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Nuclear fusion or Dark Ages - You have 100 years starting from.... now
Fusion is the only form of nuclear power we should be considering in the long-term.
In the short-term: Smart meters, energy storage, renewables (solar, wind, hydro), and greater efficiency in general, should all be invested in in a big way.
Oh, and switch off those damned street lights.
Fusion is the only form of nuclear power we should be considering in the long-term.
Reasons? Define long term.
Fusion really is still a long way off IF it is ever proven to be commercially viable.
Reasons? Define long term.Fusion really is still a long way off IF it is ever proven to be commercially viable.
Reasons? Primarily waste, or lack there of with fusion. I read an article recently where experts estimated that the first fusion power station is approx. 50 years away, which isn't too bad in my view.
I think our first aim is to reduce, and eventually eliminate, our use of fossil fuels. It's an obvious one, I know, but all this talk of fracking and exploration of new oil and coal reserves seems to suggest that the powers-that-be are looking to maintain the status quo.
Fusions getting worse - it was 20 years away in 1980!
Fission is proven and if we start "burning" our waste we already have the fuel for next 100 years sitting in storage. The problem I building nukes is political and financial. France built their fleet in less than 15 years. We could do the same if there was the political will and have all the electricity we need without covering our wild spaces in reservoirs and windmills.
You mean the MOX or PRISM reactors? These are still some years from being widely used and don't deal with the waste issue completely.
PRISM is nothing more than an opportunistic money maker for GE Hitachi, I was at a talk presented by their CEO and he couldn't answer a straight question as to why paying them to build the reactor then paying for them to convert the "waste" (which is nothing more than stockpiled plutonium at pretty low waste levels) then paying again to buy the usable product back was value for money. If they skipped the nonsense about export licences and let us just use the Pu and reactor as a power source from the get-go it would be fine but as a business model for us (the customer) it sucks.
Shame really as it's an otherwise nice looking bit of kit.
Mikey - that's probably a reasonable expectation but is entirely dependent upon JET or ITER achieving Q1 efficiencies (what goes in comes out) and then some. They expect ITER to scale better and actually go some way to achieving this though from what I gathered from some JET folk I met they aren't that far off themselves.
MOX is a bugger in that you can't just fling it into any old reactor, I know it's certainly incompatible with the AGR's and Sizewell has enough waste issues without adding to them (we have no reprocessing facility for it). Thermal reactors really aren't the answer and beyond the present Gen 3.5 builds I think it'll be the end of the line when safer and cleaner forms of nuclear power are proven. Gen IV (fast reactors) is already looking promising (despite pulling out years ago hence relying on the everyone else to develop it for us) and Gen V (fusion) is well on the path to development.
mikey74 - MemberFusion is the only form of nuclear power we should be considering in the long-term.
Hitching all your wagons to one horse, before you even know if the horse can pull a wagon, is a bit itchy.
Murray - MemberFission is proven and if we start "burning" our waste we already have the fuel for next 100 years sitting in storage.
At current rates of consumption... But what is it, 11% of world generation coming from nuclear vs 67% for fossil, that's one big increase in fuel consumption. (Always surprises me that renewables outstrip nuclear worldwide, you can forget how big renewables are now and how small nuclear.)
Hitching all your wagons to one horse, before you even know if the horse can pull a wagon, is a bit itchy.
That's not what I said. Fission is fine in the short term but in my opinion, if nuclear is to have any kind of future, then fusion is the way to go. Anything else appears to be a bit like sticking a catalytic converter on a car i.e. you replace one lot of harmful substances with another lot of slightly less harmful substances.
From my somewhat limited reading, and ole squirrel up there knows a lot more than me, fusion is there as proven science.
I do apologise mikey, I can't read even when I'm quoting 🙁
You misunderstood then.
That's what I mean! I somehow read your line and just failed to see the word "nuclear".
Also it seems I'm such a naturally sarcastic person I can't even genuinely apologise for being an idiot without it seeming sarcastic 😆 It is both a gift and a curse.
[quote=squirrelking ]Pumped storage is also perfectly viable, you do not need a massive pump head to achieve a viable output - look at the Galloway hydro scheme or the likes of the Kielder dam. The whole Severn Barrage idea hinges on this principle!
Though in the case of the Severn barrage you have a huge amount more volume than you're going to get building a system with reservoirs (can't be bothered doing the research, but I'd imagine it's significantly more than all of our current reservoirs put together) which makes up for the lack of hydraulic head. Nobody is suggesting pumped storage isn't viable, simply that it can't store the quantity of energy required if intermittent renewables are expected to provide a more significant proportion of our needs.
[quote=Murray ]Fusions getting worse - it was 20 years away in 1980!
20 or 50, the suggested timescale never seems to get any shorter.
I can't remember the figures offhand but I can assure you that we do have a significant untapped resource in the form of reservoirs in this country. Perhaps not enough to meet all our needs but certainly enough to go a long way towards it. As for the barrage itself, my point was that low head systems can and do work, you seem to have glossed over my other example (that actually exists!) being the Galloway Hydro scheme.
And intermittant or not, they can still be coordinated (in certain cases such as tidal systems) or probability will dictate that in at least one part of the country we will have wind.
Pumped storage is good, but there are not that many sites available in the UK any more.
Salt flow batteries are getting quite interesting. Cheaper materials than current chemistry, scaled up to the size of ISO containers to give really big dispersed storage. Couple that with dispersed generation and you start to get a grid of the future.
it would be smart to change our lives so they fit the resources that are available to us
That's exactly what the energy companies have wanted for years and will achieve using smart metering. They want the morning and even ing peaks shaved because a nice steady base load that doesn't fluctuate is far easier and cheaper to provide. The increased granularity of smart metering will take a fairly blunt style of Economy 7 and vary the cost of electricity down to a minute by minute basis. They will charge more for it between 6 and 9am and 5 and 8pm, driving consumers away from those times.
Just beaten to it - flow batteries are probably the way in the immediate future, IMHO.
aracer - Member20 or 50, the suggested timescale never seems to get any shorter.
but we're building one!
[url= http://www.iter.org/ ]iter[/url]
[quote=squirrelking ]I can't remember the figures offhand but I can assure you that we do have a significant untapped resource in the form of reservoirs in this country. Perhaps not enough to meet all our needs but certainly enough to go a long way towards it.
That depends on your definition of "a long way". In reality nowhere near enough that we could cope with a significant proportion of our current baseload generation being replaced by intermittent renewables.
And intermittant or not, they can still be coordinated (in certain cases such as tidal systems) or probability will dictate that in at least one part of the country we will have wind.
Tidal schemes, yes - mostly as whilst tide times vary around the country, not everywhere is suitable for tidal generation and there will be variation, though that's on a short enough timescale that the absolute storage requirements aren't huge. I'm quite a big fan of tidal as it's reliable and predictable in the way most other renewables aren't (so long as it's not significantly damaging in the way a Severn barrage would be). However it's not that great to suggest that there will be wind somewhere most of the time when the lights go out because right now there doesn't happen to be any, or there's only wind where we don't have significant installed capacity - there are occasions where there is no wind over most or all of our country.
it would be smart to change our lives so they fit the resources that are available to us
worth phrasing this differently;
if we do not do it out of free will now, we will be forced to change our lives to fit the resources available
Think the summary section from that withouthotair book sums things up pretty well
Let’s be realistic. Just like Britain, Europe can’t live on its own renewables. So if the aim is to get off fossil fuels, Europe needs nuclear power, or solar power in other people’s deserts (as discussed on p179), or both.
I guess the UK had better continue to be very friendly to any countries with a lot of sun.
The conclusion for the whole world is pretty much the same. A lot of solar electric generated in deserts, plus nuclear.
Or, drop our energy use.
There's more to energy than just volts and amps coming out of a plug socket.
mrmonkfinger - MemberThe conclusion for the whole world is pretty much the same. A lot of solar electric generated in deserts, plus nuclear.
Orbiting solettas. You can do lots of cool things with a space mirror (including incinerating godzillas, the inevitable side effect of all these nuclear reactors)
They want the morning and even ing peaks shaved because a nice steady base load that doesn't fluctuate is far easier and cheaper to provide
It's cheaper to provide due to our very cheap coal fired power stations. There isn't currently a viable renewable option in this country to generate that base load. Nuclear is the answer but we are 20 years behind in developing the technology and we are all scared of it due to the missguided nuclear policy.
More people died this week in Turkey mining coal than have died due to the generation of nuclear power since Chernobyl.
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned the developing world and meeting their energy requirements? A billion people in China and a plan to reach high income nation status by 2030.
They do have massive pollution problems in the cities and understand that something needs to be done - but a 5 or 6 times increase in the size of the economy (over and above growth in the USA/EU) is going to require a huge expansion of energy use. Not to mentioned India, Indo, Malaysia, Sub-Saharan Africa perhaps.
In this context whatever we do is frankly p***ing into the gale.
There's more to energy than just volts and amps coming out of a plug socket.
Correct - so share your knowledge.
We do need to get towards more electrical energy to reduce carbon in energy. IIRC the Zero Carbon Britain report looked at de-carbonizing transport ie all electric vehicles (assuming the vehicle tech was there). It would require something like 3 times the electricity that the current grid carries. But the current grid probably won't be the grid of the future.
In this context whatever we do is frankly p***ing into the gale.
So do we do nothing, or do we get on the high ground then sell them the more efficient tech we've developed?
There's more to energy than just volts and amps coming out of a plug socket
Almost everything that isn't transport & heating is electric.
Electric can do heating (heat pumps) rather well, even more efficiently than being on gas (and even accounting for the inefficiencies of power stations), if we (politically, etc) got our act together.
Transport. Well, that could [i]largely[/i] (i.e. private transport) be electric as well, if we got our act together. Public transport probably could. Haulage, dunno, maybe.
And then when everything is on electric, renewables can feed it, and so can nuclear.
In this context whatever we do is frankly p***ing into the gale
Bring on the dark ages, eh?
Maybe we could all ride bikes to work or something. Crazy idea.
Despite having nothing to contribute, I'm enjoying this thread.
[quote=mrmonkfinger ]Almost everything that isn't transport & heating is electric.
Electric can do heating (heat pumps) rather well, even more efficiently than being on gas (and even accounting for the inefficiencies of power stations), if we (politically, etc) got our act together.
Transport. Well, that could largely (i.e. private transport) be electric as well, if we got our act together. Public transport probably could. Haulage, dunno, maybe.
And then when everything is on electric, renewables can feed it, and so can nuclear.
The best thing about some of the things you mention is that they tend to be things which work well at intelligent load spreading - you charge up your electric car at night, and you're not in a hurry.
Assume the raw materials for these public, private and haulage transportation devices are made mostly by way of windmill and tidal barrage powered electric ovens and 1000C oversized hairdryers?
From the satellite images we take over China, they presumably don't have that technology yet.
Absolutely we (ie the rich Western nations) should do what we can now as we are the most polluting nations by far. This extends the time horizons for a permanent solution - but without some major technical breakthrough (which is why I mentioned fusion above)I can't see us maintaining the standards of living we have come to expect or that the rest of the world is aiming for. This is in no way a criticism of the developing world - if you have real poverty problems today, your main focus is to solve those as soon as.
The point I was making is that scale of the problem will expand rapidly as the world develops - so solutions have to be big and transferable
... Dark ages - yes it could all go badly wrong if sufficient action isn't taken - and I don't see the will to do the hugely radical things that are required. The focus of domestic politics is very much restoring economic growth and the media is frightened of being alarmist on the environment - but I think the consequences of not taking serious action now are pretty damn alarming
mrmonkfinger
Maybe we could all ride bikes to work or something. Crazy idea.
The thing i really don't understand, is why in the UK, where the vast majority of works are no longer doing manual labour, is why we still all drive to work in the morning to sit at a computer, just like the one i am sat in front of now at home typing this?
Unfortunately, it's a social thing, and will be very difficult to change. But the Government could give tax breaks to companies that encourage/enable their staff to say work from home just 1 day a week etc
(at a stroke, that would be up to a 20% reduction in road traffic at rush hour!)
andytherocketeer - exactly, the iron and steelworks in China make S****horpe look like a village smithy.
I think as a society we are increasingly divorced from industry so don't get the scale. I've not really been anywhere near a productive plant since Mrs OD packed in here job at Lafarge. Working in an office (or at home) forget what goes into the maintaining our lifestyles
Global electricity generation comes to about 14% of global energy consumption. After accounting for generation inefficiency, that comes to about 33% (assuming 100% fossil fuel, since renewables is tiny).
Replacing fossil fuel with immediate use renewables can start to reduce that 33%. But the moment you have a delayed use renewables with a heat engine energy conversion you're putting back a 50% inefficiency that you just removed.
That's assuming that wind, pv, etc are 100% efficient, and hiding the effective efficiency of the device harnessing "free" power, since the portion of wind/solar power not converted to electrical wasn't really "wasted".
27% of global energy consumption is "lost".
Maxtorque, exactly what I've been saying for ages!
andytherocketeer - Member(assuming 100% fossil fuel, since renewables is tiny).
16%, according to teh wiki- wouldn't call that tiny? More than nuclear.
It was very interesting and some good ideas. The bit I dont understand is the obsession with wind power and not tidal power given that we live on a island with some of the biggest tidal ranges in the world.
I have been involved with prototype wind and tidal blades for 25 years . Not too many sites in uk with the right depth and flow characteristics. Tidal is very expensive due to being off shore and running cable ashore etc. We have built blades running in the Humber, Orkneys and soon to be in the Pentland Firth and off Ramsey Island in Pembrokeshire. One thing is for sure it is a recession proof industry...at the moment.
Assume the raw materials for these public, private and haulage transportation devices are made mostly by way of windmill and tidal barrage powered electric ovens and 1000C oversized hairdryers?
I'm fairly sure I said "almost".
But, yes, a large amount of energy is embodied in the materials used in production of stuff.
was 10% in the figures I saw for renewables.
1.4% of total global energy consumption is renewable source electricity.
assuming 50% efficiency for the rest, the only dent renewables make is approx 0.7% reduction in total energy consumption. And figure for HEP is approx 1/5th of that assuming that any pump storage is 100% efficient (which you could argue possibly is if all pumps are powered solely by dedicated windmill/PV isolated from grid)
I think what all this debate confirms is that to maximise the benefit of renewables, then an efficient way of storing electricity is essential. It also needs to be a solution that is compact enough to be located close to the users, in cities and countryside alike.
don't see why it needs to be compact and distributed close to place of use.
there's a national grid with international interconnects specially designed so that power can be sourced and exported based on demand and the characteristics of the generation source. so we can source solar from spain to power aircon during summer, and we can send them wind to power lighting in winter.
the storage bit is a given, since PV only work during daylight, turbines on windy days, ...
don't see why it needs to be compact and distributed close to place of use.
there's a national grid with international interconnects specially designed so that power can be sourced and exported based on demand and the characteristics of the generation source. so we can source solar from spain to power aircon during summer, and we can send them wind to power lighting in winter.
I'm no electrician but do you not get voltage drop over mains cables? I think you do with AC, but not sure about DC.
the only dent renewables [b]currently [/b]make
FTFY?
there's a national grid with international interconnects specially designed so that power can be sourced and exported based on demand and the characteristics of the generation source
I get the feeling the international part of that grid is going to have to get a whole lot more capable.
that's why they use high voltage AC distribution.
DC distribution was tried in teh early days of electricity. it didn't last all that long.
I'm no electrician but do you not get voltage drop over mains cables? I think you do with AC, but not sure about DC
Yes, but its calculable. And more important than just voltage drop is the power that ends up being converted by the cables into useless heat. This depends on voltage [i]and[/i] current [i]and[/i] the characteristics of the transmission medium (i.e. cables). Generalising, more current = more power lost.
Broadly speaking, loads of volts and not much current is a good combination - hence the lovely proportions of power pylons.