Posts by blackcat 1139 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2010
The energy density of nuclear fuel is utterly mind boggling. Similarly mind boggling is the quantity of coal, oil and gas we drag out of the ground every day and then oxidise.
South Korea is a good partner as they have the heavy industry to make the key components for the reactor. And blimey they have a LOT of reactors!
I'd not appreciated just how enriched the UK sub fuel actually is. Very similar to the SL-1 reactor fuel. 90+% enriched.
It makes sense as you have a very small core. And to get good life you need a high reactivity, which was ultimately the downfall of the SL-1 reactor as it went prompt critical due to the main control rod being manually withdrawn too far.
The contamination from non radioactive materials is just horrific. And not just the US govt. What was the name of the town where they inadvertently sprayed dioxins on the dirt roads? Then there is the Love Canal, all the rivers polluted with PFOAs from Dupont, the towns covered in lead from mining... its a long list.
My father in law was in the USMC and some of the stories he tells are just incredible!
I believe the fuel is still on site (or rather next to the old site) at Zion.
This was a PWR. If the reactor has run its life without ever splitting a fuel element then there should be no contamination. All you're dealing with is neutron bombarded water, steel and concrete. The water can be diluted but then the half life of irradiated water from a PWR/BWR is pretty short anyway. Steel is also not too bad when it comes to irradiation.
The British gas cooled reactors contain many thousands of tons of graphite. The irradiated graphite is a much bigger problem, which is why the safestore periods are a lot longer.
Now if there has been a fuel melt in the core.... well now you have all sorts other things to clean up. I know Chappelcross suffered a fuel melt. And there is of course the pile at Sellafield that caught fire and has a whole load of melted fuel. It really is far better to just leave them well alone.
Here is an interesting doc about how they removed the graphite from Tokai:
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/ngwm-cd/PDF-Files/paper%208%20(Fuji).pdf
A nice example of Japanese efficiency! There had been a promise made to return the site to green field within a certain number of years after the reactor shutdown. I could not see that level of efficiency and neatness being done in the UK. :(
This is not the legacy of nuclear energy. This is the legacy of the UK's atomic and hydrogen bomb programme. It is a very different beast. A HUGE amount of mess left at Sellafield is the result of making plutonium and other bomb material. There was zero consideration for what they were going to do with the waste long term. A lot of the waste from the two air cooled piles was dumped into silos that had no way of being emptied.
It is a complete and utter shit-show for sure. Even the US managed to things more cleanly... just.
I've just moved from Three to Voda. Been with Three for ages and had the free Europe and North America roaming grandfathered in. I don't know what Three did but the data throughput around where I live dropped to near zero about 3 months ago and after many claims that it was 'fixed' got no better. So that finally motivated the move. Plus my OH gets a staff discount on Voda sims :)
"also decided against pursuing a complete nuclear weapons capability, unlike the French and other Western European states."
So there is an issue with his claim because we continued with our nuclear weapons programme after the US started sharing their designs with us. Our first 'American' H-bombs were made in the UK with locally produced fissile material. We were not buying fully built bombs from the USA. The UK Trident missiles have UK designed(?) and built warheads.
One of the BIG reasons for moving over to using US equipment in the 60s was the cost. The AIM9 missile was 1/4 the cost of the UK designed and build red top missile. Technically red top was superior at the time.
You certainly don't need English lit. I never even took the exam! I did pass English language which was a requirement for my post GCSE education.
As you say, it is not a high bar to reach but I have worked with people who have somehow managed to miss even that. I am probably slightly biased as I am quite severely dyslexic and went to school in an era before widespread home computer ownership and long before spell checkers and autocorrect.
Yes and no. If you work in a huge company and are happy to be a cog in the machine then it is acceptable to behave in that way. One of the quickest ways to get yourself a black mark is to utter the phrase 'that is not my job'. I witnessed a (now ex) colleague utter these words in a meeting with management and it went down VERY badly.
There are times when you are going to have to face management or a customer as you rise through the ranks.
"and often outperform their formally educated peers"
Up to a point. If you just want to be a code monkey grinding away in the dark, then this is fine.
But at some point you are going to have to interact with higher-ups and even customers directly. Being able to communicate with people who are not as tech savvy in a way that they can understand and being able to interact with customers in a way that makes them feel special and doesn't open up your company to liability are skills you will need.
"practical problem-solvers"
These people are often the most broadly educated. If you are hyper focused it can be all to easy to miss something.
You do have to ask the question that if this part is critical to operation AND relatively easy to break why are there no spares on a shelf somewhere?
Working in a high reliability commercial industry, there is an expectation from the end customer that spares for wear items and items that might break are all kept in stock. I suppose in the world of governmental agencies months of downtime for a basic part are not an issue as you get paid no matter what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
The plants use BrightSource Energy's "Luz Power Tower 550" (LPT 550) technology[25] which heats the steam to 550 °C directly in the receivers.[26] The plants have no storage.[27]
The upside is that the system is simple, water in, steam out. The downside is that if the sun intensity changes the steam out changes quite rapidly. Zero thermal inertia.
https://iowaclimate.org/2025/02/01/ivanpah-solar-plant-the-flaming-failure-thats-finally-being-put-out-of-our-misery/
Its never really made it past 50% capacity. It was a nice idea but turned into a proper boondoggle! If you've watched 'Planet of the humans' it was claimed that the mirrors were not being maintained and this claim was disputed. Go on google maps and you can see many smashed mirrors just left on the ground. It is a tiny fraction of the total but you get the feeling that the owners sorta gave up on the plant pretty soon after opening. They could see the writing on the wall.
Spain has a number of CSP plants that seem to work ok but most have an intermediate working fluid. I believe Crescent dunes was based on a Spanish design.
"Also, the notion of trees contacting 400kv lines is frankly laughable"
It is not unknown. It does not take much elongation of the conductor wires to cause a very large sag. It also requires good upkeep of the vegetation around lines.
The 2003 US 'Northeast blackout' was in part caused by line overload and sag resulting in contact with trees.
The molten salt one is crescent dunes in the Nevada desert. Ivanpah is the one in CA just north of the I15 just before Primm and is a pure solar to steam with no intermediate stage.
Crescent dunes was a good idea but oh so complex.
Both insta-fry birds.
The theory of grid systems is that the loss of one major interconnect should be mitigated by other connections but as you say they are all running near, or at, capacity so there is no head room.
Large scale PV will always be subject to large variations. A single cloud going over can drop the output by 90+%.
One of the issues with the Ivanpah solar thermal plant was the tendency of the area to get scattered cloud cover and they had to keep the steam temperature up using natural gas.
Yes and no. Part of the grid frequency regulation is a electro-mechanical property of the many multi-hundreds of ton spinning turbines and alternators out there. These huge generators are actually magnetically phase locked together simply by being linked to the grid. If you reduce the steam flow to a turbine it initially won't slow down, it will maintain speed as the grid will keep it turning in sync, to a point.
This is a property that electronic systems do not inherently have and the vast majority of inverters currently installed are just grid following.
Look up synchro systems, its really very cool how you can lock magnetic devices together with electricity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchro
This is a major problem. The whole point of the interconnects is to allow sharing between areas when there is an abundance of elec in place A and a shortage in place B. But what has happened is that market forces have taken over. If you can sell your elec for 10p/kWh in place A or 20p/kWh in place B you will do your level best to sell it for the most money.
Now if you can only generate elec for 30p/kWh in place B you will like buying it from elsewhere at 20p as its cheaper. The interconnects have resulted in a reliance on energy coming from elsewhere.
Germany saw the light a bit after the project to put vast solar farms in North Africa fell through. Someone finally had the brainwave that putting the majority of your power generation a thousand miles away on the far side of the Med reliant on long cables through international waters isn't as secure as advertised.
HVO is a bit of a con. There is a major issue in Indonesia where farmers used to supplement the feed for livestock with waste/used palm oil but now the market for the used oil is HUGE as its used for HVO so the farmers now use virgin palm oil. It is also suspected that virgin palm oil is added to the 'waste' oil to make more money.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm24n8nej94o
"The UK can produce our own coke, but the government won't let it"
Here we get into the problem of exporting our carbon. UK made steel would probably be less carbon intensive than say Polish or Chinese steel. BUT as part of the carbon reduction we can't allow that to be released within our territorial air volume.
Another issue with the very dry areas is that the cooling effectiveness of the air passing through the racks is reduced. Many data centres actively humidify the air within the building as it has a higher heat capacity.
The sheer amount of $$ being thrown around is enough to make some people turn a blind eye to these problems. There are areas of the US where datacentres are using ground water and the locals in the area have found their wells are running dry and can't afford the 10's of k to have a deeper one drilled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI
I think they were just having fun watching things go bang! It has been claimed that they were making the atlas rockets so fast that when one went kaboom there would be a backlog of already built rockets likely with the very same issue waiting to launch and they just kept sending them up.
'Yes, it failed in the same way as the last 2, well now we have definitive proof of the fault'.
Those were very different times. And I'm very glad that we didn't have to rely on the Thor missiles for defence.
My point is that generation needs to be scaled to instantaneous demand, not an average.
For the last 24 hours my average is 542W and a peak of 4002W. 8:1 peak to mean. And my usage is quite predictable. A peak in the morning for the kettle, if someone is home during the day a peak at lunch for lunch and a rising usage in the evening with a potential longer period of high demand for cooking supper. Now its unlikely that us and next door have the kettle on at exactly the same time every morning but there will be overlap for supper and both houses will turn on lights as it gets dark.
One of the reasons they built pump storage such as Dinorwig is to serve as a peak generator and one of the example cases was people putting the kettle on after the football or after watching Corrie.
They even have some graphs showing the demand spikes during the footie.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091229024828/http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/1C4B1304-ED58-4631-8A84-3859FB8B4B38/17136/demand.pdf
You see jumps in the order of a couple of GW, not MW.
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