A discussion about heating the house

I have managed 2 in 1...

Lots, if we decided to go for it (like the French did after the oil crisis in the early 70's).

Depends on whether we allow lengthy planning processes, or get something really streamlined where we do a really thorough "safety case" for a selected type (hopefully something relatively simple and proven), with a modest "site specific" add-on.

We built Calder Hall in 3.5 years, and that included designing the engineering and quite a lot of the physics almost from scratch.

Well we already have Wylfa, Sizewell, Oldbury, and Sellafield fairly well lined up. Not much space at Bradwell, but room for something. Dungeness has space but is surrounded by SSSI. But that's just the current sites. Until someone says "We need X of them" we don't know how many sites might be needed. There's really no technical reason they can't go anywhere that the grid needs reinforcing.

Waste is a political problem, not a technical one. Modern plant produces less waste per MWh than older plant.

If you override planning objections and unnecessary safety regulations, like we did for wind, about 5 a year with a build out of 4 years each. It remains to be seen how well Rolls Royce SMRs meet this specification, but they should be installable in small urban sites. Like Battersea power station. Ideal location

Where the old ones are now. Anywhere there is a decent grid connection and cooling water. They don't take up much space, compared to a wind farm. SMRs typically could be installed in every large town where there is a river.

Anywhere. Its a lot less toxic than a solar panel

yeah. the longer you live, the more likely you will get it. Most men over 80 have some form of prostate cancer...

twice is a bit of a bugger tho

Ah yes, those are the pictures of Harry that I remember seeing. There was one more in a colourful bulky pullover.

I see no reason we couldn't build all we need.

Not fast enough, evidently. There's plenty of reasons for that

That is a problem for *any* infrastructure in this country (HS2, anyone?). This country is massively overpopulated, down around 25-30 million would be better than the 65 million we have now. When I was a kid, it was 50 million. It doesn't help that all the do-gooders want to allow immigration from everywhere, and interfere to prevent expulsions.

Look up the interview on the Life Scientific by Prof Sue Ion of Imperial, in which she described that glassification of waste is and has been going on for

Plenty of room at Torness, I drove past the site yesterday

I've just been checked and I'm OK. (aged 81)

I remember those photos - walls that appeared to be three foot thick and resembled castle arrow slit holes when viewed from the inside.

You don't even need a particularly large amount of cooling water. Didcot managed fine with its comparatively compact forced draught cooling towers.

There are reason that I don't know why all nuclear reactors use rivers lakes or the sea. Not cooling towers. I agree it ought to be feasible.

Oh, it appears some do and in fact the reason is pretty simple. Cooling towers are more expensive, but environmental legislation has mandated that later power stations use towers to avoid giving the wildlife a nice warm habitat to swim in...

... so its unlikely today that rivers would be used...cooling tower would be used inland. So Greta Thunberg would be able to 'see all the radiation coming out'

Perhaps?

Theo

Not quite true, Calder Hall and Chapelcross had cooling towers.

Most UK nukes are in "remote" locations which tends to go with "coastal" although as you imply Trawsfynydd was on a lake, and Hartlepool and Heysham are both close to population centres.

I don't know how the economics compares, there is quite a lot of civil engineering in the Hinkley Point C cooling water system, and you need big rotating screens, and some sites are quite vulnerable to being shut down by "loose" seaweed after big storms. If I were to guess, I'd say the cheapest systems were probably the traditional cooling towers of the coal fired power stations on the Trent.

In the days of coal, the condensed water vapour above cooling towers was often described as pollution.

Much more photogenic than flue gas!

Yes, that the picture I remember (briefly visible before it disappeared behind the paywall message!).

Finding his property isn't difficult. You can tell from that picture and others that it's L-shaped. He has boasted often enough here about how many solar panels he has on his roof, and his general address is widely available in the media articles about him. So you go into Google Maps and find the area, then into satellite view and 'fly' around until you spot an L-shaped property with lots of solar panels, then drop into street view and you get the picture I first posted a link to - his property as seen from the road.

Fortunately, it will be decades before most properties look like that, and I shan't be around to witness them.

It is possible to actually read Telegraph articles without the paywall being triggered.

Set up a Pi Hole and block the one website URL that issues up the paywall, I also have:

privacy badger DuckDuckGo Privacy essentials Ghostery Ublock origin Disconnect

in all three browsers, chrome, edge and firefox.

I also have NoScript as well.

I have been reading Telegraph articles ever since

Couldn't you simple add those URLs to your Hosts file?

For the likes of the Telegraph I use "Disable JavaScript".

Not when you have lots of devices, and some of these don't have a hosts file such as iPads, iPhones, Android, Roku etc.

Much easier to just to run a single Pi Hole for the whole home network...

and while I'm at it, I also run WireGaurd so all mobile devices VPN back home over public wi fi to my pi hole and then onwards to whichever websites I wish to habituate :-)

Don't have a Pi Hole (got an Ars hole somewhere but I don't think I've ever seen it). Will Pi Hole run under windows? - I see the descriptions mention Linux.

Got Ghostery, Adblock+ and uBlock Origin. Don't know why I have all three; I expect one would do. But can I use any of them to do what you've just describes? Not that I'm desperate to read the Telegraph - nothing against it any more than any other newspaper, but I'm just not in to reading newspapers.