It can be reliable, although the issues of safety and waste remain.
And anyway the UK seems to be incapable of getting the things built for anything like a reasonable cost and return, in anything approaching a worthwhile timeframe.
All of which, for me, is a red herring. We should be thinking of patterns of and reasons for energy consumption, with a focus on reducing it.
Culling say 75% of the population perhaps? Someone then has to decide who to cull. Should we start with the art students?
I calculated it would take the while of loch Ness pumped out to 1000 ft below sea level to take the UK through a sunless and sporadically calm winter
And that was with current electricity demand.
The trouble with ArtStudents™ is that they are neither capable of Doing Sums nor of understanding that there are People Who Can, and to whom the old adage 'If it were that simple, we would all have done it years ago' applies.
The come in with their man buns and Islamic beards, their hands in your pockets and their heads in the clouds and tell you they have figured out how to SaveThePlanet, buy using techniques that were discarded hundreds of years ago because they were simply pants.
There are no issues of safety and waste except those manufactured by those that have a vested interest in renewables
And why, pray, do ou think that is?
Fucking cat-belling idiot.
If you want to go back to a 'renewable Britain', go back 400 years with an appropriate level of disease, grinding poverty and population density.
I've just got back from Hiroshima.
Radiation risk was not something I worried about. The only reason I though about it at all was to have the prepared argument for my wife (who is an art student... usefully fluent in half a dozen languages!).
I was really struck by the twinning with Coventry.
Andy
Those are issues that need to be addressed during the manufacture and operating. Most of the time they're delat with, sometimes not. Same with all energy regeneration.
Private sector procurement.
?
Did I say that?
No idea how you can draw any of that from what I wrote.
Don't think there's much of a reason to worry about the radiation there nowadays.
That's pretty good.
That’s impossible! How would we know what colour to paint the nuclear stations?
There are issues, you just refuse to recognise them and hold your head in the sand going lalalalalala
I agree that nuclear is the only sensible way forward.
Because government don't want to invest and expect everyone else to pay. It's about time we had a government that is willing to invest in the future.
Once again, a failed argument hence resorting to abuse.
Once again, you conflate energy conservation and green energy with living in the past. The only person living in the past is the dinosaur bent on gobbling up the worlds resources.
Er, the Government doesn't have any money unless it takes it from you and me.
Sometimes you need the foresight to provide the required investment that private enterprise won't provide.
The money doesn't come from you and me, but from future generations through Public Sector Borrowing.
Home heating, for instance.
The problem is that retrofitting home insulation is hugely expensive, and hasn't ever been cost-effective, at current energy levels. I'm pretty sure extra nuclear power could be done much cheaper than equivalent savings from insulation.
Additionally, it is quite likely nuclear could be made a lot cheaper, with economies of scale. So an insulation project, with a payback of a century, is a poorer bet than nuclear with a payback time in decades.
You cant deal with and issue that someone claims cannot be dealt with.
Wrong
regulatory ratcheting...
if you don't want nuclear that's all that is left
Yes, a good example. I'd suggest that we could use our homes differently, and just heat a couple of rooms and wear more clothes for example.
Zero carbon homes often have long payback times - 30 years plus in the case of larger Victorian houses. Other things, at less than zero like draught proofing and loft insulation, can pay back in months or a couple of years.
Well, maybe. But this about more than financial cost - for me anyway. There's the whole environmental/climate change debate. And I have a near obsessive problem with wasting energy. And conspicous consumption/buying tat.
Maybe, but certainly not the way things are in the UK today.
In new homes, financial payback usually happens within 10 years. Retrofit - less certain. But I and a few others count the costs differently, in non-financial ways.
Par is about £3.8bn per gigawatt capacity with a 60 year life at around
90% capacity factor.Let's say that makes the total capital cost £3.8bn plus 60 x 7.5% per annum loan interest. Plus lets say 5% O & M.
so total cost excluding fuel is 8.5 x £3.8bn over or £538m a year. Out of that you should get 900MW for 8766 hours or £68 a MWh.
6.8p a unit.Higher than coal, but a third to a quarter the price of renewable shit with gas backup
And 7.5% on a 60 year bond is an unbelievable return.
My brother tried that and started getting mildew in the colder rooms.
Yep, it has to be managed carefully, taking account of cold bridging, moisture, patterns of use, etc.
It's quite a skill - and I have little faith in what little the government is doing to promote more heat efficiency in our homes.
Neither of which are real issues.
Of the three incidents with commercial reactors, only one actually killed or injured anyone, and the operators had to work damn hard to make it do that.
As for waste, as TNP has pointed out, just leave it for ten years. By then most of the really nasty stuff will have simply gone away. 1000 tons of I-131? Not a single atom left after 2.5 years. The remaining waste can then be vitrified and stored.
Since moving here we've replaced all the windows with double-glazed (incl. some that were already DG but it was rubbish and leaked air), replaced the boiler with a condensing one (oil as there's no gas here), properly insulated the attic, put in a wood-burner, and put in cavity wall insulation. All that's helped quiet a bit but the house can still get cold at times in winter. What I am NOT goint to do is rip up the floors and put in under-floor insulation. Far too disruptive.
To do a poper job requires a close study of how a particular house performs in terms of the circs under which it gets cold and which parts get cold, and what is reasonably feasible and affordable. Such a study is not going to be cheap and will take a long time, but needs to be done for each house, else any measures taken may be a waste of money. And that's before any actual work. Many people would not be able to afford that.
It not just a matter of people being able afford it but also the lack of SKILLED trades people to undertake the tasks.
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