peterc
Thermal Neutron
Posts: 30
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Post by peterc on Mar 1, 2013 19:37:54 GMT 9.5
update: the sunshine total for February was 37 hours : www.wetteronline.de/wotexte/redaktion/rueckblick/2013/02/0228_fr_Februar-noch-nie-so-trueb.htmThe longterm February average according to that link is 80 hours. That amounts to 11% of total Feb. hours. If you take into account that the sun is still quite low (here in the northern hemisphere) in Feb., what proportion of the rated output of the solar installations can you expect? My impression is also that the Jan/Feb have been fairly low wind months as well, but I ought to check that out. Roger Clifton : I'm afraid my response is just more gloom! There's no mainstream movement which dares to introduce a bit of realism. It's a hobby-horse of mine, but I put most of the blame on the media. Every journalist has a bit of the politician-manqué in him, and they've found it very easy to manipulate the public with nuclear-scare stuff. Even a serious paper like the Süddeutsche Zeitung works incessantly at this: they deliberately conflate the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and their results with Fukushima, (the whole episode is known as Fukushima here: many Germans believe that the 10k deaths are a result of Fukushima). They make no secret of getting their information from green lobby groups. Here, declaring oneself green and pro-renewables has a feelgood factor to it which it's difficult to work against until the public gets realistically informed about the options we face.
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Post by sod on Mar 5, 2013 7:00:14 GMT 9.5
SMA provides pretty accurate data of power provided by solar systems in Germany. you can scroll back a few days, if you want to take a look at january/february. www.sma.de/unternehmen/pv-leistung-in-deutschland.htmlBut you should also look at today (04. march) and you would see that for several hours (10 am to 3 pm?) solar provided more power than the remaining nuclear power plants...
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Post by edireland on Mar 5, 2013 10:46:50 GMT 9.5
SMA provides pretty accurate data of power provided by solar systems in Germany. you can scroll back a few days, if you want to take a look at january/february. www.sma.de/unternehmen/pv-leistung-in-deutschland.htmlBut you should also look at today (04. march) and you would see that for several hours (10 am to 3 pm?) solar provided more power than the remaining nuclear power plants... One would hope so, considering the absolutely absurd amount of money that has been expended on them, and the fact taht the vast majority of the German reactor fleet is already gone. PV expenditure has probably been an order of magnitude higher than the cost of building nuclear plant equal in capacity to the whole remaining German reactor park.
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Post by Nuclear on Mar 5, 2013 14:39:55 GMT 9.5
Don't let yourself be fooled by PVs output on sunny days. Without the feed-in tariffs, PV would not be competitive on the electricity market.
On a free electricity market, coal would dominate if the natural gas price is high. If you outlaw coal, nuclear would dominate. If you outlaw coal and nuclear, gas would dominate. The cheapest unreliable, wind, would only enter the market if natural gas prices are so high that the fuel cost savings outweigh the cost of the additional wind turbines and the cost of letting the gas plants idle or run as spinning reserve.
Wind only makes sense if overall costs can be reduced by adding it to the grid, which is the case nowhere but on a few islands. A carbon price may help with that, but if you outlaw nuclear and tax carbon emissions heavily, be prepared for high electricity rates.
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peterc
Thermal Neutron
Posts: 30
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Post by peterc on Mar 5, 2013 15:25:47 GMT 9.5
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Post by jobrien on Mar 9, 2013 16:03:14 GMT 9.5
Those whose religion is anti-nuclear are putting forth Deutschland as a model of environmentalism which we here in the U.S. of A. should emulate. They quote statistics about the growth of PV power in Deutschland and tend to ignore the dependency of Deutschland on imported power from Gaul and lignite mined in Deutschland which is the direct result of attempting to phase out nuclear power. Eventually the problems resulting from Deutschland's eschewing nuclear power will become too obvious to ignore and it will no longer be possible to write panegyrics extolling Deutschland's "insight" and "wisdom" in attempting to migrate to renewable sources of power. How long it will take for that epiphany to occur is impossible to predict accurately, but it could occur in as little as five years. When I have corrected the misunderstandings posted on anti-nuclear sites, some if the responses have such that they could not be quoted in polite society. I've been called a liar; the "f" word and words of a similar nature have been liberally used. Many of those people make no attempt to use facts. Instead, they use the well-known propaganda technique of name-calling thereby discrediting themselves. I myself am always very careful to avoid name-calling and language that might be unacceptable in some places. In spite of the above, there are some environmentalists who, although they oppose nuclear power, are amenable to reason and can be convinced with facts. This site tends to favor the IFR over any other nuclear power technology. I tend to favor the LFTR but also think that it is too soon to know for certain which nuclear power technology will turn out to be the best one; it could be the IFR. Surely it will not be the nuclear technology which we are now using, i.e., the PRW which, in my view, is a serious mistake.
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Post by jobrien on Mar 9, 2013 20:52:12 GMT 9.5
I note a sense of desperation and despair amongst the climate change pragmatists on various blogs. It is truly distressing listening to the ever hopeful RE brigade predicting that wind and solar can replace base load at inconsequential increase in cost. A common trick used, is to quote installed capacity rather than energy produced. Another piece of duplicity is trivializing the cost that RE imposes on all electricity users. For example, a proposed 20MW PV facility in the Australian Capital Territory is claimed to deliver up to 10% of the instantaneous power demand, yet it costs just $13 per annum for the average electricity consummer. The reality is it will displace 1% of electrical energy consumed. Consumers pay little and get little benefit. It appears that until significant RE build up occurs, and it is evaluated by respected analysts, that the hopeful RE supporters will command public sentiment. Once the game is over, governments that are welded onto RE will need to be replaced as they will otherwise soldier on relentlessly propping up their defective policies. We will get there in the end, but perhaps a bit late for the well being of the planet.
Something that is wrong won't last forever, however things that are wrong somtimes last for too long. This, I am afraid is the future for RE roll out.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Mar 10, 2013 20:00:57 GMT 9.5
@joebrien - "too long ... a RE rollout"
Events that get public attention are inevitably out-of-the-ordinary. Because weather varies randomly much faster than the climatic decays, we can't expect the public to get aroused over the creeping trend when happenstance weather disasters are more camera-worthy.
However a random cluster of weather disasters happening one-after-the-other may well be the trigger for global realisation of a global emergency. Then we might hope for mobilisation for a mass rollout of alternative energy sources. … each with appropriate storage. Where technically feasible, that is.
I wonder how many governments around the world are investing in contingency design and testing?
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Post by edireland on Mar 10, 2013 23:47:40 GMT 9.5
The only contingency that really ought to be prepared for is the production of multiple 600 tonne ingot, 15000t force forging presses.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Mar 11, 2013 20:45:23 GMT 9.5
edireland spoke of the most important contingency planning being tooling up for the large steel components. Although the heavy duty BWR and PWR reactors could be rolled out as fast as those 600 t presses could forge their pressure vessel heads, the small modular reactor (SMR) production lines could be ramped up faster. Another bottleneck would be the provision of fuel. The slow neutron reactors would need enriched uranium, so preparations for their eventual rollout would involve setting up extensive facilities for enriching uranium. That might worry the neighbours! On the other hand, the fast neutron reactors would need diluted plutonium, which could be stockpiled by accelerating the reprocessing of the current backlog of used fuel. That, the neighbours would be more likely to approve...
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Post by totterdell91 on Mar 14, 2013 19:44:29 GMT 9.5
If you are concerned about the speed of roll out, the denatured molten salt reactor has no integrated fuel cleaning, but can go 30 years until batch fuel cleaning is necessary. The only input side processing necessary is to fluorinate CANDU spent fuel. The spent fuel from a single CANDU has ample fissile to fuel 3 similar size Denatured MSRs.
There is also the WAMSR design, & the Fuji MSR, as well as the LFTR. Combine this with the various solid fuel SMRs and fast reactors and you have situation like China where they are running multiple parallel builds over the ranges of technologies, thus increasing output and experience without over taxing their supply chain
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Post by Roger Clifton on Mar 16, 2013 10:21:44 GMT 9.5
If you are concerned about the speed of roll out, the denatured molten salt reactor has no integrated fuel cleaning, but can go 30 years until batch fuel cleaning is necessary. The only input side processing necessary is to fluorinate CANDU spent fuel. The spent fuel from a single CANDU has ample fissile to fuel 3 similar size Denatured MSRs. Yes, being ready for a nuclear rollout requires the supply of the right fissile mix. Preparations need to establish means to provide either enriched uranium for slow neutron reactors, or diluted plutonium for fast neutron reactors. Reprocessing could supply both, but you imply that the MSR can use spent fuel without reprocessing. My understanding is that Candu reactors start with natural uranium, so their spent fuel has even less U235 than 0.7%. Sure, there will be traces of Pu239 and Pu240. Without removing most of the U238, please tell us, how can an MSR achieve start-up criticality with that mix?
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Post by totterdell91 on Mar 16, 2013 20:38:47 GMT 9.5
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Post by totterdell91 on Mar 16, 2013 22:50:44 GMT 9.5
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Post by anonposter on Mar 17, 2013 1:31:20 GMT 9.5
I know MSRs have incredible neutron economy (when using LiBeF) but I didn't think it was that good.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Mar 17, 2013 13:02:41 GMT 9.5
When we actually get to read it, the para ends: "Thus 1 GWe CANDU plant running off 143 tonnes of natural uranium [accumulating 550 kg Pu] per year could provide the fissile makeup for roughly 3 GWe of DMSR simply by employing fluoride volatility processing of the CANDU spent fuel and direct use of the PuF3 this produces." So they would separate Pu from U after all. But it does give us numbers on reproc, whether by fractional volatilisation or electrochem. The immediately fissile part is less than half a percent of Candu spent fuel. I believe spent fuel from PWRs is richer.
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Post by totterdell91 on Mar 17, 2013 13:22:40 GMT 9.5
You can also look at it the other way. You could (much more simply) recover the uranium ans simply add the fluorides of the bottoms to the D-MSR fuel. The difference that this level of FPs would make to the running characteristics of a D-MSR is trivial, and the Uranium could be on sold, or re-enriched or whatever.
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Post by anonposter on Mar 17, 2013 15:03:25 GMT 9.5
CANDU reactors superior neutron economy means they can run from spent LWR fuel (i.e. DUPIC), a nifty way to roughly double the use you get out of the fuel without needing reprocessing.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Jun 14, 2015 17:17:08 GMT 9.5
@ PCAH -- your links do not support your message.
The paper by Gordon Taylor does not refer to any deaths due to radiation at Fukushima. Similarly there is no report on health effects on the linked EPA page. And the antinuclear group you linked us to is political not scientific. You gave no link at all to the UK government saying that there is a health detriment due to radiation exposure.
Much more interesting is your news that the UK Energy Minister has announced that all premature deaths, perinatal mortality, birth defects and heritable genetic mutations were due to nuclear electricity. If he did indeed say that he would be most heartily jeered for his ignorance. Do, please, give us a link to him saying that.
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