O.T. Deep sea wind farms

And we would still have a huge problem. Half a solution is not a solution at all. That's what's wrong with your thinking.

Your half idea is what's silly. It's exactly like being shot with a smaller caliber projectile. Cutting the size of the bullet in half.

I don't know what you are talking about "despised". Fracking is great for my heating bill, but doesn't solve the green house gas problem.

Why can't you see the ideas people support or oppose is based on thinking that simply isn't the same as yours rather than no thinking at all?

It is very clear that cutting green house gas emission in half is not a solution. Not that fracking will ever cut emissions in half. There is also a lot of concern about the leakage of gas from the wells as methane is a MUCH more potent green house gas than CO2.

Do you actually listen when other people speak? You have shut out any conversation about Thorium reactors because what you have heard for the last however many years was that Thorium isn't interesting. But the US is not the only player in the world and we are going to be left behind while China becomes the big player in the Thorium field.

Uranium has a *huge* fueling industry which is where all the money is made these days. That is where the US nuclear industry is focused. Thorium doesn't need the huge support industry. The money will be made over the next 50 years in *building* new Thorium reactors. So the US nuclear industry will be essentially phased out as the focus shifts from Uranium fueling to Thorium plant construction. We need to get into the game as leaders, not as a service industry.

--

Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
on the centerline of totality since 1998

I've made that point many times; so have others.

One accounting sleight-of-hand is simply to ignore the cause of those costs. That then makes "backup" baseload more expensive per MWh, which makes windpower look more competitive, so more windpower is deployed, which makes baseload more expensive per MWh, ad infinitum.

The British Isles will certainly be smaller when that happens :(

That may have been me. I propose Molten Salt Reactors for 24/7 power.

Reliable, already proven to work, walk away safe, much higher burnup, higher efficiency due to high operating temperature, much cheaper than Pressurized Water Reactors since they operate at atmospheric pressure, cannot run out of thorium fuel. Some versions can burn current high level nuclear waste.

Kirk Sorensen has many videos on Youtube. Well worth watching:

Molten Salt progams are ongoing all over the world. Here is a summary:

Steel making is a huge source of CO2. See "Making steel without coke: dramatically cutting coal use in steel making"

When MSR comes online, solar, wind, coal, gas, petroleum and PWR will die.

4 day period. On occasions. Sometimes wind and solar produce essentially zero power, so coal and gas plants heve to be kept ready to fire up and support the entire load.

--

John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

While molten salt is a promising technology, the chemistry of reducing ore to metal does not allow easy substitution for coal/coke. Metallurgical coal can be substituted (Swedish steel traditionally used charcoal, not coke), but there isn't any foreseeable iron-industry future without a small amount of low-sulfur coal as a feedstock.

Steel is one of the highest percentage of recycling materials available and well-suited for electric arc furnaces. This reduces the need for raw iron from blast furnaces.

For reducing iron ore to steel, new processes reduce the need for coke. Natural gas is becoming an attractive subsitute for coal. It has all the same advantages of natural gas over coal in energy production.

See "Making steel without coke: dramatically cutting coal use in steel making":

------------------------------------------------------------------------- The surprise for me is that for many years now there has been an emerging revolution in the steel making industry that heralds a switch from blast furnace (coke requiring) steel making to more nimble Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) steel construction. I was amazed to learn that the most recently constructed blast furnace in the U.S. was built in 1965!! And the cost of refurbishing a blast furnace can be $100s millions!

On the other hand, EAF plants, which are not powered by coke (derived from met coal), are booming. Nucor (NYSE:NUE) is the company which has led the transition from blast furnaces (needing coke) to more nimble EAF micromills. NUE is North America's largest recycler of scrap steel and the largest steel company in the U.S. The company also produces Direct Reduced Iron (DRI), which takes iron ore and makes it available for steel making in an EAF facility.

Gas is used in the DRI process rather than coal. In the U.S., 65% of steel is now made in an EAF, which means that coke isn't involved. And today the trend is going even smaller and more nimble with new EAF-based micromills as being developed by Commercial Metals Company (NYSE:CMC).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is a huge change in basic industrial processes that most people are unaware. The basic trend is to improve efficiency and to replace fossil fuels with electricity.

MSR is ideally suited for this trend.

:

shore waters to deep to allow solid foundations.

e power available from 1.5 W m^-2 to 6 W m^-2

at

e

Or you have to have a bigger grid to hook up to places with the wind is blo wing.

In Europe, hydroelectric power in Sweden and Norway is available to fill in the gaps, and the cables already exist to ship it south when needed. At th e moment the northern hydroelectric schemes are sized and used as local bas eload sources, but bigger turbines run only when needed (and sometimes run backward to build up pumped storage) could support rather more load when ne cessary.

The smart grid can shut down optional loads, which can also help.

went into this in 2008, but John Larkin didn't get the message - one of man y.

On Friday, October 27, 2017 at 7:28:36 PM UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote: ...

in the gaps, and the cables already exist to ship it south when needed. At the moment the northern hydroelectric schemes are sized and used as local b aseload sources, but bigger turbines run only when needed (and sometimes ru n backward to build up pumped storage) could support rather more load when necessary. ...

France, Holland, Ireland and the UK exchange power using underwater bidirec tional HV DC links for such a purpose - different timezones, behaviors and power generating mixes (e.g. nuclear from France) help even the load.

This site show the current power mix for the UK -

lar.co.uk - the various transfer links are at the top right second row.

kevin

The Greenland ice sheet is worth 7.2 metres of sea level rise if it all mel ts (or just slides off into the ocean, which is what is actually going to h appen).

That isn't going to make a great deal of difference to the area of the Brit ish Isles. Denmark - which is on average 34 metres above sea level - has mo re to worry about. The Dutch are only 30 metres above sea level, but they'd just shorten their sea dykes and make then even higher.

The Maldive are much worse off and Quatar is in the same boat. The UK, with an average elevation of 162 metres, isn't anywhere near as threatened.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bangladesh probably has the most people affected. Although its average HASL isn't the smallest, most of the food and people are barely above sea level.

I'm not sure that it matters. The UK government wants to close down all coal fired power plants by 2025: The UK gets about 30% of it's power from coal plants. My guess(tm) is that they'll switch to fracking (natural gas).

Grid status:

Grid statistics:

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

You're dreaming. you can't turn ore into iron with an electric arc.

--
This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

The current UK government has an attention span of about five minutes. What they say they want to happen in 2025 has nothing much to do with what might happen in 2025, and everything to do with their prospects in the next by-election.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I took a year's readings for the entire UK wind output from

and post-processed it to see how true that was. The rule-of-thumb result was remarkably simple.

Draw a graph of output vs the probability that the instantaneous output is below that value, i.e. the CDF of the power output. Obviously there is 100% chance that the value is below the the peak power (plus delta!), and also a 0% chance it is less than 0 power. In

What surprised me was that the line was pretty linear between those two points, i.e. there was

30% chance it was

Interestingly, quickly scanning the graphs shows there is a strong seasonal and diurnal components to the French link, but the Dutch link is more-or-less constant .

I have never seen a solid description of how that would be implemented in practice.

The nearest I have seen is the "notice of insufficiency" which is an advance warning that some industries will have their power chopped in accordance with the contracts they signed.

Those notices are becoming more frequent.

Of course other places will be worse off, but that would swamp some economically important areas, especially parts of London and our "breadbasket" that was drained (courtesy of the Dutch) a few centuries ago.

It would also swamp an area 10/20 miles from me, where government planning is insisting that new houses are built. There is local opposition, unsurprisingly.

Probably is, if they're allowed to sell all the power they can generate, when they can generate it, at whatever the market spot price is, displacing more reliable generation that has a higher marginal cost. Require them to pay for the backup needed to make their power reasonably reliable, and a different story emerges.

Sylvia.