If I had not spent much of my life wrestling to sell instrumentation and often losing to incomparably worse competitor devices at much higher prices than ours I might give this a thought. In those circles having the lower price is typically a huge disadvantage, no matter how much better your equipment is. I have been told that straight more than once. So just take my word for it, the safety can be times better at < 1/3 of todays cost were it all not that corrupt (I mean globally).
No, 10 years from now there will be no practical way to back the UK up on batteries. Even if capacity doubles it will still be a laughable idea.
if you at times have excess wind or solar energy that's a reasonably efficient way of storing it until you need it, something like 75% round trip I believe
Exactly. If you consider it as a battery, then it behooves you to invest in an "efficient" charger; one that can top it off regardless of local conditions.
(located in the desert southwest, solar makes sense due to the abundance of sunshine, lack of overcast days -- we advertise "360 days of sunshine" -- and the "empty real estate for solar farms)
But, you can't keep recycling ALL of the water as downstream customers need it to drink, farm, run businesses, etc.
And, retooling the dam is decades of work so you can't just change your strategy overnight.
Yeah, but... the TMI incident didn't hurt persons, just wrecked an expensive piece of equipment. It was totally significant, in terms of enhancing owners' concern with operational inadequacies. That's a good thing. Safety, on the other hand, was basically covered. 3 miles distance would put your personal danger far below that of folk downwind of the Hanford plant during its wartime and early coldwar years.
Dick Thornburgh (the governor) made lots of noise, and the press gave him free publicity; that, rather than radiation reported, is the reason we all remember the 'significant accident'.
The traditional "market" thinking would have excess capacity drive prices down. So, the calculus for how much excess "makes sense" is biased. Why not build a few "extra" nukes -- that may be underutilized?
The local utility is offering customers a chance to lock-in rates for an extended period of time (subject to "fine print") in return for financing the deployment of more solar power. I.e., the utility is upset that homeowners are benefitting from the tax breaks and increasingly independent of the utility for their power.
[It's only a matter of time before the "grid tied" option is bypassed and the utility left with no way to ding these individual cogenerators -- nor benefit from the excess capacity that they provide!]
It is one of the most simplistic energy schemes around. It is rather the Vanadium battery version of clock weights. The storage capacity is not dependent on the power level, so whatever power level is designed in can be produced for a significant amount of time.
Actually, this speaks to the robustness of the scheme. The article says the river basis is in a 15 year drought!!! That shows just how resistant such a scheme is to the vagaries of nature.
That was an interesting read. I noticed Wikipedia says the lake level is presently on the rebound.
Seems to make sense to me. They said the output of the dam is not adjusted to demand. Rather it is set by the demand for water down stream. With unused capacity it seems like an excellent idea to use it for solar energy storage. Too bad we don't have more places like that.
Yes, and it will be built. Every journey starts with a single step. That doesn't mean you are making any sort of reasonable argument. It just means you don't understand what is being discussed very well.
You could make the same argument about any one generating station, that it is far too small to be significant in the grand scheme, so why build it? Please stop being silly.
I think you will find the instrumentation is not the lion's share of the costs. A good friend used to design the pumps that are used for nukes. Then he got a job with the power company as the guy who signed off on the pumps in a reactor. There was no appreciable cost difference from what was sold to the sewage facilities. The process of verifying the pump would function the way they wanted them to function was a lot more extensive. With the other pumps they mostly cared about the power used to drive them, the efficiency. So any difference in the design process which was the expensive part was the safety issue.
You seem to have a very limited ability to understand how quickly things can change when the costs start coming down. In ten years i expect to see a ten fold increase in battery grid storage... well, in advanced countries.
Radioactive particles from Chernobyl showed up in Sweden two days after the disaster
"In fact, the initial evidence in other countries that a major release of radioactive material had occurred came not from Soviet sources, but from Sweden, where on 28 April (two days after the disaster itself) workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant (approximately 1100 km from the Chernobyl site) were found to have radioactive particles on their clothing."
"Before the accident, the rate of thyroid cancer in children in Belarus was less than 1 per million. By 1995, nine years after the disaster, the number of cases of pediatric thyroid cancer in Gomel Oblast rose to 100 per million per year."
A month is 31 days, roughly four I-131 half lives, which means that the level is down to 6.25% of the original value.
Clearly, enough I-131 got into thyroid glands to cause a lot thyroid cancers. You may not want to talk about it, but it did happen.
The first knowledge of the cloud seems to have come from Sweden, two days after the event. The cloud would have made it to the UK in another day or two, at most.
You do seem to be coming across as the kind of idiot who knows a lot about a specific area, and imagines that this expertise generalises.
You conviction that the radiation from Chernobyl wasn't a real problem seems to be based on ideology rather than facts (which you don't seem to have much of a grasp of). That makes yours' the "religious" convictions, not mine.
At that time I worked for our German institute of destructionless material testing, nice neutral name, ( our group did ultrasonics to check the inner confinement of nuclear power plants) and some of us had access to the unfiltered news about the incident. The result was that nuclear power itself is OK, the problem is the people. But people are required.
Just like Chernobyl, where a group of rookies simulated a power outage that turned real on a night shift without adult supervision.
There also was a core meltdown in Lucens, Switzerland, were they were lucky in that it happened inside a mountain. They could keep it under the carpet, so to say.
And from a hill close-by I can see the French reactor at Chattenom, stone age technology with twice its projected life up to now. With mostly wind from the west here in central Europe, I guess I can feel really comfy at home.
Near Vienna, they have the wold's most secure nuclear power plant. They rejected no cost whatever to make it really, positively absolutely safe, only to never switch it on. It is now a boot camp for training people under realistic conditions.
They bought their energy from Chernobyl, then. Good move.
I just gave the example I can give from personal experience. I think it demonstrates how the system works and why the costs are sky high. Of course I know my instrumentation is not the most expensive part.
I would share that expectation of yours of course. By twofold I meant capacity per volume unit of a battery, like most of us here I think
18650 or AA cells. Tenfold overall storage capacity increase given todays trends is to be expected, obviously. But this is still nowhere near what it takes to back up a country the size of the UK.
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