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Post by edireland on Jul 8, 2013 3:25:01 GMT 9.5
Anyone who can build a B-reactor can potentially have nuclear weapons.
The hard part is keeping it a secret, and a dedicated reactor is considerably easier to keep secret. So what if a warehouse sized building beside a lake or the sea appears in the other country? You have a hard time proving that the warehouse contains a few thousand tonnes of graphite.
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Post by edireland on Jul 1, 2013 2:58:50 GMT 9.5
I am dubious that even a new coal plant could be profitable at under 50 pounds/MWh. It is really hard to compete with old plants that have been paid off long ago. This will be the first plant built in the UK in years, and I note that subsequent plants are expected to be cheaper. I am not sure I believe that, though. What kinds of safety regulations will they add in the future? It depends on the assumptions you add. I based my calculations on repaying the construction loan over the entire 60 year design life of the plant and using gilt-based capital with 60 year maturities issued especially. Ie. things that can only be done by the state.
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Post by edireland on Jun 30, 2013 22:48:25 GMT 9.5
If it was a mass state programme the nuclear industries costs would be nearer ~£30/MWh not £100. We are just in the grip of energy profiteering.
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Post by edireland on Jun 30, 2013 8:33:32 GMT 9.5
How fast the well declines is not really that important I think.
Its more about how much gas you extract from the wells in that time, if you have a continuous well drilling programme then you can keep production stable, without requiring "exponential" increases in drilling.
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Post by edireland on Jun 30, 2013 3:31:49 GMT 9.5
sod seems to be under the impression that we can trade in all the research done on nuclear technology to get our money back..... that money is already gone so we can't really count it against nuclear. And the consequences of a nuclear accident are not very severe at all, for instance the cheap response to the Fukushima accident would have been to simply buy up all the farmland around the plant and put fences up around it, then sit on it for the next 300 years until the Strontium and Caesium had decayed away or simply turned it into a wildlife park. That was considered politically unacceptable and so absurdly large amounts of money are need to "decontaminate" things to an insanely great degree because the government demands it. When an insurer is on the hook for hysteria-dictated kneejerk reactions of governments with one eye on the next election they are going to shy away from such insurance. And as to EDF subsidies this is partially to do with the fact that the EPR is a disaster of a reactor but naked jingoism on the part of the French Government won't let them build anything else and partially because the only alternative to nuclear that has any chance of getting built in comparable quantities is offshore wind, which is so much more expensive that EDF can hold out for a brilliant deal with no threat of losing the business. Wow, nuclear demands exactly the same money as onshore wind, when the plant is finished (95): ~3GWe would be equivalent to 15GWe of wind nameplate capacity, which is ~750 several hundred metre tall 20MWe wind turbines, and a huge industrial park full of massive sodium-sulfur batteries storing all the power on a diurnal and probably seasonal basis. Find me a place in Britain you can build that practically. You might not be familiar with just how closely packed Britain is, but people don't tend to like living in the shadows of things like that. and solar will be pretty close as well (110..) Perhaps I haven't been paying attention but I don't recall an Alps sized mountain range appearing from nowhere in the last few years. There is nowhere for new hydro plants to be built, the Scottish Hydro Board already exploited the entire available capacity in the 50s. So the cost of new hydro is meaningless. Biomass is effectively the same as the coal in terms of environmental damage. And solar reaching £110/MWh? lol. Considering that the subsidy alone is still far larger than that I have to doubt that it will get that cheap within the next 7 years. Those estimates are normally derived using 0% capital and repayment periods that are found only in panel manufacturer-made brochures. EDIT: And for the record, at ~£100/MWh and 90% capacity factor, the pair of reactors would turn out £2.365bn of electricity every year. That demonstrates just how ridiculously corrupt the privatised electricity business is.
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Post by edireland on Jun 28, 2013 0:15:02 GMT 9.5
Wouldn't the royalties only be payable in the country that produced the gas? Many countries are now net importers of gas.
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Post by edireland on Jun 26, 2013 18:51:44 GMT 9.5
Have you got a source that documents any of these assertions? The source is the Guardian website itself. Take a look at the articles posted in the environmental sections. Damian Carrington was also one of those people that scarified Mark Lynas for daring to change his position on nuclear power.
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Post by edireland on Jun 26, 2013 9:31:18 GMT 9.5
They have a rabidly anti nuclear, anti GM, pro-renewable "science" editor who arranges for every pro nuclear/GM piece to be answered by half a dozen alarmist ones or with several pieces that go on and on about how Germany is a great example that should be emulated.
They also regularly report that things are carcinogenic when they have not been so recognised by any competent scientific authority.
They even attacked David Mackay for being pro nuclear. It is essentially the publishing arm of the Green Party.
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Post by edireland on Jun 25, 2013 22:12:45 GMT 9.5
And I have a left wing slant and am not dependant on significant public funding, so yeah
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Post by edireland on Jun 24, 2013 10:12:42 GMT 9.5
I no longer consider the Guardian to be a reasonable source on energy policy thanks to its blatant rigging of matters in favour of wind and solar.
(Assuming nameplate capacity is a useful measure for comparing energy generation technologies and then claiming that a typical nuclear power plant has an output of a few hundred megawatts).
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Post by edireland on Jun 23, 2013 2:37:02 GMT 9.5
The majority of carbon in a forest is in the soil, not in the trees themselves, additionally coppicing of the trees in the forest could produce significant quantities of timber that could be used to build things that will last a long time.
The minerals thus removed would have to be replaced by fertiliser but still..... Ocean fertilisation is a very dodgy concept and I have not seen any evidence that it will lead to significant net trapping of carbon once you account for the increase in ocean productivity workings its way through all the trophic levels.
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Post by edireland on Jun 22, 2013 20:49:25 GMT 9.5
All of these stations are going to need high power grid taps at atleast the 33kV level, especially once electric cars become more common. I am not entirely sure a half megawatt hour battery is going to cut it, and additionally the battery is going to be expensive, even if they are sodium-sulfur units. (And Imagine what NIMBYs would say about a concrete pad covered in batteries that are full of molten sodium)
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Post by edireland on Jun 21, 2013 22:30:45 GMT 9.5
The reason that nuclear power is not considered viable in the modern electricity market is because of the deregulation and privatisation of the entire system. Thanks to the expensive capital that privat utilities must rely on a power system that has its entire cost presented up front will always fare badly against something with a shorter lifespan and higher marginal operating costs.
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Post by edireland on Jun 19, 2013 3:08:00 GMT 9.5
It will be interesting to find out how much the Tesla batteries are degraded by fast charging. But because of the warranty, for owners it's rather a moot point. As for stress on the grid, many of the charging stations will be equipped with solar roofs and half-megawatthour batteries. That should help even out the load, and as Elon Musk points out, will also make the chargers robust (even in a "zombie apocalypse"). green.autoblog.com/2013/05/30/tesla-supercharger-network-goes-nationwide-gets-faster-w-video/ And means that it costs Elon Musk nothing to deploy this infrastruture, since its a giant subsidy farm.
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Post by edireland on Jun 17, 2013 18:07:16 GMT 9.5
That just means they are willing to replace the battery when it gets cooked. It is effectively impossible to build a lithium ion battery that can survive that level of abuse on a regular basis and maintain anything near its full capacity for 8 years.
Tesla have a whole business model about buying replacement batteries in advance.
And thats before we consider the implications for the grid of intermittant several hundred kilowatt draws appearing and dissapearing at near random intervals in near random locations.
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Post by edireland on Jun 17, 2013 9:34:37 GMT 9.5
And using it repeatedly will cook the battery in a couple of years.
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Post by edireland on Jun 13, 2013 13:30:44 GMT 9.5
Giant forests covering the Sahara and Arabian Deserts would presumably lock up ridiculously enormous amounts of carbon in biomass.... but even with desalination costs crashing it would still be insanely expensive.
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Post by edireland on Jun 13, 2013 10:11:05 GMT 9.5
The mass of the ash is a small fraction of the mass of the wood, I doubt that is a serious issue compared to the general size of the problem.
As to excluding ruminants.... since the trend is towards keeping animals indoors anyway, could just keep them in sheds fitted with catalytic oxidisers that destroy trace methane before its released into the atmosphere.
I believe such technologies have been developed for processing deep coal mine ventilation air, but I am not sure if they have been applied at the very low concentrations found in livestock sheds.
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Post by edireland on Jun 13, 2013 2:16:13 GMT 9.5
The best option if we want to build a giant carbon sink is, in my opinion, the whole enormous forest in the Sahara plan. Its ridiculously expensive but all the other options for long term disposal are even more so.
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Post by edireland on Jun 12, 2013 6:07:52 GMT 9.5
As I have said before, the number of remote power needs locations is vanishingly small now that we have relatively low cost/lightweight systems for moving power great distances.
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Post by edireland on Jun 12, 2013 2:09:38 GMT 9.5
I am not convinced that SMRs a reasonable solution to grid energy production. They are just too small, I understand the argument that the existing large designs require too many large forgings which we don't have the capacity for at the moment, but we would apparently be able to spit out reactors in the 500-900MWe range relatively easily (see the SBWR).
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Post by edireland on Jun 8, 2013 2:08:22 GMT 9.5
Overhead costs for trams tends to be a very small proportion of the total cost of the system. Especially as innovations with parafil ropes make it practical to simply attach the cabling to adjacent buildings or to use combined streetlight-support posts. Additionally you have to worry about galvanic corrosion of things close to the rails in a light rail system since the rail is grounded and has significant currents flowing through it. With trolleybuses the circuit is entirely closed.
The real reason Light rail costs such an absurd amount of money is rerouting all the utilities, and in my experience with bus lanes, people driving in them without the right to do so is a minor problem, and does not significantly reduce average speeds. Trolleybuses will beat conventional buses and light rail in terms of travel speed when stops are close together as they are on many bus routes simply because they will have superior acceleration to either of them. (Due to having an electric transmision and lots of power in the first case, and because rubber tyre interfaces are inherently faster accelerating than steel wheel-on-rail systems in the latter case).
The relatively low cost of installations - based on experience in Vancouver I estimate ~£813k/double lane kilometre (roughly $1.26m US) has to be a big selling point.
That isn't really that much compared to light rail projects which can rapidly baloon out of control.
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Post by edireland on Jun 7, 2013 23:58:15 GMT 9.5
I live within a hundred yards of a bus corridor with more than 30 busses per hour in each direction. So that tends to skew your perspective. (And most of the routes on the corridor terminate within a mile of it, so the average per route mile is still huge).
Thing is, with Trolleybus/bus rapid transit a "dedicated right of way" is some paint on the tarmac. With a tramway you have to dig up the street and move all the utilities to make way for the track slab. The costs of that can very easily baloon to absurd levels.
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Post by edireland on Jun 7, 2013 11:06:10 GMT 9.5
The filtered containment venting should have prevented any isotopes other than gasses like iodine and krypton from escaping the containment. No caesium, no strontium and no technetium.
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Post by edireland on Jun 7, 2013 9:17:20 GMT 9.5
I did some number crunching on trolleybusses a while back.
And I came crunched an estimate that a route average of ~100 round trips per day with double decker vehicles would be superior in economic terms to normal motorbuses, even assuming no fuel taxes to speak of.
This changes slightly with hybrid buses but not drastically.
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Post by edireland on Jun 7, 2013 3:34:47 GMT 9.5
If hydrogen recombiners had been fitted the primary benefit would have been that large scale venting of gas from the secondary containment would have been unneccesary. This would have reduced releases of radioiodine, krypton and other volatile fission products.
Additionally the secondary containment of one of the units could not have exploded.
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Post by edireland on Jun 1, 2013 20:44:50 GMT 9.5
Any nuclear power plant can load follow, through the ultimately very crude mechanism of simply dumping steam from the steam generator/reactor directly to the condenser.
Why you would want to is another question, surely you can find something to do with 1-2 cent/kWh electricity?
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Post by edireland on May 30, 2013 23:49:06 GMT 9.5
Energy use per capita may be a flat graph. However that is not what concerns us, Electricity use is what concerns us. It is highly likely that electricity demand in the majority of the first world will double in the low carbon future you purport to want. Renewables can't hope to provide a hundred gigawatts in the UK or even more absurd figures in the rest of Europe (excepting places like Norway). Additionally this rather proves our point. Despite the myriad forms of energy efficiency introduced since the oil shocks, we have not managed to significantly cut energy use per capita. That is plain out false. There is absolutely zero difference between a fridge that uses less power and one that uses more. (apart from saving money, that is) Now find me a use for that spare money that uses no energy at all. People tend to celebrate the fact that they are spending less on running their refrigerator by buying more goods that use electricity or by taking holidays or whatever. And that is before we get on to the fact that the only way to cut energy use through efficiency is to spike the price. If renewables really were the same price as nuclear, you could not expect any significant additional savings in energy use. Yes, but it still shows you have not managed to reduce energy use overall, all the endless talk of energy efficiency has managed is to hold it flat. You also have to adjust for the abandonment of energy intensive manufacturing and metallurgical industries in most of the west that has suppressed the demand for energy in those countries. That effect is unlikely to continue much longer for the simple reason that all those industries are already gone.
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Post by edireland on May 30, 2013 23:40:37 GMT 9.5
Now find everyone $80,000 to buy one wiht a decent sized battery.
There are far more efficient ways to cut emissions.
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Post by edireland on May 28, 2013 20:57:05 GMT 9.5
Methanol means Methanol-to-Gasoline and similar processes.
WHich means energy density is the same as now.
Assuming we can make methanol cheap enough, it is also animal feed thanks to "Pruteen". But making it cheap enough is the big problem.
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