Velkess Energy Storage

Coal is obvious..

you grow trees, chuck them in a sea trench, wait a few million years and mine the coal.

Plutonium is another matter as I don't think we can manage a supernova yet. We could extract some energy from Uranium and make some plutonium.

I suppose we could melt it and store heat that way but sodium would be safer.

Reply to
dennis
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You mean its like the difference between trains and cars..

if a train crashes and kill four passengers there is an enquiry and millions spent on adding dubious safety features.

If four die in a car you discuss how long it is before you remove the flowers taped to the lamp post.

Reply to
dennis

You can make anything costly if you do it in unnecessary depth.

In a funny way chernobyl has been massively useful: by not cleaning it up, there is a huge experiment going on to see how damaging that sort of low level radiation is. And the answer is 'about 100 to 1000 times less dangerous than the models predicted'.

There is bugger all danger from FUKU and there never really was: Even the WHO admits that.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

easier than that use Fischer Tropf to make hydrocarbons from CO2 and then cook them in a low oxygen atmospher to get carbon soot, and then compress that into blocks.

No need to melt it.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

As will any flammable and finely divided substance.

Reply to
Tim Streater

But only because of people like you. You don't understand radiation so you are scared. Lots of scared people equals unnecessary expense.

Reply to
dennis

One thing I haven't seen mentioned so far.

Will it deliver the 15kWh at a consistent rate?

Not my field, but I do wonder if it can deliver a lot of power when it is spinning really fast but the output may reduce as the flywheel slows.

I presume the technology exists to smooth the generated output to give a constantly variable output at all speeds of rotation.

I also assume that they will have to be pretty damn big as well as heavy to store a useful amount of energy.

Possibly fine for countries/areas with a low population density but I don't see these as an easy fit for any UK urban or suburban location.

I assume they would need to be buried to avoid damage on bearing failure being widespread.

Cheers

Dave R

Reply to
David.WE.Roberts

Your assumptions are well founded.

Yes to all the above.

Its nothing new. There IS nothing new in storage. Its all years old ideas that are being dressed up in Green emperors new clothes because

- the assumption that renewable energy HAS to be made to work is driving the possibility of getting massive subsidies and

- people without engineering backgrounds will believe anything and are easily parted from their money.

The ENGINEERING reality is that far far better stores of energy exist ready made in the form of fossil fuel and fissionable and fertile materials.

There is no need to create it with an expensive inefficient and physically massive and expensive transient technology and then store it in another expensive inefficient and physically massive and expensive (and potentially highly dangerous) technology in order to do the same job.

the energy density of atomic binding energy is at least three orders of magnitude above anything else we know of, and can use. That means storage is small and has little impact on other things. The fact that its extraordinarily difficult to access it at all, makes it somewhat expensive, to access, but inherently very safe. And as far as our curent thunking goes, its te primary energy driving the Universe. It doesn't get better than that.

The excess of radiation generated by nuclear power is less than one percent of the total radiation we receive. It really is a non-issue.

Eventually these facts will be recognised, but sadly it seems, not until every other alternative has been explored, because people like to believe, rather than learn science, do sums, and face reality.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

It could be done, but there are cheaper more reliable ways using batteries and inverters these days. I can't recall the spec of the largest one to date but it was in the 10-20kWh range in the 1970's.

It is a very old mechanical UPS design. Whilst there is good mains power a clutch keeps the drive from mains to generator in - lose mains and the flywheel keeps the generators going until it runs out with gradually falling frequency so you have to hope the load is tolerant.

Such things have already been successfully engineered. The I know of was the emergency shutdown flywheel supply for the MRAO Ryle 5km aperture synthesis telescope at Cambridge where the stored kinetic energy in the flywheel was intended to stow the instruments back to vertical in the event of mains power loss in a storm.

Big dish scopes have been wrecked in storms through losing power and emergency generators failing to start. ISTR alignment of the bearing was carefully chosen so that if the rotor broke loose it would not hit anything in the two miles or so it was expected to travel.

The main problem with this method is that to be any good at energy density the flywheel necessarily contains a very dangerous amount of kinetic energy. Think robot wars Hypno-Disk on steroids.

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Reply to
Martin Brown

Use a DC motor/generator and use an inverter. It increases the cost, but makes the system much less critical of rotor speed. You need more than

3000rpm at the flywheel to get a decent energy density per unit mass, too, so you need to add gearing to keep the output frequency right on a synchronous system, which causes its own losses.
Reply to
John Williamson

exactly so. Inverters exist that are capable of working over at least a

3:1 input voltage range. You will get constant output followed by totalshutdown, rather than a steadily falling one.

Of course everything is now bigger, heavier more expensiveand more useless than ever...

But that's renewable energy for you...

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

And you do?

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Reply to
harry

Still got your head up your arse. My cat knows more science than you. You think constant repetition creates facts.

Reply to
harry

No harry, I think the world consists of facts, and not opinions, but the facts need advocates.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

presumably written by a CND member.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

No. Maybe a wind turbine will kill somebody, some time. When a big dam breaks it's like a tsunami, and many thousands are likely to die. In the case of the Russian dam, there could be hundreds of thousands, and whole towns destroyed. Do you see the difference?

Reply to
Gib Bogle

You should be wary of anything that starts with a wrong statement like

"Ionizing radiation is generally harmful and potentially lethal to living things "

As *all* living things on earth have evolved in the presence of ionising radiation and haven't suffered death because of it.

In fact there is good reason to believe that evolution is, at least in part, driven by ionising radiation.

Reply to
dennis

If you are considering thousands dying why include nuclear?

Reply to
dennis

The EU seems to have torpedoed its own carbon trading scheme today

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Reply to
Andy Burns

ISTR that when the Hinkley Point A steam turbine came apart, one disk went through eight brick walls and I think some bits just about made it off site. And that was only going at a little over 3000 rpm.

Reply to
newshound

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