The Return Of Nuclear Power !?!

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Too busy to reply

Off to buy tinfoil.

Be back later

 

[Hopefuldave]

It would be unlikely, the 2 things are hugely different in the way they operate, about the only thing they share is the name “nuclear” - fission is splitting apart atoms, the other is fusing atoms together under enormous temperatures/pressures. The fact that fusion is still experimental means that by the time they actually get around to producing a commercially available version (if indeed they ever can) means that even newly built fission reactors will probably be at the end of their life anyway.

Fusion has been 20 years away FF or the last 60 years...
I did work with a very bright lass who had worked on the lasers for ignition at ITER, she thought it was 20 years away, too...

Dave H. (the other one)

 

[My Old Landy]

Fusion has been 20 years away FF or the last 60 years...
I did work with a very bright lass who had worked on the lasers for ignition at ITER, she thought it was 20 years away, too...

Dave H. (the other one)

Well as we used to say, fusion is thirty years away and always will be! So things have improved if we are only twenty years away now

 

[mike os]

I just did my dissertation on electric vehicles vs diesel hybrid vehicles.

The long and short of it is that the UK currently produces enough electricity per year to support 100% ICE cars being replaced with EV taking in to account charger losses, grid losses etc.

The problem is that that is the average electricity generation, winter would be a problem and cold snaps such as "the beast from the east" would be disastrous. We would simply not have capacity to charge cars and support current domestic & industry demand during those events.

Now add in 25% domestic heating by the end of the decade and tell me how that works?

 

[mike os]

Fusion is as much a pipe dream today as it was 50 years ago..... either it us serious under funded or it just doesn't work in the real world, or it still needs a fundamental principle understanding/ discovering... which I guess is the same thing

 

[Mr Fro]

Now add in 25% domestic heating by the end of the decade and tell me how that works?

Erm... That's the point, it doesn’t.

 

[mike os]

Erm... That's the point, it doesn’t.

Correct

And what's planned to Correct this.?

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Correct

And what's planned to Correct this.?

Crossed fingers.

I jest but feels that way

 

[ronan]

Aren't the UK going to import power from Iceland ? Thought i heard something about that.

 

[HealeyBJ8]

The obvious place to put a Nuclear power station is in London, they could run a district heating system from the waste heat and much of the demand is there due to the big servers needing to be close to the City, so few transmission losses. They never do build one anywhere close to London though, I wonder why?

Plenty of hot air from number 10 !!

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Plenty of hot air from number 10 !!

Don't forget all the fertiliser he spouts out of his mouth.

 

[4String.]

I once worked for a chap who was a prof at Hull uni, they built some model and trial tidal equipment, got the funding to go full size but it would not scale

This was a few years ago but looks like it hasn't been solved

When I first started on hiab wagons back in Hull about 15 years ago I took an experimental tidal generator and craned it into the river Wharfe just downstream of Bolton Abbey.

It was a tiny thing that looked like the front of a speed boat and had 4 shafts sticking out of the bottom that had vanes on them which oscillated in the current and generated electricity. It only generated 2KW but did it 24/7 at no cost to the environment, and I think the same folk had something a bit larger moored out in the Humber as well.

 

[Blobber]

Were lucky if we go a month without a power cut here in north east lincolnshire, always got a generator on standby just in case!

 

[500e]

At what cost
We have learnt nothing regarding internal supply.
No steel no coal no real indigenous veichle manifacturers no ship building on any real scale huge imports of food Little consumer electronics clothes it is not a good to be reliant on others to this level

 

[Guest 10992]

At what cost
We have learnt nothing regarding internal supply.
No steel no coal no real indigenous veichle manifacturers no ship building on any real scale huge imports of food Little consumer electronics clothes it is not a good to be reliant on others to this level

That's because we used to be a manufacturing nation until Thatcher, who thought it would be a good idea to turn us into a 'service' nation. It was a just a cheap way of taking power away from the unions of the time. Like most things in life then as now there was or is no balance.

 

[Munkul]

Fusion is as much a pipe dream today as it was 50 years ago..... either it us serious under funded or it just doesn't work in the real world, or it still needs a fundamental principle understanding/ discovering... which I guess is the same thing

Not at all.
The biggest stumblingblock is suitable and commercially sensible superconductors for the tokomak design to decrease the energy losses to a viable level.
It's fairly well understood, and current superconducting materials are sufficient to give a theoretical return on energy, although no where near the levels of the tokomak power output. Its nearly all lost as waste, as a crazy amount of power goes into generating the electromagnetic fields and cooling the conductors.

 

[Ross365]

As an insider for the UK Atomic Energy Authority
Fusion could be there if the funding was put in the right places,
JET reactor is the current biggest working reactor, later this year we are going for a big experiment that could get more energy out than in.
Iter in France is massive and just an experiment as well, no chance of getting on the grid.

The uk also has another reactor called MAST -U, this has been giving good results in the last 6 months and this will be the bases for STEP, this is planning to be the first power producing fusion plant in the world.

Thanks for that - it reflects what I've been seeing in newspapers. Apparently, three locations are already applying to be the home of the first commercial fusion station; two are in Scotland but the other is the huge former site of the Radcliffe-on-Soar (coal) power station, a few miles SW of Nottingham.

But with fission, the UK has done exactly what it did with ship building (and to some degree car manufacturing) - just lost the capacity through sheer political neglect.

I think that Hinckley involves Chinese funding rather than technology, which is French. The French have been building a similar station in Finland which is miles behind schedule. Having said that, the French do have about 60 reactors running in France; the most we had was 33 but they mostly closed after long ( and safe) service and I think we are down to ~5 remaining?

I think that this what happens when you have a country run by Civil Servants who all went and did degrees at Oxford in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
The TV series "Yes, Minister" was not a comedy!

 

[mike os]

Not at all.
The biggest stumblingblock is suitable and commercially sensible superconductors for the tokomak design to decrease the energy losses to a viable level.
It's fairly well understood, and current superconducting materials are sufficient to give a theoretical return on energy, although no where near the levels of the tokomak power output. Its nearly all lost as waste, as a crazy amount of power goes into generating the electromagnetic fields and cooling the conductors.

So just doesn't work in the real world?

 

[Munkul]

So just doesn't work in the real world?

A bit like electric cars. We all thought that lithium ion tech wasn't going to be good enough for the real world, yet here we are.
Or a bit like computing. A computer that fits in your pocket and has all the knowledge in the world available... that was just a dream a few decades ago.
Technology development gives incremental gains of efficiency which make things possible now, which weren't possible just 20 years ago.

What we really want is a huge jump forward, but it doesn't work like that...
The last great quantum leap forward was when they developed the first silicon integrated circuit... although I suppose that's debatable too

 

[mike os]

Except fusion has made no real progress in my lifetime, despite supposedly being the holy grail