Inside Dinorwig. BBC Click 22-august

[Andrew]

I haven't checked iPlayer, but it is the Aug 22nd edition.

Interestigly, the 'spokesman' was asked what happens 'when' there is no more cheap off peak electricity, if all there is, is renewable.

[newshound]

Significant in the sense that it's a significant part of the workload of her team.

There are *lots* of different elements in managing the Grid these days and batteries are involved in quite a lot of them. If I understand it correctly, some big users find it worth getting batteries because of the return they can get on the investment.

Don't forget of course that every coal and nuclear plant has a big room full of lead acid batteries, and the nukes have gas turbines too.

We're not talking about multiple Dinorwics but these are mechanisms which, at the very least, chip away at the slightly simple minded view that, for every windmill you need a CCGT on standby for when the wind stops.

[Chris Hogg]

But are these batteries intended to supplement the grid, e.g. for peak-lopping, or are they for a 'black start', to get the particular power station back on-line in the event of some massive and widespread power failure?

[newshound]

Not at all. Appliances are starting to come smart. The chips are cheap as, well, chips. Putting smartness into them improves functionality and potentially makes them more economical. For fridges and freezers, a three term controller becomes cheaper than a mechanical clicky thing. And you can add an alarm to warn of open doors and power failure. It just takes a few years for penetration.

There are sometimes downsides. My two newest cameras have bluetooth and wifi, which means I can't take them on to certain industrial sites. I have to leave the watch behind as well as the phone, now. But for most people, most of the time, there are advantages.

[Paul]

They can do their lesson plans from Wikip now.

Who needs perfessors ?

Paul

[tim...]

That's not the point

the point is that these appliances can reasonably last 12-15 years

but TPTB don't want to wait 15 years for natural replacement

they want them all replaced *now*

So the plan is that perfectly good appliances are to be scrapped for new ones

effectively wasting the resources used to make the new ones (as a proxy for the wasted old ones)

but ATM manufactures are using these extra functions to sell at a very premium price

so the majority of punters just carry on buying the dumb ones because they don't see that paying 800 pounds for a 300 pound appliance is an acceptable premium for smartness

provided that they are sold at the same price.

Which they are not

It's like all new fangled gizmos, they are sold an an excessive premium when they are a new thing

I've now got a smart TV

it cost 199 pounds

but there was a time that smart TVs cost 2 grand, when dumb ones were 199.

but not at the premium manufactures are setting on this particular type of item

[Andrew]

If nobody looked at the moon, would it be there ?. (Schrödingers 'cat')

[Andrew]

Are any BT trimphones still out there ?.

[Andrew]

Wales runs for 5.5 hours on Dinorwig according to the 'spokesmen'. If Port Talbot is converted from blast furnaces to electric arc, then he might need to recalculate that figure. :-(

[newshound]

Who?

but it won't happen

see above. It's called market theory.

First adopters always get screwed

That's just my point.

IMHO it will be ten years before there is significant penetration of really sensible smart meters.

[newshound]

Ah, the old "reserves are low" argument. I went into nuclear power in

1970 because, apparently, oil reserves were going to run out in the 1980's.

Similarly, there won't be enough exotic metals to make smartphones soon. And lithium for the batteries will run out.

Plutonium is not *that* difficult to make; and there is a useful carbon-free by-product.

[newshound]

Sure, the coal ones are for black start. You are not allowed to black-start a nuclear power station in this country.

But, they are still batteries. You would not be allowed to run down the batteries at a nuke to support the grid.

It's a bit more complicated than "peak lopping" now. Frequency support and constraint management is pretty useful, as the last big outage showed.

[newshound]

The problem with fusion, which is seldom mentioned, is that all your inner structural bits see fast neutron doses that make fast reactors look like a picnic.

Apart from the radiation damage, just about anything useful will activate. While the dose rates fall a lot when you turn off the plasma, you still have a pretty hostile environment inside a machine that is running at useful power levels.

[Jethro_uk]

You don't need to see the moon to know it's there ....

[Jethro_uk]

Which suggest that intermittent usage isn't practical, and we need to look at an "on forever" mode of operation.

Much like the Sun then ...

[Jethro_uk]

Not according to the Russians.

In 1986 I was working for British Gas and one of their *top* (he had 2 doctorates I believe) scientists was seconded to a project in Russia. I met him on a flying return visit to the department I was in, and remember him chatting to colleagues about some very outre ideas that were accepted fact in Russian science. One of which was the existence of far more gas than had been accepted at that point. More gas means more oil.

When shale gas became A Thing, it reminded me of that.

[Paul]

I don't think the proposal is for fusion devices to be intermittent.

They'll have the same dynamics as regular fission solutions. It takes time for the steam system to build up pressure, time for the turbines to spin. They'll be used for base load.

And extracting the energy, preserving the chamber, that part isn't necessarily solved yet.

And people are working on other solutions. As soon as I say I haven't seen any work on fission lately, up pops a report a few days ago. Like this one:

It doesn't mean that one is practical - the only problem it solves, is visually is looks "cheap" to be building a small one, like an "incremental investment". There's no claim that for equivalent capacity, it would be practical.

The reactors we have here, there were all sorts of claims about them during the initial phases. But doing maintenance on them turned out to be a bear, just like every other one of these projects. Fueling robots and the lot. When the cladding on the fuel swells up and you can't get the fuel out of the tube, there's hardly a chance for "standing over top and cursing and swearing at it".

Paul

[Richard]

OK, so Andrew couldn't/wouldn't answer my simple question. Relevant part of transcript from that Aug 22nd edition: <q>

08:47 if we were to move completely away from 08:51 fossil fuel power stations would that 08:53 mean that this sort of power station 08:54 wouldn't be able to run 08:55 in reality yeah if we need to pump that 08:58 water up the hill we've got to go and 09:00 buy that electricity from the market 09:01 somewhere whether that is a thermal 09:03 power station a set of windmills a gas 09:06 power station </q>

Maybe the BBC edited stuff since broadcast, but I can't find the question which Andrew seems to have heard.

[newshound]

Any large plant like this is going to need maintenance and inspection. Instrumentation will fail and need replacing. Extracting the energy will involve pressurised systems eventually and these will may require NDT for fatigue assessments, etc. And, at the end of life there will be activated structures to dispose of. Not the same issues as with fission products from fission plant, but not "waste free" either.

Actually, one of the possible designs involves using lasers to compress and ignite individual fuel pellets so that is, in a sense, intermittent. It's just that it might be 1 - 10 pulses per second.

[Vir Campestris]

Solar is ideal for aircon - peak load is when it's sunny.

Sadly this is the UK, and peak load is in the winter just as people get home from work in the evening - when it's dark.

Andy