RPRT, so you would advocate that we supply our troops with Bows and Arrows on that basis? 
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Nuclear Power, yay or nay
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Posted 2 years ago #
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"Does it matter? These devastated ecosystems. Are they useful stuff or just birds and wiggly things?"
Nature obviously doesn't provide you with anything. That's because you get all you need from the supermarket, innit!
p.s. How do you do that "quote"y thing?
Posted 2 years ago # -
Aracer - remember they told us it would be "electricity too cheap to meter" and that it would be reliable. It turned out to be the most expensive electricity and unreliable.
Now if you have a past history of not living up to expectation then would you believe future promises?
You missed off the crucial part of that quote - its about faith - you have faith that the next generation will be better - I don't based on past experience.
Posted 2 years ago # -
FckU me! Glad I didn't bother posting any more on this thread -
Its just turned into an 'I'm right: No I'M right' bitch slapping contest.
Sad really. It's sort of reminded me why I don't usually bother. Although your earlier input was a bit more useful than most, SO!
Posted 2 years ago # -
Posted 2 years ago #
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TJ - most people don't have faith that renewables can live up to expectations. Do you see the parallels?
As discussed, neither is the total answer, however I never understand why people who clearly have read up on this stuff form an either/or approach. You explicitly stated that nuclear has no part to play in future energy generation. You have yet to provide us with a more proven alternative...
Until we crack fusion, or destroy ourselves in a final war over dwindling oil, energy generation will be a whole raft of compromises, not absolutes.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Aracer - remember they told us it would be "electricity too cheap to meter" and that it would be reliable. It turned out to be the most expensive electricity and unreliable
Exactly how unreliable is Sizewell B?You missed off the crucial part of that quote - its about faith - you have faith that the next generation will be better - I don't based on past experience
No, I have faith that the next generation will be just as good as the current generation, or even the previous generation (which is what SB is). You appear to believe that it will regress back to the being no better than it was many generations back. The only reason I can see for you completely ignoring how well more recent stations work is that it's so inconvenient for your point. Remember that in terms of the timescale of nuclear power, the stations you like to use figures from are actually more caveman than Agincourt.Posted 2 years ago # -
Zokes - we ain't going to agree. I believe it can be done with renewables and efficiency and carbon capture. remember nukes are not carbon neutral - they produce one heck of a lot of CO2 in building them, extracting the fuel and decommissioning them.
I simply do not believe they are part of the answer. Too much polution including CO2, too unreliable - I believe they are a dangerous and useless dead end. My understanding from the facts. similarly I cannot believe how anyone who knows a bit about this as you do can be so dismissive of efficiency measures and can believe that nukes are any part of the solution.
It would be a dull place if we all agreed.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Posted 2 years ago #
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Exactly how unreliable is Sizewell B?
Not very reliable. It went down in may 08 unplanned and has had planned downtimes on other occasions as well. What % of its capacity has it run at over its life?
Posted 2 years ago # -
I never said they were carbon-neutral. However, I did state that many other 'low-carbon' technologies are no worse.
I understand your standpoint to an extent, however we will always need baseload generation. This is exactly what nuclear power stations do, reliably (just how reliable surprised me when I pulled up the link above for aracer). This need will only increase as we go from running transport on oil to charging it one way or the other (H2, batteries, or whatever)
Tidal power has a lot going for it in baseload terms, but it can't replace nuclear, coal and gas all by itself.
The main reason I dismiss almost out of hand efficiency savings is that we're talking about saving electrical energy by making appliances more efficient. Yet as gas for heating and cooking runs out, and more cars move to electricity for energy, our demand overall for electricity will increase. This is irrespective of political will or electoral stubbornness to reduce current electrical usage. Currently, political will (the obsession with electric cars / H2 generation) looks like we'll need a lot more electricity generation, not less...
Posted 2 years ago # -
crossed post zokes. am I reading those figures right? 80-90 % load for 80 - 90% of the time? so its actully run at around 70% of capacity?
Not very good.
Posted 2 years ago # -
tides are at different states around the country, so even looking at tidal power alone you could have continuity of supply.
So, to guarantee 10GW of electricity production at 3pm on a given sunday, you need a huge overproduction capacity - you can only guarantee that one of your tidal power facilities will be running at max capacity - one may well be at zero capacity (slack tide), and another at sub optimal capacity,
and thats before the overproduction capacity that you need to make up for grid losses - if you're relying on a tidal power station in Scotland to relieve the slack tide in the south west, then your grid losses are going to be huge.
You've got no guaranteed alternative wind supply, no guaranteed solar supply - you might as well forget about them as a reliable power source.
Hydrogen production, great, but you need to be able to store and transport it from point of production to point of power generation.
Posted 2 years ago # -
A Severn tidal barrage would take about 12 years to build and cost estimates are £20billion (triple that figure to £60billion based on other large engineering feats). What would the payback be on that both economically and environmentally? I suspect it would need to be as funded as Nuclear Energy is.
Posted 2 years ago # -
What % of its capacity has it run at over its life?
Cumulatively, 89.23%, ranging from 100% last year to 79.6% in it's second full year of running
Posted 2 years ago # -
What % of its capacity has it run at over its life?
Rather higher than any conventional power station, an order of magnitude higher than most "alternative energy".Posted 2 years ago # -
am I reading those figures right? 80-90 % load for 80 - 90% of the time? so its actully run at around 70% of capacity?
No, they're two slightly different measures of the same thing (surely the giveaway for that is how well they track each other?) You can't multiply them.Posted 2 years ago # -
Cheers for the link Hainey. Interesting I would have thought it was more than that though.
Posted 2 years ago # -
crossed post zokes. am I reading those figures right? 80-90 % load for 80 - 90% of the time? so its actully run at around 70% of capacity?
Not very good.
Sort of.
The load factor is the demand put on it from the grid, not its limit, so it was asked to run at 80-90% most of the time. I'll admit I'm not so sure on how to interpret the rest of the figures, but distant memory tells me that my interpretation of load factor is correct.
Incidentally, there are 8760 hours in one year, and last year sizewell B was online for all 8760 of them. That's pretty damned impressive. As has been pointed out, this is now a power station at least two generations behind current design.
I very much doubt you'd find a modern gas station that can beat that, never mind renewables...
Posted 2 years ago # -
remember nukes are not carbon neutral - they produce one heck of a lot of CO2 in building them
Not really.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_169.shtml
Mythconceptions"Building a nuclear power station requires huge amounts of concrete and steel, materials whose creation involves huge CO2 pollution."
The steel and concrete in a 1 GW nuclear power station have a carbon footprint of roughly 300 000 t CO2.
Spreading this “huge” number over a 25-year reactor life we can express this contribution to the carbon intensity in the standard units (g CO2 per kWh(e)),carbon intensity associated with construction = 300× 109 g / 106 kW(e) × 220 000 h
= 1.4 g/kWh(e),
which is much smaller than the fossil-fuel benchmark of 400 g CO2/kWh(e).
The IPCC estimates that the total carbon intensity of nuclear power (including construction, fuel processing, and decommissioning) is less than 40 g CO2/kWh(e) (Sims et al., 2007). Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I wonder what our great-great-great-grandparents would have thought of today's energy 'needs'
Posted 2 years ago # -
So, after all that, it appears that nuclear power is incredibly reliable, and has a comparatively minute CO2 footprint! Makes you wonder what all that fuss up there was about...
Posted 2 years ago # -
So 1/10th the CO2 per kilowatt - I'm surprised at that and I do doubt the figures( given the fudging that has come from the nuke lobby and no one really knows how much decommissioning will take.} however even if it is fudged it will not be by an order of magnitude so will only be marginal ( I hope)
Its not the carbon neutral that many claim tho.
Lies damn lies and statistics.
Posted 2 years ago # -
So 1/10th the CO2 per kilowatt - I'm surprised at that and I do doubt the figures( given the fudging that has come from the nuke lobby and no one really knows how much decommissioning will take.} however even if it is fudged it will not be by an order of magnitude so will only be marginal ( I hope)
Its not the carbon neutral that many claim tho.
Lies damn lies and statistics.
Give it a rest TJ.
David MacKay is very well respected, and also FRS - hardly likely to be fudging results. It looks like you're trying to justify your standpoint with little regard for the facts - something you have accused anyone who dares support nuclear of for some time.
Posted 2 years ago # -
The point is that saying "building a nuclear plant uses HUGE amounts of concrete and steel etc." is no more meaningful than saying "building a tidal barrier / wind farm / solar array / magic bean farm uses HUGE amounts of concrete and steel". You need to quantify what you mean by 'HUGE'.
MacKay's book isn't pro-nuclear, as he says in the last sentence of the bit I quoted. He is trying to get some actual FACTS into the debate though, as they are strangely lacking. Again, I thoroughly recommend reading it.
Posted 2 years ago # -
OK zokes - but surely you accept that their has been much fudging of figures from the nuclear lobby in the past? I did accept that it wouldn't change the comparison tho and the order of magnitude will be right.
I have seen people from the nuclear industry and lobbyists claiming nuclear is carbon neutral which clearly is nonsense.
Decommissioning costs will always have to be an estimate as no one has done one yet.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I have seen people from the nuclear industry and lobbyists claiming nuclear is carbon neutral which clearly is nonsense.
On the basis of including construction and removal, wind farms or tidal barriers aren't carbon neutral either.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Just to come back to where I joined in, TJ's original claim was:
the two nukes in Scotland are running at around 40% of capacity and this fluctuates greatly.
Thought it worth checking the data to see where that came from
Torness
Hunterston
SO it would seem the 40% is by cherry picking the 2007 figures for Hunterston or 2002 for Torness. Hardly typical. Remind me who it is fudging figures?Posted 2 years ago # -
So, to guarantee 10GW of electricity production at 3pm on a given sunday, you need a huge overproduction capacity - you can only guarantee that one of your tidal power facilities will be running at max capacity - one may well be at zero capacity (slack tide), and another at sub optimal capacity,
The fact that tidal power varies with the tides probably won't come as a surprise to many people Z11.
But guess what, the people who build them do take that into account when they work out the cost/benefit of a particular installation. They don't sell them on the basis that they will produce a constant output then act all surprised at low tide. However, they will produce a fairly predictable output, which is a good thing if you're involved in balancing the overall electricity supply.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Basicaly what I've learn't from this thread is that we're all going to die no matter what, so lets just wreck the place up before we go.
I know this is a pretty deplorable thing to say but if the world goes to war in 50 years over oil and the all the reactors blow up followed by prolonged nuclear holocaust and then the climate change comes into play then we're all doomed any way, I won't see my 80th birthday and if not I want to say at least I did get involved in some apocolyptic antics before I died.
The world is already over populated and energy demands are going to go up so theres not much we can do to stop it.
Nuke the French first, followed by the Yanks.
Posted 2 years ago # -
OK zokes - but surely you accept that their has been much fudging of figures from the nuclear lobby in the past?
Yes, I certainly accept it. In particular it makes discussions like this somewhat difficult at times, as has been shown today.
I have seen people from the nuclear industry and lobbyists claiming nuclear is carbon neutral which clearly is nonsense.
I agree - absolutely nonsense. But no worse than oil lobbyists, or biofuel lobbyists - or most other 'ists', for that matter. The key is to remain open-minded
Decommissioning costs will always have to be an estimate as no one has done one yet.
Granted this is clearly a pro-nuclear source, but they refer to IAEA stats. It appears that some have...Posted 2 years ago # -
zokes - Member
"I love the idea of a huge fusion reactor telling us that Nuclear power is bad."
Exactly. The only huge fusion reactor which should be supplying us with energy, should be kept 90 million miles away.
Not next to a city.
Epic FAIL.
Even wikipedia can reliably tell you the difference between fission and fusion, ernie...
"Epic" ? Hehe ..... well if I'm gonna fail, then I like to do it to nothing less than "epic" proportions
But yeah......if you want to split atoms over this, fair enough.......change the the u for and i, and add an s
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But they are increasingly dependant on Russia for energy. Not very bright when it comes to energy security.
Fear of dependency on Russian gas has come up a few times, it's a fear which imo, is completely unfounded. It mostly stems from a dispute which Russia had with Ukraine. A dispute in which imo, Russia acted completely reasonable and Ukraine did not. Back in the old days of the Soviet Union, Russia almost gave away their gas to Ukraine. In fact the stuff was so plentiful, and because central heating tended to be 'district based', often the most common way of regulating the temperature in your home in winter was to open or close your windows.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the setting up of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia continued to supply Ukraine with gas at knock down prices well below the global price - in fact at a fraction of what it was getting for it from western countries. This arrangement worked OK, only obviously, it was if great benefit to Ukraine but of little benefit to Russia.
Things however changed when the Ukrainians voted out a pro-Russian government, and elected an anti-Russian government - in fact the party of the rather gorgeous Yulia Tymoshenko, stood on a specific "anti-Russian" platform. They then proceeded to tell the Russians to piss off because their new friends were the Americans and they wanted to have nothing more to do with Russia. The Russians understandably said OK, but now you are going to have to pay much closer to the global price for your gas. The Ukrainians refused point blank - despite the fact that the price hike still meant that they would be paying below global prices. So as a consequence, Russia started to turn off the taps. Normal practice I believe - when customers refuse to pay their bills.
Of course the whole episode was exploited by the West, specially by the US, which still desperately wants Russia to be seen as the bogey man in a dangerous world. However imo, the West has nothing to fear from dependency on Russia, anymore than it has to fear dependency on any other country. Russia needs to sell it's gas, in the same way as other countries need to sell their oil, natural resources, etc.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Aracer - nope - you don't have last years figures there which are worse from my memory - less than 25% last year.
The exact figures don't matter - its merely illustrative of the fact that the nukes we have now are less reliable than we were told they would be more expensive electricity with more pollution than we were promised.
Its a simple point. I was told in the 70s how wonderful the nukes would be and they turned out not to be as reliable or as cheap as promised. This leads me to be sceptical of promises of what they will do in the future.
If someone lies to you several times will you believe themn in future?
Posted 2 years ago # -
The exact figures don't matter - its merely illustrative of the fact that the nukes we have now are less reliable than we were told they would be more expensive electricity with more pollution than we were promised.
Its a simple point. I was told in the 70s how wonderful the nukes would be and they turned out not to be as reliable or as cheap as promised. This leads me to be sceptical of promises of what they will do in the future.
If someone lies to you several times will you believe themn in future?
But we're talking fractions here. Those figures from sizewell demonstrated that a plant several generations old has cumulatively operated above 80% to date. Yet it has had to be shut down once or twice, both for routine maintenance and faults - most of the latter being at the non-nuclear generator side. These are the same faults that befall conventional power stations, except without the 'nuclear' word, they don't attract the same hysteria.
Compared to the theoretical maximum installed capacity (the figures you're using to do-down nuclear power), load factors of any renewable resource will be minuscule. Say we have an installed capacity of 30GW tidal power, no matter how clever you were at siting the lagoons and barrages throughout the country, their output as a percentage of theoretical maximum would be about 10GW. It has to be. Run at full power and you get the 30 GW, but all the water's gone and you have to wait for the next tide, generating 0GW. Run slowly to steadily release the water, you're still not getting 30GW, but 10GW all the time, instead of 30W for 1/3, and 0GW for 2/3, same results in the stats.
As for lies - lets see how well scotland does after you get independence eh? That could just be the biggest lie you've believed. It also might not be, but time will tell. Given how many lies all politicians are guilty of, I'd be very sceptical of believing that one...
Posted 2 years ago # -
Given how many lies all politicians are guilty of, I'd be very sceptical of believing that one...
That I can agree with without qualms
Posted 2 years ago #
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