Nuclear power : how visions change

Martyn1981

chris_m wrote: »

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.

I suspect you are describing a flow battery where the electrolyte is stored in one large tank, flows through the 'charger' and is then stored in another large tank. The beauty of these is that they are only limited by the size of the tanks, rather than the whole 'thing' being a single battery.

The cost of these is falling, and they are being trialed, as you describe.

Regarding basic batteries, simply as a worst case example. I've chatted with off-gridders who use very large lead-acid batts to balance their generation. Technically this is a small grid, where generation comes from PV and wind, and for backup on those 5 to 10 days a year when it's simply not economic to have a bigger batt or generation source, they use a generator (think FF backup).

Cost wise, some have suggested 4-6p/kWh when considering all costs, and life expectancies. So ..... here comes the assumption .....

if relatively small scale storage comes in at 4p/kWh, then it should be simple(r) to do this on a larger scale for £40/MWh. If nuclear is £40/MWh more than on-shore wind and PV, then intermittents, with storage may be cheaper.

However, you wouldn't want to store all generation, so let's say you consume 50% and store 50%, then you only need a £20/MWh advantage. Hinkley is to get £93/MWh, current bids for PV and on-shore wind are already down to £80, and still falling. And those contracts are for 15yrs not 35yr, allowing a faster replacement as costs falls.

I'd rather not have nuclear, but for CO2 reasons I accept it may be necessary, but even after 50yrs of support already, it's still not cheap, and looks like it's pricing itself out now, as renewables are simply getting too cheap, too fast.

Back to storage, there is already an option available now, which is compressed air storage. This is then used to increase the efficiency of gas turbines, when back up is needed. We will soon have millions of EV's sitting in our drives at 5pm, with enormous amounts of storage, already paid for. Small domestic Li-ion batts may be rolled out to domestic properties with PV, just 2kWh each, in 5m homes would knock 5GW off the evening peak from 5pm to 7pm. So there are many options starting to arrive, and many more in development, as we look towards the next 10 years, when Hinkley is still under construction.

Mart.

chris_m

Martyn1981 wrote: »

I suspect you are describing a flow battery where the electrolyte is stored in one large tank, flows through the 'charger' and is then stored in another large tank. The beauty of these is that they are only limited by the size of the tanks, rather than the whole 'thing' being a single battery.

The cost of these is falling, and they are being trialed, as you describe.

Yep, that sounds like what I saw, cheers..

kinger101

Martyn1981 wrote: »

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.

It's not similar at all. They have 8 types of generation, which together are capable of meeting peak demand. Cells was coming up with artificial situations involving two types of generation.

kinger101

Martyn1981 wrote: »

I suspect you are describing a flow battery where the electrolyte is stored in one large tank, flows through the 'charger' and is then stored in another large tank. The beauty of these is that they are only limited by the size of the tanks, rather than the whole 'thing' being a single battery.

The cost of these is falling, and they are being trialed, as you describe.

Regarding basic batteries, simply as a worst case example. I've chatted with off-gridders who use very large lead-acid batts to balance their generation. Technically this is a small grid, where generation comes from PV and wind, and for backup on those 5 to 10 days a year when it's simply not economic to have a bigger batt or generation source, they use a generator (think FF backup).

Cost wise, some have suggested 4-6p/kWh when considering all costs, and life expectancies. So ..... here comes the assumption .....

if relatively small scale storage comes in at 4p/kWh, then it should be simple(r) to do this on a larger scale for £40/MWh. If nuclear is £40/MWh more than on-shore wind and PV, then intermittents, with storage may be cheaper.

However, you wouldn't want to store all generation, so let's say you consume 50% and store 50%, then you only need a £20/MWh advantage. Hinkley is to get £93/MWh, current bids for PV and on-shore wind are already down to £80, and still falling. And those contracts are for 15yrs not 35yr, allowing a faster replacement as costs falls.

I'd rather not have nuclear, but for CO2 reasons I accept it may be necessary, but even after 50yrs of support already, it's still not cheap, and looks like it's pricing itself out now, as renewables are simply getting too cheap, too fast.

Back to storage, there is already an option available now, which is compressed air storage. This is then used to increase the efficiency of gas turbines, when back up is needed. We will soon have millions of EV's sitting in our drives at 5pm, with enormous amounts of storage, already paid for. Small domestic Li-ion batts may be rolled out to domestic properties with PV, just 2kWh each, in 5m homes would knock 5GW off the evening peak from 5pm to 7pm. So there are many options starting to arrive, and many more in development, as we look towards the next 10 years, when Hinkley is still under construction.

Mart.

I think there will be more options in the future for steadying the demand. Already we might fluctuate between 25GW and 60GW in the UK during the year. Batteries, compressed air and pumped hydro are all one way, but again, by diverting energy into industrial processes is another good option. As you indicate with nuclear, you might as well leave it running at full if you can.

kinger101

cells wrote: »

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".

More straw men. I've never said you could get 100% from intermittent sources but you continue to assert I have.

Adjusting with energy intensive industries would work for the very reason that excess energy is cheap. Although nuclear plants can vary output, it doesn't make much sense for them to do so. So the electricity might as well be sold at peak and off-peak tariffs.

UK demand varies between 25GW and 60GW, so it's hard to even eliminate 50% of carbon without finding a way to somehow stabilize this demand fluctuation. This will need to be done by either grid storage, or demand manipulation.

stator

If the government practiced joined up thinking they would invest in hydrogen production built in to the new nuclear power stations. Require london busses to use hydrogen fuel cells and then expand it to taxis and eventually private cars.
It would massively reduce pollution and would make nuclear power stations more efficient as they would be producing hydrogen all day long and not just electricity.

kinger101

stator wrote: »

If the government practiced joined up thinking they would invest in hydrogen production built in to the new nuclear power stations. Require london busses to use hydrogen fuel cells and then expand it to taxis and eventually private cars.
It would massively reduce pollution and would make nuclear power stations more efficient as they would be producing hydrogen all day long and not just electricity.

I think there are a handful of hydrogen buses already. Also some electric taxis, but these only have a 35 mile range. Definitely room for improvement.

cells

kinger101 wrote: »

It's not similar at all. They have 8 types of generation, which together are capable of meeting peak demand. Cells was coming up with artificial situations involving two types of generation.

I think what we have or had 10 years ago even was fine. a mix of coal and gas and extending the lives of the old nukes we have

you can go to a generation of 30GW nuclear and 30GW mix of coal/gas and it would work fine and be 75% nuke 25% other

however as i have said multiple times now, the systems in place in the UK are that new nukes would be too expensive to be worthwhile so just keep what we have for another 10+ years

cells

kinger101 wrote: »

More straw men. I've never said you could get 100% from intermittent sources but you continue to assert I have.

Adjusting with energy intensive industries would work for the very reason that excess energy is cheap. Although nuclear plants can vary output, it doesn't make much sense for them to do so. So the electricity might as well be sold at peak and off-peak tariffs.

UK demand varies between 25GW and 60GW, so it's hard to even eliminate 50% of carbon without finding a way to somehow stabilize this demand fluctuation. This will need to be done by either grid storage, or demand manipulation.

UK demand variation has been dropping for over a decade now and with more LEDs replacing other less efficient forms of lighting every day the peak winter demand is continuing to fall (even though hundreds of thousands of additional homes and business are connecting to the grid yearly)

What that means is that over the last 15-20 years baseload sources could meet more and more of the total energy needs of the nation and going forward this will further increase.

also the only reason nukes need to run at full capacity all the time is due to the high costs. If they were cheaper, lets say $2/watt then they could function quite well in a load following manner

Everything in time needs to go towards electrification including the big one of seasonal heating. That means the world needs nukes affordable enough to run for just 3 months of the year or batteries to slowly charge up over 9 months and discharge over 3 months. The battery option is imo impossible as its only using a batter one cycle per year. its like buying a nice expensive car and only using it once a year its stupid


TBH i dont think nuclear is the answer, nor do i think wind/solar is. Its clear to me that fossil fuels (or its cousin biomass) will play the major part of our needs for all of our lifetimes and probably into the 2100s as well

nuclear could have become the largest source of primary energy its proven to be able to do that on a national scale. but it hasnt and it wont not this century anyway

Garethgrew

kabayiri wrote: »

I stumbled across this Youtube video (as you do)



It was interesting to hear the expectations from the new wave of nuclear power stations arriving in the 60s (starting with Berkeley). The future appeared promising.

Flash forward half a century and this appears in the news :


It seems we need government underwritten Chinese investment to get the £25bn nuclear development at Hinkley back on track, and even then the subsidy required will mean energy costs twice the market price.

Is this a good deal for the economy? Can't we use fracked gas or buy in 'leccy from French nuclear until Fusion comes on stream?

It doesn't seem very MSE to me.

Solar is now cheaper per GW than, nuclear, why we don't go over to clean renewable I don't know. Seriously why.?