Notes from an eco house. (2025 Update)

This one near me seems daft - they have built an access ramp, only to then add a 90 degree turn and a couple of steps.

Chris

Thanks - I should have remembered that the ouput is closer to 0.5GW.

When you have problems to which even the shape of viable solutions - let alone the costed detailed design - is unknown, no realistic timescale estimates can be made.

No one knows how long it will take, and whether it will ever be cost competitive with fission

and some amazing maths to get the re-entry calculations correct

It isn't a particularly closely guarded secret. Marine reactors are around the 20-80MW mark, and are fundamentally boring in design.

Given the much vaunted '1kW per household' figure used to generate bullshit about wind turbines...that equates to a town of up to 80,000 people or more than enough for a data centre..

But in fact RR has chosen with their design to build the biggest reactor that doesn't need active safety and can be transported by road. 470MWe.

And that is similar to older Magnox reactors so the SMR would not be hard to retrofit to decommissioned Magnox steam and turbine plant.

Even the AGRs are 600Mwe, in pairs so three SMRs could replace them.

Re-using all the old nuclear sites with existing planning permissions and infrastructure could enable up to around 10GW of nuclear power to be installed extremely rapidly as well as generating enough income at those sites to guarantee site security and the money for decommissioning them

As of today, the vulnerability of long distance undersea cables has already been demonstrated by that nice Mr Putin. Attacking energy infrastructure is his thing.

Renewable energy is massively vulnerable - it is not self contained. Nuclear power is, with 10 year plus stockpiles of nuclear material easily achievable.

The tide is turning against wind and solar and firmly in nuclears favour.

I am unclear as to how much of that they need. Many gas turbines manage with cooling towers and atmospheric condensation.

A nearby river is a cost saving luxury...

A quick google suggests that the actual input of fresh water is really quite low...

From that site's FAQ:

"Is your technology a ‘scaled-up’ submarine reactor?

"No… Rolls-Royce has decades of experience and an unrivalled heritage designing propulsion systems for submarines, but the Rolls-Royce SMR has been designed specifically for use providing large amounts of stable, carbon-free electricity for the grid and energy intensive industries."

nib

Are you regarding the AP1000 as 'below a certain size' or 'requires emergency forced cooling' ?

Fiddler's Ferry coal burning power station is now shut and partly demolished. It is on the banks of the Mersey. It has a footprint of 253 acres on one side of the St. Helens Canal, and possibly similar on the otherside (looks like ash heap or something, not sure).

It produced 1989 MW at it's best, and all the grid wiring is still there.

So naturally it is being buldozed and replaced with what will be s***ty quality housing and warehouses (inevitably).

Why aren't old power station locations being reserved for SMR use? To the simple minded it seems obvious.

AND! The coal plants have rail access...

Steps directly up from the pavement would need high risers between each step. Not sure if that would fail building regs but that house does not comply with Part M anyway. Maybe it had exemption or wheelchair access to the rear to compensate ?.

The houses on the other side of the road have completely level access from pavement to the top of the door cill while further round the corner some houses have a step half way between pavement and front door cill.

Milkbottle too. Don't see those very often.

There’s an anti-nuclear lobby out there that simply doesn’t want nuclear’s

The solution to defunct power stations is not to put a SMR there and make use of the in-place infrastructure but to bulldoze them ASAP to avoid that situation, and then put up The Slums of Tomorrow.

OTOH, we are on top of a hill.

Infuriating, isn't it.

Neither. It isn't pre built and it doesn't require forcced cooling.

I said SUB SMR for a reason.

Whatever that reason was appears to have been overtaken by other posts.

You also have access to much better rates for off peak electricity once you have the EV, from Octopus, Tomato or Eon, so you can charge the car and a home battery at ~7p/kWh and run the house all day on that if the battery is big enough.This then gives a saving of the normal daily tariff minus 7p and minus the cost of the charge discharge cycle and cost of storage/kWh over the life of the battery. This latter is the gamble, from what I can see the minimum is 7p/kWh recovered from battery and it could be double that if the battery only lasts 8 years.

Once one is in that league it gets to be difficult to decide how much the return on solar panels is as it becomes worthwhile to simply export all daily production with a SEG of 15p/kWh. I still don't expect that SEG rat to last long.