OT Yet more Nuclear bollix.

[harryagain]

The true cost of nuclear power.

[bert]

In message , harryagain writes

"The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Avebury has written to Mr Davey demanding to know why ministers left the decision of whether to hand a contract extension to the private sector consortium running the clean-up of the site in Cumbria to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns Sellafield."

Maybe its because the NDA know a lot more about the subject than Ministers Independent journalists and stupid Liberal peers.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Looks like some lobbying didnt work..

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, I know Ed Davey and he is pretty canny about things, but I'd hope that everyone concerned did their homework as its a safety issue. Brian

[John Rumm]

I don't know why you bother harry. You know as well as the rest of us that windmills and solar panels are never going to provide base load generation without some revolutionary improvement in cheap and effective storage.

So if you want a low carbon source of electricity and are not deluding yourself that the developed world is about to adopt the sack cloth and ashes approach espoused by some of the more unhinged of the green persuasion, such as a a return to pre-industrial levels of energy use (and the annihilation of the majority of the worlds population that would entail) nuclear of one sort or another is the *only* answer. Might as well get used to it, its not like you have a choice.

In the mean time, better get start making use of that shale gas to ease the transition.

[harryagain]

Still spouting your ignorant drivel? Still got your head up your arse? It's about time you did some research instead of living in the past. You could start here.

Shale gas won't come on line in less than ten years. Renewable energy together with a smart grid is gong to have to meet the load. Sooner than you think when Putin turns off the gas taps to show us who's boss.

Nuclear power is looking less and less likely in the UK. Far too expensive for a start. We can't afford the cost of waste disposal, even supposing we knew how to do it.

[Tim Streater]

Funny, it took the Yanks a lot less than that.

Ah, harry's in "la la la I can't hear you" land again. It's reassuring how some things don't change.

[Nightjar]

On 02/05/2014 07:52, harryagain wrote: ...

Typical of the rubbish that has been infiltrated into Wikipedia by greens.

From initial exploration to production can be as little as eight months, or as much as 2.5 years, depending upon the site.

It can't, whatever the proponents claim.

As I have pointed out to you before, only a fraction of a percent of our gas comes from Russia and that quite indirectly. Prices might go up if Russia cuts off supplies, but that only makes shale gas and nuclear more attractive.

Less expensive than renewables.

As you have been told repeatedly, we do know how to dispose of it. Cost determines which method we choose.

Colin Bignell

[John Williamson]

Only due to the FUD spread by the Greens. And for the foreseeable future, it's going to be more reliable, cheaper, and produce less CO2 than the windmills.

The claimed cost of running Sellafield hasn't much to do with the recyclable and recycled fuel from nuclear power, but it does have a lot to do with the waste left over from producing nuclear weapons.

[Tim Streater]

I think you mean "lies". Let's call a harry a harry, OK?

[John Rumm]

Indeed - they whole shale revolution only took 10 to 15 years to unlock the puzzle of what techniques were required, and develop them sufficiently. Given the starting point with what we now know, you can have a productive well within months from start of drilling.

[John Rumm]

There is no conceivable way it could.

When its dark, and there is no wind, no amount of smartness in the grid is going to conjure 40 MWh of electricity from nowhere.

Since we are not dependant on Russian gas its not directly relevant. However it will increase demand and drive up prices, making rapid development of our own share reserves far more attractive.

Less likely - but ultimately inevitable.

I seem to recall someone claiming that Solar was expensive at the moment, but will get cheaper...

What you call "waste" I call fuel. All it needs is the political will to build the infrastructure to use it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

fracking was developed in the 50s and 60s.

It makes no commercial sense until you are at the sort of price levels we have now.

IF we find some good economically frackable reserves and the greens are pushed out of the way, then is 2-5years max and boy we will need it to stop lights going out.

THIS time let it buy time to build nukes, not votes to keep Miliband in power.

[harryagain]

And how do you get the gas away? In buckets? There will have to be whole new pipeline infrastructure. Through/under road and railways. For water as well as gas. Electricity. Storage and treatment plant. Disposal of the fracking fluid. Disposal of the drillings, Roads to be built. The wells only last a few years at most and will be within ten miles of one another. And the NIMBYs will be jumping up and down.

Everything's simple to the simple minded.

[Johny B Good]

Succinctly put. The current crop of nuclear power plants are a Cold War legacy. Happily, there's a much safer type of nuclear fission reactor technology (a Cold War legacy 'orphan' in this case) known by the acronym LFTR, which has lain unused for the past 40 years or so, which is far better suited to the production of electrical energy.

Not only does it do away with a large pressure vessel containment dome (the most expensive part of the legacy reactor designs), it also uses Thorium (4 times more abundent than Uranium) which it can usefully extract over 90% of the nuclear energy from versus uranium's

1% extraction potential between each expensive cycle of reprocessing.

The L stands for 'Liquid' which means no need to completely shut down a reactor core every 2 or 3 years for refuelling since the fuel can be replenished whilst the reactor maintains output. It's true that such reactors will still need to be completey shutdown every 10 to 25 years to replace parts damaged by radiation but this is still way better than what the current fuel rod based systems have to go through.

Putting aside the various disasters with legacy nuclear power generation, the amount of radiocative pollution released into the global environment has been far less than that produced by coal fired power stations.

With such risks of explosive release of radionucleotides inheritently eliminated by the LFTR design, the nuclear option would be the greenest most eco-friendly power generation ever yet invented. Not only that but it would also solve the current problem of nuclear waste disposal by allowing the long lived dangerous nucleotides to be burned down to radioctive elements with much shorter half lives measured in the range of days to years making the size of the problem far more managable than it is today.

Even if world demand for energy was held at its current level, there's very little future left in fossil fuelled generation technology whereas there's, conservativley, a good 3000 years of future left for LFTR even when the whole global population is able to enjoy its fair share of energy.

I think 3000 years should be enough breathing space for mankind to develop the Holy Grail of Nuclear fusion power. If it isn't, then we'll have had a good run as a species when the lights finally do go out.

[harryagain]

The waste is what's left after reprocessing to get the fuel out. It is worthless.

[John Rumm]

There was a bit more to it than that. Frakking is only part of the picture and not even the major bit really; its the modern horizontal deep drilling techniques used into deep shale that are "new" as such. Sometimes this is combined with hydraulic fracturing, but often its not necessary.

Pretty much all of the development of the technology was done by so called small independent "wildcatter" oil and gas men in the US (folks like Harrold Mann, Aubrey McClendon). The big oil companies had long since lost interest in "local" oil at home assuming that US reserves were dwindling - and were concentrating or foreign drilling and offshore stuff. The assumption previously was that conventional oil wells is were the bulk of the reserves were, and shale concentrations were difficult to get at "dregs" you go after once the main well are falling in production. They are now beginning to appreciate that the main wells may have actually been the dregs and that the shale concentrations represent the lions share of the deposits.

Yup sounds like a plan ;-)

[John Rumm]

You make it sound almost as objectionable as building wind turbines.

Must make the world a breeze for you...

[Johny B Good]

You think? No need to respond, it's a rhetorical question you're not qualified to answer anyway.

[John Rumm]

Indeed - China and India are on that case already... another technology we can buy from them!

There are quite a few interesting applications of liquid salt reactors - not only with thorium, but also with harry's so called "waste" (or thousands of years worth of free energy as us engineers like to call it)

Don't forget all the radioactive "waste" that they dig up and have to store[1] when getting all those nice rare earth metals that harry needs for his batteries, and motors etc to keep the windfarm, and wind up car going.

[1] Again "fuel" to an engineer.

Shhhh don't tell the greenies, they were hoping to corner the hair shirt market with "I told you so" printed in eco friendly ink on the back.