So what is *your* solution, then? And don't say "wind farms", because at the moment it is very cold, has been for a few days, and during that time our expensive investment in wind has struggled to supply more than
1% to 1.5% of demand (as I type, demand: 51.83GW, Wind: 0.74GW).
Thats not pumped storage Mike. :-(
Thats interconnectors.
Then we are totally shafted because we used up all our own. And windmills rely on imported gas.
we even had uranium. The worlds first uranium was extracted in Cornwall!
They used it to get radium out. I think they threw the rest away.
that's scaled in kBYTES per second. So its doing about 100kbps normally.
AS I said, its not bandwidth limited at the moment.
No, but its still interesting to see.
So its a *lot* of work. Most worthwile things are.
Brain fart moment!
It's a WORST CASE ANALYSIS, or don't you know and understand what is meant by the term?
It demonstrates that, as we have no indigenous supplies of nuclear fuel here in the UK, nuclear power generation is as unreliable to us in the long term as wind is in the short term.
WE KNOW that we have at least 40+ years of carbon-based fuels within our national and marine borders, so the best long-term strategy to ensure continuity of supply is to invest in carbon sequestering in an attempt to ensure that we can use these known reserves.
Typical British arrogance on a par with the days of Empire. Stereotyping is not thinking, it's exactly the opposite - it's being too f~*#ing lazy to think. Most countries are not run by 'hippies', in the meaning of the term as most of us understand it..
Leaving Putin's character aside as irrelevant to the actual issue - we could choose to import from elsewhere or burn our own reserves if we were prepared to pay more to avoid importing from Russia - the fact that we currently choose to import rather than burn our own is entirely determined by the market. Currently, it happens to be cheaper to import than exploit our own resources, but that's fine, because it means that we are conserving OUR resources for longer against an uncertain future.
Another typical wave-hand-in-air-dismissively assertion stated as if fact from the pro-nuclear lobby. I note that, as usual, TNP (whom I've previously plonked for abuse) has not bothered to give a credible reference, so I shall ignore this until he does and I see it through someone posting in reply. However, current UK stockpiles have been covered before in the thread I linked previously, and others.
The 'solution' would have been to continue using coal to generate electricity, and keep the gas for the things it is best suited to - like heating houses. And spend some on the money wasted on wind farms developing ways of burning coal more cleanly, with some form of carbon capture.
Worring about the medium term would be a good start - and fission will address that for the foreseeable - once the buggers get on with building some more!
No thanks. It was boring enough the first time.
We do have indigenous supplies of nuclear fuel. There's an awful lot at Sellafield, and there's a fair bit under cornwall actually. Its just not worth using it because uranium is currently dirt cheap. And plentiful. World's first uranium mine was in cornwall.
You might as well say we have no coal and no gas, because they are alao currently more expensive to extract that in other parts of the world.
And there's a lot of thorium around too.
carbon sequestration is impossibly expensive. More expensive than nuclear power.
I thoink you will find they are, where energy is concerned :-)
Indeed,. And anyway, we import from Norway not Russia, by and large.
its that kind of weather.
Now if I had a research grant I could write to Dinorwig..
As I type, demand: 52.11GW, with:
Coal: 44% Nuke: 14% CCGT: 37% Wind: 1.75%
So we are using coal. Whether coal can be made to burn more cleanly (whatever that means), I don't know. There will always be ash, whatever you do.
The last time we lived within our renewable income was when we had a population of about 2 million. And average life expectancy was 30 years.
More total unscientific bollocks from the resident dreamer.
There's enough fissile material in the world to keep it going at current population levels for a few thousand years.
Why not use it?
Until fusion comes along, and then maybe we can get off planet.
You never asked for one. That's DECCS own estimate on stockpiled plutonium actually.
I guess you believe everything you read in the guardian.
So we have a LOT of potential nuclear fuel in the nation already. A huge amount. U-238 isn't even classed as a material that comes under radioactive safety regulation.
"Estimated Future Stocks: It is estimated that the combined stocks of depleted uranium could reach around 106,000 tU by 2020, although this quantity could be reduced according to use. These stocks are thought to roughly consist of depleted uranium from the enrichment of natural uranium (40%), enrichment of reprocessed uranium (20%), reprocessing of spent fuel (25%) and military stocks (15%) "
YOU are the hand wavy not-a-calculation-or-a-fact-in-sight person here, not me.
Not worth doing dave.
Personally i'd have hedged the best with nuclear as well.
There is however a need for gas..demand fluctuates and pumped storage is like a fast acting capacitor on a DC supply. It can get rid of riuipples and act in seconds. Gas is like a bigger capacitor. It cant cope with sub hour fluctuations, but it can be brought on line and is very efficient doing so - very fast.
Coal takes several hours to get up to working efficiency and several hours to come down - days even.,.
Nuclear and bunker oil is similar to coal in response times.
That leads to the relatively sane arrangement we used to have, where coal and nuclear ran the base-load and coal handled the major long term dispatch events, like evening peaks and nightly drops in demand, and gas filled in the imbalances.
hydro and pumped were simply useful to cover very short term demands or fill in whenever there was water up a hill somewhere in surplus.
Then North sea gas and Arthur Scargill came along and met Maggie. At a stroke interest rates went up, nuclear because of the high build cost became uneconomic,coal ceased to be mined, and gas gas gas was all we needed.
Hence what we have today. Ageing coal and nuclear plants which together supply the majority of the electricity we use. a lot of almost uneconomic gas, because gas is now so expensive, and a load of useless windmills that come into work when they want, charge us a fortune for 'free' energy, and then f*ck off to polish their mails and chat about their boyfriends in the toilets.
We DO need gas because its still cheaper to use gas for peaking demand than to build massive nuclear or coal plant that only operates under limited capacity.
what we need is more reliable base-load to replace the coal and nuclear.
What we don't need is unreliable fluctuating expensive real estate destroying windmills and solar panels.
That cots us three times, first to build, then to back up and then to connect. Plus the hidden costs of the environmental damage they cause.
ash full of uranium too.
very hard to separate CO2. because it comes mixed with air.
One way is interesting: you first burn metal, and get a metallic oxide. You mix that with coal dust and 'burn' that. Out the end you get hot pure CO2 and hot pure molten metal. You burn the metal again and put it back in the input, the CO2 is almost 100% pure and so you can do whatever you like with it. without bothering about separating out the nitrogen and oxygen. Its actually slightly more efficient than burning the coal straight up in air.
However, its all expense. Its cheaper to build zero carbon nukes.
If you give a f*ck about UK emissions, bearing in mind (a) climate change is increasingly looking like 'not our fault' as it gets colder again and (b) China India and the USA wont change their policies just cos we do.
But there is more pumped storeage than just Dinorwic, though that is the biggest. I can only think of Festiniog (360MW) ATM but I think there is at least one other in Scotland.
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