Rolls-Royce Plans To Build Up To 15 Mini Nuclear Reactors In Britain (newatlas.com) 347
Rolls-Royce has announced that it plans to build, install, and operate up to 15 mini nuclear reactors in Britain, with the first set to go online in nine years. New Atlas reports: In a BBC Radio 4 interview with business journalist Katie Prescott on January 24, 2020's Today program, Paul Stein, chief technology officer for Rolls-Royce, said that the company is leading a consortium to produce factory-built modular nuclear reactors that can be delivered for assembly by ordinary lorries. Rolls-Royce believes that its consortium has got its sums right and can restart Britain's nuclear industry by building up to 15 Small Modular Reactors (SMR) with an expected value to the UK economy of $68 billion, another $327 billion in exports, and 40,000 new jobs by 2050.
Each power station is projected to have a service life of 60 years and generate 440 MW of electricity, or enough to power a city the size of Leeds. The estimated cost of the electricity generated is $78 per MWh. According to a previous press release from Rolls-Royce, the British government has already promised 18 million British pounds in matching funds, or about half the present costs of the endeavor, with the consortium partners providing the rest. Prescott says that the advantage of the Rolls-Royce plan is that it doesn't involve building a whole new reactor, as other companies have tried to do, but rather to adapt a present design. In addition, the reactors will be built along manufacturing lines rather than civil construction, which the company claims will drive down costs rather than inflating them.
Each power station is projected to have a service life of 60 years and generate 440 MW of electricity, or enough to power a city the size of Leeds. The estimated cost of the electricity generated is $78 per MWh. According to a previous press release from Rolls-Royce, the British government has already promised 18 million British pounds in matching funds, or about half the present costs of the endeavor, with the consortium partners providing the rest. Prescott says that the advantage of the Rolls-Royce plan is that it doesn't involve building a whole new reactor, as other companies have tried to do, but rather to adapt a present design. In addition, the reactors will be built along manufacturing lines rather than civil construction, which the company claims will drive down costs rather than inflating them.
The first one will be built in Nimbyham (Score:2)
IOW, I doubt it.
Re:The first one will be built in Nimbyham (Score:5, Informative)
IOW, I doubt it.
Answer is in TFA: the first ones will be build at existing nuclear power sites, replacing old reactors.
And by the way, at 440MW electrical, these are small traditional reactors, not what I'd call "mini".
The Russian floating power stations are mini, with 70MW from 2 rectors, that were originally designed to power ice-breakers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:The first one will be built in Nimbyham (Score:4, Funny)
"Answer is in TFA:"
I couldn't possible read that, I'm not a newbie.
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I don't know where the USA gets its fascination with Grey Poupon from, most Brits have never even heard of the stuff.
Re:The first one will be built in Nimbyham (Score:4, Informative)
In the 1980s, Grey Poupon produced a commercial campaign that was a masterpiece of advertising. The ads not only boosted sales directly but built the brand even further as they became a meme and were endlessly parodied by comedians. Although Grey Poupon mustard is available in any grocery store and is not particularly expensive, the product was positioned as a snobby prestige brand consumed by the extremely wealthy.
When Americans want to portray a snobby rich person, he usually rides in a chauffered Rolls Royce and has an exaggerated British accent. So the ads wouldn't go over so well in the UK.
See What Brexit does (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:See What Brexit does (Score:5, Interesting)
They're gearing up for increased electricity prices due to Brexit. The UK is a net importer of energy. In addition, every EU country is a net importer of energy.
The UK can no longer count on fair prices on energy that comes in through Europe.
Rolls Royce believes that they're going to be able to make money generating electricity at a cost of 7 cents per KWh.
As a point of comparison, I'm paying 5 cents for 100% renewable electricity, and another 6 cents for delivery. Delivery costs should be comparable in the UK. But you have to add profits on top of that 7 cents for production.
This is only profitable because of Brexit. Also, in 10 years Scotland will probably not be in the UK, so there goes most of their domestic production. I'm sure Scotland will be willing to negotiate a transition period, and wait a couple years before gouging the English, but high prices will come. Scotland will be the only net exporter in the EU.
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They're gearing up for increased electricity prices due to Brexit. The UK is a net importer of energy. In addition, every EU country is a net importer of energy.
The UK can no longer count on fair prices on energy that comes in through Europe.
Rolls Royce believes that they're going to be able to make money generating electricity at a cost of 7 cents per KWh.
As a point of comparison, I'm paying 5 cents for 100% renewable electricity, and another 6 cents for delivery. Delivery costs should be comparable in the UK. But you have to add profits on top of that 7 cents for production.
This is only profitable because of Brexit. Also, in 10 years Scotland will probably not be in the UK, so there goes most of their domestic production. I'm sure Scotland will be willing to negotiate a transition period, and wait a couple years before gouging the English, but high prices will come. Scotland will be the only net exporter in the EU.
In other words the UK created the Brexit mess which is affecting energy prices and now they have live with it and they don't like it. Sounds like the motto of British politics post Brexit will be the same as that of British politics pre-Brexit: "... we may have done this stupid shit ourselves but it is everybody's fault except ours".
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> every EU country is a net importer of energy.
Hmm, you've switched from electricity to energy, which are completely different things. I'm not sure how Brexit has affected the cost of gas/oil within the UK, but i'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with leaving the EU.
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>"They're gearing up for increased electricity prices due to Brexit."
And/or they are gearing up for increased independence and security. Perfectly sensible either way.
>"The UK can no longer count on fair prices on energy that comes in through Europe."
Because the EU will try to "punish" Britain? Perhaps when the EU loses the revenue from exporting to the UK, the prices in the EU will go up, also. So it isn't in the EU's best interest to gouge the UK to the point of losing a "customer."
>"As a poin
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And how much are you paying for the non-renewable, non-nuclear energy needed to back up wind/solar?
You know, someone ought to think of a way to store energy. Initial methods might be hydraulic or even battery. Yeah, we're waiting for someone to think of a way to do that sort of thing.
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You know, someone ought to think of a way to store energy. Initial methods might be hydraulic or even battery. Yeah, we're waiting for someone to think of a way to do that sort of thing.
Going circles. I'd like that before having batteries, we could have a reliable and cheap method to dispose those batteries. Like we should have had an actual disposal method for PV panels and wind turbines [npr.org], before building them in the millions. The actual solution is the usual solution: "let's throw them at the market, the market will take care of them". That "solution" never worked and it won't work this time either.
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Perhaps the blades can be dumped in the same lakes they put coal slurry in? (that's a joke)
That [argusleader.com] is [bloomberg.com] not [opb.org].
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We have figured out batteries.
now if only someone could figure out how to get those batteries, in the quantities required, without costing the earth figuratively and literally.
Storage need is massive to support renewables, the cost is next to impossible by any short-term measure.
Re:See What Brexit does (Score:4, Informative)
Delivery costs are far lower in the UK than the US due to the smaller distances involved. I read that it was 17% of the retail cost of electricity.
The current retail price of electricity in the UK is 17 cents/kWh, so 17% of that equates to a delivery cost of just under 3 cents/kWh. If your figure of 7 cents per kWh is accurate, Rolls Royce should be able to deliver that power for way under 17 cents per kWh.
I would argue that these reactors would be capable of being profitable regardless of Brexit.
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Transmission losses in the USA are around 4%. That's not nothing, but it's not any 17%.
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The 17% was related to the total cost of transmission, not to electrical transmission losses. Although having checked some other sources, that still seems too high.
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"delivery costs" are not just transmission, but include profits, staff, maintenance, etc etc. That 17% is the total running cost of the infrastructure that gets electricity from the supplier to your outlets.
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This is only profitable because of Brexit.
There is absolutely no way that Brexit is going to mess up the international electricity markets that involve the UK. £70/MWh is not going to be competitive in the open market.
Rolls Royce saw Hinkley Point C get £92.50/MWh plus inflation, and they are reasonably confident that they can beat that figure. The UK needs to keep a civilian nuclear industry going in order to keep a sufficient talent pool for its military nuclear needs (primarily submarine propulsion). Doing that at £70/MWh is be
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There's also all those green commitments - the gov has to have nuclear, at any price, because they have committed themselves to reducing CO2 emissions, and while renewables help, they cannot provide the full supply as they are by their very nature, somewhat intermittent. So nuclear is the only other option, as its less costly than massive amounts of battery storage.
I'm hoping this is the first stpes for RR, and that they'll start to produce SMRs using Thorium or other reactors that can be safer and more pow
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while renewables help, they cannot provide the full supply as they are by their very nature, somewhat intermittent.
Luckily load is intermittent too.
Which is why nuclear needs to be extremely cheap to be useful. Nuclear needs load to be constant, otherwise the already terrible price per kWh gets worse by the load factor. You can solve that with storage, but nuclear does not produce extra in UK winter when demand is highest, unlike wind. That means it needs more storage than wind. If you have the storage anyway, you may as well use the cheapest production -- in the UK, that is wind.
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Peak demand is a daily thing - 4pm to 7pm prices rise massively. Load simply has to be present at those times, and unless we generate a guaranteed amount all the time to meet those peaks, we're screwed.
Storage would be the best bet, and I think that's why they're calling for EVs to be used as batteries... they're wrong in that those cars will not be storing to cope with that peak hours - they'll be empty after the commute home. This is also why they're pushing fo rmsart meters, to try and spread the demand
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Scotland will never leave the UK, although there's a very loud clamouring for independance from a very small minority with vested interests in getting power for themselves, the majority know that they'd never be able to sustain their standard of living from what they have (whisky and oil, and we know where oil is going) without the funding they get from Westminster. And the majority of Scots aren't racist morons who hate the English
As for "fair prices from Europe", that's nonsense. Right now we get loads of
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Yes, that energy that comes in through Europe by means of dozens of high-tension wires... right over the Channel! Wait, what?
No, the high tension cables run underwater. And there aren't that many of them; still the UK is a net importer of electricity.
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The relevant price is the non-household electricity price in the UK. That price according to this graphic from the article [europa.eu] equates to 100 Euros per MWh, of $111/MWh. So they are projecting a power cost that it is competitive with, in fact undersells, current UK prices.
The cost of power in the UK appears to be rather high. The average wholesale cost of power in the U.S. is about $60/MWh and has been stable in constant dollars for 60 years or more. If installed here, these units would require a subsidy to be
40+ years in the making (Re:See What Brexit does) (Score:3)
So 1 minute after Brexit the UK is gearing up for higher energy demand and investment?
There's been people begging for nuclear power in UK for decades. This goes back to PM Thatcher in the 1980s, if not earlier.
https://www.margaretthatcher.o... [margaretthatcher.org]
Re:See What Brexit does (Score:4, Insightful)
All parties ran on a green and independent energy platform. It seems they are trying to deliver on the actual reduction of CO2 emissions with working solutions.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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If they're going to stick to their policy goal of phasing coal out and banning fracking for natural gas, they're going to need a lot more nuclear power. Wind and sun remain intermittent, and batteries aren't improving fast enough. The UK isn't going to fuck up their grid like Australia did.
-jcr
So just install enough wind, solar and grid storage capacity to account for that. It will still be cheaper than coal and gas. Whatever little margin of competitiveness you may get from fracking gas will be eaten up by market fluctuations and the colossal un-profitability of coal.
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The grid storage capacity part is the problem.
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Not enough land without nuclear (Re:Necessary.) (Score:3)
There's not enough land area in the UK to collect enough wind, water, and sun to meet their energy needs.
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
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There's not enough land anywhere to collect enough wind and sun. The US would need to fill California, Germany is having to import coal power from Russia.
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There's not enough land anywhere to collect enough wind and sun. The US would need to fill California
So there is enough land, then.
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Yep! For hundreds of trillions of dollars, we can make it happen - absent backup/storage.
Or we can spend less than a trillion dollars, build a hundred large nuclear plants, and be done with it (no storage needed).
Re:Not enough land without nuclear (Re:Necessary.) (Score:5, Informative)
There's not enough land anywhere to collect enough wind and sun. The US would need to fill California, Germany is having to import coal power from Russia.
You must think California is a lot smaller than it really is. According to MIT: [mit.edu]
As an example, we consider supplying all of U.S. electricity demand in the year 2050, projected to total roughly 4,400 TWh (or 0.5 TW averaged over the course of a year), with PV.24 The land area that must be dedicated to PV in this case is indeed large — roughly 33,000 square kilometers (km2), or 0.4% of the land area of the United States.
FYI, California has an area of approximately 423,970 km2, so installing solar on 8% of its land would be enough to power the entire US.
Re:Not enough land without nuclear (Re:Necessary.) (Score:4, Informative)
FYI, California has an area of approximately 423,970 km2, so installing solar on 8% of its land would be enough to power the entire US.
How much would this cost for an equivalent generation capacity from nuclear power?
For equivalent this means taking into account capacity factor and the ability to meet peak demands. An often stated solution for wind power to meet peak demands is batteries. Well, batteries don't care if the electricity used to charge them is from wind or nuclear. What utilities want to do is provide low cost and highly reliable power to customers. This will require some nuclear power for many parts of the world. The few places that might be able to abandon nuclear power and reach a net-zero carbon economy are those blessed with ample access to hydro and geothermal power. The rest of the world will need some nuclear power.
Oh, and a citation to back up my claims on cost. Look at the raw material needs of nuclear power compared to other near zero carbon alternatives.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
We can bring labor, engineering, and other costs to very low levels with economy of scale. What remains is raw material costs, and nuclear power has an advantage on this that is an order of magnitude wide.
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The area of the UK is ~250000km2. Wind power potential in the area is usually considered at around 3 W/m2 as a yearly average, or 3 MW/km2. That is 750GW in total just for the UK land mass.
However, on-shore wind expansion is mostly done already, so ignore that. Offshore, the UK has ~750000km2 in its exclusive economic zone. There is no particular reason that wind turbines cannot be placed in international waters as well, but let us stick with that number just to be conservative. That is a staggering 2250GW.
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How much will this cost?
The answer is about 10 times that of nuclear power.
With economy of scale we can bring costs of labor, engineering, and more to far less than we pay now. What remains as a cost that cannot be brought to near zero on scale is material costs. The material costs for wind, solar, and nearly everything else is far higher than nuclear power, and this is not likely to change.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
Does this mean we should not use *ANY* wind, solar, or hydro power? Absolutely not
Re:Not enough land without nuclear (Re:Necessary.) (Score:4, Interesting)
How much will this cost?
Right, so your argument is "there is not enough room", I refute it, and your answer to the refutation is "how much will this cost?"
The answer to "how much will it cost" is around £25/MWh currently, falling 10% or more per year. Iron is both cheap and plentiful, and if we run out we can switch to aluminium which is even more plentiful. Of course, that would require a cheap source of power for aluminium production.
l maintain that there is not enough land area in UK for wind and solar power to meet the energy needs of the UK
Right, so I refute your argument and you sidetrack the discussion and then restate your original, refuted, premise.
And then you bring up, of all things, eagles. Eagle population in Denmark has been approximately directly correlated with installed wind capacity.
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Nuclear power will always be an important part of the UK's National Grid.
The UK are still building new CCGT (gas fired) plants and wind farms. I know wind power is sometimes scorned on Slashdot, but in combination with CCGT it is surprisingly effective.
Have a look at Britain's current power levels:
https://www.gridwatch.templar.... [templar.co.uk]
Coal 0.75GW (2.36%)
Nuclear 6.32GW (19.85%)
CCGT 4.20GW (13.19%)
Wind 11.39GW (35.78%)
Wind power is doing well at the moment, so most of the UK's CCGT stations are currently powered d
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The UK are still building new CCGT (gas fired) plants and wind farms. I know wind power is sometimes scorned on Slashdot, but in combination with CCGT it is surprisingly effective.
Yes, it is. What this also does is produce a lot of CO2.
When the wind blows, the UK can stop burning gas for a while.
Then when the wind stops they have to warm up the turbines again, burning gas in the process, during this warm up period they produce no power.
What can happen with this continual cycling of natural gas turbines is that there is no net savings in CO2 emissions compared to if they burned coal. Even if this is better than coal this is still worse than nuclear power.
Nuclear will always be the gold standard, but having several different types of power generation is no bad thing.
I don't know where people get this idea that being pro-nuclear power equates to being ant
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Re:Necessary. (Score:5, Interesting)
maybe they should deal with this potentially unsafe storage issue before expanding the nuclear option...
Maybe we should do more than one thing at once.
The article you linked to shows how the EPA proposes to solve this problem. This is a link I pulled from RTFA -> https://www.epa.gov/radiation/... [epa.gov]
Here's an idea, let's listen to the experts on how to safely store this waste while we move on to building next generation nuclear power plants. Many of these power plant designers claim to be able to destroy much of this waste. If it works then we turned a trillion dollar problem into a profit producer. Oh, and it also solves many of our energy problems. If it fails then we added a minuscule amount of additional waste to an already very large problem that will not go away on it's own. There is a gamble with a very small downside with an immeasurable upside.
The arguments to abandon nuclear power are tired and old, and often do not apply to nuclear power as it is done today. Nuclear waste is not only a solvable problem, it's already been solved. We know how to do this, all we need to do is to decide to act on it.
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Yes, it is. What this also does is produce a lot of CO2.
That's true, but the quantity of CO2 produced is relatively small when compared to a fuel source like coal. Natural gas produces roughly 50% less CO2 than coal.
If you calculated how much CO2 the CCGT stations produce specifically when covering for a shortfall in wind power, I think that the combination of wind and CCGT would be much less CO2 than the coal equivalent. I'm guessing something like 20% compared to pure coal.
Also, does the UK necessarily care if it produces some CO2? From a political point of vi
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If you calculated how much CO2 the CCGT stations produce specifically when covering for a shortfall in wind power, I think that the combination of wind and CCGT would be much less CO2 than the coal equivalent. I'm guessing something like 20% compared to pure coal.
How about instead of guessing you search out the answer. Not only is the world wide web a vast resource to mine for such information but I've pointed you to this information before.
Look again:
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
Since methane has such a powerful GWP, a 1.6% leak rate wipes out 40% of the climate benefits we hope to derive from gas-backed wind and solar: 1.6 is 40% of 4, and 4% is the Worth-It Threshold for gas-backed renewables.
As RFK Jr correctly points out,
virtually all of our large wind and solar farms are backed by gas. What he doesnâ(TM)t mention is that with a 4% leak in the methane infrastructure, gas-backed renewables simply arenâ(TM)t worth the trouble.
In fact, you might as well be burning coal for all the good itâ(TM)ll do (global-warming-wise, not total-pollution-wise: Methane is a lot cleaner than coal.)
It's true that the CO2 emissions would be lower but the total greenhouse gas emissions are not any better than coal. As pointed out there's other benefits to natural gas over coal, less pollution in the air and water being the biggest. Noted elsewhere in that webpage is that the ind
Airplanes, Trains, and Automobiles (Score:2)
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France is full of nuclear-powered high-speed trains.
Technically, you could put a reactor in a train. You could easily fit reactor, generator, motor, shielding - everything in one car.
You could probably make it passively cool in a crash - only needs a few megawatts, so no chance of a Fukashima accident.
But it is just so much easier and cheaper to run over-head power lines from the grid.
Cars? I don't think anyone has ever figured out how to make a shielded fission reactor that small.
But you could have a plut
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What about a nuclear powered personal jet pack? They promised us jet packs at the same time as flying cars.
I don't understand the fascination with jet packs. People have built them, so this isn't a fantasy. What they offer is an uncomfortable and horribly unsafe ride. The view may be obstructed only by one's visor, much like on a motorcycle or snow machine. What is far safer, far more comfortable, and far more practical for long distance travel in nearly any weather is an aircraft with an enclose cabin.
It used to be that only the extremely wealthy could afford a trip in a "flying car". Even then this was of
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Who "promised?" How was the "promise" phrased?
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They promised us mini nuclear reactors for our cars too.
With SMRs and synthesized hydrocarbons you just might get it. From a certain point of view.
I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:2)
$78/MWhr is about double the average wholesale rate of where I live. And, on top of that, nuclear costs tend to end up many times over the estimates.
Re:I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
$78/MWhr is about double the average wholesale rate of where I live.
Yours is an unsustainable price base on squandering a limited resource, and does not include externalities, particularly the cost to the world of carbon emissions.
(Unless you are lucky enough to be somewhere with cheap hydroelectricity, but they are not making more of those.)
Re:I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:5, Informative)
It's way higher than on-shore wind. Actually they are building offshore wind subsidy free now, at a lower per MWh price than that.
Re:I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you include the gas powered backup in the cost of the wind? Even if it only has to run a small amount of the time, it still needs to be there.
For the moment we can use surpluses of existing reliable power as backup of renewables so the costs are mostly ignored. As enough reliable power goes out of commission at some point the cost of building new reliable power will have to be added to the costs of intermittent power.
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Yes the total cost of wind is lower. They don't use gas powered backup for most of it, they just have geographic distribution and the wind never stops blowing. Especially off shore it's constant.
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Tell that to Germany, they built out more than 100% of their needed in wind and solar yet only increased dependency/usage by 13%. Most of it gets exported as surplus to steel factories and neighboring countries, in the mean time, they are importing coal power from Russia while costs for electricity in Germany went up to 25c/kWh.
Re:I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:4, Informative)
In 2019, Germany produced 40% of its electricity from renewables (244 TWh). For hard coal it is 56.0 TWh which is down from 107.9 TWh ten years ago. Lignite (which is domestic) was 114 TWh in 2019, down from 145.6 TWh in 2009. Source: https://www.bdew.de/media/docu... [www.bdew.de]
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40% "on average", which is meaningless when you need the power generated but the renewables aren't supplying it.
the wholesale price fluctuates massively - in the UK, we can get wholesale prices for electrictity at negative levels occasionally, becuase there is too much supply at times of no demand, and they end up having to pay you to take it away. This situation is increasingly common as renewables generate when they want, rather than when the customer wants.
Meanwhile, at peak demand times (4pm to 7pm) the
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Look at the bloody map. Germany does not have a border with Russia hence we are physically unable to import electrical power from there.
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The CCGT stations are already built, it's a sunk cost. Collectively they can provide 32GW, UK peak demand is 52.7GW.
The UK used to produce almost all its own natural gas from the North Sea, which is why the UK now has so much CCGT capacity.
Re: I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:2)
"sellers" of fossil fuels largely get ripped off by the nature of getting assassinated if they try and get a half decent deal for their population. The guys that make money on fossil fuels are the refiners, who started investing heavily in "green" aka "renewable" aka "free" energy as soon as assassinating people became harder. most of the climate change nonsense is just them funding psy warfare to justify their malinvestments, if they had been allowed to do nuclear sooner the world wouldnt be in half the me
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It's way higher than on-shore wind.
Until you need storage, which you do if you're going to get rid of fossil fuels completely. Wind needs to be supplemented by other options for windless days.
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On windless and sunless days you avoid charging (most of) the electric cars, and for heating you use the hot water stored in huge tanks. It will require a significant overbuild and some battery storage, but even if that doubles the price of renewables, it is still cheaper than £70/MWh.
(Before you tell me the heat storage is impossible, Denmark already has solar heat collectors used in summer that store the heat for winter. With a simple electric heater added to that facility, you can store wind power
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It's way higher than on-shore wind. Actually they are building offshore wind subsidy free now, at a lower per MWh price than that.
That's nice... until the wind stops.
If you are going to say that batteries will fill in this gap of power generation then I must ask, how much will those batteries add to the electricity costs?
Studies on this have been done and the conclusion is that powering UK from wind, water, and sun is "an appalling delusion".
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
There's people that did the math for the USA, and they came to the same conclusion.
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.co... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
I didn't save a link for it but this is also tr
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Have you ever been to the North Sea? The wind doesn't stop blowing.
Maybe you could name a day in the past where it has if you disagree. Should be simple to find some data on that.
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Have you ever been to the North Sea? The wind doesn't stop blowing.
Maybe you could name a day in the past where it has if you disagree. Should be simple to find some data on that.
Here you go:
https://www.meteoblue.com/en/w... [meteoblue.com]
From may until August you can expect 1-2 days per month with wind speeds under 12 km/h, at which point you have zero electrical generation. Additionally you can expect 5-6 days with wind speeds of under 19 km/h, at which point you'll be generating some electricity, but not much.
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May until August are not interesting in this area. The power consumption at that time is much less than half what is required in winter. Solar overproduces at that time anyway.
And yes if you look at purely electric power usage right now, the difference between summer and winter are less pronounced. However, the UK has plenty of natural gas and plenty of gas fired power stations that can ramp up and down quickly. For the next decade, "storage" will consist of firing up those already built power stations once
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I found some numbers on wind power output in the UK.
https://energynumbers.info/uk-... [energynumbers.info]
If I'm reading that chart right wind power production is less than 20% rated capacity 30% of the time. The best annual average capacity factors out of a wind farm is somewhere around 50%, and the fleet average is likely somewhere between 35% and 40%. The times that power output drops to zero will be rare, perhaps it will never happen. The problem is that with this kind of variability, and an insufficient supply of cheap
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I don't think anybody suggested that the UK was going to abandon nuclear power. The UK has more nuclear power than the US (21% vs 19.8%). I'm not arguing against nuclear.
I pointed out in another post that CCGT balances out wind power, but you haven't responded. If there is a flaw in my reasoning, please let me know.
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I pointed out in another post that CCGT balances out wind power, but you haven't responded.
I have responded.
If there is a flaw in my reasoning, please let me know.
There are many. I'm getting rather tired of repeating myself on pointing out the flaws in any plans for nations like UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, and so on, to supply the power they need from only wind, water, and sun. The answer is long and complicated. And it will take a lot of reading on your part to make this clear. I'll post the links again but I have my doubts you, or anyone else living in this fantasy, will read them.
https://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
https://www.theguardian.c [theguardian.com]
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Dr. David MacKay was a very intelligent and respected scientist
Dr. David MacKay went a bit loopy in this later years. This is unfortunately not uncommon among scientists (or among non-scientists for that matter). Just look at Stephen Hawkings for the last ten years.
Generally for a new paradigm to be accepted in science, the old guard needs to die off.
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I refuted Dr MacKay in another post already. As you already know, since you answered me.
Your argument was: "Dr. David MacKay was a very intelligent and respected scientist". That is an argument to authority. Unfortunately said authority went loopy in later years.
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Britain balances its wind power with CCGT (gas). When the wind blows, the UK spins down its CCGT stations. When there is little wind, the UK fires up the CCGT again.
Right now:
Wind 11.09GW (35.87%)
CCGT 3.86GW (12.48%)
But the installed capacity of CCGT allows for 25-30GW to be fired up on demand. So if there was somehow no wind at all, it would be easy for the UK to make up the difference.
This website shows real-time power production of the UK's National Grid, I find it very interesting:
https://www.gridwatch. [templar.co.uk]
Re:I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:4, Funny)
Re: I gather the UK has expensive electricity (Score:2)
where do you live and why is it relevent?
UK wholesale electricity averaged $90MWh last month.
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Energy pricing is not a zero sum game, cheaper is not always 'better' if you are building up environmental debt.
yup bury the waste underneath Parliament (Score:3)
I'd like to see the executives at Rolls Royce indemnify everyone for as long as the waste lasts ... just more rich people looking to make money from a situation they can't really be held accountable for ... again.
Re:yup bury the waste underneath Parliament (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see the executives at Rolls Royce indemnify everyone for as long as the waste lasts ....
Are you going to apply the same standards to carbon emissions? Or are you just going off-grid?
Why can't people understand the simple inverse relationship between radiation intensity, and half-life?
Carbon-12 has a longer half-life than uranium, OMG!
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I'd like to see the executives at Rolls Royce indemnify everyone for as long as the waste lasts ....
Are you going to apply the same standards to carbon emissions? Or are you just going off-grid?
Why can't people understand the simple inverse relationship between radiation intensity, and half-life?
Carbon-12 has a longer half-life than uranium, OMG!
Yes, actually, I would, and heat, after all, sustainability ultimately means zero emissions / zero net heat ... with billions of people all you have to do is math to see that even a small amount of heat and pollution per person quickly adds up to eventually lethal toxic concentrations given sufficient time, and yes, if people had better options, many wouldn't be so much on the grid anyways ... indeed, people can't easily get off the grid, but companies can make endpoints of the grid much less energy reliant
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Yes we should apply this standard to all pollution and hazardous waste.
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Not to mention the hundreds of thousand of cases of cancer caused annually worldwide, with about 7000 deaths in the U.S. alone, due to ionizing radiation from that giant nuclear reactor in the sky, i.e. the sun.
Our path is clear: we must shut down the sun.
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Our path is clear: we must shut down the sun.
Yes sir, Mr. Burns!
Re:yup bury the waste underneath Parliament (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yup bury the waste underneath Parliament (Score:5, Insightful)
"Providing 440MW from wind means using around 44 square miles of land"
Bollocks. The land a nuclear plant is on can't be used for anything else. There land a wind farm is on can still be used for agriculture. The windmills only use little pieces of it. The only reason that's not always the case is that some wind farms are sited in locations which aren't good for anything but wind farms, which is a pure win.
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If that was the only reason then it wouldn't be normal to see wind turbines on single use land in the midlands of Britain which are used extensively for agriculture; but it is, so I assume when you wrote bollocks you were indicating what was about to follow. It's also "bollocks" to think of land as good for nothing but wind. The land may be
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Bah, facts! The nuclear fanatics do not care for facts!
In other news, renewables are ready, storage is possible (they are _optimizing_ at this time, not finding out how to do it...), and the whole mess could be solved. But some deeply evil and greedy people keep pushing nuclear and find a lot of useful idiots cheering them on.
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Then I suppose you'd hold the people who stop nuclear facilities from being built responsible for the lives lost as well?
"Sir, your protest delayed the building of the reactor by three years. That has resulted in the burning of an additional 13 millions tons of coal, causing an estimated 17 premature deaths per year. I hereby sentence you to 51 life sentences to be served consecutively."
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The article does mention it. They're planning to build them on the sites of existing nuclear power plants, particularly those that have been or are being decommissioned. The UK had plenty of MAGNOX reactors and various experimental designs. RR has plenty of locations already set up for nuclear generation.
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No, they are still in the process of selecting the sites:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/... [futurism.com]
TFA states that the UK government have committed to paying for 50% of the funding, so it seems very likely that they will get the go-ahead on a national level. Getting approval from local authorities may be more difficult - however, the promise of jobs and investment will probably be enough to persuade many of them.
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Does this "plan" actually have a construction site? Have they received approval to build one of these systems anywhere?
This "plan" is at the "let us have some government money for fleshing it out properly" stage. They are not anywhere near ready for site selection or approval.
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Don't forget to read some newspapers that don't hate everything when coming to your conclusions. The Guardian,lol. They're still shouting about tax havens, whilst using a tax haven.