Energy rationing

Section62

FreeBear said:

Section62 said:

70sbudgie said:

FreeBear said:

Total, just shy of 2.8GW - Not too shabby, but no where near enough to take up the slack if there is a major failure elsewhere.

4 plants with more than 1/3 of the capacity of the 5 nuclear sites. And perhaps a quarter of the build time for new. 

Dinorwig took about 10 years to build.

Building additional pumped storage or building additional nuclear would be on a similar timescale.

And as SparkyGrad has pointed out, one doesn't fully substitute for the other as they do different things.

But 70sbudgie and myself were not claiming that pumped storage is a substitute for nuclear.

I didn't say you were.

But 70sbudgie was drawing some kind of comparison (not clear exactly what) with the part of their post I quoted.

MattMattMattUK

ariarnia said:

Section62 said:

70sbudgie said:

FreeBear said:

Total, just shy of 2.8GW - Not too shabby, but no where near enough to take up the slack if there is a major failure elsewhere.

4 plants with more than 1/3 of the capacity of the 5 nuclear sites. And perhaps a quarter of the build time for new. 

Dinorwig took about 10 years to build.

Building additional pumped storage or building additional nuclear would be on a similar timescale.

And as SparkyGrad has pointed out, one doesn't fully substitute for the other as they do different things.

aren't the rolls royce plants supposed to only take 3 or 4 once approved? not a solution for this winter but multiple mini plants might be a (relatively) quick fix. 

I think you mean SMRs, they will take 2-4 years to build and bring online once sites are approved, but there is a big issue, the RR SMR is only on preliminary design at the moment, it is not expected to be prototyped for another 2-3 years, with low level production towards the end of the decade and only able to reach mass production in the 2030s. 

QrizB

Dolor said:

Pray that we do not have a Winter similar to that of 1962/63 - and that happened before global warming was ever mentioned.

‘The winter of 1962-63 was the coldest snap of weather in the UK since 1740. 

This was 1955, but still quite impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ugIoMD495E

70sbudgie

Section62 said:

FreeBear said:

Section62 said:

70sbudgie said:

FreeBear said:

Total, just shy of 2.8GW - Not too shabby, but no where near enough to take up the slack if there is a major failure elsewhere.

4 plants with more than 1/3 of the capacity of the 5 nuclear sites. And perhaps a quarter of the build time for new. 

Dinorwig took about 10 years to build.

Building additional pumped storage or building additional nuclear would be on a similar timescale.

And as SparkyGrad has pointed out, one doesn't fully substitute for the other as they do different things.

But 70sbudgie and myself were not claiming that pumped storage is a substitute for nuclear.

I didn't say you were.

But 70sbudgie was drawing some kind of comparison (not clear exactly what) with the part of their post I quoted.

I'm not sure either! 

I am a bit of a tree hugger, so although I appreciate that nuclear is low carbon, in my heart, I can't support a technology that produces a waste we don't really know how to dispose of. (Burying it, or sending it to someone else and pretending they have a magic solution, don't count). I don't know much about pumped storage, so was wondering what the negatives are.

I guess my (admittedly very weak) comparison with nuclear, was that someone had said that pumped hydro is too expensive and the planned projects haven't got planning. But I'd only just seen a news article about Boris pledging £700M for nuclear. I was wondering how much pumped storage that would get us and when.

I thought nuclear was more like 25 years to build. So even if pumped storage is 10 years, it is still half the time for nuclear. I think we can probably exclude the mini nuclear plants as they are technically still developing technology (though I thought they'd been putting them in subs for a couple decades?)

MattMattMattUK

70sbudgie said:

I thought nuclear was more like 25 years to build. So even if pumped storage is 10 years, it is still half the time for nuclear. I think we can probably exclude the mini nuclear plants as they are technically still developing technology (though I thought they'd been putting them in subs for a couple decades?)

Nuclear is around 5-10 years from breaking ground to fully commissioned, issued with the planning process can take a decade or more before that, however the government could legislate to deal with that if it wanted to solve the issues.

For SMRs the technology is based on marine nuclear reactors but that is the starting point, those existing reactors are smaller than the proposed RR SMR and would not work for commercial power generation, but as a starting point for a the land based SMR they provide a reasonable and proven starting point.

The problem with pumped storage is that it adds nothing to our generation capacity and in many ways it takes away generation capacity due to not being 100% efficient, all it does is load shift slightly.

70sbudgie said: 

I am a bit of a tree hugger, so although I appreciate that nuclear is low carbon, in my heart, I can't support a technology that produces a waste we don't really know how to dispose of. (Burying it, or sending it to someone else and pretending they have a magic solution, don't count). I don't know much about pumped storage, so was wondering what the negatives are.

Burying it in a shallow hole in the ground nope, but Deep Geological Repositories are a perfectly sensible and viable solution. The UK was once a global leader in nuclear power and reprocessing, technologies which would have meant the UK could have a secure, carbon free power generation capacity. Realistically in the medium and probably long term nuclear power remains the only viable solution to low or no carbon energy production and national energy security, in the short term we have to accept both carbon emitting production as well as risks to supply. The best time to build more nuclear power plants was twenty years ago, the second best time to build them is now.

sienew

70sbudgie said:

Section62 said:

FreeBear said:

Section62 said:

70sbudgie said:

FreeBear said:

Total, just shy of 2.8GW - Not too shabby, but no where near enough to take up the slack if there is a major failure elsewhere.

4 plants with more than 1/3 of the capacity of the 5 nuclear sites. And perhaps a quarter of the build time for new. 

Dinorwig took about 10 years to build.

Building additional pumped storage or building additional nuclear would be on a similar timescale.

And as SparkyGrad has pointed out, one doesn't fully substitute for the other as they do different things.

But 70sbudgie and myself were not claiming that pumped storage is a substitute for nuclear.

I didn't say you were.

But 70sbudgie was drawing some kind of comparison (not clear exactly what) with the part of their post I quoted.

I'm not sure either! 

I am a bit of a tree hugger, so although I appreciate that nuclear is low carbon, in my heart, I can't support a technology that produces a waste we don't really know how to dispose of. (Burying it, or sending it to someone else and pretending they have a magic solution, don't count). I don't know much about pumped storage, so was wondering what the negatives are.

I guess my (admittedly very weak) comparison with nuclear, was that someone had said that pumped hydro is too expensive and the planned projects haven't got planning. But I'd only just seen a news article about Boris pledging £700M for nuclear. I was wondering how much pumped storage that would get us and when.

I thought nuclear was more like 25 years to build. So even if pumped storage is 10 years, it is still half the time for nuclear. I think we can probably exclude the mini nuclear plants as they are technically still developing technology (though I thought they'd been putting them in subs for a couple decades?)

Nuclear is far quicker than that. If a lot of effort and govt support was done it's reasonable to have nuclear production in 5 years an massive production in 10. Half the battle with nuclear is getting the permission to actually build the plant but with full govt backing that planning permission could get down to months instead of 5+ years. It's just a matter of how much the government will actually back them.

Section62

70sbudgie said:

I guess my (admittedly very weak) comparison with nuclear, was that someone had said that pumped hydro is too expensive and the planned projects haven't got planning. But I'd only just seen a news article about Boris pledging £700M for nuclear. I was wondering how much pumped storage that would get us and when.

I thought nuclear was more like 25 years to build. So even if pumped storage is 10 years, it is still half the time for nuclear. I think we can probably exclude the mini nuclear plants as they are technically still developing technology (though I thought they'd been putting them in subs for a couple decades?)

The current planned nuclear build is based on a construction period in the range of nine to twelve years. So comparable.

The opportunities for pumped storage are limited by the need to have both an upper and lower reservoir with sufficient head (hundreds of metres) between them.  Essentially you are looking for a mountain with something like a cirque/corrie/cwm near the top which can be dammed to form the upper reservoir.

Connecting the two involves large-diameter tunelling through rock.  And although Foyers and Ffestiniog power stations were constructed in the open (on the edge of the lower reservoir), it is more likely that any future schemes will be built the same way as Cruachan and Dinorwig - with the turbines and generation equipment buried deep within the mountain.

Building involving tunelling in rock is a high-risk activity.  Although some uncertainty can be reduced through ground investigation, the uncertainty only ends when tunelling is completed. A site suitable for pumped storage also needs to have the right geological conditions, and stability.  And then you need to get lucky.

The planning process for new nuclear power is achingly slow.  But planning for new pumped storage won't be appreciably faster.

shinytop

We accelerated the development process for Covid vaccines hugely, without compromising safety.  because we had to.  We can and should do the same for new power generation and storage.            

MattMattMattUK

shinytop said:

We accelerated the development process for Covid vaccines hugely, without compromising safety.  because we had to.  We can and should do the same for new power generation and storage.            

What exactly do you want to accelerate though? Remember that the vaccines were already an established technology, adapting them to a new coronavirus is not a particularly difficult task and existing production facilities were used to produce and prepare the vaccines. New nuclear reactors cannot be fast tracked to a few years no matter how hard one tries, at least without compromising safety significantly. For existing designs there are only a few facilities in the world that can build the pressure vessels, due to the radiation involved you cannot just knock one up out of mild steel in a standard production facility, fusion reactors cannot be fast tracked as we have been trying to get them working for 50+ years and even in a best case scenario they are probably another 20 years away. Storage depends on the type, but as others have pointed out pumped storage would take the best part of a decade, battery storage is not really viable to start with in the UK and requires a huge amount of lithium, as well as building a new grid scale battery factory alone would take two years before it even started making anything and needs dozens of supporting industries.

If there were easy answers countries would already be doing them, there are not which is why everyone is having to make hard decisions. I hope the UK commits to a huge nuclear and wind building program, with more gas (including fracking) as a stopgap solution for energy security in the 10-15 years it will take to build enough zero carbon generation capacity.