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Its more like digging some test pits on a building plot to see what sort of foundations you need
It is this too, don't get me wrong. But before you get that far, you have to ask: "is this even possible?" If the answer is no, well you don't have a project.
The site is super important for power stations, you can't just design around shit conditions like you can with a house. Loads of sites have had GI over the years, often multiple rounds over the years and decades, but never had a project associated with them.
A good example would be the 4x(?) times proposed M4 extension at Newport in South Wales. It's had 5 or 6 rounds of extensive GI over the decades, and still no project, but we know it's an option and we have a rough idea of the cost if we want to pull the trigger.
This afternoon energy production consisted of:
Solar – 14.3%
Wind – 14.9%
Hydro – 1.0%
Gas – 45.6%
Coal – 1.9%
Biomass – 5.0%
Nuclear- 12.3%
Pump stations- 0%
Import – 5.0%
to me the answer is pretty obvious, you need to utilise every available source of low/no carbon energy available. the ultimate goal is is zero emissions init, and we've stll got a fair old chunk to go, currently burning gas and biomass alone is over 50% going on those numbers, take away nuclear and that's hitting 60-65% going. (I'd guess those imports will be producing a fair whack of emissions too)
If we want zero emissions or as close as we can get. We need a mix of every source that will help towards that goal. Cause tbh, even if we got tidal up and running on a mass scale, it'd probably only replace nuclear at best and it'll take a fair few number of years to even get there.
The goal is getting emissions as low as possible, ideologies shouldn't be getting in the way of that.
On plutonium-
The (large) civil and (pretty small) military stockpiles are completely separate. The UK has not made military plutonium for more than 25 years and doesn't really have the ability to make more- the Magnox reactors were used for the irradiations, and they are all gone, and the reprocessing plant will go soon as well. Civil plutonium (most of the stockpile) is not all that useful in a weapon anyway, because of its much lower isotopic purity.
Once we built the Magnox reactor fleet, we had to reprocess the fuel because it was uranium metal, which is chemically too reactive to be just stored and eventually disposed. But that was what we wanted because the early Magnoxes were built for both military plutonium production and electricity generation, though you'd run them a bit differently for those two purposes.
The Magnoxes would be pretty rubbish plutonium burners because they are designed for unenriched fuel, so they would have limited ability to burn plutonium, and they are metal fuelled which would mean you'd need to turn the stockpile into a plutonium-containing alloy with uranium and maybe other things, which has obvious proliferation risks. They did look at using Magnoxes to burn a mixed oxide about 15-20 years ago but it never went anywhere.
You could burn MOX in an AGR but there has been no point in developing that fuel because the reactors are old. You can certainly burn it in PWRs like Sizewell B or Hinkley C- Japan, France, Switzerland all do that, and the reactors can run up to about 1/3 MOX without modification. The problem here is that, actually, we don't have enough plutonium. If you have 200 tonnes of fuel in a core which is 1/3 MOX at 7% plutonium and you replace 1/3 each year, you are getting through 20-25 tonnes of MOX and maybe 2 tonnes of plutonium per year. With a 60 year working life, a single PWR would pretty much chew through the UK plutonium stockpile during its life.
^ Thank you, a far better answer than I could give. As far as I was aware AGR's weren't capable of burning MOX but that doesn't seem to be the case. As you say though it's not worth it especially at this stage.
Indeed - all info is good. the more we have the better. so thanks
I have learned a few things from this thread
This afternoons current usage:
Solar – 19.0%
Wind – 21.4%
Hydro – 0.9%
Gas – 34.0%
Coal – 0%
Biomass – 5.5%
Nuclear- 13.8%
Pump stations- 0%
Import – 5.5%
Pump storage will go up at 4/5 when dinner time starts to happen and solar will go down a bit after that.
If I may comment on the timing of commencement for Hinkley Point C:
National Policy Statement EN6 Nuclear Power Generation was published in 2011 and named Hinkley Point as one of eight [i]Potentially suitable sites for the deployment of new nuclear power stations in England and Wales before the end of 2025[/i]
The sites were put forward by third parties with EDF putting forward Hinkley. EDF had previously done a fair amount of feasibility work and consultation (including the 2008 SI activity). Inclusion in the NPS indicated that location was acceptable in national planning policy terms but development consent would be needed which took into account acceptability in environmental terms.
In 2010 a planning application was made for site preparation works (not the power station itself), which was approved in 2012. There was an express requirement that the site be fully restored should the subsequent Development Consent Order application for the full power station not be approved, there was a clear commitment to the scheme.
The DCO application was submitted in October 2011 and approved in March 2013 - so that's when formal consent to build it happened (subject to various other regulatory and DCO requirements needing to be discharged).
So far as I’m aware, using MOX doesn’t actually reduce the plutonium that much as even though the MOX typically has 7% plutonium, the reactor itself actually makes around 5% during the fuel cycle so you only deplete the plutonium by around 25-30%.
Another major issue is that the waste from MOX is significantly hotter and more radioactive.
In essence France is now trapped in a cycle where they will have to build breeder/burner reactors in order to get rid of the MOX waste.
If we as a country are going to do nuclear as part of the solution, it should really be in the form of a couple of breeders.
It works for our own stockpile and would allow us to partner with France /buy from/ France pays us in the future.
If we as a country are going to do nuclear as part of the solution, it should really be in the form of a couple of breeders.
No one has successfully made a breeder reactor work for electricity production on a commercial scale have they? Superpheonix has been a huge white elephant
so we are back in the realms of future tech will solve the issues
Dounreay had a fast breeder factor providing power to the grid in the 1960s. It was experimental but worked fine.
GEH offered the PRISM reactor to the U.K. at around the same time Hinckley Point was given the green light.
In small quantities IIRC. its main purpose was to make bomb grade plutonium was it not?
As far as I am aware a fast breeder for power production at large scale has never been done. Superphenix was the main one I know of and an unmitigated disaster of a white elephant
True, but you shift the plutonium isotopics away from 239 (the main weapons-usable isotope) to others which don't bring the same proliferation risks. Once irradiated, you can either dispose as waste or recycle. Multi-recycle of plutonium is tricky and of less value because of the reduced fissile content. Disposal of irradiated MOX as waste seems attractive to me. The plutonium is dispersed in the residual uranium and, as it decays, is diluted in the non-fissile uranium matrix so there is no prospect of chemically recovering fissile material from the material (ie your waste repository will never be a fissile material mine). If you just convert the plutonium to a wasteform and dispose, Pu-239 decays to fissile U-235 so the waste disposal facility will basically be a fissile materials mine forever.
Cooling time is dictated by the bentonite buffer material in the disposal facility and is longer for MOX (maybe 150 years) than uranium oxide fuel (maybe 100 years) but it is actually silly long for both. Would be good to get rid of the bentonite.
TLDR- Dispose as irradiated MOX = less attractive for weapons use, harder to recover fissile material; dispose as waste = remains fissile for (more or less) ever, can recover fissile material with some simple chemistry
I wouldn't use a breeder to make weapons material. For a start you need high fissile content driver fuel (so you essentially have weapons usable material anyway) and you can do it very simply using a simple thermal reactor (see North Korea).
I read this thread backwards and it was like listening to drunk people in a pub.
I believe the floating tidal device being referred to is still in prototype stage but is very interesting and was literally being started in someone's garage when I lived in Orkney nearly 20 year ago. The people designing it are very clever and I'm sure will figure out how to attach it to the sea bed and survive the weather for those concerned about that. Humans are quite good at fastening floating things to the seabed now. Tidal in general provides many challenges but the beauty of that device is it avoids a lot of the problems of mounting a submerged device on the sea bed. Unfortunately tidal developers get very little support to develop the technology to a market ready state given the energy resource available.
The fourth round of Scottish offshore wind leasing I believe ventures into deeper water so it will be interesting to see what comes from that, whether floating wind will venture beyond small projects like Hywind Scotland and how they'll deal with cost of interconnection and transmission etc the further out from civilisation we go.
Someone did touch on interconnectors and y'all should read more about them.
In small quantities IIRC. its main purpose was to make bomb grade plutonium was it not?
Dounreay or PRISM?
Neither were for bomb generation, Chapelcross and Calder Hall were already doing that when Dounreay went live whilst PRISM is actually designed to run a weapons grade fuel cycle to either generate (power) or non-proliferate the material. Having sat through the PRISM sales pitch I'm glad we never went for it, pants pulling on a massive scale (build us a reactor then pay us to convert that weapons grade plutonium to non-proliferable stuff then we'll sell the resultant material back to you).
As far as I am aware a fast breeder for power production at large scale has never been done. Superphenix was the main one I know of and an unmitigated disaster of a white elephant
True. Current designs for sodium loop breeders are of the small modular type so more of a development on the older prototype stuff than large scale.