that not at scale. That's peanuts.
I can cut enough twigs to boil a kette of water from a hazel bush.
I am not talking Kw minutes, I am talking gigawatt years.
Nope. Do the sums.
Calculate what 50GW of *reliable 24x7*renewable energy does to the country.
Basically the country doesn't exist anymore. Its one huge power station.
Precisely. If renewables cant do the whole job, or even more than a small faction of the job, and MUST be backed up with fossil fuelled stations, because there isn't enough hydro in Europe to back them up, nor ever will be, then what on earth is the point of having any? The nuclear solution fully replaces fossil fuel. Renewables cant do that.
And cost far far more.
Since we patently cant do without nuclear, we have to take on the safety and waste issues. Once we have taken those on, why on earth do we need renewables?
Depends on what you mean by "will run out". Using just uranium in single pass processes - yup there is a finite amount of the stuff that is easily recoverable. However even that will provide many decades worth of supply. Liquid salt thorium reactors can provide many many decades more than uranium (and the two are not exclusive - we can have both). However, that's assuming that we stick to single pass fuel use (that recovers around 1% of the actual energy available). Reprocess the stuff and use it again, or start building a few fast breeders so you can use the stockpiles of what is currently thought of as "waste" and you multiply those decades out into many centuries. With luck we might have a viable fusion process by then.
I'm pretty sure of it, yes. Where else could it go when the earth is in steady state?
Where do you think it goes? The earth is a big non black body radiator. It receives solar input on one side, releases some extra stored energt as people burn fossil and nuclear fuels and radiates from all sides all the time.
The projected footprint of the Earth is about 1.3e14m2, the solar radiation receieved from the sun about 1.3kW/m2 so the solar gain of the earth is around 1.6e14 kW in total which is 160,000 TW
If we factor in cloud cover and ice and reduce the solar power being absorbed to 1/10 as a big fat guess, that's still 16,000 TW
If Britain needs 50GW peak (we'll assume constant as a worse case) and Britain has around 1/50 of the earths population, then assuming everyone uses that much energy (another huge overestimate) the total power generation for the world would be 2.5TW.
All the wild fudges I've put help the case you've postulated but I think you'd agree that an extra 2.5TW out of 16,000TW is bugger all, even if the heating of the earth due to extra input was non linear.
It's a real beer mat calculation so feel free to find errors. ;->
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:
You said, "any scale". Now, perhaps you'd like to revisit the meaning of the word "scale".
Precisely. There is enough fissile material to keep us going for 1000 years at present population levels, and if populations increase beyond what they are, we will run out of space, food and other elements like copper way before we run out of fuel.
Even faster if we use 30% load average renewables instead of 98% load average nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is just a way to get sunlight on the earth in a more convenient and usable form.
If you choose to deliberately misinterpret a fairly clear statement to make a debating point, that's your problem, not mine.
Just like calor gas cylinders
I bet the Pikey's will still find some to nick ;!...
Well collecting that from some obscure places like oceans etc perhaps;?..
Making them much more dangerous to pedestrians.
Do I need more than 500 Nm?
More like 1500km with mine.
The furthest I went along that route was trading in a 19mpg 5 litre V8 petrol motor for a 2.2 litre diesel that does about twice that. The cost was less of a consideration than having to stop to refuel more than once a day on a long trip.
Think ahead and deciding that electric vehicle technology still has too far to go to make them useful for anything other than a shopping runabout is more to the point.
That, of course, presupposes that it is even possible to develop a battery that can be recharged in anything like the time it takes to fill a car with liquid fuel.
Colin Bignell
That will never happen, but make an interchangeable battery pack on all vehicles in the same class (Cars, delivery vans, motor bikes) compulsory, and just pop the flat one out and pop the charged one in. It'd take seconds to change the pack,which is held as common stock by the energy supplier, rented off them at a suitable cost, and can be charged from the best source available and maintained at a convenient time.
95% of our car use is just that..
Oh, its possible. 5 minutes is possible. I spent longer than that queuing for diesel yesterday...
Its not efficient and there are safety issues, and it might not be more than a 90% charge, but its doable in the lab. IIRC they got down to 2 minutes on a particular cell technology.
But imagine charging 100Kwh in two minutes! that's a peak power rating of 3MW!!!
Not impossible, but some interesting challenges..
What about lorries?, bit of a job to change the size needed for those?...
Just 'pop in the charged one'?
They are a large and heavy item. Which would need some form of mechanised changing. So only really practicable with one design of vehicle.
It doesn't scale to the whole country though. That's the problem.
They use (round here at least) a 4 mm^2 cable from the tap to the street lighting cutout. So more like 30 A, I'd say
You can order a car that operates like that, only £30k with the subsidy.
I was suggesting a way to quickly and relatively conveniently recharge a battery pack in a car. Most lorries and buses can be scheduled to allow charging when they're not in use, but a standard size pack for lorries could be achievable, if it were made worth the makers' trouble.
Not quite true, the only standard part needs to be the battery cradle, which needs to be accessible to somehing like a pallet truck, and changing them at a fuel staton that does nothing else would be a quick and easy operation if it were mechanised. It would be possible, just about, to completely automate it, if it were a common enough procedure.
It's still cheaper enough, by a large enough margin, to prevent take up, and no-one wants to sink the capital into providing a chain of battery changing stations.
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