Posts by itzman 1931 posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
France decided to use rivers to cool some of its reactors, but then the envirionmental lobby decreed that warm fish was a nono, so they werent allowed to fully utilise them
Japan has a lot of coastline.
Windmills kill birds and bats and parachutists and cause sleep disturbances in humans.
Windmills are not safe.
"The development of nuclear power does not imply that renewable energy sources are not also being developed."
That depends on whether engineer politicians or profiteers are setting the policy:
"There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy."
Yeah, the science is settled. a gamma ray from material that came out of a nuclear plant is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from a gamma ray that occurs naturally when 'natural' uranium decays...
That's why you don't have to clear Dartmoor at 20mSv/yr, but you do have to clear Fukushima at 2mSv/yr
There really are fairies at the bottom of my garden, and secret microchips in the vaccines they gave me.
The precautionary principle: A justification for spending enormous sums of other people's money on something that doesn't exist, and never will.
Cui Bono? Is that man warning you about this, a purveyor of a solution perhaps?
That started the telephone revolution before anywhere else. It has a huge installed base of copper, and some very tight ducting.
It also has high wage levels for skilled people.
Its simply more expensive to throw fiber in, but it is coming.
Just be happy you don't live in e,g., rural USA. Or Germany.
assuming you buy the 'co2 causes massive warming' scenario which has failed to predict anything accurately in the last 30 years.
In the end Global warming doom is irrelevant. Northing the uk does will make the slightest difference.
'Saving the planet' is down to India and China.
Our problem is more local. with ecohippies shrieking against fracking we have no economically viable local energy source left.
Do we really want to rely on Arab nations and Russia?
In the limit uranium is abundant everywhere. And you don't need very much. A mass produced production engineered bog standard reactor is exactly what we need to meet any future challenges
"How do you know that this wasn't a malicious attack?"
Hume's Problem of Induction. You cant know anything for sure, so you go with the balance of probabilities.
Access to BGP tables is something very few people need to have and would likely be extremely hard to hack from outside. As supported by the fact it had to be fixed from inside.
So it was most likely a fat finger or equivalent.
Whether that finger was paid to be fat? Or was consciously fat?
We can argue for the nmext ten years and not know the answer...
Yup. Sure its a faff when you get a null pointer returned from a function and apply a test to it and the compiler says 'but its not an integer' BUT if you explicily cast it to one, the next bloke along compiling onto a 16 bit integer target with a 32 bit address bus at least knows what you were TRYING to do...
"If you stop measuring light, does it stop moving? Or perhaps head off in a random direction till you measure it again?"
The fact that anything not directly observed even exists, is in the end only an article of faith.
You appear to be blind to the Materialist worldview which you assume to be true, for no other reason than it vaguely explains your experience.
Once you confuse models in your mind with the RealWorld™, you have stopped learning anything.
The answer is simple. Heatpumps will cool the citries, and circulate the working fluid to mountain tops where extremely hot heat exchangers will radiate earths surplus heat to space.
What do you mean that's what clouds do?
Is that teh scientist has this Geat Idea, and announces it to the world 'it Could Work!' while the engiuneer grabs his slide rule or equivalent, starts calculating costs efficiencies , automatically thinks of safety, and worst cases and concludes 'No, it's worse then the mousetrap I already have' and goes back to reading 'Biggles'
Well you should be. The national grid is about to lose its independence and be nationalised, bringing it under full political control.
Anyone who murmurs that it can't be done will be sacked for 'negative attitudes'.
Name one big government sposnsored infratstructure project that has actually delivered what it was supposed to, on time and on budget, if at all..
The benefits of the small modular reactors being developed worldwide are eaily listed
1. Small reactors can use the cube-square law of heatloss versis size to be safe under passive cooling in SCRAM conditions. At a stroke the cause of the only two core meltdowns of PWRS is eliminated
2. Small reactors can be assembled in factories under controlled conditions and then shipped out for installation, massively reducing build inspection and certification times.
3. Larger outputs can still be achieved by use of multiple units
4. Water coooling may not be needed for smaller units making siting less of an issue.
5. Although less efficient in the use of uranium and especially when compared to fast breeders, there is no shortage of uranium at the moment and its dirt cheap.
Although the bogeyman of man made climate change is pretty much dead in the water in scientific circles, the fact remains that fossil fuel costs both in terms of cash and energy required keep on rising as the low hanging fruits of mining and drilling have all been plucked, and the massive propganada campaign about CO2 has left the ill informed public thinking they need alternatives, and renewable energy - which was esily provable over a decde ago to be unsuitable and not fit for purpose - is now undergoing subsidectomy, there remains only one viable and poltically acceptable alternative - and that is nuclear power of some sort..
And whilst not intrinsically ideal from an overall efficiency and engineering perspective, factory built type approved mass produced small (350MW ) modular pressurised water reactors would use thoroughly known and proven technology - the only thing different is that they would be factory built - and can couple up in as many uniyts as are needed to bog standard steam turbines up to a gigwatta mecahnical output or more. Rolls Royce Trent gas turbine units are already used in multiples in gas power stations feeding steam boilers to drive additional generation capacity in CCGT power stations so the modular technology already exists.
What the public probably thinks (or has been told to think) it wants , is a Heath Robinson array of windmills, solar panels, hydrogen production, grid scale batteries made of unobtanium, transcontinental interconnectors and BEVS using lithium sourced from the imagination - there not being that much around to mine...
What it needs however, is a couple of hundred small modular reactors, driving the grid and synthetic hydrocarbon plants. Nothing in the chemical table beats hydrocarbons for energy density and safety in off grid power.
Except uranium and plutonium of course, and how far we will have nuclear ships powered by very small modular reactors plying the oceans remains to be seen.
Nuclear waste.
1. The longest lived nuclear isotope in the world today is the natural uranium we burn to make nuclear power, thus reducing the total amount of radioactivity in the world.
2. There are ~4 billion tonnes of it in the worlds oceans, yet people get excited when a few pounds of radioisotopes were released into the sea at Fukushima.
3. the longer lived the isotope, the less active and the less dangerous it is. If the Romans had had reactors by now they would have decomissioned themselves.
4. If the Romans had had reactors, their Empire would not have collapsed
5. The science now tells us what we didn't know in the Cold War period, that chronic exposure to low level radiation up to 200msV/year has absolutely no discernible effect on cells. And total dose is not what counts - peak dose is what counts.
6. If reactors were built and waste dispaosal were done to reflect what we now know about radiation - that its about 1000 times less dangerous than those old cold war regulations suggest - as evinced by the zero death count from radiation at 3MI and Fukushima and the piddling death count at Chernobyl - less than a hundred people, all exposed to massive single doses fighting fires - then most of the cost would vanish.
Nevertheless this project is, while sexy, not really commercial. We dont need advanced reactors, we need cheap reactors, and that means trying to meet regulatory ratcheting driven by anti-nuclear sentiment paid for by other energy interests with simple cost effective boring ordinary 50 year old technology that is developed to be quick to manufactire and install, and cheap.
If the nuclear industry spent one percent of the money it spends on trying to meet insane and ever moving safety goal posts, on educating people on how safe it was...
https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/bdfff1aa-1a50-4793-9362-a95119b2307d/recalibrating-risk-report.pdf.aspx
Having said that, heatbanks as a way of storing heat energy before conversion to electricity are interesting and may be more cost effective at supplying peak demand than building either pumped hydro (if handy nesaby mountains and water exist) than overcapacity of reactors running below full capacity much of the time.
What is disppointing in reading posts by El Reg readers is that one would have expected the readership to be both techically savvy and capable of researching what this project actually is, and yet the majority of comments betray utter ignorance of either.
a molten salt heat bank is not lightning fast load following since it will still be used to generate steam for a turbine.. unless they use flash steam...which no other power station to my knowledge ever has.
It will ramp up and down as fast as a coal burner, maybe even a CCGT, but not as fast as hydro.
A well manged PWR is almost as fast.
Natrium isnt a molten salt cooled reactor.
Its a molten sodium cooled fast breeder reactor plus a heatbank that stores thermal energy in molten salt to allow it to modulate its output above and below the reactor output in order to provide dispatchable load following without having to have a pumped storage hydro scheme coupled up. Batteries of course are completely unsuitable for grid scale storage
At an intelligent guess I would say it will mostly work eventually long after small modular reactors of bog standard design have become the de facto standard, and more money than even Gates can afford has been spent on it.
Really there is no need to invent or develop massivly new reactor designs.
What Rolls Royce and others are doing - production engineering small, and hence passively coolable under Scram, bog standard type approved pressurised water reactors for mass production at low cost with lifetime storage of used fuel (until polticians can decide what to do with it) is the low cost low risk option - is by far and away what we need right now.
Natrium is a complex liquid sodium cooled fast breeder. Dounreay effectively. Expensive, technically tricky, and full of the same problems as Gen II reactors.
Throw enough money at it and I am sure it will work eventually, but it seems to be repeating the same mistakes that the UK nuclear power program made - letting scientists create a better mousetrap rather tnan letting engineers cost reduce and streamline production of a perfectly adequate one
The golden rule is always to hand it over to an ArtStudent™ for testing.
Not only do they not think like you, what passes for thinking is more like random radioisotopic decay. They can break anything without even putting a mind to it.
Then hand it over to the most evil hacker you can find.
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