Apparently Octopus seem to offering a ‘zero bills for five years’ scheme, to eligible households, which appear to be those with solar panels, a battery, and something called a heat pump, and claim to be making it possible to give up energy bills and carbon emissions ‘altogether’. Initially, they are hoping to be involved in the building of 100,000 Zero Bills homes by 2030.
Who will be paying for this largesse, one wonders? (Rhetorical question).
What did they say about nuclear power when it first went on line, it would be too cheap to bother metering
Developers, since it's for new build: https://octopus.energy/blog/introducing-octopus-zero/ New build should already be super insulated so the heating costs are minimal
- if not then they're building it wrong. Then a decent quantity of solar can cover a lot of the day to day electrical loads like a well designed ASHP system, hot water and cooking, especially when buffered in a battery. That leaves pretty minimal bills once those major things are taken away, and it's not implausible that zero might be achievable if you have enough solar, even in winter.
OK, so it's not really developers paying it's the people buying the houses. But the deal is they're paying a bit more upfront to save on energy over the long term. All these things are cheap to fit at construction time - eg solar panels are now cheaper than tiles, so the additional cost involved is actually not a lot.
Theo
An old penny per unit.
No, that was what they predicted about nuclear *fusion* power. They also predicted that by now 'children wont know what snow is' That Putin would never invade Ukraine That Donald Trump wouldn't win the election And that Starmer would not be as bad as the Tories.
Which 50 years later we still haven't worked out how to do in a controlled way.
And was said by a US general, not necessarily, IOW, by someone who understood the ins and outs.
Accord "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."
However, not believed at the time:
"A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future."
Which sounds about right!
nib
CANDU did some excellent analysis on that and concluded that if the interest rate was below 10% and the capacity factor was over about 75% then their nuclear was cheaper than coal.
But to make nuclear power you have to leverage the capital cost and its attendant interest payments to the hilt. That means running the units to extract every last kilowatt hour out of them while they are still operational
In general UK's *existing* nuclear fleet sells to the grid at about 4p a unit. Hinkley point has a strike price of 9.8p I think.
No, it was fission, on the basis that Uranium (not sure which isotope) has a half life of billions of years.
Which has NOTHING to do with the cost of nuclear power. Now OR tyen.
I think you misremember
Donald Hintz, Chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said at 2003 conference that the nuclear industry had been "plagued since the early days by the unfortunate quote: 'Too cheap to meter'." Those four words had become a standard catchphrase for what critics claim were impossibly sunny promises of nuclear power's potential.
Not so fast, Hintz countered. He noted that Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers, had coined the phrase to describe fusion power, not fission. Nuclear power may be a victim of mistaken identity.
Hintz was not alone in this view. Over the past four decades, antinuclear and pronuclear versions of what Strauss meant by "too cheap to meter" have appeared in articles, blogs, and books. Even Wikipedia has weighed in, on the pro-nuclear side. Reconciling the two versions isn't easy since Strauss wasn't explicit about what power source would electrify the utopian future he predicted.
Half life has nothing to do with it. And a half-life of "billions of years" would give you material that is so non-radioactive that it would be useless in a fission reactor.
The isotope used in reactors and bombs is U235, enriched to 3% for reactors and 80% or some similar high number for bombs. The accompanying U238 in reactors stops it going bang, and also some of that gets converted to U239 and then decays to Pu239 (plutonium), which can also be used in bombs and reactors.
And it was fusion, not fission, that Chummy was referring to way back when.
U235 half-life: 700 million years U238 half-life: 4.5 billyun years
Yes, but people misunderstood the term. (That *is* the half life of (some isotopes) of Uranium, but irrelevant to their usefulness for fission, which involves a (controlled) chain reaction rather than radioactive decay.)
A chain reaction needs natural decay to start it.
U238 and thorium is fertile, but not fissile. U235 is the only (naturally occurring) element that has a half life long enough to still be around and yet radioactive enough to fission enough to spark off a chain reaction.
Excepting its decay products of course. But they don't exist without the U235
It might be possible to start a nuclear power program without U235, by building particle accelerators to create something like it, but its much easier to use U235.
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