OT: When Will the Next Nuclear Accident Happen?

They are toy amounts for virtue signalling near London and will make not one jot of difference to the overall equations. The big problem is that the windiest place is in the north of Scotland and there is nothing like enough infrastructure to move the peak power that it can generate down to London where these toy battery storage schemes are being installed.

They feather a significant fraction of the wind turbine up north when the wind blows hard because there is no cable to carry the peak power and it would not be cost effective to provide one. It is a snag when peak turbine output power scales with the third power of wind speed.

If you want serious levels of stored energy pumped water storage schemes are the way to do it. Dinorwig dates from the OPEC crisis of 1970's.

In it's day it was the UK's largest civil engineering project.

Where would I be if it weren't for someone like you to point my fallacies, yeah.

Thank you for your explanation, I'll have to think about it when I write my next version of my gamma spectrum evaluation software, LOL.

Oh you know better than all the people who have spent their lives evaluating the consequences of the accident, I see.

So you think you are equipped to make the judgement what I know. Pathetic.

You should have known about it before you wrote the last version. You may have known it well enough to manipulate the numbers correctly, but clearly not well enough to express yourself as clearly as you should have done.

The health physicists I ran into spent most of their time keeping their hospital administrators happy.

Worrying about how many people ended up dead as a consequence of Chernobyl would be a hobby activity.

Your judgement isn't all that impressive. I'm just pointing out that your story misses out certain details that I happen to be aware of .

I'm not saying that that I'm all that confident that you are wrong, but you would have told a somewhat different story if you knew enough, and understood it clearly enough to be likely to be right.

Scepticism doesn't go down well with the over-confident.

Irony does not go all that well with you, does it. Come on.

So show us a paper substantiating your figures claiming all these deaths. Not a propaganda article like the one you posted earlier, a peer reviewed paper. So far you have only conspiracy theories and I am certain you will remain at that - which is understandable, after all the antinuclear media screams all these decades. Almost all people think like you do nowadays - and they are wrong, just as most people were wrong about the Earth being flat not that long ago.

I have been accused of being overconfident before, yes. You will have to point me to something I claimed I can do and failed if you want to differ from the rest who have accused me of that. I know my confidence can be annoying but I do not owe anybody an apology for who/what I am.

You may like to think that you were being ironic.

"I-131 has a half-life of of only 8 days so unless you get it right away you just won't get any."

is a pretty horrible example of the wrong way to think about exponential decay. If you think you can brush that off by claiming that your evaluation programs gets it right, you need to think a bit harder.

<snip>

So how long does it take from accident to ingestion. A month after the accident there has been virtually no 131I to speak of. People can have ingested some unknowingly only in the immediate aftermath, before anybody knew - which has not been the case anywhere simply because the cloud took longer to reach them than the knowledge of it. And where does spectrum evaluation come into that, I only mentioned it in order to prompt you who are you talking to.

Do you now understand why I was being ironic. Your religious convictions about nuclear energy are... religious beliefs, nothing more.

I presume you do understand the difference between GW and GWh. That article

lots of planned GW figures, and only one planned GWh figure.

Right now that GWh figure (0.64GWh) would keep the UK powered (at 34.8GW) for about 70 seconds! And the consumption is higher in winter.

To rely on renewables, we need several days of storage rather than several seconds.

What's your proposal for that? If you have a good answer, you can become very rich :)

Just to understand, you believe that because it hasn't been built yet, it is impossible to build?

You start off challenging my claim that storage is coming online in the UK as well as other places and now your complaint is that all that the storage we will ever need isn't online now?

Do you honestly believe that we simply will never be able to provide storage to make renewables practical for nearly all our energy needs?

Your response to that will probably be that it has to be *cheaper* than current production. The problem with cost comparisons is that most don't factor in all the costs of fossil or nuclear sources.

Nuclear can be much much cheaper than it is today. It is overpriced because there have been too many monkeys wanting to sit on that branch, because of the fearmongering have been allowed to. Fossil sources are finite so something else will have to replace them. They have been an excellent way to store energy which has been given to us but for one reason or another this is about to end in the not so unforeseeable future.

Energy storage in batteries to back a country like the UK for a few days is laughable, it just cannot be done in a practical way.

I remember an attempt on energy storage done when I was a kid or even before I was born, not sure, here in Bulgaria - they pumped water back to a higher dam. Don't know how it worked out, haven't heard of it being in use for a very long time (decades). I somehow doubt I have not heard of it because it operates flawlessly.

So what now, Tom and co pump the Thames back up to some higher dam to store energy... If they do that by installing bikes on the shore for people to pedal the water up I am sure it will be a success, plenty of spectators might be drawn in :D. Tom? Will you join the pedaling or just be a spectator?

Just had a quick look at the water storage here - Belmeken-sestrimo. Turns out I have been dead wrong, it seems to operate flawlessly for decades after all....

Burning trash can put all sorts of nasty stuff into the air.

tirsdag den 11. maj 2021 kl. 22.26.24 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

sure if you are doing a bonfire in your yard, modern incinerators burn at high temperatures and filters and cleans the flue gas

here they are connected to the district heating system

The problem with hydro is that there are increasing demands on water supplies (for domestic and farming and industrial uses) at the same time that there are dwindling natural sources of water (in those regions).

Note the scale of the *boat* in the photo against the bathtub ring.

Note also the stated level at which the dam will no longer be able to generate electricity (maximum output is ~2000MW).

Amusingly, there is talk of using solar and wind powered pumps to return the water that has passed through the damn back to Lake Meade -- for another trip through the turbines!

Here, they harvest the methane "naturally" produced in the landfills and use it to fire generating stations.

what about plastic bags and such? it is excellent fuel, basically oil in a different form

That is often claimed, but the people responsible for nuclear safety care about making them safe, not BS. We had a significant accident in the US once already. Would you have us NOT improve our safety from the things we learn? I live 3 miles from a nuclear reactor, two actually. They recently f***ed up some work resulting in a scram so one reactor is still offline from a refueling that should have been over months ago. Should we not require them to take measures to mitigate potential harm from such events? Even if we ignore the safety issues, such problems are what drive up the cost of nuclear because such events have the potential of reducing the output. When the plant suffered a scram from an earthquake a few years back they found numerous issues that has extensive potential for great harm. I discovered the company was fined during the permitting process for covering up the existence of a dormant fault line very close to the reactors. They knew of the fault, but did not disclose it in the permitting process. $60,000 fine reduced to $32,000.

Yeah, we need to make safety a priority with nukes to try to prevent Fukushimas because of the huge losses that can occur.

Your statement creates a strawman and then attacks it. Batteries are becoming better and cheaper. There are other technologies as well. So you can't make a reasonable claim that it won't be a good solution 10 years from now.

So? That is exactly what is being done in some places. You don't always need a lower reservoir. Some places a river has enough flow to work.

No, they simply need to tap into your hot air as that is inexhaustible.

gives lots of planned GW figures, and only one planned GWh figure.

The wind power can be essentially zero for a week here. Let's say we need 4 days storage. 70s is 1/5000 of that.

So you are claiming that planning 0.02% is a success, while not considering the other 99.98%. Snort.

As Martin Brown put it, those are toy amounts, not serious amounts.

We need more than toy amounts.

I thought they use some other source of electricity to pump the water back up, may be they do, I just don't know. Or they just balance the water levels somehow, anyway, none of my busyness. Which is not to say I withdraw my suggestion for pedaling the water back uphill :-). Water shortage is the obvious limiting factor of course. We have a small hydroelectric plant just across the river here, 1km or less, I used to walk nearby hunting for birds with my camera (I now almost never do, with Lucy not at home it is just painful to go there).

From our yard we can see the pipes and some building above the plant, perhaps some filtering house.... I don't think they can pump the water back, there just does not seem to be enough water to speak of down at the plant.

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.5835624,23.4228143,798m/data=!3m1!1e3 There used to be plenty of blackouts when *that* plant was the source, not sure which it is now (few blackouts anyway). But the voltage has been 180-190 (nominal 220) all winter, still is (25C outside). Better than last year when it was 245, nothing fell victim but it got me worried.