That is what is being considered. The Mersey lagoon would be a barrage across Liverpool Bay The Severn lagoon would go right out into the Bristol Channel, creating a road/rail link from Somerset to way into South Wales, putting Cardiff inside the lagoon. The lagoon would also act as basin (buffer) to store water that comes down from the upper reaches to prevent flooding in Shrewsbury and Gloucester.
From
"The Barrier has the capacity to generate over 1GW of electricity, equivalent to the output of two nuclear power stations!"
The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:
The sums have already been done. The height variation is fixed by the tides. Building the barrage higher than that needed to survive the worst case scenario of raging sea would be an expensive waste of space.
You are moving the goalposts and joining the greens in putting wildlife first. Your principal gripe was "will totally transform the appearance of thousands of square miles". The appearance of a large body of tidal water is much the same regardless of whether it is artificially constrained or not. If the barrage was not in your field of view all that would be permanently lost from the view would be the below half water mark mud flats.
If you stand on the cliff at Dovercourt (maybe 50 feet above mean sea level) you can, on a clear day, see the Roughs Tower right on the horizon. The tower would be considerably taller than any barrage but even at 10 miles distance it is an insignificant arch on the horizon. Now if that was a wind turbine it might stand out like a sore thumb. :-)
The planning alone is about 8 years..
If EDF or EON succeed in their bid for British Energy, they could proably slam in a few PWR reactors next door to existing ones in that sort of timescale though, the theory being that the planning for such sites has already been done. At lest the heavy 'nuclear' issues..
But firing up a nuclear set is not something you want to rush.
We don't make anything anymore. The companies like GEC which we had which did that sort of thing are long since gone. You can't suddenly decide to just pick up nuclear generation when you abandoned it 30 years ago -- the expertise we had is all long since retired or dead (or fitting kitchens or servicing gas boilers, etc). It's not just us either; lots of the nuclear construction sector from 30+ years ago in other countries also no longer exists.
This means we have to go and buy it from someone else. I believe the french have just ordered a significant number of nuclear power plants, so at best we're standing some way behind them in the queue at the moment, and whilst we're still pondering if we should even join the queue, other countries with a more realistic grasp of the situation are making their minds up and joining the queue ahead of us.
We are around 10 years too late making up our minds, and we still haven't done it. If/when we do, it will doubtless come as a great surprise to us that the lead time might well be over 20 years, whilst everyone else gets their orders fulfilled first.
We are stitting on over 300 years of coal reserves. I think we may find ourselves tucking into those again (or someone else's) in order to keep the lights on over the next few decades. Highly efficient and clean coal burning was another area where we lead the world research, until we decided to abandon development of our coal generation some years back.
A bit of exaggeration there. Hartlepool NPS,quite an old one (when it is working) produces 1.2GW.
I wonder how much the Severn barrier could produce? 4GW? 8GW? perhaps.
So who *is* making this stuff? I'd assumed (wrongly :) that countries such as France had retained their design/manufacturing ability and so were handling the problem themselves.
Whilst certain countries seem capable of producing high-tech electronics and/or crappy plastic junk, a nuclear power station seems like a different realm altogether...
Highly efficient and clean compared to what?
---
What's the nature of the planning, though? I'm trying to get my head around where the bottlenecks are - surely key elements are to pick an intended output level, and to build the foundations of the thing according to the local geology. Building a whole new plant would take a long time, but wouldn't copying an existing design (and all that goes with it) save a bundle in terms of time and effort?
Probably not :) Testing would still take time, and fr sure there'd still be site-specific planning to do even if copying an existing site (e.g. see geology above) but I'm surprised it could't be done in a lot less than 20 years *given sufficient political motivation*
Of course that's assuming any country wants to let the UK have access to their plans, data and expertise...
All of which is rather sad because it suggests that there is more emotion than logic in the whole debate. We already knew that, though
There is the political bollocks to be overcome, educating the uneducated and paying several lots of consultants as the insurance policy for the decision makers.
Compared to older forms of coal generation.
OK, yes, I think we're on the same page.
IMHO Air to water or water to water heat pump with large water thermal store FWIW
Think public enquiry, endless greenies chaining themselves to trees etc. I'm surprised if you could get planning through for a new nuclear reactor location in less than 8 years.
Chris
They only moved there after the Mersey was cleaned up. I think they should use carrier pigeon to notify them.
The one-line summary was that coal was converted to a dust, and then much like a gas, blown through large jets where it burned rather like a gas.
I would suspect some other country probably picked up on the technology since we stopped developing it.
On or about 2008-04-29, Andrew Gabriel illuminated us with:
Probably something like this:
On or about 2008-04-29, illuminated us with:
FoE reckon 17 TWh/yr. That's about 2GW average I think. Oh and they say it might contribute 5.4% of England & Wales demand, not 8% of UK BTW.
Greys Power station was using coal dust in burners 25 years ago. About 18 years ago ABB of Sweden were ahead in clean, coal burning technology and also in the stack srubbers. May have changed.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.