Rolls-Royce SMR selected to build small modular nuclear reactors

But there was strong, or at least loud, opposition to nuclear power then, peaking after Three Mile Island when Livingstone declared London a 'nuclear-free zone', in defiance of reality and English grammar.

Still, at least we didn't chuck out all the existing reactors, as Germany later did.

No amount of dishonesty can change the safety record or nuclear power.

More people die annually building non nuclear power stations than in the entire history of civil nuclear power.

I had one of those nuisance callers demanding to know what kind of heating system I had. I insisted it was nuclear with the reactor in the basement. The caller terminated the call and never called again.

We need to get them down to the size of walnuts as envisaged by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series.

Is that a materials and engineering challenge ?

They were worried about a tsunami (as in Japan).

Fairly rare in the waters around Germany, but not impossible if something really nasty happened to Iceland.

I think overall, had the will been there, something could have been done to improve on what must always have been a design factor. It is always impossible to design for 'the worst case', you do have to stop somewhere. I feel that the shutdown was more about public opinion than about reality.

Same old, same old.

I'll believe it when there's more than just hot air.

Are walnuts a recognised unit of measurement in nuclear engineering?

You are obviously a customer of some taste and refinement... and not to be messed with.

We had one of these at uni, and the operator told us "it could make 10kW". It's used for Neutron Activation Analysis, and you irradiate a vial with a sample in it, wait ten minutes for it to "cool off", then take a pair of tongs and put it in the gamma spectrometer, to measure precise gamma eV values from the decaying species. The detector is a solid block of germanium. if I put a sample of my hair in the vial, it's possible to tell when I last washed my hair (height of sodium peak). If you'd been poisoned with heavy metals, that would also show up. None of my classmates had heavy metals. You could do hair or finger nail clippings.

Ours was decomissioned some years ago and was not replaced.

So that gives you some scale, on what it would take. 10kW.

Paul

Most people know how big their nuts are...

Weren't the greens in coalition? All the anti nuclear s*it was Russian funded anyway, as were the Greens. No nuclear meant more Russian gas and more dependency on Moscow. Mama Merkel being a fully paid up ex communist was delighted with that.

More a physics. I guess pure plutonium 239 or pure U235 might go marginally critical inm an AA battery form...but think of the person who buys a 100, takes them apart and makes a fission bomb.

They have exhausted every other alternative. Only nuclear is left

Our SMR project has just kicked off. Delivery date of online power, 2030. They've made a tiny hole in the ground :-) You know, that high tech stuff, the hole. All important that hole. (I don't know if that's a legit picture or not, looks kinda fake.)

One thing I don't understand about the picture, is where is the turbine hall ? I've been for a tour of an under-construction reactor, and stood in the turbine hall, and that sucker is huge. And that would have been at approx 1GW level.

Paul

Nuclear does appear to be the cost of renewables - at the moment, until storage can be sorted. But it's an astonishingly expensive backstop that might not be needed medium term.

I'd prefer to see the bulk of the money spent on consuming less energy - retrofit for example.

You are probably looking at something the size of a diesel locomotive

You are hand waving.

How much money do you think we could save consuming less energy. Where would the savings be made. Quantify them. Retrofitting houses for heat savings is very expensive. There isn't that much energy to be saved.

The reason houses in the UK are not insulated is because it wasn't economic. It might be economic to insulate new builds, but it isn't economic to retrofit houses. It is actually quite easy to do the sums, look at all the insulation methods for your house. See how much they cost. See how much energy they save. Calculate payback time at current energy prices.

My total heating bill has never been that high, even if I saved everything, insulation measures would have a very long payback time (if they were economic at all)

If insulation worked, people would already have done it. It only works if energy is much more expensive.

Nuclear works. It could be done cheaply. It has already been done in France economically, producing cheaper electricity prices. We buy electricity from France.

The current "cost" of renewables is gas as a backup, something for which no solution is in sight. For this reason, Wind and Solar have built in CO2 emissions. They are not a net zero solution.