Windpower

So they are...

There are no renewable energy sources that we know of.

Even the Sun is using up fusible elements, its just got a lot of them to use up. Once they all get to iron fusion will stop as the Sun doesn't get hot enough to fuse them and can't get any energy out.

We won't be around when it happens.

The elements heavier than iron are produced by fusion in novae and supernovae so aren't renewable either.

Thats because they use rivers for cooling and they don't want to cook the environment. They could have been left running.

Maybe they need big cooling towers?

Yes a tunnel to get sea water in to cool would work too.

He's a brexiteer, understanding things doesn't suit his arguments.

You are flattered to be confused with Wodney? That says a great deal.

Another who doesn't understand the meaning of a pretty simple saying.

It also contains hydrogen. In even more vast quantities. Enough for all the energy ever needed. If it could be extracted economically.

One very big difference, even using conventional means it would still be viable to extract uranium from the sea and burn in reactors, from a cost as well as an energy perspective.

The same could not be said for extracting hydrogen from an energy perspective alone.

Your judgement is flawed once again.

Only if you can get fusion to work. It takes energy to get hydrogen out of water molecules and you at best get the same back when you convert it back to water so it doesn't actually contain energy you can use easily. Its another of those green dreams that environmentalists come out with because they don't understand any science.

I think oxygen is the limit for a star of the suns mass.

The limit is iron for all of them as you don't get energy out after iron.

Anything heavier is novae and up.

Yeah. Still, when the Earth is engulfed by the red giant sun in some 5 billyun years time, that should sort out the plastic pollution problem.

That?s because theirs are mostly river/lake cooled. They don?t have to be with a small island.

Mmm. yes and no. When we transition to a uranium economy most of that wont get to the sea - we are likely to mine it.

I thibk the contributrion of *raw* uranium costs to electricity so generated is about 0.1p per unit.

Since reneable electricity is not cost effective at 10p a unit, theres plenty of room for economically viable uranium at 50 times the cost it is now.

The ecomonics of breeders take off at a cost about 3-4 times what it is now.

Nuclear power is actually suffering from the fuel being too cheap. And te reactors too expensive.

I note that both EPRS built in and for China are now operational whilst their European ones - started earlier - are still mired in paperwork

Exactly. Current spot rate of yellowcake is around $30 per lb ($66/kg) IIRC.

Japanese study estimated $200/kg for seawater extraction. Take you up to about 0.3p per unit of elecrticity in a conventional reactor. Less in a breeder.

Only problem is time and cost of meeting regulations to build a sodding reactor.

SMRs are not better reactors, just a way around the regulatory red tape

Less flawed, more nonexistent

Will it supernova?

But wind can be virtually zero across the whole country at the same time or shut down due to high winds across large areas.

SteveW

# I am beginning to wonder if Dave is actually mentally ill.

The point of diversity is no single point of failure. Wind has an inherent single point of failure and so has solar so you need other stuff.

Nuclear power has no inherent single point of failure, so you don?t need other stuff.

The other reason to have a mix (that excludes renewables) is so that depending on what rôle it takes in power generation - base load, loåd following, or STOR - different technologfies represent optimal cost benefit.

Coal, waste burn and nuclear for baseload, CCGT for load following (and hydro if you have any) and OCGT or diesel for STOR.

Wind and solar are not cost competitive for anything other than off grid low reliability battery charging

No. Nothing like big enough. A (much, 30 or so solar masses) larger star would go through the extra fusion phases Dennis mentioned, until there was a substantial iron core to it. Up to then, all fusion phases are exothermic. Fusing iron and above is endothermic. At this point the star has onion-like layers, fusing hydrogen on the outermost layer, and silicon on the layer just above the iron core.

The core (if larger than about 1.4 solar masses IIRC) may collapse to a neutron star, leaving a void into which the rest of the star collapses. It's during the collapse and subsequent events that heavier than iron elements are produced (Winky has much more detail). And the bastard then, for a while, outshines the other 500 billion or so other stars put together.

You don't want to be less than 500 light years away from one of these when it goes off.

Jellyprck is of course Rod