OT: Rolls Royce on track to deliver SMR

:)

No objection here.

Which is why titanium has been the preferred material for a long time. Actually the bigger problem is the mussels and other stuff that likes to live inside the tubes.

But SMRs make particular sense when located near load centres. Obviously that includes some coastal sites, but many more decent sized towns are located on rivers.

We were the first country with large nuclear plant close to urban centres, with Hartlepool and Heysham. Less harmful than the RTZ smelter at Avonmouth, which was still operating into the 70's, until medics started looking at lead levels in children in Shirehampton.

I havn't seen any sums for that. IIRC reverse osmosis is remarkably low-energy and low capital cost compared to distillation.

We've got the River Cam here, do fine in my backyard perhaps i can "mind" it for them:)

Got a new railway coming too, all good backyard stuff!

Indeed! all seems too good to be true, lets hope the other f-Art students known as politicos can see this is a very good idea:)

Oh dear, the literal left brainer has been whooshed again. ;-(

Of course you would.

Safer than living as near a nuke?

But could with additional storage and doesn't melt down and pollute the surrounding environment for thousands of years:

See above re storage and don't melt down and pollute the surrounding environment for thousands of years:

Ah, an ideal place to put a nuke then, especially for everyone else.

Cheers, T i m

So, you wouldn't mind one IYBY then?

Cheers, T i m

Not in the least. I spent nearly 20 years with two dominating the view out of my office window.

Does that mean you don't understand the question posed?

As would many others.

Given the number killed or injured it's very likely.

What additional storage? More batteries consuming the rare element Lithium? Or did you have some other storagein mind?

They do fail in spectacular ways. Only if you place large nukes near oceans with a history of tsunamis or known safety flaws.

Clean energy, why not. Certainly less CO2 than all your 'green' energy and far more reliable. No need to wait for the sun to rise and the wind to blow.

You might think so, but if you have oodles of low grade heat it might become cost effective.

I heard it was a high energy process. Either way lower than distillation.

The number of years this has been talked about I was surprised it was still so far in the future. Chances are I might not be here to see it. I'll be 80 dribbling and thinking its 1956 probably. Brian

T i m is so good at assessing risks, he rode a motorcycle and went fanatical-vegan.

Sorry, just can't see it. Not sure I can even see a large scale solar still with photovoltaic pumps working for coastal deserts. Otherwise someone would be doing it.

Your low grade heat from a power station operated in the usual way isn't going to evaporate water quickly. Then you need massive condensers to collect it, pumping seawater through them to keep them cool with the associated pumping and pipe friction losses.

In a combined electricity/desalination plant it *might* make sense to take bled steam from the HP turbine outlet to do the evaporating, this still has a decent energy density so your plant volume (and hence capital cost) is lower for a given throughput.

I presume that you chose 1956 deliberately, for Calder Hall?

Israelis and IIRC Kuwait are. Doing fresh water desalination

In the desert you dont even need the heat to do the evaporation.

And you enjoy the locally caught fish? ;-)

Cheers, T i m

You need a source of salt water, not normal in a desert.

Low grade heat could be 100+C, enough to boil water.

Given you can heat incoming water by the condensate much of the energy can be reclaimed. That would make condensers more manageable and a power station would normally need a condenser of some size.

You only need a little higher than 100C to boil water. HP steam can be up to 600C, and there are many stages to a generating turbine to bleed steam off, I might suggest nearer the low pressure exhaust side.

Of course if you want a higher temperature exhaust it means the turbine could be a few stages shorter and correspondingly cheaper.

I suspect that reverse osmosis would still make better commercial sense.

Which is why I said coastal. Although of course brackish water is available in many deserts, you just have to dig deep enough and then pump it up.

The waste heat from a power station is at about 20 deg C. Because all the practicable energy has been removed from it.

And you don't need to boil the water, merely to evaporate it. This is easier if you create some vacuum (although that requires energy). But you still need to provide some latent heat to get it into the vapour phase (to separate the salt) and then remove it again.

FFS reclaiming this energy is just not useful. The point is that to keep the process going you have to remove the latent heat from the vapour continuously, and them MOVE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE. This requires capital hardware and some energy.

Trust me, engineers who design such systems do the sums properly. In most cases where process steam is taken out of a power station a smaller "volume" at higher temperature is usually removed, because this provides more flexibility and lower cost.

Greenhouses are a bit different because all they usually need is condenser outlet temperature.

Of course it does. That is exactly my point, this is the way that everyone does it. Not by faffing around with thermal cycles.