Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Yep, nuclear would have been a great deployment in the 80/90's, but it seems it can't keep up with the modern world.

If French nuclear is such a great idea, then why doesn't France build it on the NW coast then sell it to us via interconnectors at market rates ....... after all, it's a great idea isn't it?

Here's the Guardian version of that story:

New UK nuclear plants could be paid for upfront by consumers

What France could do is

1 deploy a large district heating grid so 85% of French homes and businesses are heated by district heating grids from the waste heat of nuclear reactors

This reduces electricity demand in France by about 160TWh (as a lot of French homes and businesses are heated by the grid using simple resistance heaters)

2. Upgrade and uprate their existing reactors to add 10GW of nuclear capacity (without building additional nukes). And Increase capacity factor to 92%. This increase nuclear output by some 190TWh

This allows France to export an additional 350TWh annually which is massive it's more than 100% of UK needs.

3. Build/complete additional links to UK/Italy/Germany/Spain/etc

4. Close down its CCGT fleet and coal fleet (unnecessary as peak domestic winter electricity demand would fall from about 90GW towards 50GW)

Could be done in as little as 10 years

Just to note that theoretical french nuke industry could be enough to provide 25% of all of the EUs (510 million people) electricity needs.. more likely 100% of France and 50% of its neighbour countries

Plus 85% of France's heating needs

But of course this won't happen too much anti nuclear sentiment
Nuclear heating should be considered
It can provide significant quantities of cheap clean heat
It can also reduce electricity demand currently met by electrical heating in countries like France Norway Sweden etc

The state should give free heating to the people via nuclear heat for 10 years then charged at 5p a unit

Much safer than traditional electricity nuclear generation

Solves existing and future nuclear waste (you just keep it in the heating pools and it's decay heat becomes a resource for heating buildings)

Lowers electricity demand from ~335TWh towards 300TWh

Close to 100% domestic jobs and GDP (most the cost is the district heating side which are shovels and pipes) rather than importing Chinese PV panels or German wind blades. Could also innovative like micro directional drilling to lower costs of building out a district heating grid

Solves the hardest aspects of a 0% fossil word which is heating especially seasonal heating

Potential for hybrid nuclear designs like LWR followed by HWR designs to get 3x the energy output from the same fuel rods. Also 90% overall efficiency rather than 33% for nuclear electricity

Reduces consumer costs (no need to buy gas boilers or heat pumps and replace them every 10-20 years and maintain them)

Could be done in as little as 10 years (potentially as little as 5 years
If reactors are delayed could power the District heating grids via natural gas until they are ready
Could heat 95% of buildings (the very remote homes can be heated via electricity)

6-7 million homes to be built now to 2050 could direct plug into district heating saving them £5-15k on a heat pump. Existing 30 million or so gas boiler heated buildings and homes can be converted at lower cost than paying £5-£20k for a heat pump each.

ed110220 wrote: »

I'm sorry, but your proposals/forecasts etc seem to be getting more and more fanciful. First you assert that climate change will have no real net negative effects when all mainstream scientific and economic authorities have found that they will be severe.

Now you're talking of nuclear powered district heating, which I'm not aware of even being proposed seriously on a large scale from large centralised power stations, let alone installed. OK, it may work if we were to build sizeable towns from scratch next to nuclear power stations (like the Soviet Union did at Pripyat, Novovoronezh etc) but the idea that waste heat from say Hinkley Point could be practically and economically piped to and round Bristol and all the streets and gardens dug up to distribute it is a total fantasy.

No one said solving heating would be easy. It's going to be more difficult than electricity and more difficult than transport maybe even more difficult than aviation

Piping hot water to homes would not be an impossible task. We pipe water gas and electricity to homes so it's just one additional service. Plus there exists ways to lay pipe without having to dig ever meter of distance. Plus these pipes would not be massive as water is a great energy carriers you can transfer tens of KW of power with a 15mm pipe (about the thickness of your finger)

By comparison what is the alternative? 40 million heat pumps at £10k average would cost £400 Billion and only last about 15 years talk about a mega project!!. plus heat pumps would add a huge demand to the grid so grid upgrades plus gas fired station backup for when the wind doesn't blow plus mass offshore wind to power it all

By the way it doesn't have to be nuclear.
You can do District heating with anything
Biomass. Natural gas. Coal. Oil. High temp heat pumps. Electricity. Or nuclear.

And District heating has/does exist on some areas. Like Poland (but that's mostly coal fired) and Finland which is a mix of biomass gas etc and Iceland (geothermal)

And yes I am aware there are no plans to do nuclear district heating
There isn't really a plan to do mass decarb of heating
On an individual level a home can just install electric heaters or heat pumps that's fine (if you can afford the £10k for a heat pump or can afford paying 15p for electricity rather than 3p for natural gas) but on a national level it gets really difficult. Try pulling 40 million X 2KW for resistance heating and you add 80GW to winter demand. With heat pumps maybe it's half or even one third that number but then the government needs to find £400 billion to mass install heat pumps should that £400 billion come from healthcare or school budget? Plus what do you do in a winter week when the wind isn't blowing strong? Do you fire up natural gas fired power stations to feed the electric heaters and heat pumps? That's not very green is it? People think.... hydrogen will solve storage but it's s pipe dream with a lot of problems

Nuclear heating could work it solves heating
90% efficiency
No energy storage problem because you can control it's output to match demand
No real 'waste' in that the waste generates heat so let it generate heat for the district heating system for decades and decades
Very different from electricity generation nuclear. Low pressure low temperature
Can be built as small as 2MW to heat 1,000 homes to as big as 10GW to heat 5 million homes
Saves households the cost of buying maintaining and replacing gas boilers or heat pumps
Really cheap energy
But expensive distribution costs. But that is true for NAT gas and electricity too they cost about 1/3rd wholesale as they do retail

Plus this can be done in 10 years or less
There is no other way to decarb heating that fast
There is no other way to do such a deep (95-100%) decarb of heating
The big cost is the district heating grids not the nuclear aspects
You may find the nuclear side is 10% of the cost and the district heating grid is 90% of the cost.

As mentioned nuclear power stations already produced lots of heat
While an EPR reactor is 1.6GW electricity it is in fact 4.5GW heat
Not having to make electricity would probably reduce costs by 70%
So even using EPR figure of about £100/MWh you get towards £10/MWh for a heat only reactor
Perhaps much less still once you have a learning curve
The UK could build and use for instance 100 X 1GW thermal reactor. One hundred reactors would be enough to learn and get good.

Not that it is necessary but there is almost no limit to the size of a heat only reactors
You could even just build one nuclear heat station for all of England. Something like a 85GW thermal reactor (more likely multiple piles in the same pool). With electricity you are limited by a lot of things but one in particular is the machinery to make electricity plus the fact you don't want one massive electricity station as if it trips you can cause problems. While thermal reactors can be turned off and on without much trouble as the system has inbuilt thermal energy storage so if a thermal heat reactor tripped it would cause no problem at all but if an EPR tripped depending on the size of your grid it could take the whole grid down hence why you won't find a country like Ireland deploy an EPR it's too big


Oh and I know this isn't likely because well... nuclear run for the hills

But it solves heating
Can control power
Can scale from 1MW to even 100GW
Much simpler design smaller cheaper than electricity
90% efficient
No 'waste' as when the fuel rods are used you just keep them in the pool so they contribute to the heat so it's a useful product not 'waste' you can even store existing nuclear waste in these pool heat reactor systems so they too contribute to heat
Can be built faster (since it's a nuclear power station minus about 70% of the bits and bobs)

Again I don't think this is likely but it certainly would work and would be effective

A deep decarb of heating quite rapidly (10 years) at probably a cheap price

There is no other plan for a deep decarb of heating that comes close to this.
The only other plan is a mass deployment of heat pumps
But installing 40 million heat pumps on the UK will cost around £400 billion and these things run off expensive electricity and where do you get the electricity in the winter when PV output is very limited and when we can have a weeks worth of windless days? Also a heat pump lasts about 15 years a heat reactor would be designed for 60 years and most likely the reactor and the district heating grids would be fine for 100+ years.