Discussion
deeen said:
Major Fallout said:
eldar said:
Major Fallout said:
Ok this I why I don't like it.
There was a kid at school that was the butt of most jokes, The problem was he was stupid. Not thick he just lacked all common sense. He is now living with the local female nutter, she has even tried to kill him a few times. Guess what he works at Sellafield now doing god knows what, something about sucking out the radioactive sludge from under some water after a problem they had a few years ago. Last time I met him he was telling me about some of the pranks they like to pull on the other workers.
There are some very clever people involved in the nuclear power industry, but it only needs one nutter to spoil it.
Helps if you are stupid and hoovering out radioactive sludgeThere was a kid at school that was the butt of most jokes, The problem was he was stupid. Not thick he just lacked all common sense. He is now living with the local female nutter, she has even tried to kill him a few times. Guess what he works at Sellafield now doing god knows what, something about sucking out the radioactive sludge from under some water after a problem they had a few years ago. Last time I met him he was telling me about some of the pranks they like to pull on the other workers.
There are some very clever people involved in the nuclear power industry, but it only needs one nutter to spoil it.
Edited by Major Fallout on Wednesday 17th November 17:01
Dumb people work in petrochemical, as well, and cause the odd incident. Does it stop you buying petrol?I realise we have to have nuclear power.
But I don't have to like it.
RobDickinson said:
According to that report by a pro renewable prof last year the UK is totaly stuffed and needs to rely on nuclear power.
Green/renewable sources and fossil just wont work.
Renewables work......they just arn't going to provide all that we are going to need..... unless, we have a unbelievably drastic reduction in demand, which isn't gonna happen.Green/renewable sources and fossil just wont work.
RobDickinson said:
Doesnt a big chunk of the Uk power come from France and there 90% nuclear...
Yup, and not only that, but due to the last 4 or 5 UK Govt's ducking the Nuclear issue during the past 20 years, not only has our domestic Nuclear expertise all but dissappeared, but privatisation has meant the French actually now own our Nuclear generation capacity 
randomwalk said:
fission nuclear power has a place as a way to get us thru to the next technology, ie fusion nuclear power, this will have the benefit of almost limitless power and little waste products, some say we will have fusion power in 25 yrs.
There's a running joke that fusion reactors are perpetually 25 years away.Several downsides
One of the downsides is that you don't really know how much nuclear generated electricity costs, because decommissioning costs are unknown because nothing has been completely decomissioned yet. Take Dounreay for example, it will finish decommissing in AD 2336 ( job for life!) at an estimated cost of £2.9billion. Estimated costs always go up, given it is 300 years to overun I think that would be nearer to £10 billion. £100 billion, nobody knows. They are already running into trouble up there, according to wiki
"A 65-metre deep shaft used for intermediate level nuclear waste disposal is contaminating some groundwater, and is threatened by coastal erosion in about 300 years time."
So just as it becomes decommissioned ..
Even without decommissioning costs environmental costs can be large. The UK government has spent £750m cleaning up the Irish Sea and it still isn't clean from radioactive particles.
Finally, security comes into play, we don't have our own uranium ore, a lot of the places you can get uranimum ore from may not wish to give it to us if they become unfriendly for whatever reasons.
Personally I think the £750m spent on cleaning up the North Sea from the Windscale bomb matrerial making, sorry power station, would have been better spent getting houses with good loft insulation, cavity wall and efficient boilers!
Andy
One of the downsides is that you don't really know how much nuclear generated electricity costs, because decommissioning costs are unknown because nothing has been completely decomissioned yet. Take Dounreay for example, it will finish decommissing in AD 2336 ( job for life!) at an estimated cost of £2.9billion. Estimated costs always go up, given it is 300 years to overun I think that would be nearer to £10 billion. £100 billion, nobody knows. They are already running into trouble up there, according to wiki
"A 65-metre deep shaft used for intermediate level nuclear waste disposal is contaminating some groundwater, and is threatened by coastal erosion in about 300 years time."
So just as it becomes decommissioned ..
Even without decommissioning costs environmental costs can be large. The UK government has spent £750m cleaning up the Irish Sea and it still isn't clean from radioactive particles.
Finally, security comes into play, we don't have our own uranium ore, a lot of the places you can get uranimum ore from may not wish to give it to us if they become unfriendly for whatever reasons.
Personally I think the £750m spent on cleaning up the North Sea from the Windscale bomb matrerial making, sorry power station, would have been better spent getting houses with good loft insulation, cavity wall and efficient boilers!
Andy
Edited by zakelwe on Thursday 18th November 07:46
Edited by zakelwe on Thursday 18th November 13:16
Dounereay's probably not the best example to show what future decommissioning will be like, it was a science experiment started 55 years ago and they really didn't plan how to take it apart once it was over. It's lessons learned from that project that will make future waste storage, decommissioning etc much more effective.
Cheers,
FT.
Cheers,
FT.
zakelwe said:
Finally, security comes into play, we don't have our own uranium ore, a lot of the places you can get uranimum ore from may not wish to give it to us if they become unfriendly for whatever reasons.
zakelwe said:
Personally I think the £750m spent on cleaning up the North Sea from the Windscale bomb matrerial making, sorry power station, would have been better spent getting houses with good loft insulation, cavity wall and efficient boilers!
Yes, we are still a long way from getting to a point in this country where we are not wasteful of energy. You only have to drive around London at nighttime and look at the amount of lit up empty offices to see that!And to be fair, Calder Hall/Windscale/Sellafield or whatever they call it next, has been used to generate elecktrickery over the years more than produce material for our old atomic weapons programme, which intially came from the special plant at Capenhurst before the additional capacity of the reactors at Calderhall and Chapelcross were used.
Sorry, I'm not seeing the link between the nuclear bomb and nuclear power.
Anyway, the point is that technology has progressed a lot and our understanding of how to process the waste has come a long way.
We can now process a lot more of the waste than we used to be able to and re-purpose it back to fuel. It leaves a lot less waste going into the ground.
The earth has a surface area of 148,300,000km2
I don't see why we can't take 100, 100km plots of wasteland, dig a big old hole and dump it in there. Making a few plots of land uninhabitable seems like a small price to pay for solving our energy needs.
Anyway, the point is that technology has progressed a lot and our understanding of how to process the waste has come a long way.
We can now process a lot more of the waste than we used to be able to and re-purpose it back to fuel. It leaves a lot less waste going into the ground.
The earth has a surface area of 148,300,000km2
I don't see why we can't take 100, 100km plots of wasteland, dig a big old hole and dump it in there. Making a few plots of land uninhabitable seems like a small price to pay for solving our energy needs.
There was a programme on TV last night about this (BBC2 - The Secret Life of the National Grid). Apparently we (British) went for the AGR type of reactors because, back then (in the 1950s and 1960s), our nuclear power generation was run by scientists rather than anyone with a commercial or political overview, so most of our nuclear power stations are the AGR type. This is, apparently, a very elegant scientific creation but as was later found (and mentioned above) bloody expensive to decommission - and led directly to the cancellation of Maggy T's proposed power services "sell off" (the "sell off" wouldn't have even covered the costs of decommissionin).
So, whilst I agree that the only real solution for power in the future on the scale we have it today is nuclear, we either have to remove the commercial aspect of it altogether (make it public-owned) or there's a lot of work to do in making them run for longer, without compromising safety, and disposal and decommissioning practices need working out in more detail.
Or, we **don't** continue at current levels of power, make power generation the responsibility of individuals or small communities, and force people to reduce their consumption.
We have squandered our natural gas and oil supplies. We still have mountains of coal but the current CO2 tax-gathering agenda is simply incompatible with coal-fired power. Ultimately any power generation that relies on natural fuels is limited by time.
So, whilst I agree that the only real solution for power in the future on the scale we have it today is nuclear, we either have to remove the commercial aspect of it altogether (make it public-owned) or there's a lot of work to do in making them run for longer, without compromising safety, and disposal and decommissioning practices need working out in more detail.
Or, we **don't** continue at current levels of power, make power generation the responsibility of individuals or small communities, and force people to reduce their consumption.
We have squandered our natural gas and oil supplies. We still have mountains of coal but the current CO2 tax-gathering agenda is simply incompatible with coal-fired power. Ultimately any power generation that relies on natural fuels is limited by time.
We have a facility here called "Nuclear Powerplant Doel", a nuclear power station of the PWR type with 4 reactors:
Doel 1 : 433 MW
Doel 2 : 433 MW
Doel 3 : 1006 MW
Doel 4 : 1040 MW
Together worth almost 30% of Belgium power production, employing almost 1000 ppl.
Without nuclear power, we would be in the dark. At night, we sell our excess energy cheap to France, and "store" it in the form of pumping a huge reservoir up, so that it can be "emptied" when there's need for extra power.
The "government(s)" (remeber, this is belgium) had plans to shut them down within 15 years. That's 10 years ago, and all they did meanwhile was up the capacity.
It's all too easy to mock current processes, but it's another matter to propose a decent alternative.
My call is they are here to stay until they are made redundant by nuclear fusion (sun-on-earth principle).
Nuclear fusion imho is the future, as it proposes the possibility of near limitless power with near zero environmental impact.
This could open the doors to Hydrogen powered vehicles (or -everything), as the biggest downside to hydrogen power right now is the power required for the electrolysis, which won't be an issue with fusion (use the excess power at night for the creation of hydrogen for example).
Doel 1 : 433 MW
Doel 2 : 433 MW
Doel 3 : 1006 MW
Doel 4 : 1040 MW
Together worth almost 30% of Belgium power production, employing almost 1000 ppl.
Without nuclear power, we would be in the dark. At night, we sell our excess energy cheap to France, and "store" it in the form of pumping a huge reservoir up, so that it can be "emptied" when there's need for extra power.
The "government(s)" (remeber, this is belgium) had plans to shut them down within 15 years. That's 10 years ago, and all they did meanwhile was up the capacity.
It's all too easy to mock current processes, but it's another matter to propose a decent alternative.
My call is they are here to stay until they are made redundant by nuclear fusion (sun-on-earth principle).
Nuclear fusion imho is the future, as it proposes the possibility of near limitless power with near zero environmental impact.
This could open the doors to Hydrogen powered vehicles (or -everything), as the biggest downside to hydrogen power right now is the power required for the electrolysis, which won't be an issue with fusion (use the excess power at night for the creation of hydrogen for example).
Frankeh said:
Sorry, I'm not seeing the link between the nuclear bomb and nuclear power.
It's a pretty big one.UK plc had been at the forefront of the early atomic age at the begining of WW2, and then we pooled our resources with the Canadians and Americans on the Manhatten Project. After the war the Govt decided to go it alone with an independant atomic weapons programme, as this would also allow us to develop our own technology that would then allow for expanded use for civilian power generation off the back of the weapons programme.
It's a technology that subsequent Govt's have since squandered...as per usual..... as newer generations of politians make decisions based on short term vote winning rather that looking at the long term view for the countries future
Mars said:
There was a programme on TV last night about this (BBC2 - The Secret Life of the National Grid). Apparently we (British) went for the AGR type of reactors because, back then (in the 1950s and 1960s), our nuclear power generation was run by scientists rather than anyone with a commercial or political overview, so most of our nuclear power stations are the AGR type. This is, apparently, a very elegant scientific creation but as was later found (and mentioned above) bloody expensive to decommission - and led directly to the cancellation of Maggy T's proposed power services "sell off" (the "sell off" wouldn't have even covered the costs of decommissionin).
No AGR's have been decommisioned yet.Initially, all our stations built in the 1950's and early 1960's were of the Magnox type, and these are the ones that are being decommisioned, not the AGR's which are the ones that are still in use. I think there's only 1 or maybe two older Magnox stations left active which are due for shut down in the next year or so.
The AGR's were a better solution and the design and building of these started in the late 1960's early 70's. I started work 30 years ago on the design of Heysham II and Torness NPS which were IIRC the last two AGR's built before the first (and only) PWR at Sizewell was built in the 1980's.
The Thorium fuelled reators, if created, could certainley be the interim solution in terms of cost etc., and raw material matter, until they can crack the fission idea.
In a nutshell, Calder Hall's (the original reactor on the Sellafield site) primary role was to extract the plutonium from spent fuel to provide fissile material for the UK's atomic weapons programme. It wasn't until the mid/late 1990's that the govt announced it was no longer acting in this capacity.
The real Apache said:
Waste seems to be the biggest issue of concern, does Thorium address this?
Somewhat:1. Thorium reactors should be able to run on waster from older reactors, removing the need to store or re-process that.
2. The output from Thorium reactors will be about as radioactive as current systems at first, but has much shorter half life. For example the radioactivity will be something like 1/10th after 100 years, and 1/10,000 after 500 years compared to conventional, which makes storing it a lot more appealing.
3. It's hard to produce any weapons grade materials from it. Difficult to get U233 out of it, and I think impossible to get plutonium. So nothing you could make much or a bomb out of (dirty bombs aside).
Cheers,
FT.
I'm not sure you can make these things a lot more safe as long as humans are still involved. The Japanese reactors are very advanced and earthquake proof but we still have operatives carrying nuclear waste around in buckets. The americans on the other hand put coats on top of the big red flashing warning light.
Andy
Andy
aeropilot said:
I think there's only 1 or maybe two older Magnox stations left active which are due for shut down in the next year or so.
Wylfa & Oldbury - both have been granted life extensions for another couple of years.aeropilot said:
The AGR's were a better solution and the design and building of these started in the late 1960's early 70's. I started work 30 years ago on the design of Heysham II and Torness NPS which were IIRC the last two AGR's built before the first (and only) PWR at Sizewell was built in the 1980's.
I did once read that the AGR's were considered safer compared to a PWR due to the gas coolant not being able to cause anywhere near the amount of damage that water could in the event of an explosion, though the trade-off was that an AGR was more expensive to build.Is this right or was it just a way of trying to justify the AGR over a system that another country was trying to sell us?
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