Nuclear Britain

worrywart_3

https://www.ft.com/content/e6426194-21e6-49c4-9520-97c337b350fd

UK ministers will put nuclear power at the heart of Britain's strategy to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 in government documents .

tastyhog

Good, should have done it years ago

Verdigris

We don't know how much the earlier generations of nuclear power have cost, because we still haven't solved the problem of safe storage of nuclear waste. Hinkley Point C is going to cost more than three times per MWh than offshore wind.

Money would be better spent on storage for renewable energy and more predictable  forms of renewable energy like tidal barrages and wave generation.

I accept that we have to have some nuclear generation but only because we have squandered opportunities to develop renewable solutions in the past. I would be happier if the nuclear generation was based on Thorium reactors, as that obviates many of the downsides of "traditional" nuclear and can, indeed, help mitigate "old nuclear" by rendering nuclear waste  less dangerous.

QrizB

Well it's nice to learn we've got a strategy, rather than making things up as we go along.

JudgeDekker

Remember when people used to worry about storing nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years? I'm not sure those problems have been solved instead of just ignored.

The_Green_Hornet

JudgeDekker said:

Remember when people used to worry about storing nuclear waste for a hundred thousand years? I'm not sure those problems have been solved instead of just ignored.

Given time (and money) I'm sure that Bezos, Musk or Branson will come up with a neat solution to off planet the nuclear waste.

coffeehound

Verdigris said:

I would be happier if the nuclear generation was based on Thorium reactors, as that obviates many of the downsides of "traditional" nuclear and can, indeed, help mitigate "old nuclear" by rendering nuclear waste  less dangerous.

Interesting, sounds like it is some decades away from becoming viable though.  We had our own breeder reactor programme once, until M Thatcher shut it down

Verdigris

coffeehound said:

Verdigris said:

I would be happier if the nuclear generation was based on Thorium reactors, as that obviates many of the downsides of "traditional" nuclear and can, indeed, help mitigate "old nuclear" by rendering nuclear waste  less dangerous.

Interesting, sounds like it is some decades away from becoming viable though.  We had our own breeder reactor programme once, until M Thatcher shut it down

We also had research into carbon capture, until the Tories shut it down.

There seems to be a bit of a pattern emerging.

[Deleted User]

What was on fire at Sellindge?

Ultrasonic

DeletedUser said:

What was on fire at Sellindge?

An electricity connection to mainland Europe - nothing to do with nuclear power as far as I'm aware? Well, unless you want to count electricity that may have been generated by a nuclear power station elsewhere passing through it I suppose.

matelodave

DeletedUser said:

What was on fire at Sellindge?

The cross channel power cables carry electricity using DC current rather tha AC so at Sellinge in Kent and Les Mandarines ststion (near Calais) there are ginormuos converter stations that convert AC into DC and DC into AC (dpending on the direction of the currebt flow). I suspect that one or more of the inverter units and its surroundings is what has gone up in smoke.

They aren't the sort of thing that you can get spare from Maplins to patch it up.

Bearing in mind that it only carried between 1-2Gw and the average UK consumption is between 35 and 45 Gw it really shouldn't have a significant effect on our capacity.

However as we've been chucking all our eggs into wind power and the wind hasn't been blowing as much as we'd like then gas is still our major source of leccy. At the moment the Fench are generating  around 43GW or 93% of their electricity with nuclear and we are managing to produce around 4.3Gw from nuclear