, which would hopefully give us more information about the Higgs boson, which is a particle that CERN discovered in 2012 using the Large Hadron Collider.

Yeah, I spoke to some particle physicists about this this week, and one of them said, look, we found the Higgs boson in 2012.

That was brilliant.

What they wanted afterwards was to find something they couldn't explain, essentially.

We've got the standard model of particle physics and it's brilliant, but we know it cannot be true.

And they wanted to find new stuff.

And

they've been running and running.

And basically, they found nothing unexpected.

So the plan is to just keep going, but more so.

Yeah, the 2012 discovery was huge, but there hasn't been something sort of equally notable and exciting since then.

And, you know, some physicists are sort of saying there isn't enough evidence that these higher energy collisions would produce enough new, interesting, more massive particles.

So yeah, it is a lot of money for something that may or may not help us better understand the fundamentals of our universe.

And what is it they want to find?

What would be the sort of dream where in 2070 they say, ha, we told you so, the sort of great grandson of whoever set it up?

I think there's sort of two areas it's trying to focus on.

So still the Higgs boson, because that is actually lighter than it was expected to be.

It sort of thought maybe there's a heavier counterpart which could be discovered by this larger collider.

Also, we know dark matter exists because when you look out at the universe, there's sort of evidence of this invisible matter pulling things towards it.

But we haven't seen it on sort of a small particle scale.

So if we could see evidence of dark matter, that would be pretty cool as well.

Cool.

Well, we'll watch it and I hope they get their lovely tunnel.

What do you have next for us?

So So there's a really interesting paper that's been published in Nature Medicine where researchers have developed a blood test for Alzheimer's.

And it doesn't just diagnose Alzheimer's.

It can tell you how far the disease has progressed in terms of symptoms.

And that's not something we have at the moment.

There are diagnostic blood tests, but they don't really tell you about progression.

That's quite exciting.

It could be used to basically match patients up to the best treatment because different treatments are better for different stages of the disease.

And also, excitingly, it could track the performance of new drugs in trials because it's sort of very accurate at telling exactly how the disease is progressing.

It feels like we're in the middle of a revolution in blood tests because before you had to use these very, very expensive things.

And now it looks like we're getting all manner of cheap and easier ways to track what's going on.

Whenever I write about this, I get these perfectly reasonable questions in the comments where people say, well, I don't want to know.

What's the point of this?

What's the justification for knowing?

I guess it can help you make more informed decisions about your treatment.

So say you're someone who's experiencing symptoms of Alzheimer's.

There are various medications and treatments that you could take or use.

And knowing exactly which treatment is likely to give you the best outcome, I think is really useful information.

And this blood test could help you make that decision, partly by telling you how progressed your disease is and also by matching you to the best medication or treatment.

Yeah, I think when I speak to scientists about this, they also make the point that until now there's been a bit of a vicious circle in that there's no way of properly detecting it early in the population, which means it's really hard to develop the drugs to treat it early.

And without the drugs, there's no justification for getting the thing to detect it early.

So they have to break this somehow.

Yeah, it's really difficult because the changes in your brain can happen decades before you even get any symptoms.

And with one of the sort of more readily available blood tests at the moment, they're looking for signs of this plaque in the brain of a protein called amyloid beta.

And the really difficult thing about that is you can have that plaque in your brain and never go on to develop Alzheimer's.

So it's, yeah, it's just, it's very difficult.

We've got time for one more from your pick of the science journals this week.

And this is about tricking bees to see how hygienic they are, which is what my mum used to do to me.

Talk me through it.

So beekeepers in the United States last year lost more than 55% of managed colonies.

And it's largely down to diseases.

And a new paper published in the Frontiers of Bee Science, which I think is a very cute sounding journal, has had a look at a new method which involves a chemical spray that can help select the best colonies to breed to create more disease resistant.

colonies in the future.

So inside, say, a honey beehive, you have these little hexagonal holes where the queen bee will go in and lay an egg in each hole and then as the eggs hatch nurse bees go and feed the developing pupae and eventually they sort of cap over these holes to protect the developing bees until they mature into adults.

Now if these developing bees get sick or die, they give off a pheromone, they give off a chemical that these nurse bees pick up on and then they pull the developing bee out to protect the rest of the colony from the disease.

And this is good.

We want bee euphanasia.

That's what we need.

That's good.

Bees killing each other when they're sick.

Exactly.

That's something that beekeepers are looking for.

That is great bee behavior.

One way of trying to sort of work out which colonies do that best, which beekeepers and scientists have done in the past, is to pour liquid nitrogen on part of the hive and basically kill some of these developing bees and then see how good the nurse bees are at going in and removing the dead bees.

But...

This paper has had a look at a new method that basically sprays part of the hive with a synthetic chemical that mimics the pheromone that's given off by a diseased or dying bee and then you have a look and see how the nurse bees respond so the colonies that have more curious nurse bees that go and have a look at these developing bees and see how they how are they doing are they sick are they dying perform better when it comes to diseases so you can basically use this spray to work out which colonies are better at coping with disease and then selectively breed them in the future so you can make super hygienic bees who ruthlessly deal with their their weak and sick Thank you very much, Caroline, and thank you to all my guests this week, Dr.

Andrew Garrad, Dr.

Ian Watkinson and Professor Steve Haik.

I'm Tom Whipple and that's all for this week.

Our email address is bbcinsidescience or one word at bbc.co.uk and do remember to keep those science questions coming in.

Next week Marnie Chesterton will be at the helm and I'm going to be working on my baseball swing.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Tom Whipple, Science Editor at the Times.

The producers were Dan Welsh, Claire Salisbury and Jonathan Blackwell.

Technical production was by Kath McGee.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

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