OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

Well, there was a smiley at the end.

Interesting (to me) that the UK's consumption has gone *down* about 20% over the past 50 years. Note I'm talking about the UK - the figures from that link suggest that consumption and (not surprisingly) generation have been going down for quite a while. Meanwhile, China has trebled, and India has doubled, in the past 20 years.

It's not just vehicles, though. Half of the UK's energy consumption is used for heating, and most of that is gas. A lot of pressure (currently £7500 per household) to move over to heat pumps. More pressure on the grid.

Anyway, my point is that something will have to replace the duty currently collected on petrol once EVs take hold. And it seems likely that'll be owners of electric vehicles.

There's always some plutonium-239 in them, from neutron capture by uranium-238. The uraninium-235 which fissions to produce the energy splits into pairs of isotopes

Quite a few of them are radioactive and none of them are reactor fuel.

The amusement should a reaction to the imprecision.

Some of the isotopes are radioactive - some decay rapidly and are intensely radioactive for a relatively short time and others have longer life times and stay radioactive for longer - " actinides dominate roughly 10^3 to 10^5 years after fuel use".

Uranium isn't any kind of "radioactive waste", it's just one more long-lived radioactive element that got synthesised in a supernova a couple of billions of years ago. Potassium-40 is another, but you don't need supernova to get it, though it does need a star heavier than the Sun.

The sun runs on nuclear fusion, mostly of hydrogen at the moment.

But the UV that gives a melanomas doesn't get through the skin the way gamma radiation can.

It takes a cataclysmic supernova to form anything heavier than iron.

Nuclear fusion in stars quite a bit heavier than the sun can get you up iron (which is the nucleus with the biggest mass defect).

Actually, cosmic rays produce stray neutrons, and a neutron hitting an nitrogen-14 nucleus knocks out a proton leaving you with a carbon-14 nucleus."Carbon-14 is unstable and has a half-life of 5700±30 years".

Since the Natural Philosopher doesn't know enough about what he is talking about, his claims about "any rational metric" are more of his pretentious twaddle.

And your brain is more problematic than you seem to realise.

You seem to be living in cloud cuckoo land. Being upside down, all your blood has run to your head making your thought processes sub-optimal.

Wrong.

The cyclotron (such as it was) was down at the other end of the building.

We all know it is part of your pretentious twit self-presentation. Why do you think that anybody would take you seriously?

I worked in the UK from 1971 to 1993. Over a lot of that time, Thatcher was doing her best to dismantle UK industrial production, and household heating went from electric radiators to gas-fired central heating.

Starting from a much lower base. Lenin saw rural electrification as a necessary part of the socialist revolution. It certainly makes a lot of difference to the economy.

Heat pumps deliver quite a bit more heat per unit of electrical energy fed in than an electric radiator, and the UK is starting to take home insulation seriously. Double glazing and the like.

Or it might just be that a UK government could get around to constructing a taxation system on rational basis, rather than slapping taxes on stuff more or less at random. You are about to get a new one, likely with a big enough majority to get away with being rational for a few years.

There are some small one's around in Australia's remote outback. They replace diesel generator sets that need a truckload of diesel every few weeks. They seems to work well.

You thought that you did, and you think that the conclusion is absolutely clear. You do go in for a lot of self-delusion.

Except that when anybody tries to build a nuclear power plant it seems to take a lot longer, and cost a lot more, than the initial estimates.

Renewable power is generated in much smaller modules, which can be mass produced. Big wind turbines are large, but they are still mass produced.

Theories about costs and output get tested whenever a bunch of modules get stuck together on-site and wired into the grid.

Building nuclear plants takes long enough that pretentious twits like you can spend quite a while posing as experts - and getting over-paid for their services - before their incompetence catches up with them.

As you say. Nuclear power is a dream come true, but of course, it was too good to be true. In its current form, it's far too easy to make bombs with it. In truth, that's what it was developed for! That we can also use it to make electricity is just a useful accessory circumstance.

Jeroen Belleman

The old jokes are the best. Cloud cuckoo land was invented by Aristophanes. "The Birds" was first performed in Athens in 414 BC.

The "living upside down" joke about the southern hemisphere isn't as old, but it is a flat-earth conceit.

Sydney is 33 degrees and 52 minutes south of the equator, so my oerientaion to closer to being at right-angles to yours - 90 degrees rather than 180.

I've been a 'radiation worker' for most of my career. I *know* everyone gets between 3 and 10 uSv of radiation from natural sources every day. Most people have no idea. Yet, to work on radioactive stuff contributing just a few hundred nSv over the natural dose, we had to jump through all sorts of hoops. This isn't rational, it's politics.

Jeroen Belleman

Possibly because of the UK having less heavy industry and importing our products that rely on heavy energy usage from China or the far east etc.

Industries that were once heavy users of electricity probably had contractual agreements stating that it wouldn't be used in peak domestic times.

Is that 30% in the past 6 years mainly due to the installation of more wind turbines which produce little when the wind barely blows for periods of weeks? Possibly also solar which produces little during the winter and nothing at night. Has there been a corresponding 30% increase in the backup capacity to fill the shortfall when wind fails? If the two are not matched then it's rather silly to rely only on extra intermittent power generation, especially during a cold winter.

Although unlikely to happen within the timescales the green lobby would like there is also the move away from gas and oil to electric for central heating that will increase demand for electricity.

The quote was that the UK's *consumption* has gone *down* about

Where the power consumed has come from doesn't come into that.

With intermittent power sources you do need to install enough capacity to generate the total output you need - which is a lot more generating capacity than you'd need if the sun shone and the wind blew all the time.

That does get figured into the cost of the power actually generated, and they are still the cheapest sources around. Once you've got a lot of intermittent renewable sources in your generating capacity, pumped or battery storage is also necessary. Fast start gas-turbine powered generators have been around for quite a while now, but they don't generate power as cheaply as renewable sources, and they would bbeing phased out even if they weren't CO2 emitters.

Sure. But heat pumps push out a lot more heat energy than the electrical energy used to drive the compressor.

Not exactly. When I was a graduate student some of the graduate students working with radio-active sources weren't exactly meticulous. They didn't endanger me but it struck me that they were endangering themselves and their close colleagues.

"Jumping through hoops" is mostly applying enough pressure to persuade people to be meticulous and properly careful.

Extravagant gestures do get people's attention. It is politics, but politics is all about getting people to do the right thing. Sometimes what clowns like Donald Trump imagine to be the right thing, but we haven't perfected our society yet, and have to pick the level of imperfection that will get an adequate result.

It was too good to be allowed to compete with Oil...

No, it isn't. You may have PU239, but you still have to refine it, machine it and carefully assemble it.

In truth, that's what it was developed

Not since 1960 or thereabouts.Nuclear power is now entirely separate.

Using flying pigs might be an option but rockets are far too unreliable.

The main one being that volcanoes are spewing stuff *out* with a fair amount of it as fine dust particles. That is exactly what you *don't* want your nasty radioactive waste to be turned into.

If you were crazy enough putting it into a subduction zone well away from any active volcanoes would be a better bet.

There are (expensive) glassification processes that can render it more or less inert for long term storage underground. Snag is the best places to put it geologically in the UK are not the same as the places where it will most likely be dumped (under Sellafield, formerly Winscale formerly Calder Hall - cunningly renamed after each mammoth cockup/MFU).

We in the UK should give thanks to Cockcroft's follies. We were damn lucky that his somewhat wacky stack filter idea prevented massive fallout when the carbon moderator caught fire back in 1957. Radioactive discharge would have been ~20x worse without them.

Well volcanies are how most of the Uranium and thorium got to where it is today. `

They could build a pyramid and stuff it in that., It would be safe.

Not even as bad as chernobyl, which was the same without the filters and

Yup. And its perfectly safe there, as well.

Correct me if you have a better source, but the information I can find suggests that the power for a maglev train is supplied to electromagnets in the track.

Which means **** all power is supplied to the train.

I have a memory of seeing one in the past where the train had a pair of contacts onto overhead wires, though I can't find it. But again, no power through induction.

Andy

Whatever makes you think that? `

The Australian CSIRO's Synroc process is one of them.

In your ever-so-well-informed opinion.

Not remotely similar, as you would have been able to work out of you had read the link below.

The Windscale piles had the sole purpose of generating plutonium - they just dissipated the heat they generated without making any effort to exploit it to generate power. The Chernobyl reactors were primarily electricity generating plants.

As they were at Fukushima?

Correct. a maglev train is a magnetic cushion married to a linear motor, all powered through the track.

Very like a brushless motor, where the coils stay still and the (induced) magnets move

Sir 412 seats has already said he intends to put noses out of joint and abolish the ability to use planning/objection delays to delay or prevent important infrastructure developments.