Posts by Alan Brown

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

"not even a fish with three eyes"

Look downstream of coal-burning power stations...

Chemicals are far more potent mutagens than radiation will ever be

How many people died at Banquio?

I'll save you the trouble: 26,000 to 240,000, probably the higher figure being the accurate one

How many people died in the Tsunami that CAUSED Fukushima?

I'll save you the trouble again: about 26,000 - including 3 at the plant

Estimates for Chernobyl back in the 1980s haven't been borne out by statistics and the firefighters' health problems have mainly been caused by a perception that radioactivity is contagious, so being treated like pariahs by the medical establishment and not getting looked after as they aged

Revised estimates for Chernobyl put it around 76 at the time and about 300-500 in the long term

Incidentally, one of the more interesting parts about the thyroid scanning undertaken in the wake of Chernobyl is that similar precursor/abnormality levels were found in unrelated scanning in Korea several years BEFORE Chernobyl

Correlation is not causality and if you go looking for something you've never sought out before, it's a good idea to actually have a control population

Re: Waste

France has the Pyranees, which are very stable

Re: Waste

"Water is better, it can be controlled"

Water can't be used if you want to make supercritical steam to feed your turbines(*)

The viability of the thermal side of your plant cannot be ignored. This low input temperature is why water-moderated nuclear plants are insanely expensive to maintain (most of the cost is in the non-nuclear side, not the reactor)

(*) Think about it - if you want to make water at the triple point for your turbines, then you have water at the triple point inside your reactor vessel == VOIDS - not such a good thing when water is your moderator.

Using a circulating coolant which boils well below the ~1150C limiting temperature of fission reactions is a bad idea from a safety point of view. Using one which explodes on contact with water or burns uncontrollably on contact with air is also a bad move

Nuclear design is full of examples of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD", where secondary safety takes a back seat to "gee, shiny!" or designs which are clearly intended to simply soak up money and practicality isn't a consideration

Re: Waste

"quality british workmanship"

Were they BL management in a past job?

Re: Waste

FBRs assume a weapons cycle

There are other ways which don't NEED heavy reprocessing.

We're locked into cycles and setup which is entirely fixated on products revolving around weapons production

Step back from that to first principles and it gets a lot easier/cheaper/simpler

The problem is that providing the means to divorce civil nuclear power from weaponsmaking dependencies also provides the means to remove the dual-purpose exemptions from limitation treaties that production facilities currently enjoy.

Cold Warriors ensured that anything risking that path was killed. These days the FUD path is chosen, but proliferation claims seem odd when they're objecting to 1-5% of the risk of CURRENT technologies...

Re: thermal power stations which can't sensibly be turned off in such short order.

"Nuclear can only be varied through a narrow range once it is going"

That depends on the nuclear. Designs with solid encapsulated fuel containers are subject to this issue, others are not

Most commercial operators run at full output all the time because it's the only way of even getting CLOSE to paying off the build/operating/shutdown costs.

France built its fleet to ensure energy supplies and independence in the aftermath of the OPEC shocks and load follow to some extent - they're less concerned about "commercial viability"

Re: Waste

".A 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant produces about 27 t of spent nuclear fuel (unreprocessed) every year"

To put this in perspective that people can understand.

Over the 60-year lifetime of a plant, it will produce enough waste to fill a single olympic size swimming pool

By comparison an equivalent coal station will make a 60+ hectare coal ash lake

The coal ash will be toxic forever whilst the nuclear waste will be less radioactive than Granite in 450 years or less

Re: Waste

IFR, FBR and EBR all suffer from the same problem whrn you analyse fuel costs (They use HEU)

$1 billion-plus/kg fuelling isn't economic by anyone's imagination, even with the energy ratio of fission

(see my analysis elsewhere in the comments)

File these under "solutions looking for a problem"

Re: Waste

The Laptev Sea contenental shelf methane clathrate deposiits have been producing kilometre-wide surface plumes for the last 15 years (which was supposed to be "impossible" according to climate modellers. The methane was supposed to disslolve into the water column)

Every year that goes by, the ice on the seafloor gets more destabilised and eventually an earthquake will trigger a submarine slide on par with the Storegga one of 9000 years ago (that's the one that produced the North Sea Tsunami followed by 150-feet sea level rise over the following 3 centuries)

There's ~20Gigatonnes of carbon under Laptev and hundreds more gigatonnes scattered around the arctic

One or two clathrate blowouts is probably surviveable. More than that will push atmospheric CO2 high enough to make rain acidic and start killing off terrestial plantlife (about 800-900ppm), at which point it's "game over most complex life on the planet"

This has happened before. The end of the Permian era was marked with methane clathrate blowouts and CO2 doing the same thing. 95% of all life on earth was dead within a decade.

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

"The increased death rate by radioactivity cannot be measured"

Statisticians will disagree with you. For all intents and purposes the number is zero

Cancers are overwhelmingly caused by chemical factors. It takes a HUGE increase in radiation exposure to cause/encourage cancers and the only population group which comes close (smokers) still aren't particularly susceptable - most lung cancers seem to be down to lead in the lungs, not the polonium precursors

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

MSRs can both go into deep offpeak AND rapidly peak-follow, unlike most nuclear designs. Even better, they can do most of this without operator intervention (self throttling) - essentially they provide a near-constant heat LEVEL input to turbines regardless of loading (it's limited by the turbine, not the reactor)

The really short term stuff can be accomodated with batteries, meanming OCGTs or Dinorygg are obsoleted

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

"the rivers that provide the cooling are being heated up too much"

Yup, right across Europe and the USA, not just France - happens every summer but getting worse

If you don't use water-moderated nuclear then you can have the "hot" side of your heat engines (steam turbines) much hotter than 250C, which means you can have your "cold" side rejecting to atmosphere instead of rivers.

It also means you can go up to 650C and produce dry steam or even ultracritical steam for your turbines, which are both much more efficient as well as having significantly lower maintenance levels (wet steam pits the hell out of turbines)

Conventional Nuclear power plants are expensive to build: because the radioactive water and steam vessel needs containing to ensire contaminated water can't escape to the biosphere

- but they're hideously expensive to RUN (more expensive than burning coal) because they have a _very_ high maintenance cost on the thermal side

- that's due to the input temperature being uneconomically low)

(That same low input temperature is an issue at most geothermal sites too. This is why they seldom have the economics that they're sold on)

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

reserving a couple of football fields means you're still wedded to making nuclear weapons - and in any case that stuff will be less radioactive than granite in 450 years anyway

There are OTHER nuclear paths which produce 1% of the waste (which will be less radioactive than granite in 300 years), solve the existing nuclear waste issue by acting as nuclear garbage disposals and make rare earth mining actually viable by consuming its primary waste product (which is a boon for other technologies)

As a nice side benefit they can also find enough fuel in coal ash slurry lakes that there's money to be made in cleaning up the hundreds of abandoned sites around the world. The TWO biggest environmental disasters in the USA lower 48 so far this century have been power station ash lake dam breaks

Did I mention they also produce prodigious amounts of helium?

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

Greenpeace is a corporate ponzi scam(*)

Bck in the 1980s and 1990s I watched them roll into several places, take credit for other organisations' work and wreck 30 years of negotiation which had been undertaken by locals in less than a week

(*) The original articles of association said that long-term members would obtain voting rights. As that term approached it was revised twice and then the clause removed entirely

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

They rely more on French nuclear electricity than anything else.... :)

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

Look at the proposed Canada tidal barrage in the Bay of Fundy

I would have provided 60-75% of Canada's entire energy needs and almost got started, but was then abruptly cancelled

Why?

Tides.

I was pointed out that putting the proposed barrage in would have massively increased tidal swing down the entire North American eastern seaboard

At New England (Boston) the increase would have been 45 FEET increase between high and low water, with high water being the worst affected

At New York it would have added 20 feet to the tides

At Chesapeake Bay, 10 feet (bye bye Washington DC)

Even as far south as Florida it would have increased high waters by 3 feet in Miami

In essence, Canada would have declared environmental war on the USA....

Interfering with established ocillatory systems has consequences and you need to work out what they are BEFORE you start

Renewables aren't necessarily "benign"

Re: Think of the children

"RIGHT NOW" actually being "We should have started on this 40 years ago"

There are bloody good reasons for treating this as an emergency - sea level rises are an irrelevant sideshow if there's a high chance that there won't be any cold-blooded reptilian species with an adult bodymass exceeding 20kg alive to see them (NO birds, NO mammals, virtually no fish, virtually no terrestrial plants)

Re: Weakening Case

It doesn't matter how much renewables drop in cost for one simple reason

With near-infinite investment, Renewables can slightly outproduce existing carbon-emitting electrical production

That's only 30% of overall carbon emissions.

Renewables cannot be cranked up in output to eliminate the rest, not even with a few grams of magic pixie dust and a sprinkling of unicorn poo

The problem in that acronym is the "U"

Anything relying on U235 is a non-starter, on cost grounds

Re: Since there are so many nucelar fans here ...

I'd rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than within 5 miles of a coal or gas one.

They're safer and the downwind cancer stats are 95+% lower than either of the burner designs

Re: Moot

Molten salt nuclear is the game changer.

It doesn't require stupidly expensive containment buildings and vessels (80-90% savings) or rely on the waste products of weapons-making (enriched U235 is leftovers from bomb manufactiring processes that require depleted uranium to make plutonium), although it CAN be fuelled with U235

It's also amazingly resistant to nuclear proliferation and produces 1% of the waste of existing solid-fuel designs (less than 0.1% if you count all the DU on the input side)

Alvin Weinberg's original power reactor was a laboratory glassware proof of concept which didn't worry about waste production or needing constant nursemaiding BECAUSE it was a laboratory design. He wasn't happy that US industry took it "as is" and built a safer industrial prototype - the MSR, which exceeded all expectations and worked amazingly well - his reward was to be kicked out of the nuclear industry, his design made illegal in the USA and the reactor itself declared beyond top secret, then ordered destroyed in 1972

Re: Double prices then double again.

"The levellised cost is 10 times that of wind, and more than hydrogen produced using abundant green energy."

1: define abundant and fully account for attempting to fully decarbonise (Hint: it doesn't matter how cheap your green energy is, if there's not enough of it to meet demand without killing off 80% of the world's population. If you don't factor in bringing EVERYONE up to "developed" levels then you lost before you started)

"I suppose it matters not if your grandchildren drown from a 30ft rise in sea level or die from the resulting nuclear catastrophes."

If CO2 emissions aren't dropped by 95%+ in the next 10-15 years, they probably won't be around to see the sea level changes (great grandchilden almost definitely not)

If atmospheric CO2 levels blow through 800-900ppm then rain becomes acidic enough to start killing off terrestrial vegetation (carbonic acid) and that's self-feeding. Last time it happened 93% of the planet's entire biomass (land and sea) was dead within a decade whilst global oxygen levels dropped to 11-12% and stayed there for nearly a million years

The planet has a "reset life" switch and we've been leaning on the "break glass" cover for a while. I'd rather not find out what it takes to break that one.

Re: The article overlooked cost

See my analysis of uranium costs and you'll understand why this tends to be masked in order to avoid too many questions being asked by those with the purse strings

Re: More people have died on UK roads so far this year ...

CORNWELL is more radioactive than Fukushima - so is downtown Helsinki

Most of the Chermobyl area is safe to be in (as long as you don't dig) and will be perfectly habitable in another century or less.

FEAR of radiation is far more deadly than the radiation itself.

You get more exposure (and to higher energies) in a single flight from London to Paris or by laying on a Cornish beach for the afternoon than the average x-ray (London to Rome for a chest xray)

Re: Two flaws with this opinion piece

Most people these days assume ton = tonne. There's virtually no difference between them anyway (short vs long tons are archaic relics)

Re: You fail physics forever

Even at 24k year halflife, Pu239 isn't particularly radiologically dangerous. You're more likely to get a thermal burn from it than a radiation one.

The chemical effects are far more of an issue (think mercury poisoning, but much worse, whilst uranium sits in the lead poisoning tree)

The group of people with highest radiation exposures are SMOKERS(*), thanks to natural polonium accumulation on tobacco leaves. Even then the incidence of long-term lung cancers seems more attributable to its decay to lead products deep in the lungs, rather than the alpha particle emissions

(*) A pack-a-day smoker gets an annual dose several hundred times the allowable one for nuclear workers. Aircrew also get very high doses. They're not dying like flies either

Life evolved in a high radiation environment and has a very good error correction/apoptosis process as a result. (one of the problems with getting a high rad dose is that it kills off your white blood cells and gives any naturally/chemically induced cancers which might otherwise be stomped on a chance to get a headstart)

Re: You fail physics forever

and in either case you can probably just toss it into a molten salt design to be burned down anyway

MSRs should achieve 98-99% burnup of input fuel without problem as well as being able to eat depleted uranium (11kg per 1kg of 3% "reactor fuel") and "nuclear waste", thanks to their innate ability to extract and isolate gaseous fission products whilst operating

(No, molten salt does NOT mean "highly corrosive". That's another piece of FUD by various vested interests)

Re: Clean up

This is compete and utter bollocks of the highest order

If I get in my car after an overnight charge and find LESS energy available in it than the night before, I'm going to be mightily pissed off and looking for blood because I can't commute to work

At best, V2G will only be tolerated by vehicle owners if it is limited to 5-10% off a fully charged battery and attempting to force them to participate in "power sharing" scams will result in widespread litigation and simple rebellions along the lines of adding software to disconnect their vehicle as soon as a discharge is noted

Let's not forget that batteries have a limited cycle life and this kind of activity is not free. If owners are not handsomely compensated for wear and tear, then it will get very ugly, very quickly

Re: Clean up

"Peak usually only lasts for a few hours each day"

When you eliminate oil/gas heating systems (2025 onwards), expand your EV fleet and start "encouraging" industrial processes to decarbonise, "Peak" ends up being a relic of the past

V2G is hideously expensive to implement in practice and vehicle owners expect to be compensated for use of their batteries.

The same amount of money builds very large stationary power reserve systems without needing to worry about hundreds of thousands of individual sources and such a system is vastly more flexible in terms of grid-stabilisation (eliminating OGT peaking plants, providing frequency stabilisation and numerous other grid-scale facilities that a bunch of 7-21kW sources simply can't do

In other words: V2G is obsolete already. It's being pushed by those who don't understand that but have the ability to compel spending "other people's money" on a system which won't actually result in a public benefit

V2G might be of use to allow YOUR house to turn itself into an island in the event of a blackout, but that's going to need more control logic as virtually all these systems require the presence of grid power (and a frequency reference) to run in the first place

"Commercial development of atomic power plants had largely stopped by the 1980s;"

Actual PLANNING for nuclear power plants virtually stopped by the mid 1960s - for the simple reason that they cost too much to run

Greenies have never actually stopped activities which are properly profitable (ie: profitable without accounting tricks). In this instance they were just a convenient excuse for a lot of commercial actors to walk away from long-term contracts or partially completed sites which they knew would never break even

GenIV designs have promise but a lot of them are good examples of "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD"

A quick overview on uranium fuelling:

Raw (natural) uranium (or thorium) runs at about USD 150-200/kg

3% enriched uranium (4.2x concentration multiplier) is around gold-platinum pricing (USD 50-75,000/kg) - 500-750x cost mutiplier

The centrifuge process is well known and pretty linear, so even though costs of higher enriched uranium are regarded as "secret", it's not difficult to extrapolate (it's used because it's the cheapest enrichment path)

Using 550x per pass and $55k/kg (low end estimates):

12.6% uranium would be approx $30 MILLION/kg

52.9% uranium would be approx $16.6 BILLION/kg

Even using this figure rather than an extrapolated 200 fold increase to go to 90% for military marine reactors (3 trillion/kg???), you start seeing that HEU machinery is stupidly expensive to fuel - simply not worth it for civil power and dubious as hell even for military use

The main reason for pushing HEU is deflection and distraction - making HEU produces lots of depleted uranium (1kg of 3% enriched "civil fuel" makes 11kg of depleted uranium) and DU is the precursor material for making weapons-grade plutonium

It's rather obvious that the push on uranium systems isn't economic, but to ensure that uranium handling facilities remain classified as "dual purpose" and not subjected to arms limitation treaties

This is also the most likely reason that the USA killed research on the molten salt reactor in 1972, given its fuel agnosticism and ease of operation on U233/thorium

I suspect it plays into allowing/encouraging research into dangerous stuff like molten sodium, as the inevitable issues are useful for demonising alternatives to the existing uranium cycle

(History lesson: Uranium was used for the original nuclear power reactors (Nautilus and Shippingport) in the words of the builders "Not because it was the best possible fuel, but because it was the only one AVAILABLE at the time" - they expected it would only be a temporary step and in fact are the same people behind the Oak Ridge Molten Salt reactor which was so sucessful that lots of FUD has been fabricated about things which never happened there (or were run as tests to verify it was safe - such as testing unscheduled stop/starts)

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

more like a Dacia Sandero and a 3 ton box van

When will the UK take another giant leap into space?

Re: What is the benefit?

"it always makes me laugh when they show figures for the British space industry and include, in the 40,000 employees, 20,000 that work for Sky and Virgin TV! "

Even _within_ the British space sector, the number of people is vastly overstated. Lots of theory researchers get lumped in as "constructors" when at best they're data consumers

I'm not running down researchers. Just the calculation methods used. There is a tiny number of highly passionate people involved on the construction side and most of them are there DESPITE the best efforts of politcians and civil servants

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Re: Brother

"Photo services have their merit but are no replacement for self printing"

They beat the pants off 4 or 6 color printing onto plain paper

UK government extends review of BT stake owned by French tycoon Patrick Drahi

Re: Beware - Look no rurther than Suddenlink in the US -- Poor BT Customers...

In this instance he'd end up essentially OWNING access to 90% of UK landline connections

Remember that mid 2000s New Zealand Ministry of Commerce paper which quantified BT/Openreach market abuse and rejected proposals to copy it Down Under in favour of a fully cleaved pair of companies and legislation ensuring the lines company (and lines!) can't be captured by a large player?

The same pensions claims were raised in that case too. It turned out the majority of them fall against the lines company and that's been a rip-roaring sucess story once the dead hand of vertical monopolisation was removed from the controls

US car industry leads the world in production cuts over chip shortages

Re: Chip Shortage & Used Cars

"It only has 166,000 miles on it"

Once upon a time that kind of milage was reserved for diesel mercedes and American cars were junk by 100,000

Re: how did we ever survive with cable actuated HVAC controls

That extra weight in vehicles is a direct result of safety requirements

You very seriously don't want to be in any kind of impact exceeding 7-10mph in the Morrie and the Honda - whilst better - would only score 1 star today even if it got 4 stars in 1986

The crash test videos over the years make interesting (and alarming!) viewing

WRT "overpowered", superminis proved a long time ago there was very little difference between consumption on similar cycles using larger engines, vs engine durability and many modern engines might HAVE ratings which appear ridiculously large but they're often 2-3 minute ratings, not continuous duty and are results of changes such as ultra low friction bore coatings on the same engine as previously sold

One of the tricks used is having a larger lightly loaded engine to improve emissions performance under normal operation without compromising milage but switching it to "full bore" mode when the loud pedal is presed hard. This is because smaller engines that were favoured for a while in the 2000s start putting out particle emissions comparable with diesels under heavy load and couldn't meet NOX/CO _and_ PM10 emissions requirements. It becomes enlarge the engine that or install a DPF in the tailpipe of a petrol engine with the attendant issues that come with it

In the old days you could only tune an engine statically for power or economy (or something in between). These days, ECUs allow both in the same package

"using a chip was cheaper than actually designing a new engine from scratch to meet them without chips in it"

Unless you're running a single speed, single load engine, it's virtually impossible to meet current requirements without chippery - and even then, chippery helps deal with mechanical drift that's inevitable when things wear

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: Ebay

There ARE labels which demonstrate they've been tampered with in this way - most manufacturers simply don't use them

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

"The other is that the passenger or goods flow that was previously served by the line has simply ceased to exist at all"

Historically, those flows sprang up because the line was there and most of the lines were originally put in for other reasons

The reason for that is that roads are massively subsidised - heavy vehicles incredibly so compared to the damage they do (one city bus carrying 28 passengers does about the same amount of roadbed damage per pass as 500-800 cars)

this was all made possible by cheap oil but that era's about to end

It used to be that one could get across Los Angeles county in less time by light rail than you can currently DRIVE across it on freeways

Ironically, most of LA's freeways are built on old light rail right-of-ways

The story of why they were destroyed makes for interesting reading about why cartels are a bad thing

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

The problem is that in Britain (and the USA) there's no concurrent plan to improve public transport alongside it

All stick, no carrot

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

"Thorium reactors come up all the time, but no one seems to actually be able to build them."

Wuwei has been running since October 2021

There's zero danger of "running out" of thorium. You need to learn how "reserves" and "resources" work. Right now there's officially no resources because there's no demand - that's despite several hundred thousand of tons of the stuff being buried in shiopping containers in the Utah desert and virtually every rare earth mine on the planet each producing at least 5000 tons per year (it's the primary waste product of rare earth mining and present in minable quantities in coal ash slurry lakes amongst other things)

In reality there's around 200,000 years worth of thorium just based on the stuff we've found whilst NOT looking for it. It's _everywhere_ in the earth's crust.

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

Deserts may have sunshine, but the other substance required for large scale hydrogen/hydrocarbon manufacture - water - is in notably short supply

US-funded breakthrough battery tech just simply handed over to China

The British stole both silk and tea from China earlier on too. It's one of the many stolen technologies that helped them build their trade

AT&T might have demonstrated the point contact transistor first, but the technology we actually use is based on the thick film transistor Philips demonstrated a few weeks later and that was in widespread use whilst AT&T were still trying to get workable yields on the point contact design (let alone generally consistent devices)

(there was a race to produce the first working one once the theory was established)

Re: Big deal!

Full of chinese employees who happen to be coming up with the ideas too

China was THE powerhouse of intellectual delevopment (philosophical and manufacturing) until only a couple of centuries ago. They're not backwards, just catching up again

Re: In reality, this was never likely to be sited in the US.

"Manufacturing" (as politicians talk about it) is an illusion and jobs aren't ever coming back - they never really left, they just evaporated

As an illustration:

The 10,000 worker factory in Detroit became a 1500 worker factory in Sonora - 8500 jobs DIDN'T go to Mexico.

If that factory moved back to the USA it would likely become a 400 worker plant in Kansas (including the gardener)

What "killed jobs" wasn't outsourcing but simple lack of flexibility. Each new generation of technology needs fewer people to operate it

"Full employment" hasn't existed for a long time. The demise of child labour and sweatshops owe as much to that as the improving social/economic conditions that came with better productivity/technologies.

For the last century there have been all kinds of methods used to mask the issue (keeping married women out of the workforce, discriminatory practices, etc) instead of facing up to it and rejigging society to stop defining people's worth by their "job" and telling them it's their own fault if they can't find work

Our schools exist to beat children into a mental shape that fits a factory floor and hours that simply don't exist anymore. Fundamental changes are needed

Re: ... long potential lead times

VCs tend to pile money into this stuff on the basis that 1-10% will show a return

The bigger problem is that stuff which might show a return in the long term frequently gets dumped if there are hurdles in favour of the easier pickings