The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.

Wouldn't it be easier to have the entire distribution network using DC?

just saying with a glass of wine in my hand :-)

The Times of London published an article today:

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Joe

A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools forever.

Why? It's very safe when done carefully.

The little modular reactors sound cool.

Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important. While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it much, much worse.

The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one reactor out of four.(*)

One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about

If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more. And that's just one installation.

Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*)

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pay wall.

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Anyway, government denies that a risk of total blackout had been highlighted on any report.

That's probably correct, but it wouldn't be cheaper. It's probably true that taking DC down to the sub-station level could be cheaper, with today's technology, if you were starting from scratch, but since that kit is already there you would be throwing away a lot of big expensive transformers from the next level up, and replacing them with a lot of big, expensive - if less expensive - inverters. It would take a lot of capital investment to make the switch, and the people who operate the grid are adminstrators rather than entrepreneurs.

That doesn't do anything about the fission products which are a bunch of isotopes of about half the atomic weight of uranium. Some of them have short half-lives, and are very radioactive and some of them have longer half-lives and have to be managed for longer periods, out to about a few hundred thousand years

Over a hundred thousands years or so deep holes can't be relied on to stay buried. Subduction zones are - by definition - geologically unstable, and there's no guarantee that your chosen target will keep on subducting.

Nuclear power is neither cheap nor safe. Nuclear policy is pretty much driven by people who want nuclear weapons and nuclear powered submarines. The US has nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, but they wouldn't last long in a modern war. U-235-fuelled nuclear reactors are a source of plutonium, and any electric power they generate is bonus.

The absence of thorium reactors is a bit of a give-away.

Nobody does. Nuclear reactors are a useful source of medically useful isotope - Australia has just one for that job, though it is also exploited as a neutron source. I got interviewed for a job to upgrade their neutron diffraction system - they'd bough the original from France thirty years ago. I didn't get the job, which was a bit of a relief. In the 1980's I worked on a French shaped beam electron beam microfabricator, and hadn't been impressed by the engineering.

Except when something unexpected goes wrong, as it did at Fukushima

The US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers have relied on them for decades. It's odd that there's never been a civilian version. "Sounding cool" doesn't get you through a design review.

The fact that those reactors rely on much more heavily enriched (weapons=grade) uranium that civil nuclear reactors may come into it.

You trust your government *not* to lie about such things? How quaint!!

It conflicts with this popular media source and other tech sources:

Not really. I distrust all, and I distrust more the opposition from the right wingers :-)

You have to notice the wording. The government does not deny warnings; they deny having received a warning of a total zero. The minister actually stressed this point in the speech.

The government, being left wing, will naturally not trust a warning coming from right wing sources that goes against renewables or in favour of nuclear, as biased and interested.

Transporting nuclear waste long distances is dangerous.

Pools are a temporary solution till someone develops a permanent solution. Nobody has, in decades.

Everybody does it carefully, yet there are accidents with consequences. Fukushima, Chernobyl, and many others. And close encounters or near misses.

I'm just thinking that adding sources to a DC distribution network is easier: the voltage just rises or drops. Possibly it autoregulates.

But of course, we have a huge installed system, replacing it would be terribly expensive.

Another very wild idea was increasing the frequency to around 600Hz. It would make transformers and all coiled things smaller. Planes do this. Possibly would also radiate more. And would not help with control.

Thinking again. Would it be possible to have even the rotating mass generators connect via inverters? I mean, the inverters would inject power always at the exact frequency no matter what. The voltage could vary, but the frequency would be stuck.

Of course, I know basically nothing of power generation/distribution, so don't take me too seriously :-)

Sounds like a perfect recipe to blow things up. No individual generator can pretend to force the grid. Either they track or they trip.

Driving power into the grid only makes sense in reference to what is happening at the injection point.

Jeroen Belleman

Yes! Now convince the populace and the politicians.

Jeroen Belleman

I'll believe it is used to monitor the parameters at key locations in "realtime", update set points and try to reset tripped breakers.

Pretty much guaranteed to cause trouble when the national grid is of a size and power level such that it behaves like a true transmission line even at 50/60Hz. ISTR it limits supergrid power handling to ~3GW max.

UK's peak N-S flow is limited by a "thermal constraint" on some insignificant location not far from where the new DC interconnector comes onshore. No explanation is given as to what that really means.

Indeed. And smaller generation systems can just get crushed like flies if they try to stop a rampaging elephant as big GW systems drop offline.

If the system did fail due to local over voltage excursions somewhere and then failed to become stable again after a few suppliers dropped out then their network stability analysis must be appallingly bad.

What are the pros and cons of storing nuclear waste deep underground?

Storing nuclear waste deep underground—typically referred to as **deep geological disposal**—is one of the most researched and widely supported long-term strategies for managing high-level radioactive waste. Here are the **key pros and cons**:

That's not true. Putting it deep underground in a stable and dry layer of rock would be perfectly safe. Finland is doing it, at long last. In other countries, the opposition still wins.

In the Netherlands, there was talk of putting it into underground salt formations. That's folly, in my opinion. Salt is plastic, corrosive and soluble, and people might want to mine it. Fortunately this time, here too the opposition wins.

Jeroen Belleman

That's terrifying. As time goes on, it gets easier to make nukes and to deliver them, and people seem to keep getting crazier.

Even conventional explosives delivered by a swarm of drones could be nasty.