Impressed £67.5 billion... nope... 263 billion, and rising.

[rynnor]

Scouse will still dis it

The only problem with Fusion is that its not going to help us in the medium term when we face brownouts.

I think its too late for Nuclear now so that just leaves gas and coal - good thing CO2 induced runaway global warming is a crock eh?

 

[Scouse]

Scouse will still dis it

The only thing I'll dis about it is that the lions share of funding has been going into nuclear weapons research.

Why? Do we need bigger weapons that we're never going to use? Shall we just piss our money up the wall for no reason?

Sooner we have one world government the better.

 

[Chilly]

ITER will be using the magnets, yes? This one is using lasers? Fuck me these experiments are cool

The magnets are to create a toroidal magnetic containment field for the super heated plasma. You can't touch it with anything cos it's so hot it would turn it to plasma, too, so you can only use fields. You have to use liquid helium cooled super conducting magnets to get a field that strong, as well. I'm not actually sure what the source of ignition will be at ITER, it may well be layzerbeems.

 

[TdC]

ah yes but then they only need the lasers for the ignition process no? that means they have a power peak and then it's cash back time? I'm thinking this because in my head I am comparing the process to basically any reactor or large oven: once it's on, it can be surprisingly efficient...getting it to turn on, now there's your problem

 

[old.Tohtori]

Why? Do we need bigger weapons that we're never going to use? Shall we just piss our money up the wall for no reason?

Just the kind of attitude which will doom the earth when the aliens arrive.

 

[Scouse]

Just the kind of attitude which will doom the earth when the aliens arrive.

I think if the aliens turn up then our nuclear arsenal will be as laughable to them as our ability to spunk cash on pointless wank is to some of us

 

[Wij]

Mark Lynas talks facts while Jenny Jones talks bollocks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24445372

 

[Raven]

It's how she makes her dollars, decent industry to be in.

 

[old.Tohtori]

I think if the aliens turn up then our nuclear arsenal will be as laughable to them as our ability to spunk cash on pointless wank is to some of us

Currently yes, that's why we need bigger boats, knives and guns

 

[Tom]

The only thing I'll dis about it is that the lions share of funding has been going into nuclear weapons research.

Why? Do we need bigger weapons that we're never going to use? Shall we just piss our money up the wall for no reason?

Sooner we have one world government the better.

Going off current world populations that'd mean you'd be taking orders from China and India.

Fuck that.

 

[Raven]

Seeing as most of the world are either communist or Muslim I would rather we stick with the way we are thanks. If you think our government are bad then visit China.

 

[Scouse]

You don't have these sorts of problems with renewables, eh Wij

 

[Raven]

Nah but you do have very dark rooms

 

[Wij]

You don't have these sorts of problems with renewables, eh Wij

So even with corruption like that, which is OBVIOUSLY the fault of the technology, not people, nuclear energy is still the safest:

Deaths/yr/TWh


Coal - world average, 161
Coal - China, 278
Coal - USA, 15
Oil - 36
Natural Gas - 4
Biofuel/Biomass - 12
Peat - 12
Solar/rooftop - 0.44-0.83
Wind - 0.15
Hydro - world, 0.10
Hydro - world*, 1.4
Nuclear - 0.04

* Includes the 170,000 deaths from the failure of the Banquao Reservoir Dam in China in 1975

/edit: and we should make our energy policy based on phone-in polls on GMTV now??

 

[Wij]

Posting for fun:

You can install 10 x Hinckley nuclear power stations and get 32GW nuclear at 95% capacity factor = 266TWh. This 32GW of nuclear would integrate into the grid. We would also need 23 GW of CCGT operating at just 32% capacity factor. All the connections exist and the 23GW of CCGT exist. It would just be a matter of replacing some of our old coal plants with new reactors.

The wind alternative is to install 76GW of offshore wind @40% capacity factor and have 55GW of CCGT backup. That means we would need to build about 30GW of new CCGTs. We would need to connect about 150 wind farms with 21,000 turbines to a AC-DC station and then run 150 DC cables ashore and convert back into AC and connect to new or existing transformers. None of the above in itself is a deal breaker its all possible.

The problem comes when your 76GW of wind is outputting 80% of capacity or 61GW when demand is say 31GW. The difference of 30GW is a near impossible figure to utilise. At the very best we could perhaps export (why would we want that) 3GW to France and the Netherlands but that still leaves us with 28GW of unusable wind power. The only choice would be to turn 30GW of the wind farms off until demand picked up or wind slowed.

As a result we would not get the assumed 266TWh from wind, as we would have to stop the turbines fairly frequently.

This would not be a big problem if wind got cheap enough so it was producing under ~£40/MWh unsubsidised but it is a problem if it is producing at ~£100/MWh subsidised.

 

[Chilly]

You could attach giant lake-moving pumps to the unused wind power and pump a lake up a hill. Not disagreeing with your analysis of nukes, btw, just pointing out that you can probably soak that power up somehow via (inefficient) storage.

 

[rynnor]

You could attach giant lake-moving pumps to the unused wind power and pump a lake up a hill. Not disagreeing with your analysis of nukes, btw, just pointing out that you can probably soak that power up somehow via (inefficient) storage.

Super inefficient but useful for peak surges - are you basing this on the famous welsh one?

Aside from wasting most of the energy it uses theres a lack of potential sites and you can bet nimbys dont want it locally.

It also has issues in a drought since its completely reliant on a large reservoir of water.

In reality if theres danger of over supply the grid pays the wind farms to switch off (happens a lot in windy weather).

 

[Wij]

You could attach giant lake-moving pumps to the unused wind power and pump a lake up a hill. Not disagreeing with your analysis of nukes, btw, just pointing out that you can probably soak that power up somehow via (inefficient) storage.

You have no appreciation of scale. To store all that energy in pumped storage would require landscaping most of Britain to meet the capacity.

Dinorwig is huge. It can produce 1.8GW at peak. It runs out of water after 6 hours max. That's a shade under 11GWh storage in a fucking enormous bit of Wales. The UK needs at least 50 times that if power generation is variable rather than baseload. We use close to a TWh per day. We can sometimes have whole weeks without wind. Sometimes most of Europe can. There isn't enough water to pump uphill even if we could afford to play Populous with the UK's land.

 

[Scouse]

Not arguing over Nuclear's efficacy, Wij. Not at all.

But discounting serious safety issues because they're "people, not technology" problems isn't cool. Guess what, people build and run all the world's nuclear plants.

Cost for equivalent generation is roughly equivalent. Minus the safety and non-existent-waste-"disposal" issues that don't occur with renewables.

 

[rynnor]

Theres also an economic cost of storing the windpower.

We guarantee 25p a unit to them plus other subsidies - water storage wastes 80% of the power generated (even more in practice due to transmission costs).

Thus one unit produced by water storahe costs £1.25!

 

[Chilly]

You have no appreciation of scale. To store all that energy in pumped storage would require landscaping most of Britain to meet the capacity.

Dinorwig is huge. It can produce 1.8GW at peak. It runs out of water after 6 hours max. That's a shade under 11GWh storage in a fucking enormous bit of Wales. The UK needs at least 50 times that if power generation is variable rather than baseload. We use close to a TWh per day. We can sometimes have whole weeks without wind. Sometimes most of Europe can. There isn't enough water to pump uphill even if we could afford to play Populous with the UK's land.

Jazus, fair enough.

 

[Wij]

Not arguing over Nuclear's efficacy, Wij. Not at all.

But discounting serious safety issues because they're "people, not technology" problems isn't cool. Guess what, people build and run all the world's nuclear plants.

Cost for equivalent generation is roughly equivalent. Minus the safety and non-existent-waste-"disposal" issues that don't occur with renewables.

As my scaling it up to the UK and allowing for cover for variability example shows, wind power at scale will be producing an awful lot of power that we can't do anything with so even given your figures, which I can dispute, you are still either paying for huge amounts of leccy that aren't needed, which won't happen with nuclear, or you have to adjust your costs to take into account the wasted electricity.

If say 40% of the electricity produced cannot be used then prices must go up by two thirds. That's where the cost for winds variability starts to bite. That's before we get into the extra capital cost of the gas plant required for when the wind isn't blowing. Who pays for that?

 

[TdC]

just out of interest is there any way to store surplus that doesn't involve lakes pumped up hills?

 

[Chilly]

Lets go through ways of storing electrical power:

Pumping lakes up a hill: very good, high capacity, low latency between demand and supply (assuming the lake is full)
Batteries: the kind of power we're talking about would need cubic miles of extremely hazardous Lipoly or similar batteries that are extremely inefficient. The latency would be excellent, though.
Spin a 5 bazillion tonne flywheel. No idea if this is practical. Like KERS in F1.
Split water into hydrogen & oxygen and then burn them later in a gas turbine plant when you need the power. Probably a reasonable store in terms of efficiency, but needs *vast* storage tanks for extremely hazardous liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Would probably explode one day, would make an excellent target for the republica....er..the terrorists.

Can't think of much else that could come close to soaking up this kind of power. I suppose you could melt a fucking massive pile of rock or steel and then cool it again later by boiling water with it, but you'd constantly lose power as it cools naturally.

 

[Raven]

Humongous battery farms? Though I doubt enough of the rare metals needed for them exist or are accessible. Huge elastic bands?

No, not really

 

[Himse]

We should produce power by mixing coal with the hippies that love to be anti nuclear. That'd give us some extra time to develop nuclear and we'd be rid of smelly hippies.

 

[Chilly]

So I just put my physics degree to use. Imagine a flywheel with a radius of 50m, weighing 100,000 tonnes spinning at 10RPM. That's an angular velocity of 1.05 rads/sec, an inertia of 125M kg/m2
That gives us about 68.5M Joules of energy stored. I have no idea how practical it is to build a flywheel that big, but I expect it's a fucking nightmare. 1 watt = 1 joule per second. So that flywheel would power your house (Assuming 1KW average usage all day) for 19 hours if you could extract 100% of the energy from it, which you can't. So, realistically you'd get about half a day or less from it, given the efficiency of the distribution network and the method you use to convert the kinetic energy to electrical energy.

So, another quick calc, making a flywheel out of stuff as dense as water (1Kg/m3) with dimensions of 50m radius and 3m thickness would weight about 24K tonnes, a quarter of what I just solved. If you made it out of granite (2.65Kg/m3) it would only come to about 62K tonnes. So, yeah, flywheels are probably not going to work out. Although, since the inertia is proportional to the radius squared, if you could manufacture one well enough you could in theory store a SHITLOAD of power, but you'd need a radius of several hundred metres.

 

[Wij]

Enormous Hydrogen and. Oxygen tanks would be an infinitely more attractive target for terrorists than nuclear power stations.

 

[Chilly]

Another option is to move the world entire capacity for smelting and refining metals to the UK and let them use up all the power.

 

[TdC]

well, if you have a shitload of power you need rid of, then something like that could be an alternative. I am scared to compute what the average power cost of -say- a steel mill is, even with all the bulk discounts they most likely get 0o

re using flywheels, what would the inefficiency be if one had to use...10 r=100m ones rather than one r=1000m single wheel? I presume it's something like a order (or several) worse due to the maths?
I mean, I am thinking of CERN, with a 27KM tunnel. Surely there is some geologically stable place in the UK where such a thing could be built underground? Also, it seems to me that it's a hellalot easier to build 10 ...call it... 40K tonne wheels and support structures and not have them collapse on themselves than it is to build a single massive one.