registerme
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Post by registerme on Jan 22, 2019 10:07:48 GMT
There are alternatives, for instance, Rolls Royce make these fancy little nuclear power plants they stick in submarines, amazingly they don't cost-overrun and they work pretty well (when did you last see a secret sub being towed back to Scotland?). www.rolls-royce.com/media/our-stories/innovation/2017/smr.aspx if you click through you will see the whole thing sits on the back of a truck, has been made in a factory and will be disassembled in a factory.... who knew?
I seem to remember a story from a couple of years back about Lockheed Martin having developed a prototype fusion power plant that would fit on the back of a truck, to be ready for production in.... a couple of years. If only.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2019 10:18:52 GMT
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Post by bracknellboy on Jan 22, 2019 10:21:28 GMT
Battery technology is certainly moving at a pace. The UK's blind faith in pushing forward with massive scale, high cost, long lead time nuclear in the face of a rapidly evolving landscape in usage, generation and storage, is I think an error. Definitely not sad to see the market itself putting a brake on it, even if unwillingly. On the subject of small modular civil nuclear, NuScale is a pioneer www.nuscalepower.com/ and been working on for sometime.
RR is probably a more recent jumper onto that bandwagon: I really don't how ready / likely they are in reality to be able to go to market in any short timescales; and how much of it is self promotion smoke blowing.
As an aside, yes you don't see secret squirrel subs being towed back to base too often (well unless they have been damaged by their commanders, ooops). Nonetheless, that doesn't necessarily mean that all has always been plain sailing with their reactors....
Significantly distributed generation and storage is a big "disruptor" and poses some interesting challenges for the grid and supply management, as well as opportunity.
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Jan 22, 2019 11:52:20 GMT
I like those "little" nuclear reactors.
Of the following two events, I predict that (A) will happen first:
(A) It will be normal to have a nuclear-powered electricity source in the home, supplying all your needs. It will contain a fraction of a gramme of fuel, which will last decades, and the fuel and waste will be securely contained. They will follow the pattern of computer adoption: at first, someone calculated six would be enough for the whole country, but within a generation or so they were in every home.
(B) My defaulted loans in Funding Circle will finish paying (i.e., fully recovered or abandoned).
I do not know where event (C), "I will die", lies on this timescale, but I bet my 6-year-old daughter lives to see (A). But probably not (B).
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Post by captainconfident on Jan 22, 2019 12:08:35 GMT
Battery technology is certainly moving at a pace. The UK's blind faith in pushing forward with massive scale, high cost, long lead time nuclear in the face of a rapidly evolving landscape in usage, generation and storage, is I think an error. Definitely not sad to see the market itself putting a brake on it, even if unwillingly. This is what I have just arrived at this thread to say. The forecasts of need for nuclear base load generation are based on renewables storage being frozen in time. Yes it needs a leap of faith to say that battery storage will develop sufficiently in time to take up the slack, but it is not a big leap of faith. Investment from nuclear should be diverted to electricity grid development. If battery powered cars take off, then everyone is plugging in a battery storage device to the grid and a lot of these are going to be sitting idle while fully charged. Already I read of a payments scheme on offer in one EU country if you allow your car to be used as a peak demand battery supply.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2019 12:33:26 GMT
(A) can't happen, it ain't fusion and it ain't fission so it can't
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aj
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Post by aj on Jan 22, 2019 13:07:41 GMT
Investment from nuclear should be diverted to electricity grid development. Absolutely this. There are large renewable installations throughout the UK that have an 'export cap' in place. This means excess electricity above a certain amount is not allowed to be exported (Limits due to limitations of local transmission networks and load balancing eg: excess of solar on sunny weekend days). Rather than the massive waste of money that 'smart' meters have been, there should instead have been a rollout of a 'smart export' system that allows the National Grid more oversight/control of our increasingly distributed power generation. Flexibility now seems to be the key to increasing the percentage of our electricity coming from renewable sources.
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Jan 22, 2019 13:12:42 GMT
Do we really need additional Nuclear Power Stations? Before we answer this, we need to look at the energy in the uk. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_KingdomBack in 2004, UK was the energy exporter, by 2013, 43% of energy was imported into UK. Although We are using less energy compared to 2004, there isn't enough energy production to supply to whole UK. In 2016, 20% production comes from Nuclear Power, although nuclear power stations have relatively longer life time, these operating nuclear power plants does not last forever, half of them are closed by 2024, we do need something to replace them unless increase energy import would be the better alternative. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_KingdomApart from nuclear power plant life time, oil and natural gas production will continue to decline. The bottom line is, UK needs to increase energy production if energy import is not an option to avoid energy crisis. There are many options to replace existing nuclear power stations, but I agree with Steerpike and registerme, UK policy of a mix of generation methods is better for UK's future and nuclear power should not been ruled out but managed. www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0411/4-clean-energy-alternatives-to-uranium.aspxwww.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf
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scc
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Post by scc on Jan 22, 2019 13:46:49 GMT
I suspect we'll see more renewables just on the basis that they are cheaper, quicker to install and (Daily Wailers aside) generally more liked by the public than nuclear (fission). Any government operating on the usual short termist next election in mind model will probably now let more renewables and supporting tech happen by default. The economics of nuclear looks less and less appealing by the day while solar and others get cheaper and cheaper.
The solar subsidiary has effectively done its job of encouraging solar and showing they can do the job (even only a partial but significant contribution). Timing of cuts to subsidies can obviously be argued about. We can do this, it just needs a bit of long time thinking, creativity and investment. I was reading about a tarmac road being used to provide heating during the winter for the surrounding area via thermal storage this morning. Such projects need to move from pilots to mainstream quickly.
I'm more and more confident that, a few areas like aviation aside, we'll see near zero carbon UK in my lifetime.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Jan 22, 2019 17:47:12 GMT
@bobo, captainconfident, that idea of using the batteries in EV to store electricity for peak demand is an excellent one, and something I've not seen before. Is the infrastructure going in at the moment capable of returning power to the grid?
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Post by captainconfident on Jan 22, 2019 17:59:22 GMT
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Post by bracknellboy on Jan 22, 2019 18:12:08 GMT
should I be offended - I mentioned it as the last point on my first post
Don't know whether the idea is technology ready, nor quite what is needed, but it seems to be regularly mentioned as a very likely development. After all, if it avoids utilities having to put in additional storage or generation capacity, at the same time as increasing the part that renewables can play, then there will big financial incentives to make it happen.
Still, if the take up of EVs is too slow, then presumably you might find that advances have allowed other storage capacity to be cost effectively added before hand.
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scc
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Post by scc on Jan 22, 2019 18:19:02 GMT
I think a techie friend of mine suggested that using electric vehicles as grid batteries wasn't completely straightforward. Something to do with limitations of the connectors IIRC. Also, you are obviously putting wear and tear on the car's battery - which might need to be incentivised in some way.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2019 9:16:25 GMT
Technology is already present the issue is how to charge for it. The present level of "Smart meter" is as we techie call it is s@ t, but level 6 (already production ready) can manage this. Don't ask how you make a level 4 into a level 6 is beyond me. Right now I have an instruction in my power box which states "unless you are fitting a level6 please do not fix a smart meter here" just in case I'm not at home when the guys come to install.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Jan 23, 2019 14:29:55 GMT
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of renewables, I just don't think that, at the moment, they are the answer in and of themselves. Interestingly there was a piece a week or so ago (I forget where precisely) that claimed that people moving to LED lighting had had a material impact on the country's electricity consumption. I'm not sure of the details but the idea that consumption (hopefully decreasing) is part of the overall picture has to be correct.
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I moved my whole house to LED lighting pretty much in one swoop (except for one room where I can't get LEDs for the fitting). As a result, my electricity consumption dropped by a third. I now feel bad when I turn the light on in the room I couldn't change: with 3x 50W bulbs, it uses massively more energy than any other place in the house! Not long ago, a 150W light bulb would have been commonplace; nowadays 150W sounds like an environmental disaster.
Thanks for the nudge Stonk, I've just had a chat with a tradesman I've used in the past and he quoted me ~£800 for parts and labour to replace all the halogen bulbs in my house with "30 year in unit LEDs" . It'll probably pay for itself inside of four or so years. Helped also by the electricity bill that just thumped onto my mat - £380 for the quarter .
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