Electricity generated by a wind turbine

[zall]

Bullshit. They are rich because they got the govt to do their oil and gas and most of their power generation and kept the income from that.

[Rod Speed]

alan_m [e-mail]> wrote

More likely the tourists poking it with a stick when it is empty will.

[SteveW]

How about an actual implementation of a train or tram? The Parry People Mover -

[Rod Speed]

Not with the best pumped hydro which has both upstream and downstream storage.

Again, not with the best pumped hydro.

Not convinced that it makes sense to waste gas generating electricity with it.

And none with enough nuclear and no more hydro.

But you don't really need an optimal mix.

The way the french did theirs makes a lot more sense.

There can be for some small communities which can't afford even a SMR which aren't economic to have on the grid.

But you still have a problem in a drought.

[Chris Hogg]

Eagle also did a flywheel powered shunting engine. IIRC it had a bank of three contacts and every 30 minutes or so it docked with a charging station to re-charge the flywheel.

[Vir Campestris]

Not entirely true.

Pumped storage systems can flatten the demand peaks allowing thermal plants of all sort to run more efficiently.

If you use thermal plants of course you only need a few hours worth of pumped storage, not the few weeks some other sorts need.

Andy

[Vir Campestris]

I wonder if that is why they are having cracking problems?

Andy

[zall]

But with nukes with their very low marginal fuel cost, you might as well just keep them running flat out and at most allow some operations like aluminium smelters to use the excess power. No need for expensive pumped hydro.

Not if they are nukes.

[SteveW]

Yes, pumped storage is very effective. It just can't store enough for overcoming more than a fairly short peak.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Read my lips. "you simply don't need *that much* storage".

Which is precisely what I said. Duh!

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, it isn't. Next?

(ramping up and down poisons the fuel with IIRC xenon or something. Freshly fuelled reactors can be dispatched far more readily. As the fuel ages they put those reactors onto baseload.

The cracks are 'corrosion stress cracks' which doesn't say much, but they are in the cold circuit side of the water circuit

Those reactors are 40 years old. )

has a paper in which the issues of dispatch are discussed for various reactor types. This is probably the most useful sentence. It is about EPR and modern PWR in general

"Given these significant improvements, one can therefore state that new build PWRs will offer operational flexibility as good as that of current fossil fuel plants"

The issue of running nuclear only as baseload is simple. The plant is massively expensive, but running it is incredibly cheap. Therefore it makes economic sense to run it as hard as possible irrespective of market electricity prices. That why high price gas is dropped as prices fall at night.

France with about 80% nuclear has had to run their reactors in dispatch mode and a lot has been learned. Hinkley should be able to load follow extremely well.

I cant find any explicit data on Rolls Royce's SMR design throttling ability, but a nuclear submarine you cant shut power down quickly in would be a piece of crap, so one assumes they already have solutions.

The US SMR reactor design that uses molten slat as a coolant (Natrium), is proposed to be able to store significant quantities of molten salt as a heat bank, which allows the steam circuits to be modulated without ramping the reactor up and down hard.

I haven't done the sums to compare this with e.g. pumped storage, but it sounds viable technically and economically.

Oh. here we are. Natrium: 345 MWe reactor Gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage (capacity of 500 MWe output for

5.5+ hours) (= 2.75GWh) So one molten salt bank is about 1/3 of a Dinorwig...(9.1GWh)

Natrium works because it doesn't attempt to store electricity as heat, it stores reactor heat as heat so there is no more loss than in the steam circuits, anyway.

Once you throw useless renewables off the grid, the requirement for dispatch becomes far far smaller, and long term annual dispatch can be handled by e.g. taking reactors down for maintenance/refuelling in summer. medium term dispatch - i,e weekend and weather related fluctuations in demand can be handled by modulating the reactors, and short term peaks - like the 'corrie' evening peak can be handled by molten salt banks and existing hydro.

Almost none of it is new or advanced technology and it leverages the existing grid to the maximum possible

In short the dispatchability of nuclear was never a massive problem and is now probably a non problem.

A nuclear plus a little hydro grid is very feasible. Add in municipal waste burning and or district heating scchemes to use the low grade heat from reactor coolers and it is a way sight greener than renewable energy.

[John Rumm]

So he would then control a large proportion of the worlds energy supply AND the food supply, and the myth of Russian Military invincibility would have remained intact. After Ukraine (and a fair bit of recreational genocide!) he would walk straight into all the other non NATO former soviet countries, take a short breather before picking on Poland or similar. How would NATO counter that then?

but probably a moot point in the face of a new soviet empire spanning all of mainland Europe given a decade.

[zall]

Not going to happen. Not that it makes any sense to just let him have the Ukraine.

[John Rumm]

More worrying would be in which perpendicular direction it would precess when you tip it to attack a patch of tall grass!

[Dave Plowman (News]

Surely many have seen a gas crisis coming sooner or later? Or simply want to reduce our demand on fossil fuels for energy?

How big a window do they want? After all, even in Thatcher days, we knew N Sea gas wasn't going to last forever.

IMHO, it's why this country is a shadow of its former self. Jam now being the important thing and sod the future.

The answer is non

[John Rumm]

Erm, what post are you replying to?

[Paul]

The article was more interested in the silly things you could do with a flywheel, instead of worrying about "minor" effects like precession.

It's quite possible that flywheels were a "favoured topic" of the editorial staff. A kind of obsession.

Paul

[Dave Plowman (News]

The bits I've quoted. From your post, as the one you were replying to hasn't appeared here.