UK power generation

So demand is constant?

Right. So that government simply closes pretty well all mines. Good bit of strategy that - punish the entire country in the future because they couldn't get the better of one man.

So as I said earlier, demand is constant? If it's not then your thesis applies to coal stations at all times. Hence the need for other types which come on stream more quickly.

Now this I do not know BUT all over the world there are mine tailings which have low concentrations of uranium in them. Even coal fly ash has a bit.

Uranium is surprisingly common - lets face it it is ultimately what generates MOST of the natural background radiation.

Currently is so early in extraction that its cherry picking the easy deposits that are super rich.

IRC the japs are working on a nanoscale filter that will hoick it out of seawater..there's is so MUCH sea..that there's literally thousands of years in there IF it can be extracted.

But by far and away the easier thing to do - and we did it way back - is to utilise the U238 and breed it down to plutonium.

We stopped because it wasn't economic compared with fresh mined uranium and we had more than enough to make A bombs with.

In conventional reactors the enrichment is low, and nearly all of the U235 remains unused: fuel replacement is down to poisoning not 'out of fuel' as such. Because of economics there is little incentive to recover the U235 or the plutonium: its just stored and gets called 'expensive waste top dispose of' BUT it isn't. IF uranium were suddenly unobtainable Sellafield could be scaled up to recycle fuel rods and also to manufacture MOX fuel - that's U235 and plutonium with U238 as the bulk. I think one of the requirement for Britain's new build is that the reactors must take a certain amount of MOX fuel.

The problem is that there hasn't been a joined up policy for years..post North Sea Gas no one was sure where the industry was going, and they still aren't. To be fair there's been no joined up thinking with renewables either. Typical Blair style political knee jerk to grab the green vote with no responsibility taken for the consequences.

I think the latest estimates is about 5000 years of potential nuclear fission fuel. And then there's fusion.

Really its an industry that's barely started. There are so many possible ways forward to burn up waste, to develop new reactor types and use different nuclear reactions - thorium has promise of course, but there are other possibles.

But those are decades away: right now we need to secure the industry with existing technology. Uranium comes from australia canada south africa - all countries that we have affinity for. Far more sensible places to trade with than arab states, which will all go down to ruin as the oil runs out..

The way I see it developing, silly politics and green morons aside, is that we simply keep coal going as long as possible - coal is cheap and there's a couple of hundred years worth lying around in the USA - and if the fracking works, we can keep the gas plant going as well: But this time we need to plan ahead and restart a proper nuclear program and start putting money into something that works. We cant leave sellafield in a total state of indecision. WE need a proper mine to long term storage plan for waste, and we need at least 30GW of new nuclear over the next 20-30 years.

The first step of course is to stop pouring money into a technology we know CAN NEVER work effectively. Renewables. WE cant afford all this green posturing.

If the greens bitch they can have nuclear - far far more CO2 reduction per pound invested. We will be forced that way anyway, but it could be later rather than sooner if AGW turns out to be the nonsense its increasingly looking like it is. Or people do proper cost benefit analysis and work out that a renewable energy policy will kill more people than AGW ever will.

Lots of options, lots of places to do research and development, half a dozen commercial reactor designs available. Just luddite greens and stupid politicians in the way and some vested interests with very deep pockets, and in the case of our ex soviet chums, a degree of unpleasant ruthlessness.

No but is far more predictable. It's going to get windy tommorow, but at say 1000 is the wind going to be enough to produce 3GW or will they be chucking out only 2GW or maybe they'll be doing 4? Either way you have to have plant on hot standby which wastes energy.

We have a bit of pumped hydro but if you use that during the day how do you service the late afternoon peak in demand?

You only have to look at the yearly Hydro/Pumped/Wind/Bio. plot on

If you read this paper,

And the worst uncertainty is high wind days in fact. Demand is predictable to a GW or so. and its very regular and repetitive. Wind power is not - I've regularly seen the wind forecast to be out by a GW or even more. One of the problems is that super high winds can cause the operators to take the turbines out with very little warning: Likewise offshore wind cant operate in very high seas..so in a gale you find that you lose large amounts of capacity in a very short space of time. Now as long as the CCGT kit is running at all, throttling it back is reasonably fuel efficient. BUT its very uneconomic to run coal that way - the large combustion directive limits the hours the older plant can operate, and that means sod the coal burn, lets run our power station flat out or not at all.

The new bill is ludicrous too. The power stations are to be limited to an emission based on their total CAPACITY. So instead of running a 1GW coal plant at 100%, you evade the emissions by building a 2GW and running it at 50% instead. That buys you twice the emissions !

Of course the total emissions will be greater...but them's the rules. Finally the biggest uncertainty is politicians. There is a huge and bitter war between the gas/renewables camp and the nuclear and coal camp.

They are all fighting for (more or less) subsidised baseload. And none of their arguments are about low cost reliable electricity, and certainly not about carbon emissions, but all about political decisions and lobbying and painting themselves as the real solution. Inefficient labour intensive generation that uses huge amounts of fuel to install and maintain itself becomes 'green jobs' as if digging holes and filling them in again was a socially useful exercise.

And this war is being fought even here, where the usual suspects whose grants and jobs depend on renewable energy come along and spout the same old lies and half truths and spin.

Because in the end they know that renewable energy survives solely because governments deem its use. Without massive subsidies its dead. And the desperation is showing as their claims become ever more ridiculous. And their web sites ever more content free.

Change at the political level will only come about when poeple say and mean what I said in a letter to my MP.

"I WILL NEVER VOTE FOR ANY MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT WHO SAYS HE "BELIEVES IN RENEWABLE ENERGY"

Once they get the feeling they are backing the wrong horse in terms of re-election, things will change.

And do it in writing. One letter they say is worth 60 emails and represents 1000 votes.

Yes, you have the two countries where it really is useful. If you have the generation capacity but NOT THE RAINFALL then adding wind or solar - if you have the empty space - can work OK.

There's another place that might work..the area around he Boulder dam on the colorado river. Its pure hot stone desert, nothing but cactus rattlesnakes and flies.. the sun always shines and the wind always blows, and they have a ready made powerline going to LA..and a ready made dam that CAN produce a lot more power than the snowfall in the Rockies allows.

Its also a prime location for nuclear power. I've been there in the height of summer with air temperatures at 50C. The river was at 5C Yeee! I got as far as my knees ...Lots of cooling water in lake mead..

Sure. we need lots of things that aren't realistically buildable.

Sorry I thought you were an electronic engineer. And would understand the terms.

slew rate is the time differential of demand fluctuation. If you lump intermittent renewables in with demand as a variable load you have to cope with, high slew rate means the demand is rising and falling fast. Then If its beyond the rate at which your existing online dispatchable capacity can follow it, you are in trouble. You end up blowing steam out of safety valves, dumping any hydro you have, and shutting down kit which then loses heat and energy in the process. Or in the reverse, with rising demand - or falling wind or solar - you end up with the opposite problem. You must have, because of the time constants of the generating kit, enough kit online as spinning reserve or throttled back, to be ready to increase the generation capacity in short order. This is a massive problem in Germany at sunset, because of the amount of solar power going offline just as everyone switches on the lights, for example. The more intermittency you put on, the more slew rate your conventional power has to deal with, and slew rate uses fuel that doesn't go to generate electricity. IN the warming up and subsequent cooling down of the boilers and in running the overheads of water and fuel pumps when in spinning reserve.

And then IF your intermittent sources suddenly are generating more power than you can absorb, including any pumped storage that you have you can do nothing but throw it away - as we are doing already. Use it or lose it.

Peak clipping. That affects costs because te cost of electricity in high capex low fuel plant relates to how much electricity that plant can produce - not to its fuel cost. If 10% of the time your wind turbines are generating energy that you are throwing away, that energy is still being paid for by having to charge more for the rest, or as we do now, paying the windfarms NOT to produce electricity at all. If you looks at the UK with about 7GW of nuclear power, and demand going as low as 25GW on a summer night, there is only what - 18GW of conventional power you can shut down if your wind fleet decides its party time.

we already have 6GW of installed wind..but the renewable obligations say we are to aim for 30% of pour electricity to be from renewables - mainly wind . To do that we would need - average demand is 35GW or so - 10GW of wind on the grid. On average. Now that means in practice 40GW of installed capacity, because in average a wind farm produces 25% of its capacity, because the wind isn't always blowing.

It doesnt take much maths to see that with a possible 18GW of power between nuclear base load and minimum demand there could easily be a time when the wind is blowing hard and 50% of the windmills are shut down. So now the capacity factor is even LOWER and you need even MORE windmills to get the average up again, on those not so windy days, because all the power you could have produced on the windy days didnt contribute cos you couldn't use it or store it.

And worse case wind produces nothing for days on end, so you need 40GW of fast acting gas as WELL.

Peak clipping.

The net result is that at moderate penetrations into the grid, you end up with exponentially rising costs, to the point where I estimate a fully 100% renewable grid would cost something like £9.80 per unit electricity! Worse if there is solar in there.

It is one of those 'If I 2wanted to get to there, I wouldn't start frim here' situations.

a LOT more constant than wind output.

that's between 50MW and 5GW essentially +-50% on any given forecast.

well its somewhere between that. With N Sea gas we really didn't need the coal then and we sure didn't need Scargill and miner strikes.

Oddly where there's coal, there is it seems frackable gas so those ex miners may once again be able to get off benefits.

It could be a huge boost for S Wales, teh Midlands and the NE - a much needed boost at that.

Quite. So Scargill still gets the blame while it was Thatcher who landed us in this mess. It is not the job of a Union leader to look towards the best interests of the country - but it certainly is, or should be, the job of politicians. Not just go on some ego trip.

No one goes on strike without reason. Despite what some like to believe.

And I gave the only answer that makes any sense indefinitely into the future.

However, you declined to read the rest of the thread on the grounds that it was "boring enough the first time". While this is certainly true, it makes the subject even more boring because people start repeating huge chunks of it, as is already happening, so we go endlessly round in circles because the pro-nuclear lobby decline to read previous threads, and repeat arguments from those threads that have already been refuted ad nauseam.

For example see my response to Tony Sayer (when I make it, I haven't yet).

Exactly. It's going to be very painful, and some form of legal population control will be unavoidable.

Again, no rational argument from TNP, just green-bash stereo-typing. This is the sort of crap that got him plonked.

It's no benefit to anyone at all, just more brain-fart from TNP.

Where he does bother to post rational arguments, and I happen to see the, I'll respond to them, but this sort of mindless junk is best ignored by everyone, pro- and anti-nuclear alike.

why is it that all greens are

- stupid

- cant do rational argument

- do always do ad hominem attacks

- never answer any rational points.

My sig is Java Jive, and signing that name I have never, ever claimed that windpower can replace all use of fossil fuels, etc, etc, so this has no relevance to anything I've said.

So who is Comrade Jive?

I've only just read anything of it, partly because, surprising though it may seem, I've got better things to do than sit wading through the same failed arguments endlessly regurgitated, partly because your posting style is so obnoxious and abusive that I've plonked you,

Yawn ...

He condemned himself out of his own mouth. After asking a question that had been covered in the previous thread he himself admitted that he'd been too lazy to read it. Under such circumstances, my response was perfectly reasonable.

Again, read the previous thread.

In the long term, unless fusion comes good, there is nothing, absolutely blooming sweet f**k all, that we can RELY on to allow us to continue to live the cheap energy lifestyle to which we are addicted.

We have to learn to live within our energy income.

Get used to it.

Can you not introduce irrelevancies like people's posting style, which is entirely a matter for the poster to choose what suits a particular post best.

It generates electricity certainly, but then so do other means of generation.

Could this be ones that have an indigenous supply by any chance? Having an indigenous supply makes a lot of difference to how strategically reliable and predictable is a raw material. We have NO indigenous supply of nuclear fuel whatsoever, and so are almost completely reliant on the market, while we are sitting on 40+ years, at least, of carbon based reserves in the form of coal, oil, and gas. The money that would probably be wasted funding nuclear builds would be much better spent on technology allowing us to use the reserves that we know we actually have.

This is where most, perhaps all, of the pro-nuclear lobby just don't get it. They claim that wind is unreliable, which it is in the short-term, and then claim we should be using nuclear instead, but nuclear power-stations have a projected 40-year life, and over that sort of time-scale the supply of nuclear fuel is less predictable than is wind in the short-term.

Nothing like enough to make a significant impact on the problem, but that's a good thing, because it means that we are potentially wasting less money than we might have been hazarding, though I'd rather we weren't chancing anything on such an uncertain outcome.

Medium-term, it's not nuclear or renewables, it's nuclear or carbon-based.

Long-term, it's renewables, or, er, fusion.