Discussion
Mars said:
I worked as an IT supplier to Magnox for a couple of years in the late 1990s, mostly at Berkley but also spent time at Oldbury and a day in Trawsfynydd. It's my understanding that they intended to remove the roof from the Trawsfynydd reactor and leave it open to the elements at some point in the next few years however that was just "talk" by one of my colleagues (we're IT people not nuclear physicists).
Any truth to it?
No, not really. The rectors would be defuelled (easy). The remaining active bits removed (easyish, but time consuming). Get rid of the asbestos (hard and time consuming). Remove the remaining hardware and dispose of it, checking it for residual contamination (easy but slow).Any truth to it?
Then knock the buildings down, and prepare the site for the next reactor
Mars said:
Whilst at Oldbury I worked amongst the training staff. Oldbury is a world training centre for nuclear control. They explained the deal with Chernobyl to me back then which was scary but also that the level of radiation emitted from the reactor building is so low that I was receiving more as background radiation living (as I did at the time) in Droitwich (a known salt mining area - salts are known to emit ratiation of certain types).
not impossible! actually..no, but away from the building itself certainly could be - I don't know what the levels are in Droitwich 
The short-term economic view is a poison, it really is time people stopped whining "oh it's too expensive" - both about deployment of existing fission technology and about fusion research. It doesn't matter how much it costs: we need it to keep the lights on, and that's all about it. We need both bits: fusion for the long term - where "long" means by the time it runs out we'll either have worked out how to use some other source of energy that we don't even know about at the moment or wiped ourselves out - and fission to keep things running until we crack fusion, which is certainly possible to do, but is still looking like it'll take decades, as we're not really that much closer to it than we were when we first started on it.
And we need to do fission properly - not pissing about with silly, incredibly wasteful low-burnup once-through fuel cycles like (AFAIK) the US are so keen on so they can nesh out of reprocessing. We need to make full use of breeder reactors and thereby extract nearly all the energy from the uranium, both 235 and 238, not just skim off the tiny fraction which is the easy bit we can get from the 235 using the usual crappy short-termist excuse that reprocessing/breeding is "uneconomic"
because mildly-enriched uranium happens to be cheaper at the moment than doing a proper job. It's a finite resource and so like all finite resources needs to be used to the best effect we can, not 99% thrown away in a wasteful manner which will come back to bite us hard on the arse when we find we needed that stuff we've thrown away because other fuels have run out and we haven't cracked fusion yet.
Waste? Modern reactor technologies are pretty good at eating their own s
t, and doing so increases the percentage of energy extracted.
Proliferation? Irrelevant. The "dodgy" states that have acquired nuclear weapons have done so either entirely off their own bat or by taking the piss out of the NPT and ducking in and out of it as it suits them, getting the technology and then telling the inspectors to fk off. Building a bomb is not that hard - building lots of good ones is, but building one or two that will just about go bang is pretty easy; that's all the dodgy states want to do, since a few nukes is enough for them to threaten people, and they will do that anyway regardless of what the rest of the world does.
Fuel supply? We're a sight better off getting hold of uranium from Canada and Australia, where the main deposits are - countries which are not only "on our side" and likely to remain so, but even "share" our Queen - than we are getting oil from the Middle East countries who increasingly hate us for pissing around with their politics for nearly the whole of last century as well as this one, and would be just as happy to get the money by selling oil to India and China and leaving us in the st.
We need nuclear power, done properly, because we're fked if we don't. End of.
And we need to do fission properly - not pissing about with silly, incredibly wasteful low-burnup once-through fuel cycles like (AFAIK) the US are so keen on so they can nesh out of reprocessing. We need to make full use of breeder reactors and thereby extract nearly all the energy from the uranium, both 235 and 238, not just skim off the tiny fraction which is the easy bit we can get from the 235 using the usual crappy short-termist excuse that reprocessing/breeding is "uneconomic"
because mildly-enriched uranium happens to be cheaper at the moment than doing a proper job. It's a finite resource and so like all finite resources needs to be used to the best effect we can, not 99% thrown away in a wasteful manner which will come back to bite us hard on the arse when we find we needed that stuff we've thrown away because other fuels have run out and we haven't cracked fusion yet.Waste? Modern reactor technologies are pretty good at eating their own s
t, and doing so increases the percentage of energy extracted.Proliferation? Irrelevant. The "dodgy" states that have acquired nuclear weapons have done so either entirely off their own bat or by taking the piss out of the NPT and ducking in and out of it as it suits them, getting the technology and then telling the inspectors to f
k off. Building a bomb is not that hard - building lots of good ones is, but building one or two that will just about go bang is pretty easy; that's all the dodgy states want to do, since a few nukes is enough for them to threaten people, and they will do that anyway regardless of what the rest of the world does.Fuel supply? We're a sight better off getting hold of uranium from Canada and Australia, where the main deposits are - countries which are not only "on our side" and likely to remain so, but even "share" our Queen - than we are getting oil from the Middle East countries who increasingly hate us for pissing around with their politics for nearly the whole of last century as well as this one, and would be just as happy to get the money by selling oil to India and China and leaving us in the s
t.We need nuclear power, done properly, because we're f
ked if we don't. End of.Mars said:
It's my understanding that they intended to remove the roof from the Trawsfynydd reactor and leave it open to the elements at some point in the next few years however that was just "talk" by one of my colleagues (we're IT people not nuclear physicists).
Any truth to it?
If I remember correctly the plan is to drop the height of the reactor hall as much as possible, but it will be re-roofed.Any truth to it?
aeropilot said:
Pigeon said:
We need nuclear power, done properly, because we're fked if we don't. End of.
This......in a nutshell ked if we don't. End of.Edited by aeropilot on Friday 19th November 08:21
hahaha only joking. North Wales has loads of them out to sea very often not moving, we have a Nuclear Power station too, that doesn't stop producing power on a nice day.
GTO Scott said:
Mars said:
It's my understanding that they intended to remove the roof from the Trawsfynydd reactor and leave it open to the elements at some point in the next few years however that was just "talk" by one of my colleagues (we're IT people not nuclear physicists).
Any truth to it?
If I remember correctly the plan is to drop the height of the reactor hall as much as possible, but it will be re-roofed.Any truth to it?
Something else I recall - The lake has to be monitored because if the level drops, exposed silt along the bank is "undesireable". Would that sound plausible?
Last thing I heard was that you definitely shouldn't fish in that lake. I think it was more about not eating what you catch than finding something prehistorically large, or with multiple heads though.
Mars said:
Something else I recall - The lake has to be monitored because if the level drops, exposed silt along the bank is "undesireable". Would that sound plausible?
Yep. The silt at the bottom of Llyn Trawsfynydd isn't the sort of stuff you'd want people standing in, unless you want to glow in the dark. Mars said:
Last thing I heard was that you definitely shouldn't fish in that lake. I think it was more about not eating what you catch than finding something prehistorically large, or with multiple heads though.
You mean the locals have been swimming in there? 
Given the need for new forms of power, coupled with the closure of many heavy industries (Redcar Steelworks etc)....it the solution not obvious?!
Hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial brownfield land, hundreds of skilled industrial workers now unemployed....why don't they just build some plants in these locations, surely the people living here would rather have jobs in a Nuclear power plant, than no jobs at all?
Hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial brownfield land, hundreds of skilled industrial workers now unemployed....why don't they just build some plants in these locations, surely the people living here would rather have jobs in a Nuclear power plant, than no jobs at all?
JCB123 said:
Given the need for new forms of power, coupled with the closure of many heavy industries (Redcar Steelworks etc)....it the solution not obvious?!
Hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial brownfield land, hundreds of skilled industrial workers now unemployed....why don't they just build some plants in these locations, surely the people living here would rather have jobs in a Nuclear power plant, than no jobs at all?
I so thought you were going to suggest human sized hamster wheels. Hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial brownfield land, hundreds of skilled industrial workers now unemployed....why don't they just build some plants in these locations, surely the people living here would rather have jobs in a Nuclear power plant, than no jobs at all?
Gassing Station | The Lounge | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff