Electrifying heating Vs Nuclear heat

GreatApe

Model: Nuclear heating Vs electrifying heating (2/3rd heat pumps 1/3rd resistance)
500TWh nuclear heat Vs 300TWh electricity
40 million heating systems (30 million homes plus offices shops schools hospitals etc)

Cost of nuclear heating = ~£4B (generation) + ~£0.7B (home heating system) + £unknown (national district heating grid)

Cost of Electrified hearing = £16.50B (Generation) + ~£8.20B (heat pumps&resistance heaters) + ~£22 billion (transmission and distribution) + £unknown (cost to buffer wind output with syn fuels or mountain sized batteries)

The nuclear waste is internalised totally (and actually there is no 'waste' for nuclear heating because the fuel rods once used become very long life fuel for the system). The waste of producing wind turbines and solar panels will probably end up in the electronics waste streams so some poor Africans/Indians can sort out the heavy metals with their bare hands because you know there nothing at all negative about low density energy sources.

My estimate is nuclear heating ~£20 billion annually, electrified heating ~£55 billion annually
Huge difference do nuclear heating and spend the £35 billion a year on the NHS to save prolong and increase the quality of life in the UK

ABrass

Haven't you created three threads on this already?

ed110220

Sadly the world's heating engineers, planners and policy makers remain ignorant of our Simian friend's brilliant ideas. Or perhaps they are deliberately ignoring them as they cannot believe such genius could come from a lowly forum poster

GreatApe

ed110220 wrote: »

Sadly the world's heating engineers, planners and policy makers remain ignorant of our Simian friend's brilliant ideas. Or perhaps they are deliberately ignoring them as they cannot believe such genius could come from a lowly forum poster

The heating we have is more a historical remnant than a detailed plan

We started off with coal and biomass in chimneys (most rooms in most homes were cold)

Sometime around the 1970 central heating started to be installed and around the mid 1980s it was common. This went hand in hand with the discovery and rapid expansion of North sea gas output

From the begining to the end of the 1970s UK natural gas production went up 4x and it was illegal to burn natural gas in power stations so it could only go one place which was space heating

And that is why we have a national gas grid and homes heated by natural gas


Instead of being patronising you could learn a thing or five

BTW the world also used to use very large quantities of oil in power stations this was because oil was plentiful and cars/planes were not so common the result was oil was cheap (or had to be cheap enough) enough to compete with coal for electricity generation. But things moved on and what made sense at one point didn't in another

GreatApe

Also as to why we use natural gas for heating

The UK North sea provided very cheap natural gas to the UK and because it was illegal to burn the stuff in power stations (until the early 1990s)

Prices were below $2/mmbtu for much of the 1990s, that's cheaper than shale gas in America today!

For a number of years the wholesale price was only 0.3p/kWh.....we had some of the world's cheapest natural gas. Cheaper than even the USA

So it made sense when we had cheap plentiful domestic natural gas we could use for nothing else we used it for heating

That doesn't mean what was right in 1970s is also the best solution now in the 2020s

Kentish_Dave

I wonder if I hadn’t studied physics at university if I’d still think that this was barely coherent ramblings.

On balance I’d have to say yes, I think that I would.

silverwhistle

I'll have to take your word for it KD, ;-).

GreatApe

Also for historical context nuclear started to be born (imagined designed) in an era of plentiful fossil fuels.

From 1945-1973 oil prices averaged below $15 (in 2018 dollars)
That is extremely cheap it's about 0.9 cents /KWh and that lasted for 30 years!!

With oil that cheap, natural gas was even cheaper and coal even cheaper still!
It's a wonder any nuclear plants were built !

Not only were fossil fuels cheap they were being found left right and centre. The USA was producing more and more and more oil coal and gas. Europe had lots of coal and it also hit a fossil fuel jackpot in the form of North sea oil and gas

Plentiful and cheap fossil fuels made nuclear birth difficult
It was successful in France as they embarked on a large nuclear build hair after the Arabs pushed the price of oil sky high.

In some places like the UK, natural gas was illegal to burn for power generation so we had stupidly low NG prices just 0.3p/KWh but of course that was only temporary but norms and fixed infrastructure linger on for years for decades after they made perfect sense


If fossil fuels were not so plentiful not so cheap then I reckon the USA and much of the rest of Europe would have gone a deep nuclear as France did.

GreatApe

Kentish_Dave wrote: »

I wonder if I hadn’t studied physics at university if I’d still think that this was barely coherent ramblings.

On balance I’d have to say yes, I think that I would.

Which university ?

GreatApe

Great_Ache wrote: »

its a historical fact that due to the fact we had an abundance of natural gas we didnt build nuclear power stations but france didnt have an abundance of natural gas and so they did build nuclear power stations. now we have the same situation with wind and solar. these are so cheap that they are undermining nuclear again. this is so annoying that every time nuclear gets a chance some other technology undermines it by being cheaper. what about nuclear eh, when is it nuclears time in the sun?

we should stop installing cheap wind turbines and solar and give nuclear a chance. we have enough windy and solary things already anyway

also it was illegal in the uk at some point in the past to use natural gas for generating electricity.

i am not a crank

Stop trolling, Mart

It's beneath the office you hold as arbiter of truth justice ethics and all things good and righteous on these here boards

And it's not wind power that holds nuclear back it's existing infrastructure.
In China where they need more infrastructure and ignorance is less torrelated they build them at good prices and good speeds the result will be they will soon overtake France and then the USA to become the world's #1 nuclear producer

GreatApe

Great_Ache wrote: »

another stella post from the best contributor in hear. i find it annoying when people dont listen to this grate man and refuse to torrelate his genius posting

hopefully if he continues to post with good speeds and with good price his posts will overtake marts and we can all rest easy and can change this to the unethical and non-green nuclear energy board.

I and GA are not cranks

Marty boy, I worry for your mental sanity