Despite the filename of the image it is emphatically not of any pylon in Tyndrum, indeed there are no transmission pylons in Tyndrum as the line runs 10 miles south, the other side of a 3000 ft lump of rock
The pylon is in Dalmally* some 10 miles to the west. The houses were built after the pylons which were constructed in the early 60's to connect Cruachan Power Station, a further five miles further down the road, to civilisation. It's pumped storage, which help keep the lights of Scotland on when the wind turbines* don't blow.
56°24'7.57"N 4°57'50.12"W
Big white mainly static monstrosities so loved by Alex Salmond
Pre-dated is a bit of an understatement. The Trossachs National Park, didn't even come into existance until around 40 years AFTER the pylons were built.
Despite being just outside an existing National Park, a decade or two later the lines to Dinorwig, or at least the first three miles of them were run underground - mainly for technical reasons. The rest of the route is overhead, includng around 10 miles where two double circuit 400kV lines run adjacent to each other. They are almost invisible compared to the forest of white structures offshore.
Famous, like the Victoria Beckhams, Cheryl Cole and Wayne Rooneys of their day?
Yes, Thatcher could have stayed experimenting with ice cream, the 80's need not have happened and we'd have an economy the size of Tuvalu.
Underground cables do not magically have an indefinite lifetime.
If the UK had done it half a century ago then by now ALL of those cables would have required replacement, and in another 50 - 70 years they would all need to be replaced again, and again and again. Each time with massive distruption to the surroundings of the cable. Even with a workforce of 10 million dedicated to it I doubt we could have installed it in less than 30 years. That is more than half a trillion man hours that could have been utilised on something far more useful. Even paying them all dole money and a Sky subscription would have been significantly more productive.
While the survey carried out is a perfectly valid exercise from LCC's point of view - it enabled them to shift any accusations of Ludditism onto their electorate - there are some problems applying it to the current argument as to whether pylons are at least as big an eyesore as turbines.
1) Turbines are new additions to the landscape, whereas pylons are not, and therefore very naturally they get noticed more, at least initially. Most of the respondents would not have been alive at the time any pylons were plonked on the landscape, while most will remember the landscape before turbines. When trying to compare the two on eyesore ranking alone, this skews the results.
2) Turbines are controversial, pylons are not. This too tends to skew the results, because people cast opinions according to which side of the controversy they stand, rather than upon their actual ranking as an eyesore.
3) Only opinions about wind-farms were canvassed. The negative response to turbines doesn't mean that a similar poll concerning pylons would give pylons a favourable response. On the contrary, although the response would perhaps be less marked for the reasons given in 1 and 2, it is likely that a majority of the people would still find them an eyesore to some degree or other.
4) As so ably illustrated by LCC, the response to surveys is highly sensitive to the way that questions are phrased. For example, who is actually going to disagree with: "Any wind-farm development should give due regard to other social and environmental considerations"?
Consequently, with regard to the question we're debating here, you'd get a more realistic result if you asked visitors to Lincs that they thought, as did Scotland with their visitors.
It merely tells us that you're too young to remember it all. Read the article, linked in an answer to Tony, by David Wighton of The Times, which discusses, amongst many other valid points, the historical fight against pylons.
The problem is crystallised in the phrase: "they are a waste of time and money". They may or they may not be, but that has nothing to do with how bad an eyesore they are compared with other types of eyesore. Again, you're making value judgements which have nothing to do with their actual ranking as a blight upon the landscape.
My answer was very simple: "No pylon will ever not be an eyesore. The cables should have been buried from the start. They should be buried now." I also included a link to the one in Dalmally.
All reactors breed, some breed more than you put in.
I think the worlds *economically exploitable* reserves of uranium and thorium* are estimated to be enough for 3-5000 years of use IF TODAYS POPULATION ALL USED WESTERN LEVELS OF POWER, and all depended entirely on nuclear to generate it.
In short something else will limit you long before cheap energy will.
that means availaabl at prices not necessarily economic now, but at prices that would in the limit be economic in terms of a very high EROI. Contrast fossil which as less than a couple of hindred years. max.
Using canal beds was tried in the 60s since these often have easy access to town centres. Unfortunately power losses caused serious heating problems with the water causing both build up of algea and death of fish.
We don't. Or rather, we have some stockpiles but they will only last one or two power stations that sort of time scale. If we build all the new nuclear power stations planned by the government, stockpiles will last at best around 19 years, or slightly less than a third their planned lifespan.
If you're interested in a discussion explaining that ...
The problem with nuclear waste is this: storing it costs something significant, reusing it costs something even more significant but would save the value of the fuel that would otherwise have to be purchased, and would reduce the amount of waste, and for how long, that would have to be interred. Either way, nuclear waste is very expensive - whether we continue to let it hang around with an uncertain future, recycle and reburn any or as much as possible, or finally denote it as waste and inter it in a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), we are already today expending resources on, that is subsidising, the energy supply (and the arms race) of yesterday, and are already committing our descendents to subsidise our current consumption at least for centuries, possibly, depending on what we choose to do with the most dangerous parts of the waste, millennia.
While, after further investigation into how these stocks could be used in Light Water Reactors (LWRs), we have greater capacity of existing stockpiles in the UK than I previously thought, there are still nothing like enough to cover the projected shortfall in LWR fuel from around the early to mid 2020s.
Before discussing the actual stockpiles themselves, a brief excursion into costs ...
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"Economics The relative economics of reprocessing-waste disposal and interim storage-direct disposal has been the focus of much debate over the past ten years. Studies have modeled the total fuel cycle costs of a reprocessing-recycling system based on one-time recycling of plutonium in existing thermal reactors (as opposed to the proposed breeder reactor cycle) and compare this to the total costs of an open fuel cycle with direct disposal. The range of results produced by these studies is very wide, but all are agreed that under current (2005) economic conditions the reprocessing-recycle option is the more costly. [para] If reprocessing is undertaken only to reduce the radioactivity level of spent fuel it should be taken into account that spent nuclear fuel becomes less radioactive over time. After 40 years its radioactivity drops by 99.9%, though it still takes over a thousand years for the level of radioactivity to approach that of NU. However the level of transuranic elements, including plutonium-239, remains high for over 100,000 years, so if not reused as nuclear fuel, then those elements need secure disposal because of nuclear proliferation reasons as well as radiation hazard. [para] On 25 October 2011 a commission of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission revealed during a meeting calculations about the costs of recycling nuclear fuel for power generation. These costs could be twice the costs of direct geological disposal of spent fuel: the cost of extracting plutonium and handling spent fuel was estimated at 1.98 to
2.14 yen per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. Discarding the spent fuel as waste would cost only 1 to 1.35 yen per kilowatt-hour." [last time I checked 1 yen was about 0.7p]
Note particularly this last point that reprocessing spent fuel approximately doubles part of the fuel element of the unit cost of electricity generated, although it should be pointed out that, as currently calculated, the cost of fuel is a small percentage of the unit cost of nuclear power (about 3%, 0.5p out of the 16.6p per unit previously linked, remembering that this figure itself may not include decommissioning and handling of waste). There is also the unanswered question of how much carbon-based or other forms of energy, including electrical energy, reprocessing would consume.
The UK has about 100t of Pu from reprocessing, which could be mixed with 1,400t other uranium, the obvious candidate being depleted uranium (DU), at a rate of about 7% to produce 1,500t Mixed Oxide (MOX), which in principle can be used instead of Lightly Enriched Uranium (LEU) in the proposed PWRs. LEU converts at a rate of about
22t/GWyr, so this 1,500t represents 68GWyr. However, we would have to build a plant to reprocess the Pu into MOX, the building, running, and decommissioning of which would cost a considerable amount of money and itself consume energy from various sources. (We would also have to ensure that sufficient of the proposed new generating plant that is to be built would be capable of and licensed to burn up all the MOX fuel, but this is a relatively minor hurdle as long as we make that decision early enough.)
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The UK also has about 6kt, expected to rise to 10kt, of AGR/PWR spent fuel, which could be reprocessed as described in the above link. However, this would require, additionally to the above MOX facilities, refurbishment of the existing THORP plant, and would therefore cost significantly more money and itself consume even more energy from various sources. Spent fuel consists of 1% Pu of which 2/3 is useful isotope, that is about 67t Pu useful for fission which could be combined with nearly 900t DU as above to yield 960t of MOX which would generate 44GWyr, and 96% uranium of which less than 1% is the fissile U-235, which could be re-enriched roughly as NU to yield approximately
960t LWR fuel which would also generate 44GWyr.
It is estimated that the UK by 2020 will also have about 106kt of DU tails from enrichment, also described in the above link, which will have a content of the isotope U235 used for uranium fission of about
0.3%, a little under half its original content as NU. 2300t could be mixed with reprocessed plutonium to manufacture MOX fuel as mentioned above, the remaining 103.7kt could in principle be re-enriched to produce LEU for use in existing or new nuclear reactors. However, there is a law of diminishing returns here, either the amount of material that would have to be handled to obtain the same amount of fuel would have to be doubled, and/or the proportion of U235 that is extracted would have to be significantly increased. On first enrichment, the ratio of U in to LEU out is approximately 10:1, so on re-enrichment we'd expect the ratio to be about 20:1. On this basis this DU could yield about 5.2kt LEU, which equates to about 236GWyr.
So, using uranium fission, we would appear to have stockpiles equivalent to an approximate maximum of ... 68 + 44 + 44 + 236 = 392GWyr
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(p13) "Illustrative 2030 scenario" - The House Of Commons Committee On Climate Change foresees the nuclear proportion of electricity generation in 2030 as being 40%, 185TWh, or 21GWyr. Under this scenario the maximum stockpiles that we have are for 19 years. The lifetime of the proposed new LWRs is 60 years, so current and anticipated stockpiles represent less than a third of what would be required, and additionally their use could potentially make the resultant electricity even more expensive than the already high figure already quoted from city analysts.
On Tue, 27 Aug 2013 13:25:39 +0100, "dennis@home" wrote:
These canals I'm thinking about had no problems before the cables went in. Certainly the article I read, some years ago now, attribulted the problems to the heating effect.
Although they've had a major site revamp which has changed the appearance of their pages, the conclusions seem to be much the same - bottom graph (as before), acc text "The following graph (WNA 2011 Market Report reference scenario) suggests how these various sources of supply might look in the decades ahead", and the red demand line dips below the stacked total of the supplies a little before 2026.
Doesn't mean it was the case tho.. Rivers here had similar problems this summer on account of partially high temps but also no rainfall.
It is true that the oxygen tends to fizz out more when the water is warmer, but plenty of tropical rivers are teeming with fish. What is te kioler is no rain and no fresh oxygen rich water entering the system. That turns canals from 'rivers' into 'ponds' and that favours different plant and fish life.
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