The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain
Discussion
FiF said:
Not sure if it has been discussed on this thread, or elsewhere for that matter, but consultation just ended on a trial in a village to test viability of hydrogen.
The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
The other day I was chatting to a chemist, his view was our old network it was not viable , at a molecular level its harder to contain than hydrocarbons.The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
Interesting that tests are taking place nevertheless.
Condi said:
PRTVR said:
And coal........
Let them freeze? .
Coal has gone up in price too, looks to be about 4 times the price it was last year. Although to burn coal you need to buy more emissions allowances than you would with gas, so need to factor their price increase in as well. All energy products are related as you can switch between the fuel sources. Let them freeze? .
Oil is actually very cheap now, vs other fuels.
EU coal prices;
4 times for coal is cheap compared to gas.
Anyone know what our installed/available nuclear generating capacity is at the moment? Looking at Grid Watch, it's running at under 5GW; with the amount of wind we've got tonight, it looks like if we were running at a flat 7GW (as indicated by the dial, no other info), we could all but switch the gas plants off.
Matthen said:
Anyone know what our installed/available nuclear generating capacity is at the moment? Looking at Grid Watch, it's running at under 5GW; with the amount of wind we've got tonight, it looks like if we were running at a flat 7GW (as indicated by the dial, no other info), we could all but switch the gas plants off.
EDF operate the remaining stations and have them all listed here. Looks like just under 4GW available today.https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/dai...
Hill92 said:
Matthen said:
Anyone know what our installed/available nuclear generating capacity is at the moment? Looking at Grid Watch, it's running at under 5GW; with the amount of wind we've got tonight, it looks like if we were running at a flat 7GW (as indicated by the dial, no other info), we could all but switch the gas plants off.
EDF operate the remaining stations and have them all listed here. Looks like just under 4GW available today.https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/dai...
PRTVR said:
FiF said:
Not sure if it has been discussed on this thread, or elsewhere for that matter, but consultation just ended on a trial in a village to test viability of hydrogen.
The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
The other day I was chatting to a chemist, his view was our old network it was not viable , at a molecular level its harder to contain than hydrocarbons.The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
Interesting that tests are taking place nevertheless.
It feels like a sense a desperation, trying to force the use of Hydrogen somewhere, somehow. Assuming the trial doesn't pay for the houses to be upgrade, I can see those homeowners who don't want to subsidise the experiment will just install an LPG or oil tank instead. Probably cheaper anyway. That would be quite amusing actually - if every person in the village elected not to spend massive amounts of money on experimental and probably temporary hydrogen appliances and instead used existing proven options.
Flooble said:
PRTVR said:
FiF said:
Not sure if it has been discussed on this thread, or elsewhere for that matter, but consultation just ended on a trial in a village to test viability of hydrogen.
The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
The other day I was chatting to a chemist, his view was our old network it was not viable , at a molecular level its harder to contain than hydrocarbons.The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
Interesting that tests are taking place nevertheless.
It feels like a sense a desperation, trying to force the use of Hydrogen somewhere, somehow. Assuming the trial doesn't pay for the houses to be upgrade, I can see those homeowners who don't want to subsidise the experiment will just install an LPG or oil tank instead. Probably cheaper anyway. That would be quite amusing actually - if every person in the village elected not to spend massive amounts of money on experimental and probably temporary hydrogen appliances and instead used existing proven options.
In the very unlikely case such a trial comes in my direction, and it didn't fully cover upgrading the property, AND reinstatement in event of trial being unsuccessful, then I'd be definitely adopting a policy of zero cooperation and use existing proven options.
In terms of storing and transporting hydrogen things have moved on. Certainly back in 1980s hydrogen transport involved use of individual steel gas cylinders piped up in arrays and subject to very vigorous testing and inspection for reasons above, i.e. hydrogen embrittlement. Essentially the sort of thing that is shown in the first picture in the article linked below.
Things have progressed somewhat and there are different solutions for different applications and pressures, this article link discusses the options including the work being done to determine permeability on PE80 and PE100 pipelines.
My own view is that it, hydrogen, might be useful in specific applications, e.g. industrial, public transport fuel trains, buses but as for widespread consumer network delivery, it's a real desperate shot trying to force the issue come hell or high water regardless.
Ivan stewart said:
Gary C said:
Because they are complex, expensive and have a limited life.
And you can see my office window in that picture
Ooops, no you cant, wrong side.
What about nuclear stations !!And you can see my office window in that picture
Ooops, no you cant, wrong side.
Edited by Gary C on Tuesday 5th October 14:50
Its not a big window, only about 3ft by 3ft, and has slats across it.
But I get a great view of,errr, Heysham 1
nebpor said:
I drive past Hunterson all the time - kinda sad the reactors will be shut down for the last time in January.
My dad was a mechanical fitter at Coulport. He spent a fair bit of time contracting at Torness as well. Wish he was still here to tell me more stories about it!
The divers will be pissed off. The water is nice and warm round there.My dad was a mechanical fitter at Coulport. He spent a fair bit of time contracting at Torness as well. Wish he was still here to tell me more stories about it!
PRTVR said:
FiF said:
Not sure if it has been discussed on this thread, or elsewhere for that matter, but consultation just ended on a trial in a village to test viability of hydrogen.
The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
The other day I was chatting to a chemist, his view was our old network it was not viable , at a molecular level its harder to contain than hydrocarbons.The article behind a paywall unfortunately, link but the essence is as follows.
Pilot scheme in one village starting in 2025 to test if hydrogen be can used as alternative fuel. Homeowners will be required to change their boilers, gas hobs and ovens, fires and pipes. The consultation suggests that Government will seek powers such that gas distribution operators will be permitted to enter the premises of any homeowners who refuse to take part and forcibly disconnect them from the gas network.
Interesting that tests are taking place nevertheless.
It's not a solution to anything as to use hydrogen you will need to completely overhaul the network not least because you now have to pump substantially more volume as well as contain leaky hydrogen.
It's really just cover for the gas industry to sweat their assets for a little longer.
Gary C said:
Talksteer said:
It's a shame the choice of moderator, coolant and operating temperature is actually pretty decent. If you look at the footprint of the Hartlepool/Heysham 1 design it is actually pretty similar to an AP1000 which has about the same power output. Like for like you'd expect the construction costs to be similar.
If they had continued development I'd suggest that the following would be possible.
1: Increased passive safety (though TBH its actually harder to do that with CO2)
2: Supercritical steam plant transitioning to super critical CO2 power conversion system. Thermal efficiency up to 45-50%
3: Improvements in the fuel pins, get rid of the stringers use segments and retaining pins, increase pin surface area.
4: Move the heat exchangers to below the core as per French and US practice.
I could see a route to about 950MW output per reactor core at lower capital cost
Its all crazy wish fulfillment as it would basically involve a multi-billion program and we have no competent organisation to run it.
They can work really well, but its the choice and use of the moderator that causes all the problem. Unlike the RBMK, the AGR moderator is in the reactor coolant, and at high temperatures, in CO2 and under neutron flux, the carbon moderator corrodes away. It cant be replaced.If they had continued development I'd suggest that the following would be possible.
1: Increased passive safety (though TBH its actually harder to do that with CO2)
2: Supercritical steam plant transitioning to super critical CO2 power conversion system. Thermal efficiency up to 45-50%
3: Improvements in the fuel pins, get rid of the stringers use segments and retaining pins, increase pin surface area.
4: Move the heat exchangers to below the core as per French and US practice.
I could see a route to about 950MW output per reactor core at lower capital cost
Its all crazy wish fulfillment as it would basically involve a multi-billion program and we have no competent organisation to run it.
The CO2 does have one major advantage over water in passive safety. It sufferes no phase change on depressurisation. Water beings to flash to steam in a PWR, significantly reducing cooling, and in an over moderated reactor, it can lead to increase in power. CO2 just reduces in pressure. In fact, the AGR can be easily cooled at atmospheric pressure in CO2, so even with a big breach, we can still shutdown and cool the reactor.
The boilers are HUGE ! all 24 of them would not fit below the reactor. Thing is, they needed to achieve steam conditions for a 'modern' coal station turbine, and so they needed to reach very high temperatures of steam. Our boilers reach 538C at 161bar and 538C at 40 bar reheat. would be very difficult and the boilers are fine where they are. What was needed is a method to maintain them, which is why Heysham 1 was designed with boilers you could remove (but thats a different story)
Could write more, but have to go to work !
The depressurised failure cases are one that I think would be hard to achieve full passive decay heat removal as you have to keep the blowers on as the plant depressurises. Not done the maths on if a decay heat driven system could spin the blowers but it would definitely need to be a mechanical system even if it doesn't need AC power.
It's definitely possible to design a gas/graphite reactor with the SGs beneath the core. The French did it with their "Magnox" which got up to AGR like sizes 540MW per unit.
https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng...
The reason to stick the SGs under the core is one of keeping the reactor vessel diameter down (aids modularisation). I also suspect that they may have been able to remove the SGs as they look pretty modular.
In our fantasy AGR Mk II we'd be using compact heat exchangers so they'd be a fair bit smaller too.
Info on the French UNGC plants is pretty hard to find in English. I've never seen an explanation as to why the SGs are beneath the reactor rather than above it for natural circulation.
For HTGR they put the SG low to avoid steam going through the core but they don't care about using the SG for decay heat removal.
Talksteer said:
It's a shame the choice of moderator, coolant and operating temperature is actually pretty decent. If you look at the footprint of the Hartlepool/Heysham 1 design it is actually pretty similar to an AP1000 which has about the same power output. Like for like you'd expect the construction costs to be similar.
If they had continued development I'd suggest that the following would be possible.
1: Increased passive safety (though TBH its actually harder to do that with CO2)
2: Supercritical steam plant transitioning to super critical CO2 power conversion system. Thermal efficiency up to 45-50%
3: Improvements in the fuel pins, get rid of the stringers use segments and retaining pins, increase pin surface area.
4: Move the heat exchangers to below the core as per French and US practice.
I could see a route to about 950MW output per reactor core at lower capital cost
Its all crazy wish fulfillment as it would basically involve a multi-billion program and we have no competent organisation to run it.
If they had continued development I'd suggest that the following would be possible.
1: Increased passive safety (though TBH its actually harder to do that with CO2)
2: Supercritical steam plant transitioning to super critical CO2 power conversion system. Thermal efficiency up to 45-50%
3: Improvements in the fuel pins, get rid of the stringers use segments and retaining pins, increase pin surface area.
4: Move the heat exchangers to below the core as per French and US practice.
I could see a route to about 950MW output per reactor core at lower capital cost
Its all crazy wish fulfillment as it would basically involve a multi-billion program and we have no competent organisation to run it.
CraigyMc said:
The divers will be pissed off. The water is nice and warm round there.
Hah - I had never thought of that I *love* watching the churning of the water at the outlet! You can only really see it if you drive down to the visitor station carpark and go for a wander, which I doubt very many people around here have actually done!
Talksteer said:
Forgot to add that I would include facility to swap out moderator blocks. This has been done on HTGR designs.
The depressurised failure cases are one that I think would be hard to achieve full passive decay heat removal as you have to keep the blowers on as the plant depressurises. Not done the maths on if a decay heat driven system could spin the blowers but it would definitely need to be a mechanical system even if it doesn't need AC power.
It's definitely possible to design a gas/graphite reactor with the SGs beneath the core. The French did it with their "Magnox" which got up to AGR like sizes 540MW per unit.
https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng...
The reason to stick the SGs under the core is one of keeping the reactor vessel diameter down (aids modularisation). I also suspect that they may have been able to remove the SGs as they look pretty modular.
In our fantasy AGR Mk II we'd be using compact heat exchangers so they'd be a fair bit smaller too.
Info on the French UNGC plants is pretty hard to find in English. I've never seen an explanation as to why the SGs are beneath the reactor rather than above it for natural circulation.
For HTGR they put the SG low to avoid steam going through the core but they don't care about using the SG for decay heat removal.
The other issue I forgot with teh AGR design (though I touched on it), is that the boilers are once through so any salts plate out in the boiling zone and need ultra (and I do mean ULTRA) pure water. Eliminating the drum (or steam generator) was a major design safety feature in that it limited the number of penetrations through the concreate, but it does mean an expensive to run online water treatment where all the feed water (500kgs) flows through ion exchange beds down to a conductivity of 0.01µS/cm which is pretty low.The depressurised failure cases are one that I think would be hard to achieve full passive decay heat removal as you have to keep the blowers on as the plant depressurises. Not done the maths on if a decay heat driven system could spin the blowers but it would definitely need to be a mechanical system even if it doesn't need AC power.
It's definitely possible to design a gas/graphite reactor with the SGs beneath the core. The French did it with their "Magnox" which got up to AGR like sizes 540MW per unit.
https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng...
The reason to stick the SGs under the core is one of keeping the reactor vessel diameter down (aids modularisation). I also suspect that they may have been able to remove the SGs as they look pretty modular.
In our fantasy AGR Mk II we'd be using compact heat exchangers so they'd be a fair bit smaller too.
Info on the French UNGC plants is pretty hard to find in English. I've never seen an explanation as to why the SGs are beneath the reactor rather than above it for natural circulation.
For HTGR they put the SG low to avoid steam going through the core but they don't care about using the SG for decay heat removal.
As the boilers cannot be repaired, we need to ensure corrosion is minimised and after a trip when we have been running longer than 6 months, we have to flood over the boilers to wash the salts from the boiling zone.
In addition, the boilers have to be made from different grades of steel. 9% chromoly is used in the lower parts because they are ok with water, but it can't withstand hot CO2 (much greater than 400°C). The higher sections are made from 316 stainless steel as that can endure hot CO2 (680°C), but it cant withstand wet steam.
Making the graphite replaceable would be an interesting challenge
Also making the boilers small enough. The HT model for CO2 density of 40 bar, 4000kgs flow rate was pretty close given the needed thickness of the tubes and plattens to survive. Probably would need the replaceable function just for that but we also needed the durability of the boilers to avoid a major tube failure from raising the reactor gas pressure above the PSRV lift pressure with the risk it could stick open and then end up with a reactor depressurisation.
Maybe we could go back to external boilers like the early Magnox, I liked them
Reactor coolant flowing through a pipe in the open air 
Possibly more of a political comment but this is one cost of not investing in nuclear:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58815665
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58815665
wombleh said:
Possibly more of a political comment but this is one cost of not investing in nuclear:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58815665
"Soft power". heh.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58815665
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