Nuclear power : how visions change

cells

kinger101 wrote: »

I'm struggling with your logic here. The grid doesn't care where it's electricity comes from. It's not going to demand any reduction in wind is met by hydro from another country. Or that you use gas is a coal station is out. I didn't even say we should use only wind and solar. I'm saying we should get as much low-carbon as possible. With includes nuclear and renewables. Provided you don't exceed a certain amount with wind, you don't really need that much more redundancy that you would with fossil fuels. I the UK, we could manage 20%. Denmark produces most of it's energy from wind.

You're using straw men and false trade-offs.

I dont know what you are arguing about my point is if you were to design a grid from the ground up and you aim is for low carbon generation you have two choices.

First is 80% nuclear 20% nat gas

Second is. 95% nat gas and upto 150% capacity wind

in the wind heady (or PV in hotter nations) you effective need two grids. One the standard gas grid and a second wind grid. This is clearly obvious as a coal plant is not shut and a wind farm built on top of it. Whereas with the nukes that is possible close drax and the other big plants up north v.close to drax and replace it with a six reactor power station

The second option of 95% nat gas and upto 150% of wind wont work if you take nat gas to 50% let alone the 20% possible with nukes


this is becoming apart now with Germany and the uk moving towards capacity payments. these payments will be avilible to generators that can guarantee output so wind and solar is out


and as one last point, when the frnech built out their nukes they closed almost all their existing (a lot of it was oil fired) fossil plants. Now that germany has spent >100B euro how much net fossil capacity has Germany closed?

cells

Generali wrote: »

If only we had some sort of way to store electricity. I would call such a thing a battery.

the thing is generali, the battery of a coal power station is a million tons of coal sitting on the ground. The cost of that battery is close to zero. The battery of a nuke is just a fuel rod sitting inside a reactor the cost of that batter is close to zero

What would the cost of a 5 million ton battery be to replicate the battery that is coal sitting on the ground or fuel rods?

Hell what would be the cost of a 5 million ton anything? Lets take the most abundant metal we use steel which is >99% of all the metal used on earth. Just a 5 million ton of steel slab not processed would set you back over $2 billion

So when you compare the zero cost storage of fossil fuels vs the not zero cost of making a battery you quickly see that a wind + battery option is not feasible


also any of you belivers, know this, there will be a small town which goes totally wind/soar + battery well before a whole country does. Currently there is no such town (apart from maybe grid balancing areas like Holland which use the neighbours grids as a free battery in the same way a household with solar in the uk uses the grid as a free battery)

anywhoo within 10 years all will be clear

stator

kinger101 wrote: »

But you're disagreeing because you can't be bothered to read reports by experts.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/news/ukerc-dispels-myths-surrounding-intermittent-renewable-energy.html

Is the Earth flat too?

I've read it, it's a fluff piece.
You can argue with the fact.
Wind sometimes produces nothing.
So if you want to have electricity in those times, you need 100% reserve provision.
Anything else and you are leaving it to chance.

Having wind provide 20% of total power is quite pointless anyway. The other 80% would come from fossil fuels or nuclear.

cells

Martyn1981 wrote: »

As you point out, the over-capacity in the FF generation we currently have is often ignored by those criticising renewables.

Gas generation fluctuates on a daily basis by about 15GW (from around 5GW to 20GW.)

Coal, in the GMT months fluctuates by about 5GW (from around 10GW to 15GW.) In the BST months a number of coal plants are shut down for maintenance. Generation still fluctuates by about 5GW (from around 5GW to 10GW.)

Replacing coal with gas, would give us 35GW* of demand following generation, based on the current mix. The question then, is what mix of renewables, storage and interconnectors (plus possible additional gas back-up) would ensure coverage of the ~20GW shortfall from 5pm to 7pm in the GMT months on days when intermittent generation is poor.

[Edit: *Actually, 25GW is a fairer figure as that represents the status quo, with what we accept today as gas and coal capacity that is not actually used all the time.]

Mart.

If you add 30GW of nuclear you can close 30GW of CCGT or coal

If you add 30GW of wind, you cannot close much if any CCGTs or coal

If you add 30GW of PV, you cant close any CCGT/coal

chris_m

cells wrote: »

the thing is generali, the battery

How beautifully apposite that you should post about batteries, considering that most "batteries" are actually comprised of a number of cells :T

also any of you belivers, know this, there will be a small town which goes totally wind/soar + battery well before a whole country does. Currently there is no such town

I don't doubt this at all - ISTR seeing something a while back about stored power in California. IIRC, it involved a some form of twin-vat liquid chemical storage, about the size of a small shipping container, which was used to store excess power from solar panels (of which many Californians have plenty, excess I mean) to be used when the sun doesn't shine. It was, effectively, only a small-scale thing though, one storage unit per house. Scaling it up for a town or an entire country would certainly take some doing, however.

kinger101

cells wrote: »

I dont know what you are arguing about my point is if you were to design a grid from the ground up and you aim is for low carbon generation you have two choices.

First is 80% nuclear 20% nat gas

Second is. 95% nat gas and upto 150% capacity wind

I'm just glad you're not designing the grid. Both of these selections are ludicrous. The first doesn't provide any allowance of outages. As the second gives up to 245%. I never suggested attempting to meet all demand from an intermittent source. I just pointed out that up to a certain amount, wind doesn't need significant back-up as it the output is never zero when the turbines are geographically disbursed. We already produce about 10% wind power in the UK.

BTW, we already have stored potential energy from pumped hydros. And big wires under the sea which we use to import/export electricity. Further flexibility can be designed in using energy intensive industrial processes which only switch on when a excess is available. E.g, the Haber process that is used to fix nitrogen.

On another point, although gas in very useful for dealing with fluctuations in demand, I think the UK needs to be careful about how much it relies on this source. There is a geopolitical risk here.

cells

kinger101 wrote: »

I'm just glad you're not designing the grid. Both of these selections are ludicrous. The first doesn't provide any allowance of outages. As the second gives up to 245%. I never suggested attempting to meet all demand from an intermittent source. I just pointed out that up to a certain amount, wind doesn't need significant back-up as it the output is never zero when the turbines are geographically disbursed. We already produce about 10% wind power in the UK.

BTW, we already have stored potential energy from pumped hydros. And big wires under the sea which we use to import/export electricity. Further flexibility can be designed in using energy intensive industrial processes which only switch on when a excess is available. E.g, the Haber process that is used to fix nitrogen.

On another point, although gas in very useful for dealing with fluctuations in demand, I think the UK needs to be careful about how much it relies on this source. There is a geopolitical risk here.

typical nonsense, I dont even know why i bother

you dont build heavy industry and run it only when the wind blows. heavy industry like steel plants chem plants BOC plants and pretty much everything else tends to run 24 hours a day every day

you need some capacity to deal with outages but the fact that two fossil plants seldom go down together means you only need a little bit of excess. Unlike wind where there is a lot of correlation


anyway who gives a !!!!!. What will be will be.
Within ten years even to the cheerleaders it will be clear what it and isnt possible.

all i would ask you to consider is, if solar wind was capable of achieving primary energy supremacy there would already be a town that was "all green".

cells

The sad thing about all of this is that the green lobby is going to have to resort to burning biomass to save its dream just like in DRAX where american and Canadian forests are burnt.

We will be going back to the 19 century burning animal dung and forests to balance intermittent solar wind instead of a few ounces of uranium or some nat gas from a shale field

cells

one of the things that killed nuclear (or at least stopped it from dominating) was the very poor methods used to refuel the dam things back in the early days so much so that a lot of nukes were on for 18 months and then off for 18 months. That meant back in the 1970s the things operated quite poorly as they were off for so long

However the very same power stations now have a refuelling cycle of less than 1 month which means they can be on for 95% of the time making them a lot more economic than they were

think of it like how a F1 team takes 10 second to change its tires and refuel a car but it would take you maybe 20 minutes.

its a shame the engineers who designed and built the nukes did a very good job but it seems they didn't quite think about making refuelling fast and efficient! Had they been 90-95% capacity reactors rather than ~60% in the 1970s I reckon America and Europe would have 100-200 more reactors today

Martyn1981

cells wrote: »

I dont know what you are arguing about my point is if you were to design a grid from the ground up and you aim is for low carbon generation you have two choices.

First is 80% nuclear 20% nat gas

Second is. 95% nat gas and upto 150% capacity wind

Looking at France, they seem to match (or at least be similar to) your first option.

About 85% of generation is nuclear, and about 75% of consumption is nuclear (they have to export the difference as nuclear is inflexible and you might as well keep generating as you save nothing by reducing output). So they can't really go any bigger on the nuclear.

They have:
63GW nuclear
5GW coal
9GW oil
10.5GW gas

So 72% nuclear and 28% FF by capacity.

They also have 25GW hydro, 9GW wind, 5GW solar, 1.5GW bio.

What is really interesting about the French mix/experiment, is that after they have recently announced that they will be reducing their nuclear contribution down to 50%, and boosting their renewable capacity to meet 32% of demand, whilst closing more oil and coal plants.

Mart.