How long does it take to change a valve?

[The Natural Philosopher]

90 days apparently, if its an undersea power link to France.

link was only working at half capacity most of last summer, and it wont be back up at full capacity until May..

The Moyle interconnection linking to Northern Ireland has only just been restored after 3 month outage with a a bust extension cable.

Amazingly the Britned link to Holland hasn't gone down at all since it was commissioned earlier this year. I guess the guarantee hasn't run out.

Never mind, we will press on with the European Supergrid and use Saharan sunlight to keep our I pods charged up.

Or something.

[Duncan Wood]

That says it'll take 9 days

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, look deeper

[Brian L Johnson]

> the link was only working at half capacity most of last summer, and it

I spotted this a few minutes ago.

"How much of the Earth's surface do we need to power the world with #green energy? #infographic"

[Jules Richardson]

from Turkey to the UK? :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

yeah. assuming of course the generators were 100% efficient.

And we had the storage OR the ability to construct a world wide electricity grid.

OTOH you could fit all the uranium needed to do the same thing into Wembley stadium - though I would not recommend trying it - mind you, on second thoughts, turnning that part of london into an irradited sterile heap of affordable housing minus the people, has its attractions.

[charles]

you'd half the number if you used 10m ones.

[Adrian C]

centure of the earth, or modify a volcano. Pipe seawater down it, and collect power from the steam. Round up all the green protestors and have then Jeremy Clarkson'ed.

[John Williamson]

They claim 20% on the caption.

I'd be more worried about their assumptions about how much sunlight falls on the earh.

[Nightjar]

>>>>> the link was only working at half capacity most of last summer, and it

solar powered steam sets in North Africa and the Middle East, it would need 2,500 sq km of plant to provide 17% of Europe's needs - and another

3,500 sq km for the transmission lines.

Colin Bignell

[Newshound]

Wouldn't be a problem with natural uranium yellowcake in 200 litre steel drums.

- mind you, on

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thats easy. Buy up Greece.

Shame about the transmission lines - and the olive groves.

[The Natural Philosopher]

ah, You might need to fill a bit more than Wembley stadium could take. I was assuming at least enriched to power station grade.

[Newshound]

Maybe. According to Wikipedia, the stadium "bowl" volume is about 1.1 x

10^6 cubic metres, so it would fit about 366 Wylfa cores, giving about 180 GW. But I guess less than 10% of the core volume is uranium metal. Not sure if you could get a chain reaction in a 100 metre cube of natural uranium metal.

So you might be able to collect enough natural uranium to approach world electricity demand.

[The Other Mike]

That they can still get the valves 25 years later is pretty good going given that Radio 4 LW is on borrowed time. Despite what the document says it's more than just valves that are being changed.

There is another link to Eire coming online later this year, obviously export from the UK only.

[grimly4]

Not necessarily. Once we shoot all the nimbys we can end up a net exporter of power.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think power grade is 5% U-235

(Wiki)

"Natural uranium is 99.284% 238U isotope, with 235U only constituting about 0.711% of its weight."

"Low-enriched uranium (LEU) has a lower than 20% concentration of 235U. For use in commercial light water reactors (LWR), the most prevalent power reactors in the world, uranium is enriched to 3 to 5% 235U"

But for how long?

Interestingly IIRC the average refuel of a big reactor is just 25 tonnes every two years.

The fissile component of that is less than 5% so that's only 1.25 tonnes of U-235 to start with..

I believe the actually u235 'burnt' is less than 5kg..but I cant find the source of that..so could be wrong.

[The Natural Philosopher]

we already are with respect to Ireland And we are not far off with respect to the continent.

It tends to me more a balance though. So far slightly in favour of imports.

Essentially we run on cheap French nukes in the summer when they have bags to spare and shut down the coal almost completely - or nearly so. In winter we run on coal and shut down the gas except to cover peaks..