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Post by edireland on Jan 17, 2014 13:58:45 GMT 9.5
Renewables are even more expensive than that so they were able to bully the Government into accepting that ridiculously large price. Also how exactly do expect there to be a trillion pounds worth of damage from the reactors going bad? That is something like 10% of the combined value of all the real estate in the United Kingdom. Even Chernobyl couldn't cause that much damage. " Chernobyl" The major winds went to the thinly populated north. Still the damage is €200 - €500billion. What damage? There has been no 500 billion euro cleanup programme and there never will be? The cost of the Chernobyl Radiation damage in Britain was restrictions on the production of lamb that was only sustained by subsidies anyway so it could be argued that it saved us money. Is this one of these cost estimates that is engineered to produce enormous figures that have no basis in reality, like the one about the cost of road transport in the UK actually being tens of billions of pounds a year even though cost on roads is a tenth of that? In Fukushima the winds blew 99% of the time towards the ocean. Estimations are already €200billion, still growing. Estimates for Fukushima Cleanup are sort of impossible to derive independently and always will be, since most of the areas that will 'nee'd cleanup were covered by Tsunami debris at the time of the accident. And the evacuated zone contains areas up to 80km away from Fukushima. And yet the total area actually inside the evacuation zone is small and is growing smaller all the time despite the fact there has been no two hundred billion euro cleanup programme. " trillion pounds worth of damage" At Hinckley Point west winds prevail. Area not thinly populated. Just look at the exclusion zone of Chernobyl and put that on UK. Major radio-activity may even reach to London. But that would be bad luck, crippling UK for centuries, and create a damage >10trillion.So it can cause damage greater than the value of all fixed assets in the United Kingdom? How exactly is that going to happen? Will all of London be burned down and all inhabitants simultaneously commit suicide out of fear of the horrific deaths that supposedly await them from radaition? REmember that the lower permeability of cityscapes will in fact reduce costs since radioisotope infilitration into the soil will be drastically reduced as it will run directly over easily cleaned concrete, glass and steel into the groundwater systems and hence into the North Sea. Additionally the zone of Alienation from Chernobyl contains some 2600 square kilometres, which is something less than twice the area of Greater London meaning very little of the area around the plant would actually have to be evacuated in order for even a great majority of London to be inside an exclusion zone. But one may assume that other towns are lost (exclusion zone), such as Bristol, Gloucester, etc. As someone who is familiar with the Geography of the United Kingdom, it would be very difficult for radiation clouds to cause significant damage to Gloucester or Bristol as even the latter is over 40km from the plant, which would put it outside of the bulk of the plume and unlikely to require massive evacuations, especially if Potassium Iodide tablets or solution drops are made available to the populace and they shelter in place. Even superimposing the radiation cloud distribution from Fukushima on Hinkley Point in the orientation most favourable to produce casualties they would be exposed to less than 100mSv in almost all cases. While this is high for general population it is unlikely to cause significant increases in cancer risks. Here is a handy image with dose rates in mSv/yr Together with the lost businesses, offices, factories, infra-structure no longer used, etc. a trillion is a fairly low estimation, it can easily become n times more. Considering the combined value of all real estate in the United Kingdom is about £9.5tn, it is hard to believe that a trillion could possibly be a low estimate since you would end up discussing the complete evacuation of most of the country's land area to cause such excessive damage and that is never going to happen even if we had multiple Chernobyl level accidents. " Renewables are more expensive" May be in the fantasy of UK government. In my previous post I showed that: - in 2023 the real costs of Hinckley are ~10+20+112 = £132/MWh going up further with inflation. That is £158/MWh in 2040 halfway the 35 year guarantee period (2% inflation). - FiT solar in Germany now €99/MWh (=£83/MWh) during 20yrs (then whole sale market price). Long term trend ~8%/year decrease. So in 2023 ~£36/MWh. Going down towards towards £10-20/MWh levels according to experts (present yield of ~16% will rise towards >40%, the Dutch solar car that won the N-S Australian race had some of those panels). - Fit wind now €88/MWh (=£74/MWh) during 15yrs (then whole sale market price). Long term trend ~3%/year decrease. That is £55/MWh in 2023. You do realise how FiTs and Strike prices work right? A strike price is agreed with the operator when the generator begins operation and then this price holds for the entire contract, only changing through its uprating with inflation. The current strike price for wind is ~£110/MWh and thus any wind installations that are committed to construction will expect this strike price to be held throughout the agreement period. You can't use the projected price of wind and solar power 35 years from now to attack nuclear power. We have to add the cost of storage and grid expansion (also some savings with solar on the roof; and the grid costs are also subsidized for Hinckley Point C). German scenario studies, estimate that those are ~£10/MWh (they spent ~€200million on those). Grid Expansion costs at Hinkley Point are marginal since there is already a 400kV Grid Supply Point on site from Hinkley Point A and B with installed connection capacity being something 1500MWe from those previous reactors (since they did operate simultaneously) - it will however need expanding to take the full ~3000MWe. This is going to be rather cheaper than an enormous new infrastructure distributed everywhere. So at the start of Hinckley Point C the costs are ~£132/MWh, going up further with inflation. While then (solar+wind+storage) cost ~£65/MWh, going down. And for the record Rooftop Solar is going to be near useless in the UK for reasons I have previous outlined and will not peak shave in the slightest, but even so I will have to take the time to point out that it is not going to be cheaper. Household scale Rooftop Solar currently recieves a FiT of £149.50/MWh plus the export tarrif of a further £42/MWh taking us to £191.50, or twice the nuclear strike rpice. Large scale solars subsidy comes out something in the region of £110/MWh and will be almost useless since it will produce almost all its power during high summer when our demand is at rock bottom. It will produce very little of its electricity (on order of a few percent) during the winter when we actually need it, and even then it will almost all be at the wrong time of day. Once you add storage this number will be going up. And while in the long term it will be going down the rate of descent has been dropping drastically, I remember when FiT was first introduced it dropped by £100/MWh in the first year and it obviously hasn't continued to do that since otherwise Solar would be paying a charge several times the grid price of electricity by now. Btw. While Germany with less wind than UK, has ~30GW onshore wind turbines and only ~1GW offshore due to the high costs of offshore, Yes, Offshore is more expensive, but the United Kingdom is surprisingly small when you consider the sites suitable for turbine installation. If you run the numbers for a mostly on shore wind power system in the UK you end up with so many turbines that the average number visible from any point in the United Kingdom will be in the high double figures. Try getting that past the populace who enjoy their bucolic view of the 'Great British Countryside'. UK choose to install almost only offshore. So the costs of the new NPP show more favorable. You try finding the positions for thousands of hundred+ metre superturbines of the type that are now dominating commercial wind installations. The optimal spacings alone will make the array cover a rather large part of the UK. Similar with the high UK solar FiT's in UK. I expect that those will be decreased as soon as Hinckley Point C has all licenses and cannot be stopped anymore. Somehow I doubt it considering that the Solar FiT has been attacked for being too low already and that the number of new installations of solar panels has gone off a cliff. Also noone has explained to me how these solar panels will produce useful power in January, or during the peak periods in Januray, which occur during the hours of darkness. You also see lot of solar panels in the north of Germany, which has a latitude halfway UK. Furthermore UK has lot more coast. And the sun shines significant more at the coast. So there is little reason that UK FiT for solar should be much higher. While the FiT for wind should be much lower as UK has far more wind. Having more wind does not necessarily make it cheaper to collect, the turbines have come across major opposition on the grounds that the onshore installations are so huge that they are considered to have major negative effects on the countryside, plus the documented instances of rare birds being killed by bird strikes on the turbines. The fact remains that solar installations have dropped drastically since the last batch of FiT cuts does not bode well for the future of Solar in the UK. If UK needs more pumped storage, Norway's state owned utility Statkraft, is eager to help. They have huge amounts of unused mountain lakes for that. That would require us to suborn ourselves to a foreign power, they would have the ability to crash our electricity grid on a whim. And if something bad happens and europe is begging for whatever stored electricity is available thanks to Russia tightening its squeeze on the gas feeds into Europe as part of its dealings with the Ukraine or similar, I would rather not be in an auction with the entirity of EUrope bidding for power. Note that they are eager now as the Germans hardly need any of their pumped storage (even the pumped storage facilities within Germany make losses; new installation stopped). And electricity-to-fuel/gas pilot plants are springing up (BMW has a 2MW plant producing car fuel). That plant is never going to make any money, as I have said before it is purely an energy experiment subsidised by a state research grant. Furthermore Germany started with battery subsidies for roof-top solar households, expecting/hoping a similar decrease of battery costs as with solar, filling in the second target of the Energiewende; democratize electricity (first target: nuclear off). There is no need to embrace distributed generation to 'democractise' electricity generation. All you have to do is nationalise the system. But that is socialist and is thus a forbidden idea in the glorious new future where corporations rule. And if the costs of this transistion are so slight as you suggest, why on earth would heavy industry have lobbied so hard to escape paying for it? And why are electricity prices in Germany some of the highest in Europe and still climbing?
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Post by edireland on Jan 14, 2014 22:34:26 GMT 9.5
Because that is the price they were able to extort from the Government. Renewables are even more expensive than that so they were able to bully the Government into accepting that ridiculously large price. Also how exactly do expect there to be a trillion pounds worth of damage from the reactors going bad? That is something like 10% of the combined value of all the real estate in the United Kingdom. Even Chernobyl couldn't cause that much damage.
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Post by edireland on Jan 10, 2014 3:27:20 GMT 9.5
Brussels cannot allow UK to continue with Hinckley, because the 75% subsidy on the electricity generated by Hinckley falsifies competition (I remember UK once was pushing those strict competition rules). And what about the even larger subsidy given to wind turbines or solar panels in the form of ROCs and FiTs? I assume that is competition because its a form of power generation you likeUK/France governments must have something special in the pocket for Germany, as otherwise Merkel will not agree with a rule change. She declared already against, though not very openly (Germany is in the fire-line once Hinckley turns into a Fukushima). Six decades of power reactor operation, both civil and military. Not one significant reactor casualty. (Windscale was not a power reactor and did not release v. large quantities of radioactivity) I think you are rather overstating the risk of Hinkley Point C turning 'into Fukushima'. Not that Fukushima has actually killed anyone, nor inccured enormous unavoidable cleanup costs. (The Maximum cost to 'clean up' land is equal to its value because if it is greater, we can simply put fences up around the land, compulsarily purchase it and leave it until the radioactivity decays to allowable levels). "... using state money. Run the costs of the reactors using the gilt rate ... You end up with an energy cost around €40/MWh" That is created by the government loan guarantees. As I showed (read my post) that implies the tax-payer subsidizes Hinckley with ~€1billion/year (in addition to the strike price)! EDF makes a huge return if you actually run the numbers. If it was using state money the state would make that money and be able to pay down the construction debt in about eight years at that strike price. Then have a reactor good for 52 more years of operation with a production price of roughly €10/MWh. " ... Solar in the UK, I hope you are willing to accept ~60GWe of OCGTs as backup, ..." You should spend some millions for scenario studies. If German and Denmark can do it, and even Scotland is heading towards 100% renewable, why UK not? Germany and Denmark are relying on an enormous stockpile of dispatchable hydro generation in the Alps and Norway This stockpile is not available to the UK. The former also relies on huge quantities of brown and hard coal while the latter has large scale natural gas generators operating for CHP purposes to support its celebrated district heating grid. As to Scotland, you clearly don't seem to understand anything about the United Kingdom. 1) Scotland is absorbing a rather large fraction of the total UK renewable subsidy. It just happens to be in Scotland for the purposes of determining the "percentage of Scottish energy" that is Renewable. The Scottish Government doesn't actually pay the subsidies for renewables, the Treasury in Westminster does. 2) The requiremetn is only for generation to match consumption, enormous transfers across the wider UK grid are to be acceptable in this scenario, which is rather different from what you are proposing. 3) Scotland has 90% or moer of the United Kingdom's entire installed hydro capacity thanks to the now abolished 'North of Scotland Hydro-electric Board'. That rather skews the figure since they have almost all the dispatchable renewable power across the entire Country. You may put a high capacity power line to Norway. Norwegian Statkraft will be very happy to serve UK with pumped storage. Just how high a capacity are you talking about? It would have to be one of the most powerful undersea connections in Human History to make any difference. But it is too busy propping up the German grid. Especially since their trade with Germany brings little earnings (due to over-capacity whole sale prices stay low the whole time, even pumped storage facilities in Germany make losses now). Indeed, which is why we can expect Germany to follow Spain's lead in setting up a tax on renewable generation to pay for the maintenance of these critical pumped storage facilities that are being used over longer timescales than they were intended for and thus are struggling to stay open due to the enormous capital expenses inherent in a pumped storage station that is only used once a week or less. I do not understand that Cornwall along the coast is not filled with solar panels as: - they have excellent sun (better than NL, N-Germany); and - UK Feed-in-Tariffs are ~50% higher than those in Germany. Firstly I don't think you have ever been to the United Kingdom if you don't understand why Solar power wouldn't work that well in Cornwall. It is only sunny compared to the United Kingdom, not in absolute terms. Solar power in the UK will only generate during the summer, even in Penzance the insolation in December is roughly 0.5kWh/m2.day . Summertime UK power demand peaks at roughly 25GWe, winter demand tops out at roughly 58GWe. Tranfering heating demand to electric power will only incerase that already enormous seasonal swing. That is far larger than Germany or France which have significant summertime cooling loads which simply don't exist in the UK. You do not need that at all, as shown by good scenario studies! Twice in the last five years we have had periods, weeks long, where there has been almost no wind over the entire United Kingdom, this occured during a period of arctic temperatures and enormous banks of fog over most of the land mass. Whats your plan for dealing with these periods? Letting us all freeze is not an acceptable answer. " ... even more once heating has to go all electric to escape fuel imports." With high wind+solar capacity installed: When the sun shines and/or the wind blows, wholesale prices go down towards near zero (as Germany shows). That makes electricity-to-fuel/gas conversion plants economic. And that fuel/gas can be used for transportation and heating and stored. The round trip efficiency on that is horrendously low and the capital costs are enormous. I know, I've run teh numbers. Scotland has or is building a power-to-fuel pilot plant. In Germany several power-to-gas pilot plants (using different methods to create synthetic gas) that inject the gas in the national gas grid. Furthermore BMW/Audi have 2MW power-to-car-fuel pilot plant running. Those produce fuel that is used by their cars. In general those plants are put in places where a lot of CO2 is available. So behind a power plant that burns biomass/waste, etc. Those plants were engineering scale demonstrations to prove that something is technically feasible. They will never be viable without collosal subsidies that dwarf even the ROCs/FiTs stuffed into the hands of renewable generators. And biomass will never be a significant source of power in the United Kingdom, it was once calculated that even with half the landmass of the United Kingdom devoted to the growing of biomass it could only produce enough fuel to support roughly half of our current annual steel production and nothing else.
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Post by edireland on Jan 9, 2014 12:09:38 GMT 9.5
The problems with the Hinkley Point's FIT contract are absolutely nothing to do with the 'costs of nuclear power'.
It is just that EDF saw the Government coming a mile away.
The government is ideologically committed to using 'private' capital to build the reactors rather than just using state money. Run the costs of the reactors using the gilt rate which is currently below inflation over 30 years and watch what happens to the price of energy. You end up with an energy cost around €40/MWh.
And Blackouts in the UK are never due to lack of generating capacity. They are due to companies tripping out equipment on 'safety grounds' because it is cheaper than planned maintenance that has to be published in advance in newspapers et al. Grid reliability in Britain is falling because the lower energy prices after privatisation were purchased by the slashing of the capital investment budget that the CEGB maintained as it viewed its primary purpose to 'keep the lights on' - equipment is wearing out and now National Grid and the Distribution Network Operators are demanding more money to replace it.
As to the idea of using Solar in the UK, I hope you are willing to accept ~60GWe of OCGTs as backup, since you know... peak grid demand in the UK occurs in the dark - last full year I have data for (2012-2013) it was about December 12th at roughly 1700-1730 hours, with sunset occuring at roughly 1620 at the latest.
In December, a month where we have multiple recorded incidents of very little wind due to jet stream fluctuations (the year before last for example)
So Sun is definitely out and Wind is unreliable. You are going to need rather a lot of backup power, even more once heating has to go all electric to escape fuel imports.
Once you have enough gas turbines to support the grid by itself, the question becomes is it worth bothering with the renewables at all? We are going to be in hock to various oil sheikhs either way since we will be needing fuel at the coldest time of the year when things are most critical anyway.
EDIT:
Additionally Wind power recieves subsidies on top of the FiT which rather change the picture.
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Post by edireland on Jan 8, 2014 2:04:39 GMT 9.5
ESBWR needs a 9hp pump to pump water into its Isolation Condensor units. If that pump is available it can stay shut down indefinitely with no core damage issues.
Supporting a 9hp diesel generator is not beyond the means of a reasonably sized diesel store.
You could fuel it with 44 gallon drums.
You could use a larger mobile generating set to black start power stations one after another.
EDIT:
And as to not being able to island a power station.... why the hell don't you just have a huge resistor grid bank outside that can absorb the minimum sustainable output of the power station? Or just do what Bruce NPP did in a major blackout and dump steam from its steam generators while keeping the reactor spooled to 60% rated output?
If the main steam turbine set can't accept such a low load you can install a second turbine set that is sufficient to generate power for the station's own loads.
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Post by edireland on Dec 23, 2013 18:41:16 GMT 9.5
I don't think they are talking about pumping sufficiently large amounts of water to actually alter oxygen levels on an oceanic scale. Or we could just inject vast tonnages of oxygen into the water that is pumped up.
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Post by edireland on Dec 18, 2013 23:39:11 GMT 9.5
This is called a 'slip carriage'. It was done for a long time but the advent of ultra high power multiple units that can accelerate for a long time has rendered them pointless. Additionally their are safety implications, which is why they were never used for joining trains, only ever for leaving them.
Trains can now do 0-170mph in under 3 minutes, which sort of eliminates much of the time saving. In japan trains cover 30km in ten minutes stop to stop on the Shinkansen.
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Post by edireland on Dec 12, 2013 19:16:27 GMT 9.5
The water in the containment tanks is not in any way significantly dangerous.
All that is left is tritium, which will disperse to nothingness if they just release it into the ocean.
That is not a cost of nuclear, that is a cost of idiots who have no idea what they are doing.
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Post by edireland on Dec 8, 2013 2:02:04 GMT 9.5
That equipment is going to be titanically expensive.
And I believe with MED plants the majority of the waste heat will end up in the reject brine which ends up dumping straight back into the sea again.
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Post by edireland on Dec 6, 2013 22:08:47 GMT 9.5
@ EdIreland ... You paint a vision of powerful generators along the coast, cooling cheaply with sea water, and supplying power to the inland using efficient HVDC backbone to the grid. Running costs of air cooling include 6% of the power output. How many kilometres of HVDC does it take to accumulate 6% resistive losses? The answer turns out to be... quite a long distance. Apparently about 1000km according to this diagram from ABB. You loose 1.2% of the power transmitted in the converter stations but then you can get far lower losses due to higher average voltage and the lack of skin-effect related issues. Then you have to include the other savings from using seawater cooling such as the ability to pack far more generating capacity onto the same site. I wouldn't like to see the cooling equipment necessary to air cool several gigawatts of power generating capacity from a large multi-reactor plant. One of the less tangible capital costs of seawater cooling is the high visibility of the power station structure inserted into a crowded coastline. These once used to be proud, perhaps arrogant, symbols of progress, but now for many they are confronting symbols to be torn down. The amount of coastline required for a large plant is quite small though. For instance Gravelines Nuclear Power Plant has six 900MWe class PWRs and only has a seawater frontage of roughly 1300m, which could easily be cut to roughly 650m if some ancillary services which are besides the reactor were instead positioned behind them. (It appears to be office buildings, car parks and similar facilities). Using modern, larger, reactors potentially gives an even larger power density in terms of coastline consumed, up to 9GWe per 650m length, or nearly 14GW/km. EDIT: Extrapolating from that ABB diagram, it would appear that even attemting to transmit 1200MWe power from the Ocean to the EPIA1 'Eurasian Pole of Inaccesibility' (the most distant point on Eurasia and indeed the Earth from the ocean, a distance of approximately 2500km) would only produce a loss of 200MWe, or roughly 14%, which while high is not catastrophically so. It appears that air cooling of reactors is of questionable usefulness, considering that higher HVDC voltages than the 400kV used in the example are now available.
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Post by edireland on Dec 6, 2013 2:39:15 GMT 9.5
Why not just use HVDC to supply inland areas?
Its much cheaper than air cooling
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Post by edireland on Dec 4, 2013 4:40:51 GMT 9.5
(55 cents per cubic metre is rather less than I pay in Britain for my water, even excluding sewerage charges - our charges are per cubic metre)
That was desalination at the newly opened PFI funded plant near Aqaba. They claim that they will have 35 cents per cubic metre in a few years more with the increasing economies of scale and improvements in filter technology.
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Post by edireland on Dec 4, 2013 0:25:20 GMT 9.5
Well ironically, in the UK at least, the price of desalination has fallen below the average cost of agricultural water. But obviously the UKs irrigation inputs are far lower than elsewhere.
Singapore claims to be able to deliver chip-fab quality water (so the purest of the pure water) for about 15 US cents per cubic metre using NEWater recycling systems, but I am not sure how much of the input water is rejected as the 'brine' in that process so I can't predict how much water you can actually get out of that.
55 cents a cubic metre and gradually falling is the price I hear coming out of Israel these days, but I am not sure how that translates to the west where everything seems to cost ridiculous amoutns more for no apparent reason.
If nuclear reactors are better at anything than electricity production it is producing ridiculous quantities of cheap steam, so it seems possible that Multiple Effect Distillation will be able to keep up or even better Reverse Osmosis costs once the reduced heat costs are factored in.
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Post by edireland on Dec 3, 2013 11:46:42 GMT 9.5
Technologies such as Single Celled Protein produced on methanol potentially allow offpeak nuclear energy (available at a couple of cents per kWh in a large scale programme) to be converted into animal feed.
That tends to make animal and fish raising less environmentally damaging than conventional crops. Additionally a large part of the worlds arable land (primarily in Africa) has not been developed to its maximum potential with western style 'scientific agriculture' that prevents significant soil degradation while producing enormous yields.
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Post by edireland on Dec 3, 2013 0:37:41 GMT 9.5
'Share the wealth' still means a zero sum game, which means the rich and middle classes will not support it out of fear of what will happen to them.
The human race will survive 'Global Warming', so this is not about preventing the extinction of the species or anything like that. It may not be a nice transistion to a new world, littered with millions of dead, but it is not going to bring down civilisation.
If nuclear transistion can be carried out there is no real reason to place limits on energy consumption or population growth, because the former essentially ceases to be damaging. Population Growth can easily be accomodated in an energy-cheap world as you can withdraw animal feed crops (and fishmeal) that eat up titanic amounts of arable land in favour of things like pruteen.
Pruteen permits food production to be decoupled from land use, and then there is the constantly advancing grasp of material science that is now starting to deliver Collosal Carbon Tubes and Carbon Nanotubes of ridiculous strength.
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Post by edireland on Dec 2, 2013 19:45:56 GMT 9.5
'Steady State Economics' is a rather ominous term once you realise the side effects of having an economy that never grows any larger.
It turns social mobility and improvements in living standards for the poor into essentially a zero sum game - turning the rich and middle class against measures which do improve the lot of the poor.
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Post by edireland on Dec 2, 2013 17:04:41 GMT 9.5
We do indeed have container sized F-T or comparable process units now, although they are not as efficient as the monster plants like the Pearl GTL complex.
It is likely that the product of such plants would be methanol or heavy wax which can then be process elsewhere as on site cracking or dehydration equipment is rather expensive.
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Post by edireland on Dec 1, 2013 13:41:12 GMT 9.5
While methane isn't the insanely deep cryanogen that hydrogen is, it is far from 'easy' to store on a large scale. Biogas also simply can't hope to keep pace, I tried to run the numbers on that myself but you end up as a few percent of demand, even if you drastically reduce road transport fuel demand it won't make that much difference.
And arc gassification is a more efficient way of producing gas from waste anyway.
Natural Gas use is actually decreasing in maritime applications, traditionally LNG carriers were the last of the steamers using natural gas that boiled off of the main dewars to power the turbine propulsion plant, this being cheaper than installing enormous refrigeration systems and then carrying diesel fuel around.
However the massive expansion in the market for shipped LNG overwhelmed the relatively small remaining production base for marine steam turbines (since now even warships have primarily abandoned them leaving only nucs which require different turbine designs to fossil plants) and forced ships to be built using diesel engines.
Use of diesel engines forced the development of large scale refrigeration plants suitable for shipboard use, which has now removed the advantage of simply using natural gas in the ships propulsion plant because bunker fuel is still cheaper when diesel engines are available. (Using a diesel engine purely on natural gas is impractical for a variety of reasons).
Bunker C is $690/t, which is quite cheap considering a low speed marine diesel can top 50% efficient these days and can burn fuels that are 2.5% sulphur by weight OR MORE.
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Post by edireland on Dec 1, 2013 13:11:12 GMT 9.5
There is nowhere enough biomass available.
Also it being a net energy loss is not really a problem when we have essentially unlimited energy available.
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Post by edireland on Dec 1, 2013 10:39:39 GMT 9.5
You do realise that the first step in pretty much every GTL process (including the Shell Middle Distillate Synthesis [SMDS] used at the huge 'Pearl GTL' plant) starts by cracking methane to syngas.
Since all practical methane syntheses from carbon dioxide and hydrogen or direct electrolysis go through syngas, wasting energy making methane and then cracking it into syngas again seems to be rather pointless.
And I hope you are assigning the costs of maintaining that titanic gas grid (in the UK alone several billion pounds) to the electricity systems it will support since it would otherwise cease to exist as heat pumps and induction cookers crush it. There is also a huge liquid fuel distribution infrastructure which is just as valuable as the gas one.
Also, biogas might be 'huge' in terms of renewable resources but it is a rounding error compared to current consumption of liquid fuels and plastics precursors such as ethylene.
I can also (far more space and capital efficiently) convert waste direct to syngas using an arc gassifier, which also melts down all the nasties into a nice glasslike form for disposal which can be used as construction material. It also doesn't care if you feed it waste contaminated with antibiotics or bacteriophages or all sorts of things. It destroys biohazard materials almost by definition.
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Post by edireland on Nov 30, 2013 21:05:49 GMT 9.5
If you are doing atmospheric or other carbon dioxide capture methane has no advantage really.
You either run the SMDS process (a Shell development of Classic Fischer-Tropsch) or you make Methanol and run the Mobil MTG (Methanol to 'Gasoline') process to produce hydrocarbon fuels which we use today.
No need for any change to the vehicle fleet.
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Post by edireland on Nov 23, 2013 11:13:43 GMT 9.5
It is worth noting that the open cycle we use today is potentially sustainable for many centuries thanks to developments in seawater extraction which even now would only add $15/MWh to the price of produced electricity. The price is still falling.
Reprocessing gets easier the longer you wait, you could quite easily store the waste in dry casks for 300 years and then reprocess it once the only significant rad sources left are the actinides, which would permit the reprocessing to occur in a far lower radiation field than otherwise (5kCi/t of which 60% is 241Am, as opposed to 470kCi at 10 years)
Fast neutron reactors no longer appear neccessary.
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Post by edireland on Nov 12, 2013 18:01:42 GMT 9.5
I dont know how the dose was originally measured, it may have been "total ionization" of 200 mGy in which case the casualties may well have been stopping more neutrons than gammas. (EdIreland, is your "10000 rads" from neutrons or gammas? - link please) The '10,000 rad' figure relates purely to Gamma emissions, neutrons are a relatively minor threat against protected military personnel for the simple reason that they are rather easy to shield against. That is the real reason that the neutron bomb was cancelled, as well as it's predicted cost, because armoured vehicles (and other facilities) developed to resist the induced radioactivity mechanism that would be used to kill the crew. Although the dose to an unprotected person that close to the burst is huge from a standard weapon, the neutrons are almost entirely produced instantaneously while the weapon is still a relatively compact ball of material and thus proper engineering of the bomb casing can reduced the dose to levels that are unimportant. This is an exerpt from a rather interesting book on the topic, but the general idea that radiation from low yield weapons is far more deadly than blast effects runs throughout the military orientated literature.
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Post by edireland on Nov 12, 2013 13:45:31 GMT 9.5
You can be in a dugout protected by 24 inches of concrete and protected completely from the thermal effects of the burst but still suffer a fatal dose from the gamma flux. Considering that gamma ray flux is halved when passing through 100 kg/m2, a 24 inch shield of concrete would represent about 1000 kg/m2, and thus a protection factor of 2^10, or 1000 fold reduction in gamma dose. Heck, if I was so close to the blast that the outside of my bunker received a thousand times a lethal dose of gamma rays, I suspect that I would have been taken out by being hit by 24 inches of concrete wall long before the radiation damage had time to make me sick. Numerous military documents I have seen suggest that the 'Tenth Value Thickness' for concrete against the spectrum of fission products from a nuclear explosion is on order of eleven inches. Against Nitrogen decay gammas it is something like 16 inches. A 24 inch thick concrete shelter would produce a factor of protection of roughly 158x against the first type of radiation and only 31x against the latter. Being roughly 500 metres from a one kiloton burst will produce an unprotected tissue dose of something like ten thousand rads, giving us a protected dose of between 63 and 322 rads depending on which type of radiation is dominant. At that distance from the burst the blast overpressure will only be 20-30psi, which while large enough to collapse any unhardened structure with ease or cause near complete casualties to unprotected personnel is certainly feasible to protect against in a bunker type structure. Indeed military facilities have been proposed with two orders of magnitude more blast resistance than that. A concrete blockhouse with 24" reinforced concrete walls is capable of resisting an overpressure approaching 100psi. Although 63-322 rads is not going to cause all the soldiers to keel over, the situation gets worse if the soldiers are closer to the detonation, additionally soldiers on the nuclear battlefield could easily be exposed to multiple detonations over the course only a few hours or days, causing the cumulative dose to rapidly become problematic. And apparently the LD50 is only 400 rads over a relatively short time.....
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Post by edireland on Nov 9, 2013 5:35:47 GMT 9.5
This is unfortunately no help at high latitudes, like Northern Europe, where peak electricity consumption tends to happen in winter, after dark.
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Post by edireland on Nov 9, 2013 5:31:49 GMT 9.5
I think it may be too late to dodge on seeing the flash. Fission creates two excited nuclei, with an energy preference to promptly emit gammas and neutrons. Often, a (slower) beta decay will create a daughter, similarly excited and neutron rich. However the delayed gammas would see the same number of scatterers, solid or vaporised, as the prompt gammas. Only a very small fraction of the 'initial' gamma radiation is actually 'prompt' however. 'initial' is defined, at least in American Circles, to be the gamma flux from the instant of detonation to one minute post detonation. This is defined on the basis that the mushroom cloud will have carried the remaining highly active materials to a height sufficient to eliminate the remaining dose to people on the ground at that time. (Excluding some very low yield devices). The delayed gammas are relesaed primarily after the weapon has expanded into a cloud of tenuous plasma or gas, which means that unit mass that a gamma ray has to pass through on its way "out" of the burst cloud has been drastically reduced, drastically reducing the number of gamma rays absorbed. It is the same principle that you see in a "shadow shield" type device on nuclear powered spacecraft proposals. This is why, apparently, very few of the 'prompt' gammas escape the weapon since the weapon is still a very compact ball of material at that time. This is why proposals to wrap a thicker lead tamper around low yield tactical device fissile pits to reduce the gamma flux failed. Otherwise you could potentially use low yield nuclear weapons in 'danger close' situations which would have had a massive effect on Cold War strategy for the employment of battlefield nuclear weapons. The initial fireball would start off with x-ray temperatures, cooling rapidly as the x-rays escape only to absorb in nearby air, expanding the fireball. Air is transparent to ultraviolet, so UV would escape to dominate the flash until the fireball cools below ultraviolet temperature within the first second. Infrared would continue to radiate as the fireball reddens, drying combustibles to tinder. However the radiation injuries, mostly due to ultraviolet, would already have happened. IMHO, our preoccupation with minority of gamma injuries has more to do with its exotic nature than its contribution to the casualty list. This is the thing, its a misconception that the majority of the 'initial' radiation is produced by the detonation, even looking at the mushroom cloud that is forming in the seconds after detonation can give you a massive gamma-ray dose if you are too close to the hypocentre. This is because the cloud is full of incredibly short lived isotopes including massive amounts of 15N and the various fission product produced by the detonation. Additionally the problem with gamma-ray flux on the battlefield is that it is very difficult to take cover against. UV can be defeated by a foxhole or even a soldier's fatigues, provided you are not so close to the burst that you catch fire from the massive heat flux. You can be in a dugout protected by 24 inches of concrete and protected completely from the thermal effects of the burst but still suffer a fatal dose from the gamma flux.
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Post by edireland on Nov 8, 2013 1:34:40 GMT 9.5
Because I like to write science fiction as a hobby, I have done quite a lot of research on the source of gamma radiation from low yield nuclear explosions, in the hopes of determining a way to reduce the minimum range such weapons can be employed at on the battlefield to avoid friendly casualties.
Almost all of the gamma flux from the weapon is produced by secondary decays, since essentially all the primary gamma flux is absorbed by the bomb materials before it disintegrates. This being decays of fission products and nitrogen isotopes entrained in the blast cloud as it rises into the sky.
It is actually possible, against a large device detonation, to avoid a large fraction of the total gamma dose by taking cover immediately upon observing the flash, since it is primarily produced in such detonations by the fission product decay in the blast cloud.
Additionally you have to account for the attenuation of the atmosphere by the blast wave in these calculations as virtually all the gamma flux is released after the detonation has already occurred.
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Post by edireland on Oct 23, 2013 10:49:59 GMT 9.5
Why do you keep referencing this 'German' case?
Subsidies for British solar power installations are uprated with RPI, just as the nuclear ones are. And the problem is all these renewables are completley useless for producing baseload wintertime power.
And that is what Britain needs. During the last really cold winter we had we had a two week period with almost no wind generation at all and several complete lulls.
That is going to eat through storage capacity real fast.
You can whine all you want about renewables being "cheaper" but you haven't included all the implicity and hard to quantify grid subsidies, for example have a look at the new capacity charge being levied in Spain.
Ranting on and on about how "Solar is cheaper" using highly selective and inappropriately combined figures is not going to convince anyone, and I am beginning to get sick of constantly pointing out the obvious flaws in your arguments.
EDIT:
And I note that the 'average' Household electricity price in Germany has now climbed to a staggering 26 Eurocents, which is something approaching 22 eurocents excluding grid costs. That is £186.7/MWh.
So double the price of Hinkley Point electricity.
And an Official Germany Government study puts the price of electricity in 2040 at 40 eurocents per kWh in today's money. That is just ridiculous.
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Post by edireland on Oct 23, 2013 4:59:32 GMT 9.5
And just to hammer this point home:
On the 12th February 2013 the total national grid electricity consumption was roughly 1TWh (and this is using actual National Grid Total Gross System Demand figures for reference). . That is approximately 1bn kWh of electricity consumed Using solar panels at 20-40% efficient that is going to require roughly somewhere in the region of 5-10bn square metres of solar panels if we allow for diurnal storage (and you need a LOT of storage since peak demand occured at 18:00, london sunset was 17:12).
5 billion square metres of panels is 5,000 square kilometres, 10bn is 10,000sq km. That would be 2.1%-4.2% of the UKs land area. And these demand figures don't include Northern Ireland as they are not part of the National Grid, so the true percentage is even higher.
That is simply unthinkable, and I dread to think abotu the cost.
And before anyone asks about Wind: that has also been known to go through multi-DAY lulls in the middle of February when demand is peaking at nigh on 60GWe, so also requires insane storage, and covering the country in ridiculous numbers of windmills to meet demand.
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Post by edireland on Oct 23, 2013 4:39:15 GMT 9.5
And the price of German electricity is now so high that the subsidy levels are massively distorted. Lets compare like with like and look at the subsidies "renewables" get in the United Kingdom. (These are installations that are added to the grid now for reference) Sub 4kW PV installations have a FiT of 14.9p/kWh. 4kW-10kW PV installations have a FiT of 13.5p/kWh And it runs all the way down to the bottom category for large stand alone installations which recieve 6.85p/kWh. In addition all operators are paid a further 4.64p for electricity that is exported to the grid. This means that the range of Solar electricity prices runs from 19.54p/kWh to 11.49p/kWh. That means that at best we are paying £114.9/MWh for PV solar, which is rather higher than the price of Hinkley Point electricity which is going to be dispatchable. Oh and before you claim that large scale solar is rapidly getting cheaper, it IS NOT, subsidy levels for large solar appear to have bottomed out recently and are not dropping any more. (And this is before we get into the idea of covering a rather large proportion of Britains land area with solar panels, since rooftop installations get a far higher subsidy level - and generating nearly 60GWe in January when solar flux levels are at 0.5kWh/square metre.day) And that 'too cheap to metre' comment was by someone not actually involved in a programme but a simple politician. I am sure I can find all sorts of ridiculous political statements about the viability of Solar.
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