Nuclear Power, yay or nay

I only pointed out that RPRT is not denying climate change in this thread – a point you missed so I clarified it for you- not sure why you think that is trolling. I have said trading insults is pointless – one sided insults are probably even more pointless.
I dont do trolling I only express opinions I actually hold as I find trolling, like trading insults, a touch childish.

But what I take exception to is your your self-righteous assertion that a few hundred thousand killed in nuclear accidents is "small fry"

Pragmatically speaking, 100k is small fry compared to 1bn. It's also not a certainty, a large nuclear disaster is a small possibility. Huge loss of life directly or indirectly attributable to climate change is highly likely, and may well be around the 1bn mark. It may be considerably less, it may also be considerably more. Even so – the uncertainty +/- that figure is a considerably larger integer than the total deaths from Chernobyl – even Greenpeace's estimates, which are hardly likely to be favourable towards the nuclear industry…

Z11

If you need a national draw of, say, 10 GW – you need to build power generation capacity for what? 20 maybe 30 GW to account for the problems and lack of continuity?

But it's not like that. I already pointed out that the tides are at different states around the country, so even looking at tidal power alone you could have continuity of supply.

OTOH someone else pointed out that there are nuclear power stations currently running at 40% of projected output.

You seem to want the moon on a stick.

But what I take exception to is your your self-righteous assertion that a few hundred thousand killed in nuclear accidents is "small fry"

Look up the number of road deaths in europe since Chernobyl. 40,000 a year-ish x24 years ~ 1 million.

Chernobyl is utterly trivial.

I only pointed out that RPRT is not denying climate change in this thread – a point you missed so I clarified it for you- not sure why you think that is trolling. I have said trading insults is pointless – one sided insults are probably even more pointless.
I dont do trolling I only express opinions I actually hold as I find trolling, like trading insults, a touch childish.

I did not miss it. What I pointed out was at that point in time, he hadn't clarified his views, so I took them at face value. He certanly wasn't taking possible deaths from a nuclear accident in teh context of the incomprehensible scale of deaths if most predictions on climate change prove to be correct. As you will see, we have both clarified this.

Wiki definition of trolling follows:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Taking advantage of the remaining areas in the UK for tidal schemes at best could only supply 10% of UK electricity demands.

Not enough, especially when you factor in the devastating effect it will have on the local ecosystems.

Not enough, especially when you factor in the devastating effect it will have on the local ecosystems.

Does it matter? These devastated ecosystems. Are they useful stuff or just birds and wiggly things?

Are they useful stuff

depends which way your bread is buttered.

Either way, they're screwed with climate change…

Either way, they're screwed with climate change…

Or at a competitive advantage.

Sorry I've not the whole thread, but have now reached a high enough boredom threshold to dabble at the end.

OTOH someone else pointed out that there are nuclear power stations currently running at 40% of projected output.

Was just going to reply to that, but decided to check who pointed it out originally – no surprises really, as TJ does seem to have a habit of arguing against new build power stations on the basis of figures taken from ones built 50 years ago, conveniently ignoring all the data from more recent builds which completely contradicts his point.

I look to the history of nuclear power and I see accidents, pollution and expensive unreliable power generation. Others look to recent reactors in france and other countries and see cheap reliable and safe.

When I look at the history of warfare I see bows and arrows, cavalry charges and trenches. Others look to recent wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan and see air strikes, IEDs and guided missiles. Which do you suggest is the best information to use when determining future defence strategy?

When I look at the history of warfare I see bows and arrows, cavalry charges and trenches. Others look to recent wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan and see air strikes, IEDs and guided missiles. Which do you suggest is the best information to use when determining future defence strategy?

Well, lets see, we won at Agincourt, but Afghanistan still seems to be undecided.

Poor metaphor.

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.
😈

Its just turned into an 'I'm right: No I'M right' bitch slapping contest.

How's that different to every other thread?

I did not miss it[my point].

Was there a point to your post, Junkyard?

Ok whatever you say.

Hainey 5 sites on the West coast alone could get to more that 10% according to research . Severn estuary @5% and then Solway firth, morecambe bay , mersey and dee Estuaries. What is your source?

article here

RPRT, so you would advocate that we supply our troops with Bows and Arrows on that basis? 🙄

"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?

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.

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!

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/tidal-power.html

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.

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.

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.

Sizewell B reliability

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?

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

Cheers for the link Hainey. Interesting I would have thought it was more than that though.

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…

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.

I wonder what our great-great-great-grandparents would have thought of today's energy 'needs'

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…

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.

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.

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.