OT: Underground utilities

You may be happy with ugly wind generators, I hate them.

Plus another factor is the heat generated by the conductor. I can't remember the exact temperatures of the overhead super grid conductors but a figure of about 90 to 100C comes to mind.

Some buried super grid cables are placed in water baths to provide cooling. ISTR there is a cable in a tunnel underneath the Solent which uses this technique.

In London power lines run along the Regents Canal and are cooled by canal water. Lots of info about it here, and other places if you google:-

.. another reason they don't want us to have reversible heat pumps that can cool in summer

Dave

The whole politicisation of the electricity grid has led to decisions based on culling votes and making obscene profits rather than delivering low cost reliable electricity.

There does seem to be a small step forward however in that "Three months on from the publication of the final report of the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, the UK government has outlined its plans to speed up nuclear delivery. All reforms are expected to be completed by the end of next year, subject to legislative timelines."

Two pipes to each house, one delivers charged cells and t'other returns spent cells. On average less than eg one 18650 Lithium cell a minute for the average UK house, I think.

when cables were routed in the west London canal system, the pond weed loved the higher temperature and almost blocked the canal for boats.

Simples, just put a desalination plant at the end. Deals with getting rid of both the salt and the power.

Theo

Since the closure of Fawley of power station the cables have been repurposed to transfer electricity from the interconnector from France which comes ashore at Gosport where the DC-AC converter station is located , a new cable was then laid under Titchfield Shore and linked to the older cables where the tunnel emerges from where the existing pylon route goes to the substation at Lovedean a few miles outside of Portsmouth, the other end links to the covered switch farm the only building remaining from the former Power station from which there is a pylon route on the West side of Southampton water which makes a second connection to the greater grid at Nursling which is near or some say now absorbed by Southampton. Effectively an expensive to run oil powered plant has been replaced by French electricity from their nuclear plants over the water. Once knew the Engineering Manager of the Power station but he had been retired too long to get me a visit to the tunnel, apparently its pretty grim down there and quite eerie when ships pass overhead . There was a small maintenance railway but it succumbed to to the moist atmosphere and corroded away. NG have put out pre tender notices for a new tunnel

Don’t know what will happen to the old one, turn into a cycle path and keep the buggers off the roads could be an idea.

GH

Don't forget to transport the salt back to the starting point.

Something like those pneumatic tube systems which Department stores used to carry cash from place to place?

Far too practical. You're taking all the fun out of this.

EcoBollox won't block it. For politicians, it's the financing, and the financial guarantees that must be "offered" to the builder of the contraption. If the builder of the thing stands to go bankrupt, due to the terms of the contract, they will be demanding certain things. The politicians on the other hand, look pretty bad later, when one of those "bad terms" is used by the builder to recoup losses.

Not only do you have to find the money for it, finding a company to do the build will be hard. The LLM-AI tech bro will be buying up capacity and that includes workers to pour cement. You will be competing for those workers.

We have that problem on capital projects right now. A building project takes twice as long as normal. You can go to a site and not see workers for several months. They've buggered off somewhere. Then they show up, there is fevered activity. You can even find one dude in a bucket loader and another dude with a dump truck, at 2AM in the morning, working at a site because "they are behind and holding up the work" :-)

The time to be ambitious would have been a few decades ago :-)

If you wanted to see fevered activity, it would be the people making rockets and bombs :-) You can never have enough rockets and bombs... and Christmas is coming.

Paul

That is the whole point of changing the regulations. To de-risk the build by having predictable build times

The way things are going they may well be the dame people...small reactors are ideal for AI centres

In the case of nuclear the hold ups are all regulatory.

Nuclear power if subject only to sane regulation and given some kind of government assurance is the most ideal investment for pensions funds. Large capital investment and stable guaranteed returns over decades.

Which would mean that Reeves would not let the pension funds invest in it, but would force them to back sub-standard funds deemed 'worthy'.

It surprised me, doing the calculation. I'd expected something orders of magnitude different, but delivering energy by chemical means could be made to work. Not sure why you'd want to, and you'd want something with a greater longevity than Lithium cells, but hey, I'm the ideas guy, I'll leave the practicalities to others.

A bit like measuring a car's fuel consumption using litres/100km which reduces to an area. This area is the cross-sectional area of a stationary 'tube' of fuel which you use up as you drive along it. IIRC

(And some supermarkets still use pneumatic tubes to carry cash from the tills.)

There was a rebuild of one on TV yesterday.

How about a rebuild of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway? Given modern materials, it might be a winner.

I had been thinking about that myself, great minds and all that.

Nah, they suck.

Me? Or Brunel?

(The latter obv.)