The Natural Philosopher coughed up some electrons that declared:
I agree. Anyway, eventually fusion might get there. In the meantime we'll have to make to with fission.
Anyway, I though EDF were going to build us loads of nukes with French technology?
I have hope anyway - no one whines about carbon in Star Trek. Lob another dilithium crystal in the reactor Scotty...
They are only an economic "success" because the govt. mandates the electricity generating companies must deliver a certain percentage of renewable energy and therefore must pay over the odds for the power they produce.
They are also such a tiny percentage of the UK's current power needs that their natural variability can be absorbed by more conventional methods of generation.
BW
Some. Not enpugh.
WE need about 300 sets to eliminate oil/gas totally. We need about 100 to replace all current electricity generation with nuclear. We are I think scheduled to build just ten more.
Sounds good to me, if you can supply em..
yes, per kWh delivered, they're not financially competitive today for mass use. For niche apps they are. Nationwide power supply isnt something theyre good at today. We agree there.
Carbon footprint reflects cost, both are falling over time.
yes, but there are other bigger costs in gen & distrib, so this isnt a deal breaker
If you put a wind turbine at the user end of power distribution line, and use it to generate al or part of the wind caused propoertion of the power used, the result is less peak requirement from conventional plant, and in some cases no need to instal a new distribution line.
No tehcnology is the best option in every case, all the known ones are the choice option some of the time.
Criticising advertising isnt really much of a reflection on a product.
I'm not sure thats a positive really. More realistic positives include things like not needing to pay 25k to install a mains feed, and the fact that in some remote locations its simply the cheapest reliable option.
It might turn out it is. But I dont think you've established that by any means. Wind generation has a long way to go yet.
NT
Straw man there, no-one here is suggesting providing 100% power for the whole of the uk. It of course also takes a lot of land to build lots of nuke plants plus their security zones.
...not cheaply though. And the power has to be distributed long distance. (A nuke in the basement isn't that practical.)
NT
On the contrary they are an economic success precisely in applications that are not government grant funded, namely
- remote locations
- offgrid houses where installing a mains feed would be excessively expensive
NT
It is.
You end up with a wind turbine in everyone's backyward, which provided you dont mind a 100ft tall turbine for every house in the country, is fine, as long as the wind blows at the user site.
If its blowing in Orkney and the user is in Lands End, you need 600 miles of expensive transmission line to cover the eventuality.
If the wind isn't blowing anywhere, you have a high priced load of useless junk.
And wind technology is the worst technology in every situation, except where you have local storage and minimal total power requirements. I.e. its great for charging batteries whose drain is intermittent and low.
If it has to be lied about to make it acceptable it most definitely *is* a reflection on the product.
You are talking about micro applications. Yes occasionally a wind turbine is useful, but that's not the issue at large: the issue is large scale windfarmms being foisted on the public, paid for by the public, on the false pretext that they are actually cost effective and efficient and will reduce CO2 footprint.
It cannot break the laws of physics. Even a 100% efficient windmill would still be a waste of time.
No, it doesn't.
Average nuclear plant is about 10 acres. We can run the WHOLE country including *everything* transport wise, the LOT, off about 300 such.
3000 acres. The total size of a medium farm, spread round the country. And a 3 times upsize on the national grid. To do the same with windmills would take an area the size of wales completely covered with them. One every 200 meters or so. Or using the whole land surface, one every kilometer. Plus that loch lomond sized storage facility. Plus 10-15 times the current grid structure we have
Oh purlease. A nuke is cheaper than windmill., REAL *delivered* watt for watt, and the power lines from the existing power stations are simple short runs to population centers and grid distribution points.
The long lines are the ones the Scottish parliament demands WE build at NATIONAL expense to supply unreliable windpower to the English towns, at OUR expense. So they can make a fortune at our expense supplying power when their wind blows, and wash their hands of any shortfall that happens when the wind stops.
Well you can use em there, as long as they don't costs me a cent.
Round here, they exist at no such place, and are 'economic successes' because we pay two to five times the ,market rate for electricity delivered by them, because the EU has mandated that they will be subsidised that way, and because fat cat farmers get subsidies to install the useless things.
Now why cant nuclear power, being carbon free, get to charge 10p a unit delivered, instead of 2.2p?
The bankers would get trampled in the rush to finance them. Whereas most are pulling out of windpower.
It has been estimated that the taxpayer has been ripped by £5k a taxpayer to 'solve' the banking crisis. £60bn
Using generous estimates, the countries total energy supply needs are
350GW. (current electrical generation is about 60-80GW I think.)We could completely replace all non nuclear power stations for £60bn.
WE could replace nearly all oil imports by upping generating capacity to
300GW or so, at a cost of about £300-£450bnWE import about 160M tonnes of oil equivalent energy annually.
At current oil prices, or $50 per barrel,. that equates to about $50bn a year spent on energy imports. Maybe £30bn.
So for the cost of ten years of energy imports, we could build enough nuclear power stations to never import any energy for 40 years.
That's what *I* call economic viability.
The long lines have existed for a lot longer than a few poncy windmills.
They are there to export the Scottish Hydro power. There really ought to more investment in small/mdeium scale hydro. There is a chain of reserviours near here now even if you only get a few megawatts from each one you soon get into the tens of megawatts of low maintenance
24/7 power from the chain. And this is water they have to let down to keep the rivers flowing, may as well harness some of that energy.
And we have a lot of land. The MOD own lots of it. Or, as in current policy, we use the English Channel as the security zones and put the nasty things in France.
Anyway, there's plenty of nuclear weaponry dotted around the UK with scant regard for security zones.
By a few ginormously big pylon lines, which is cheaper per mile per MW than underground feeds into the local MV supply system from windmills.
*yet* :-)Owain
Nukes (and other poer stations) need a lot of cold water for condensers. Thery are built on coastal sites typically.
go and have a look at a nuclear power station. You will be hard pushed to see either the security, the station or the power lines. Sizewll, which supplies most of east anglia and a largish section of London, is just about invisible.
Not even that big, since they only need be sized for the power the station delivers, not the power it MIGHT deliver if the wind actually picks up..
But pebble bed unit at Battersea, to supply London, would definitely be.
Why on earth go for minimum temperature? For a small decrease in conversion efficiency the cooling water could be used for heating directly, increasing the overall efficiency.
In fact, why convert to electricity at all for the heating loads? A small nuke in each larger town instead.
Thermodynamics.
For a small decrease in conversion
A farly large one actually.
the cooling water could be used for heating directly, increasing
I am perfectly happy with CHP. but you still need to cool the working fluid down to about 50C..
Would work well with a riuver based unit, say at Battersea..
The problem with direct heating though is the controllability.
If its a hot day and you want some aircon, a pipe full of boiling water wont cut the mustard, nor can it be relied upon to cool a power station.
It might however be used to make a giant Eden project into a commercial banana plantation..
Village sized reactors are perfectly possible, but as long as people demand extremely high levels of security and safety its hard to get sufficiently trained staff to run them.
Yes. Coal and oil is the net result of natures attempts to create renewable energy out of continental sized land masses and a billion odd years..
She did better at Big Bang quantum level with all the energy in the whole Universe created in a nanosecond.
Atomic power is somewhat between.
Are you referring to the Galloway Hydro scheme?
It's surprising how well the concrete dams have blended into the landscape. Somehow, even the cream painted 1930s generator palaces look like they belong there. Then there's the bleedin' obvious point that hydro schemes sit down in the valleys where they can't be seen from far away, while wind farms on hilltops are a visual blight across half a county.
These 70-year-old hydro stations have turned into nice little earners. They have long ago written off their capital costs, the generators are low-tech and reliable with interchangeable parts, spin-up is very quick (and these days it's remotely controlled, of course) and best of all the generated electricity attracts a "zero carbon" premium on the internal market.
I'm not sure about the "tens of megawatts...24/7" as such small hydro schemes would empty their dams within a few days at full load (just over
100MW). Their main value within the modern distribution network is not for baseload but as a rapid spin-up emergency reserve. Normally SW Scotland is supplied over 100-mile lines from the baseload stations in the Central Belt, but in times of need the hydro can take over very rapidly to supply the local region - the real value being that it instantly releases an equal amount of generating capacity right there in the Central Belt where it's needed the most.From casual drive-by observation, the main priority in managing the water does seem to be keeping the dams close to full. That's just as well, given Scottish Government policy, for over the present few days there can hardly be a windmill turning in the whole country.
Your suggestion of 1x 100'er per house is completely unrealistic.
Applying a bit more sense, one doesnt install turbines to do that. You only use them where they make sense. You keep proposing stupid scenarios, and claiming they prove that all spending on wind generation is senseless. It just aint logic, no matter how many times you repeat it.
if it isnt blowing, less electricity is being used nationwide for heating.
It doesnt have to be, politicians just choose to. Investing in wind gen research in the hope that we might or might not achieve a great result is a sensible thing to do, within sensible limits.
There are several issues.
For some reason you seem to be stuck on the idea that wind generation will always mean props on towers. There's progress to be made with such, but a lot of progress with entirely different designs lies ahead.
NT
We know mass wind gen currently costs more per watt, this isnt news and doesnt support your position that wind will always cost more.
NT
clearly that doesnt make those ones an economic sucess.
I think the govt is just waiting as late as possible to do that because of the green movement, more nukes must be built sooner or later.
NT
I am glad you recognise that, but it is in fact what is needed to make large scale use of windpower.
Its not me proposing stupid scenarios, its the green movements and the politicos, who have latched onto windmills as a way to placate the climate change lobby, without actually achieving anything.
around 1% yes. Unless of course its because there is a high pressure arctic system, in which case its cold and possibly foggy, and we need extra for lights and heating...
No it isn't. Because it CANNOT ever work better than other technologies, because of the very nature of the wind itself and the physics surrounding the operation of generating machines.
The towers are mandatory, as wind is approximtaly proportional to height abpve ground level .
Whether its a prop or a paddle is immaterial. Physics says you need a certain amount of surfacce to 'catch the wind' (to bring it down to your intellectual level), and the wind is up there more than down here. So you need large structures up high. Period. Nothing else works, unless you can make invisible force fields instead of paddles, drums props or propellors.
And to get power out, those structures have to withstand bending forces. Which means lots of material in them. Or cables to stay them.
These are inescapable FACTS, apparently only known to engineers.
Which you don't seem to be.
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