Beelbeebub

Ha! 😁 No but I did have to "bunny suit up" amd wear a dosimeter for working on the lab and go through a radiation scanner on the way out each shift. Was an interesting job.

If you were contracted to produce cakes for wedding, you produced them and the customers courier couldn't make the lick uk because their vans were all busy - would you want to be paid? I suspect yes. The curtailment payments are due to the grid not being able to transport the contracted for power - which is a separate issue that is being addressed - and happens to gas (and once upon a time coal) plants as well This is false. The meme was popularised by the series "landman" where billybob Thornton goes on a (wrong) rant about wind turbines. The carbon payback for wind turbines varies from 6-18months. The bases vary depending on ground conditions but typically 100m3 per MW - so between 100-600m3 per turbine. But concrete is not unique to wind turbines. Hinckley C has over 40,000m3 in just one of the two reactor foundations. The turbine blade problem is real but more a function of composites not yet generally being recycled. This is changing but the current best practice it to recycle the blades by grinding them into particles and (you'll like this) using them in concrete..... 😁

This is part of thr high running costs. Nobody can design such a critical bit of equipment not to fail ever. What we can do is have an inspection and testing regime to catch any failure before it is catastrophic. So when they design a weld or a pipe or a valve, it's limits for fatigue, temp cycling, corrosion, embrittlemnt etc are all calculated and an inspection regime is decided. Then the item is inspected to make sure it is to spec, then it"s inspected using all sorts of expensive stuff and the results fed back into the simulations to check it's "on track" and adjustments to inspection regime made on light of the actual performance. It's a huge undertaking

You don't want to know how little planning for decommissioning was done for the early reactors (magnox, agr etc). Lots of stuff inaccessible, an unbelievable amount of stuff undocumented or not to the plans! We did design work for robotic decommissioning - really expensive special purpose robots and manipulator ms to go in and undo a nut or grind off a weld. The sort of thing a man with a spanner or grinder could do in an hour - which I think was the orginal plan when they designed some of these in the late 50's and 60's!

Absolutely, I played a small part in the magnox life extensions (Wylfa in particular) I'm sure the reactors will be kept running well beyond 2060 - which only compounds the uncertainty that EDF or it's successor will be around to honour it's commitment to decommissioning. There is a huge list of giant engineering companies that were around 50 years ago and aren't now.

Entirely consistent with the whole purpose of this thread. That we need "Net zero" policies to ensure our energy security. This thread started over a month before the Iran war. At the time gas prices were predicted to fall as more Lng capacity from the gulf and at European Lng terminals came on stream. My point was that if we abandoned NZ policies for a fossil fuel past/future (as some advocated) it would be bad for the UK in terms of energy security/prices - that we would be subject to fluctuations in the gas price that we had zero control over. I think, even you, would agree that I have been proven correct in the assertion that the uk is too exposed to fossil fuel price fluctiaons. Here's a thought experiment. The price of coal has jumped from just over 100USD to just over 130USD? Have you heard anyone in the UK panicking about the price of coal? Are we worried about it's impact on our economy? Are our electricity prices rising because of the price of coal? Nope - because coal is such a tiny part of our energy mix. We should aim to do the same with oil and gas.

The design life of hinckley C is about 30 years or to the 2060's That's a fair old time. We've seen countries dissappear and appear. Alliances crumble and old friends become enimies and vice versa. We've seen giant companies who ruled the commercial sphere vanish to be replaced with companies in sectors that didn't exist. We have no firm idea of what the landscape will be by the late 20XXs, all sorts of things could happen. French revolution, UK breakup, Cold war between Eurasian Alliance and the Anglo-American commonwealth who knows. What we do know is there will be a nuclear reactor that needs an expensive decommissioning process sat in what is currently the UK and that history has shown that companies, when faced with expensive clean up costs after the money making bonanza is over, quite often shuffle away from their responsibilities.

Ultimately the tax payer is the decomissioner of last resort though. You can write all the contracts you want but if EDF go bust what are we going to do? A fair enough point. I would be good to see the cost of backup included, though it is surely just the cost of running on gas/imports. Which does mean we definitely need to also include the cost (climate change impacts) of carbon emissions for fossil fuel plants. That means (at a minimum) the carbon costs that are already factored in

This always happens, when I was a kid "made in Taiwan" was code for cheap plastic crap. About 20 years ago I was working with Hong Kong tool makers (injection moulding tools) for clients. We were the interface and "prime contractor" pulling different disciplines into the process. At first they would make stuff to the drawings you sent them. We had to do all the jar calculations about shrinkage, ejector pin placement, demoulding, split lines. But each time they would offer more services, they could sort the split lines, they would handle the shrinkage allowances etc. About 10 years later and thwy were bidding direct to the clients for the full services and starting to offer design of the actual part as a service.... That said, the UK is still a pretty good (albeit niche) manufacturer. The thing is we can't be anything other than that now. Not every country can be the "workshop of the world". We don't have the population size to sustain it. Even all of Europe will struggle against China and India and Africa. With their much bigger populations. I did see an interesting thought. Low cost energy is an important economic advantage. Solar power is the cheapest power you can get, even more so in places with more reliable day to day and season to season sun.... Like the equator. Africa is poised to be able to offer the cheapest energy possible and, u like oil where we can nick it from the locals and bring it home, it's a hell of a lot harder for us to steal it or compete at home. Africa also has huge resources and massive population. Once (or if) they get going it's going to make China look lackluster. Maybe 100 years or will be poor Northern Europeans floating across the med to get to Africa....

Isn't one of the advantages of the new generation of mega turbines that the windspeed becomes stronger and more consistent as you move up out of the boundary layer above the land/sea

I don't thing the air pressure/density makes much difference over 200m. May r if we were sticking our wind turbines at 4,000m we'd have to account for that but the difference over 200m is about 1%

Are they? They are obviously cheap enough that the strike prices of £91/Mwh (offshore wind) £72/Mwh (onshore wind) £65/Mwh (solar) Attracted over 14Gw of bids. CfDs are sort of a subsidy but only in the sense that any fixed price deal can be a subsidy if your costs are low enough. Unlike a guarenteed price, the CfD also allows payback when the price rises above the strike price, so it's a two way bet. The supplier know they will never get less than the strike and the buyer knows they will never pay more than the strike price. This massively derisks the investment.

Re: fracking as a solution to UK oil production falls... Quote : "... when we fly over some of these pump jacks and stuff like that, you'll be able to smell it... your eyes may burn just a little bit...."

German talking about plug in solar (4m installs) for the UK. One interesting titbit... The plug in soecs/limits are designed for the likely worst case German home electrical system - he mentions "pre war" and "East German with aluminum wires and worn contacts". So the Germans have designed the systems to be safe for those scenarios. Are uk electricans, who argue that plug in solar is dangerous, arguing that uk homes are likely to have worse wiring than pre war and east German wiring? Plug in solar is going to be a useful thing for tenants. Uk rental properties choukd all have been inspected at least twice now so any really shocking (ha) working should be rooted out of that market segment.

Yes, although the problem might be that to achive 207 during a winters night with all the electric heaters on at the hypothetical remote farm, the output at the substation might need to be cranked up 249v Obviously the farmer's near neighbour's solar isn't going to help then. It would help the farmer if he had low voltage when the sun was shining (say a big air con load) but the transformers are not automatic. They are mainly set and forget. An engineer needs to visit and physically move some contacts to change the voltage If the houses near the substation are all cranking out loads of power on a sunny day that is what will push the voltage over. All that said, some batteries at the farm would help as they would be able to reduce the load on the wires, thus reducing the current and voltage drop. So whilst a 90a draw from the grid onky might drag the voltage down to 207, the 45a from grid and 45a from batteries wouldn't, so the transformer voltage could be set lower. As an aside, this "solar reduces load on wires" principle is why I think some of the panic over plug in solar is overblown. I did some basic calculations and I think, for any correctly functioning socket circuit the 4a/800w plug in solar can produce isn't able to overload the cables and might even allow higher loads than the circuit breaker is set to without overloading the cables. Of course if there is a faulty or out of spec socket circuit, plug in solar might cause a problem, but at that point normal use would also cause the problem.