In article , charles scribeth thus
I remember many years ago I worked for a company doing PA systems amongst other things like broadcast equipment;!. Once we were asked to Hackney town hall to sort out their PA system at any cost as Red Ken Livingstone was speaking there that week.
Well No expense was spared for chairman Ken to come and make his speeches. It cost a packet.
Glad I wasn't one of their tax paying serfs!...
In article , Java Jive scribeth thus
No, one can conduct a reasoned scientific engineering based argument the other is blinded by some stupid misplaced ideology...
Well you should be able to see that only a small area of the UK can be fed by such means. OK lets dam the Cam river here flood a large area and provided we don't have another 1976 then that might just provide for a few houses. OK lets be kind and discount the amount of concrete that would need and carbon that would course to be released...
So where is there that had -some- wind?. Thats still couldn't provide for much all of the time its needed..
For a few yes maybe but only for a few..
Thats were the problem with Renewables lies .. and they are lies too...
Would it have been ok if it was Boris?
Could be it was also needed for other things?
It had probably been out of action for months...
It's the same thing as when Royalty makes a visit, stuff that hasn't been touched for years gets cleaned and painted so it looks good.
I doubt Boris would get the same enthusiastic reception from his followers. I remember the days of Red Ken and the GLC.
+1
you can always tell a greeny troll. They star with hand wavy assertions without an actiual number in sight, or if there is one its cherry picked
You refute with actual numbers. Then the personal abuse starts.
- you are in the pay of some conspiracy organisation (actually they are)
- your facts are not facts, just beliefs (no, theirs are).
- your are a stick in the mud luddite (no, they are)
- you are a climate change denialist (no, they are).
- you don't care about the environment (no, they don't).
- the only way forward is renewables (actually there are many ways forward, renewables are however the way backward).
It is by these signs that you know the renewable lobby is getting desperate. They have abandoned any pretense of logic and respectability: its become a shouting match.
But the impractical and bigoted suggestion originally came from YOU! It was never any suggestion of MINE! Why are you blaming ME for it!
qv: Subthread about bigotry.
It's been relatively calm here, but tides keep flowing, water keep running, and I suspect that the nearest windmills are still turning, though they aren't visible without a drive, so I won't know until at least I fill the car, perhaps not even then (I can't remember for sure).
But this subthread has been answering your own impractical and bigoted suggestion of dividing the country into green and non-green. I'm merely pointing out that the green part wouldn't necessarily grind to a halt the way that you'd obviously like it to.
I don't think any independent-minded person reading this thread would have any difficulty in concluding that you are being just as bigoted as those you criticise and despise for bigotry.
You are being a hypocrite, Tony.
They're not making any power to speak of. Total Wind at this moment is
0.22 Gw. Out of a total demand of 45.56 Gw. They might be turning, but if they're generating enough power to run the control circuitry, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Even the sickly Biomass plant is generating more, at half a gigawatt.If you're where I think you are, then you're not far from one of the biggest potential sources of tidal power in Britain, with the fastest tides in the world, nearly. The island between the bridges has a breaking bow wave at peak flow. They'd never be allowed to put a barrage in the Menai Straits, though. Although you could screw two biosystems up for the price of one anywhere else.
:)
That's why I've taken the time to dig some stuff out to disagree with you.
"Current usage is about 68,000 tU/yr. Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium (5.3 Mt) in the cost category around present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 80 years. This represents a higher level of assured resources than is normal for most minerals. Further exploration and higher prices will certainly, on the basis of present geological knowledge, yield further resources as present ones are used up.
...
"The price of a mineral commodity also directly determines the amount of known resources which are economically extractable. On the basis of analogies with other metal minerals, a doubling of price from present levels could be expected to create about a tenfold increase in measured economic resources, over time, due both to increased exploration and the reclassification of resources regarding what is economically recoverable.
"This is in fact suggested in the IAEA-NEA figures if those covering estimates of all conventional resources (U as main product or major by-product) are considered - another 7.6 million tonnes (beyond the 5.3 Mt known economic resources), which takes us to 190 years' supply at today's rate of consumption. This still ignores the technological factor mentioned below. It also omits unconventional resources (U recoverable as minor by-product) such as phosphate/ phosphorite deposits (up to 22 Mt U), black shales (schists) and lignite (0.7 Mt U), and even seawater (up to 4000 Mt), which would be uneconomic to extract in the foreseeable future, although Japanese trials using a polymer braid have suggested costs a bit over $250/kgU. Research proceeds.
...
"Coal ash is another easily-accessible though minor uranium resource in many parts of the world. In central Yunnan province in China the coal uranium content varies up to 315 ppm and averages about 65 ppm. The ash averages about 210 ppm U (0.021%U) - above the cut-off level for some uranium mines. The Xiaolongtang power station ash heap contains over
1000 tU, with annual arisings of 190 tU. Recovery of this by acid leaching is about 70% in trials. This project has yet to announce any commercial production, however."Widespread use of the fast breeder reactor could increase the utilisation of uranium 50-fold or more. This type of reactor can be started up on plutonium derived from conventional reactors and operated in closed circuit with its reprocessing plant. Such a reactor, supplied with natural or depleted uranium for its "fertile blanket", can be operated so that each tonne of ore yields 60 times more energy than in a conventional reactor."
If coal-fired ash tips and seawater are fuel sources - no, I'm not worried.
Andy
Especially so as coal is likely to outstrip oil as the worlds major source of energy by 2022.
Got a reference for that?
Even if the greens get their way and we get 20GW of wind the demand will always exceed supply. You need a pricing regime that compensates for constrained off cheaper generation but in a way that doesn't have any impact on pricing to consumers. Mission F*cking Impossible.
The way things are going we might end up with no one in the conventional generation market offering to supply. The all take their bats home and say f*ck it.
The market is broken, that's what you get with a privatised electricity industry, one root cause - a senile vindictive evil bitch of a grocers daughter with secret communist leanings.
How about Portpatrick to Whitehead/Bangor - or thereabouts? That would be real man-size barrage/dam.
They come from the CARMA site that TNP referred to,
Type the country name into the search box top right, and then scroll down through the various options such as plants, companies etc to get to region and then select 'country'.
The numbers given by TNP refer to the 'intensity' of the emissions. This is the 'kilograms of CO2 per MWh' (see
I guess there are other metrics you could use by which to judge a country's 'cleanliness'.
CARMA gives the following for tons* of CO2 emitted nationally by their power stations in 2009:
Germany 303,089,984 Denmark 15,385,000 UK 174,630,000 France 44,593,000
*(they say these are tons, but they must mean tonnes)If you normalise these per capita of population
Germany 3.7 Denmark 2.75 UK 2.78 France 0.70
Which makes Germany the worst, UK and Denmark about equal, and France, with loads of nuclear, clearly the best.
So far I agree.
The market is broken, but its not by privatising the supply: Its by politicians of the Left who rather than taking it back, have taken it back by stealth to achieve political objectives.
The people with communist leanings lie in the Labour party which had 14 years to come up with a decent energy policy, and instead invented FITS ROCS and carbon trading which has made it a political minefield into which no one is prepared to pour long term investment, for fear they will have the rug pulled from under their industry by some new law or other.
It takes 30 years and several governments to pay back a nuclear plant. If any one of those governments does a Merkel and curtails that, with zero compensation, then its a write off of a lot of cash.
On account of not being able to access the generating hours required because wind muscles in and grabs the market at vastly higher enforced prices, and being required to sit there in hot standby for when wind cant deliver, there is no profit in gas either.
With the LCP making coal plant uneconomic to contemplate in the medium term, no one will build new coal.
Every single one of these reasons can be traced back to the last Labour government and every single reason why they are still in force can be traced to the Liberal Democrats and their troughing allies in the CP.
None of it has anything to do with Thatcher.
the single greatest step this nation could take in assuring supply is to scrap every single renewable obligation it has, and if people are concerned about emissions, move to a unilateral carbon tax alone.
That plus setting sensible and fair nuclear power regulation, so that nuclear power has as guaranteed a future as any other technology, and simply stepping back and letting te market do the rest, would net far more in terms of reliable cheap low carbon energy supply than anything else.
What has destroyed the industry, is renewable energy subsidies, and emotional responses to nuclear power. And that is entirely the fault of a Labour administration alone.
Which, in the present climate in this newsgroup, is very much to your credit, and not unnoticed or unappreciated, at least by myself.
Yes, we've discussed this apparent discrepancy between two particular pages on the WNA site before, the other being, and the other source we've been using (just to keep the links together):
Most of the 2.8 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity generated worldwide from nuclear power every year is produced in light-water reactors (LWRs) using low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. About 10 metric tons of natural uranium go into producing a metric ton of LEU, which can then be used to generate about 400 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, so present-day reactors require about 70,000 metric tons of natural uranium a year.
According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered?a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time."
Note: Most sources, when they talk about 'Uranium', are ambiguous as to whether amounts given are that of U or, I suspect more usually, U308 (c85% U by mass), and often whether it is before or after enrichment, but at least the above is clear as to the latter.
Please check my reasoning and maths here very carefully. I think it's correct, but for reasons that will become apparent, I'd like it independently checked by a critical eye ...
400 million KWh = 400GWh = 400/(24 x 365) = 0.045 GWyrSo the above states that the LWR conversion rate of fuel into electricity is 0.045 GWyr/tonne, inverting which gives us 21.9t/GWyr, a figure 1/8 of the 160t/GWyr given by Mackay, and an even smaller fraction of the 200t/GWyr given by the WNA!
Being at our most generous to all concerned, it seems he's left out a factor of ten somewhere, which is probably explained by the fact that he's referring to units of Lightly Enriched Uranium (LEU), whereas, perhaps, though not explicitly stated, the WNA page is referring to units of Natural Uranium (NU). The disagreement doesn't seem so bad if we assume 220t/GWyr, but would that mean that he is actually predicting that supplies would only last 23 years?! I think we had better find out?!
Dare we go back to the WNA, or will we just find another contradiction and leave ourselves even more confused?! Let us hope not:
So that gives 65,405tU/296.92GWyr = 220tU/GWyr! Although not explicitly stated, it does seem the WNA page is referring to NU, not LEU.
(Note also that 220tU/GWyr = 260tU3O8/GWyr - could Mackay have mistyped a 1 for the 2 to get his figure of 160t/GWyr? On that assumption, I shall use THIS figure from now on.)
So if we rework the simplistic calculation of dividing total world stocks by 2009 demand, what do we get?
Naturally occurring U308 is made up of different isotopes ...
... so this combined with the chemical formula means that U3O8 is about 84.8% U
Thus 65,405 t U = 65405 / .848 = 77,132 t U3O8, as stated by WNA.
Going back to the article in Scientific American, actually 5.5 million t / 77,132 t pa = 71 years. It's nothing like the 230 years he's trying to hype by including supposed resources, but at least it's a lot better than 23, and more in line with other figures we've seen!
Nevertheless, the above demonstrates how careful one has to be in a world where everyone is vague about what units they are actually using.
Let us continue ...
As explained above and further on your chosen page, there is a difference between the resources that are available, and those that are economically extractable. As we live in a market rather than a planned economy, the market will be the ultimate arbiter of how much exploration will be done, and how much ore will be extracted, and the market is not an entirely predictable or controllable thing. As mentioned (IMS by both organisations), it could well be that there is a significant time lag between a price increase and new resources being made available, during which time, prices are likely to be extremely volatile, and supplies insecure (as oil prices have been during various crises over my lifetime).
Further, as already pointed out, the graph mentioned previously in the middle of that page suggests that actually the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and those new resources being found are tending to be more expensive to extract.
The current spot price of U3O8 is $44.75/lb or $98.57/kg, whereas over recent years, despite a massive increase in expenditure on exploration, the amount of $80 (U, or is it really U3O8, again we can't be absolutely certain which) resources found annually has become less than half of yet more expensive resources. Yes, the spot price will certainly go up, that's what I've been saying all along, but that graph doesn't exactly suggest that new economically exploitable resources will necessarily appear to meet demand, just because the price has risen, and therefore, according to WNA, they should.
Note: Spot prices are not what the power stations actually pay at any one time, which is determined by long-term contracts, the spot-price current at the time of contract obviously having some impact on the agreed price.
See also below ...
Yes, that page is diametrically opposed in interpretation to both the other one, and the IAEA report. In fact, you could say that both organisations' communications are not entirely consistent. Therefore, it would be easy for us both to be right and both to be wrong by cherry-picking sentences or paragraphs to quote at each other (not that I'm accusing either of us of consciously doing that, but it would be an easy mistake unconsciously to fall into). We could go at it ad nauseam, and not in the end get anywhere.
The problem is: Where lies the truth?
As I didn't draw up the pages, I can't be certain what the resolution of the apparent contradiction is, but:
1) Whatever the actual explanation, the fact that there is a discrepancy or disagreement is worrying in itself, as it implies some doubt as to the way the figures are being collected and/or, perhaps more likely, being interpreted. It begs the question of how much credence can we give either interpretation? Is either entirely right, or does the truth lie somewhere in between? As we have no indigenous supplies of ore in the UK, do we dare rely on one interpretation which we like and ignore another which we don't? 2) As explained above, there is likely to be instability in prices when demand outstrips supply. 3) The 80 or so year figure that is bandied about is based on 2009 levels of consumption, but we know that is set to increase significantly. For example, going back to the bottom line of the WNA table linked above, in 2009 there were 49.6GW reactors being built, 149.6GW planned, and 204GW proposed, which adds up to 403.2GW forseeable extra demand, equating to an extra annual demand for 104,832 t U3O8, more than doubling 2009 consumption. However, some reactors will be closing down at end of life, and we are not given figures for these on that page, so, for the world figures, I'm afraid it's more smoke and mirrors.However, the UK report linked up thread ...
"Nuclear power currently appears to be the most cost-effective of the low-carbon technologies, and should form part of the mix assuming safety concerns can be addressed. However, full reliance on nuclear would be inappropriate, given UNCERTAINTIES OVER COSTS, site availability, LONG-TERM FUEL SUPPLY and waste disposal, and public acceptability."
... has this on p25 (again my caps) ...
"Nuclear. Given that NUCLEAR IS LIKELY TO BE RELATIVELY LOW COST, it should have a crucial role, provided safety concerns can be addressed (see Box 3 above). In this illustrative scenario, there is investment on all eight currently approved sites, with around 18 GW NEW NUCLEAR ADDED TO THE SYSTEM THROUGH THE 2020S, RESULTING IN AROUND A 40% SHARE (175 TWH) IN 2030."
... which, ignoring the capitalised self-contradiction over costs and after a number of intervening closures of old plant, would still be about 2.5 times current UK nuclear generation of 7-8GW.
If that was typical world-wide, the 80 or so years' worth of U3O8 becomes just 32, less than the life-time of a reactor. This was precisely the sort of situation which my Worst Case Scenario described.
Yes, I've mentioned the possibility of this before in previous threads, but there are two problems here:
We either have to go back and retrieve old coal ash from whereever we've dumped it - under building sites, closed tips, disused mines or wherever - or else we have to burn more coal to get the ash. The former might well be impractical in many cases, while the latter means burning the coal anyway, which means having to capture the carbon from it anyway, so wouldn't it make more sense, as I've been arguing, to develop that BEFORE building new nuclear power stations?
Yes, this too has been mentioned before, but there was only one FBR in the world actually generating when I last looked, which I admit is one better than none, but the rest had either already been abandoned or were massively over budget and over schedule. The UK's last attempt at FBR technology was Dounreay, not an inspiring thought, and AFAIAA, perhaps unsurprisingly, no new FBR technology is currently planned for the UK.
But, as previously explained, they are NOT.
Well shes been called most thing but commie;?, sure she'd be proud;!!...
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