Re: OT: cost of renewables

Such as?

And we've pointed out the issues that renewables present, if you wish to replace all our existing sources with them. You still haven't proposed any system that, with renewables, can *reliably* replace our existing energy supplies. People are not interested in unreliable ones.

You might start by looking at the gridwatch website

Now: how d'ye propose to deal with that? Our solution is lots more nuclear. What's yours?

Arm waving!

Use of renewables to the greatest extent possible with the minimal amount of nuclear energy.

Posters here have said that where there have been previous nuclear accidents, the same mistakes won't be made again, which is probably true. Future, as yet unforeseen, mistakes are another matter.

Even when nuclear reactors function as planned there is the problem of nuclear waste. The waste from the current level of nuclear reaction is not being handled effectively and this threatens destructive damage in the future. Increasing the level of mishandled nuclear waste should be minimised

As nuclear power stations and nuclear powered military devices can be shutdown as required, it should be possible to use them intermittently.

As we speed down the smart motorways of modern life we need to take care of the mess we're squirting out of our back ends.

Meaning, as I pointed out before, that you build two power stations to get the output of one.

Actually nuclear waste is being handled. If you'd listened to a "Life Scientific" program on BBC R4 a few years ago, where the guest was Prof. Sue Ion of Imperial College, you'd have heard her debunk this "nuclear waste problem" myth. She said quite clearly that waste is being glassified and has been for 20 years. What that gives you is stuff that can be stored underground quite safely with no possibility of leaks. Newly removed fuel elements are stored under water for 10 years before being treated, after which time they are processed.

Even if we do that, we have one or another large expensive asset sitting doing nothing for 100% of the time. Our wind fleet at the moment, for example, producing (now) 2.5% of our electricity.

You speak for yourself.

Once again you've avoided answering the question. When the wind doesn't blow, as can happen for several days in winter when electricity demand is high, once or twice a year, the minimal amount of nuclear energy needed would be 100%. Do you not accept this, or is that what you're reluctantly being forced to admit, without having the courage to say it?

If you don't accept it, what other source of electricity do you propose? And if there are enough nukes to power the whole country, keep them running as base load. Yo-yo-ing nukes output up and down is not a good way to run them. Properly operated, they last a lot longer than renewables, which is a term better used to describe the wind generators and solar panels themselves, meaning that every twenty years or so the they have to be renewed.

It's called vitrification and the old fuel is stripped out of the cannisters and dissolved in nitric acid. It then goes through a scrubber to extract the rare earths, evaporation of the remaining active material takes place in a calciner to produce a powder residue that is then fed into an inconel container, heated to 2000 C and mixed with glass powder that is poured into a cylindrical stainless steel container where the top is seam welded on.

Just to clarify: the wind/solar stuff has to be renewed every 20 years, not the nukes. The latter last 50 years or so. The nukes need refuelling from time to time, obvs, but that is minor.

In an earlier reply to Halmarack I demonstrated using real-world numbers how adding windpower to a CCGT in order to make it 'greener' saved no gas at all, for all that expenditure on the windfarm in terms of concrete used, unrecyclable plastics, use of rare-earth elements and the rest.

He never replied. I can only assume he Can't Do Sums, and believes arm-waving will deal with all the 'problems'.

Wind turbine blades are not recyclable, and go into landfill. These days they are 70m long. What a waste.

Not only is it being handled, but the stockpiles of old waste from the earlier nuclear programmes (often dirty as it was a crash programme to support the military rather than/as well as the civil programmes) are being cleared up too.

I'm not a windpower specialist, which isn't a real problem according to you, as they know not what they do.

I'm not the greatest at sums I must admit, which excludes me from having any opinion on the subject by your assessment.

At least that will give my hand a rest.

Any fool can have an opinion. What we are interested in is costed viable solutions that work.

Beware of belling the cat, see:

Oh gawd, here we go with the 'precautionary principle , hand wavey 'possibilities' and the rest

We could, but why would we need to? they simply need to be throttled back a bit if demand drops.

Why not use of nuclear to the greatest possible extent with the minimal amount of renewable energy, which turns out to be as far as wind and solar go, none whatsoever. Once you have a nuclear industry, building stations, running them, processing waste and recycling it, it makes sense to make the most of it. Then there is no point on having any windmills or solar panels at all. They just add cost an unreliability reduce stability and put extra stress on the nuclear plant.

The fact is that renewable energy of the intermittent kind has been and continues to be the West's greatest ever mistake.

And no one wants to admit it, hence the two faced approach of renewables and nuclear, which is nonsense.

The first thing that occurred to me when I looked at the grid from the perspective of a grid operator, is that its bad enough having demand go up and down day to night, summer to winter, without adding renewable energy to it which simply makes the fluctuations conventional power stations have to deal with ten times to a 100 times worse.

Which is why Energiewende has made Germany's electricity grid the most carbon intensive in Europe.

Current nukes are expected to last 60 years. Most windmills are BER at

Oddly enough running stuff on balanced shafts supported at both ends in a constant temperature dry machine hall with overhead cranes built in for servicing and fuel removal, makes kit last longer and cost less to fix than stuffing it on a pole, with a cantilevered bearing in the North Sea. And servicing it by helicopter. Everywhere you look, wind and solar are a disaster,.

Some of us are trying to eat.

Bill

Have you actually bothered to read what other people have said ? !!.

The only 'viable' source of 'renewables' is massively subsidised and *unreliable* wind and solar. Nuclear power stations are designed to run flat out for 40+ years, in which case use them for *primary* power supply.

Such as ?. Please provide some actual details.

No there isn't. We have spent £billions on a state of the art reprocessing facility in Cumbria.

Utter hand waving BS. Provide some detail for that claim.

Madness. Run them flat out and enjoy the reliable power.

Are you developing the same medical issues that Dim Tim, he of vegan fame (been awol for some time now) ?.

And what comes out of our backends might generate a trivial amount of electricity via biodigesting but a better byproduct is to use sewage sludge in place of Ukraneianand Russian fertiliser (farmers were paying £200/tonne for nitrate fertiliser and are now paying £1000/tonne).

My local farmer says £830 per tonne.

Bill

Probably because it is another of those solutions that sound good "in theory", but are impractical, unaffordable, and so down right risky that no investors would be interested.