Beelbeebub

"journalist" has come to means something different these days. Once it was someone committed to finding and explaining facts and complex topics. Now it includes columnists writing opinions, partisan press releases, commercial press releases (every single one of those 'new poll suggests' articles) and even those idiot "auditors" (any idiot with a go pro and chip on their shoulder) who call themselves "citizen journalists".

I don't agree with this point. But in both cases the maximum grid load is the same as it's demand driven so the grid doesn't need to be bigger. The only difference is the location of the generators is different so some additional work is needed to get the power from it's new source. National grid have identified the current weak links (a big one being on the Scottish borders) and are upgrading them. Another is on the east coast and one across Wales. The cost of these upgrades is expected to add about £50 to bills but save about £40 in curtailment related costs. The last point: yes we will have to add things like storage. Current rates for domestic storage are less than 5p per kWh (£50 per Mwh) I suspect grid scale is less. That's on top of the input electric cost, which would generally be near zero (the whole point of storage). As an aside the capacity of all the EV's currently on the road (5% of all cars now) is about 60Gwh. That could,with the right V2G infrastructure yield as much as the nuclear plants under construction for several hours. They would be the ideal peaker plants.

The French submarine reactor, which is a sub 20% enrichment design, is about 3m diameter and 5m height. So comparable to a large abnormal load like a big transformer or a wind turbine nacelle. It could be road transported (albeit with some restrictions) Obviously the safety margins for military vessels are somewhat different to civilian use. But if the "reactor factory" near a deep water shipyard the ships could come in, have the reactor craned out ,new one dropped in and be on their way. This is essentially what happens to nuclear subs except it:a all about more fraught with the whole 'cutting open the pressure hull' thing. All that said, i'm far from convinced that nuclear powered shipping is going to be a thing.

Yeah, the current "small' reactors are bloody huge. But *if* we could get them to container sized then the logistics of removing them to refuel them becomes much much easier. If they were placed where they could easily be craned out rather than having to do major surgery (refueling nuclear subs involved cutting the hull open) then swapping them out would be not much different from unloading a container ship.

I agree - people willing to regurgitate the oil industry line about climate change being a hoax and a communist plot to destroy our economy can have a lucrative career with think tanks, the speaking circuit and providing papers so politicans can cite 'peer reviewed research' , whilst the scientists diligently studying ocean currents, atmospheric temperatures, rainfall patterns, climate models etc live precariously from academic grant to academic grant.

And the high peak prices are something we already deal with - consumers get a fixed price which is above the absolute lowest but also caps the peaks which can get very high.

Yes, that's why the price per Mwh for a plat with 5% or 30% utilisation is higher than one with +90%. But but it's cheaper to run a plant for 4 months at about £150 Mwh than a plant for 11 months at £100Mwh Btw this is exactly what China is doing with coal. There's lots of 'but china are building coal plants!' but little mention that the utilisation of those plants is falling. It's china's energy security backup because they have lots of coal, but the growth in their demand as they electrify is coming from renewables

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UK production of oil and gas I have - can you tell me how many are in operation today? 2 - one in china that took just over 11 years to build and floating one in russia that also took 10 years to build. And there are 6 or so under construction with intended in service dates sometime before 2030. Ideally we would have gone ahead with the various reactors we had planned back in the early 00's and have several up and running by now, but we seem to be very bad at nuclear construction in the UK. I'm not convinced we will get any better in the timeline we need. We have 2 under construction (hinkley C and sizewell C) with a combined capacity of around 6.5 GW coming online in 2030 and late 2030's. But that only covers the loss from the 5 existing plants shutting down before 2030, and as they are AGR's they are going to be difficult to life extend - not impossible, they will be about 40 years old at planned shutdown and the design has been extended to 50 years at other sites. Without a time machine, nuclear isn't going to dig us out of the hole. Except when they don't keep prices down. Several years ago our gas and elec prices rocketed because a politician 1,500 miles way decided the country next door was his. Our gas and oil prices recently shot up because a politician 3,000 miles away got mad at a country 3,000miles the other way and started flinging bombs about and suddenly, ships with oil bound for us turned round in the ocean and headed to china and the far east because they outbid us. Environmental issues aside, oil and gas are very shaky foundations. We struggled in ww2 for oil. We struggled in the 70's for oil. This isn't going to get better but they don't - they offer (in effect) fixed price deals for capacity. Those prices are lower than a new build gas plant can offer (and that was before the higher gas prices). And whilst there may be a security issue with inverters made in china, in the sense they could be controlled from abroad - and there are strong arguments that the uk or at least europe should be making it's own inverters or at least the software running them - the fact the panels are made in china is irrelevant. Once you have bought them they are yours, they are dumb bits of silicon and glass that create a voltage when illuminated. That's it. Once you have bought them they will last for 25 years or so, churning out power every day. A barrel of oil, on the other hand, can be used one. Then you have to buy a new one. You realise we have wind turbines, right? They tend to do well in the winter. And if the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesn't blow - what will we do? Burn gas in CCGT plants exactly as we do now. The difference is we will be burning gas for a month or two a year rather than all year round. The future energy mix will have nuclear, wind, solar (etc) lots of battery capacity and a good chunk of CCGT plants with gas storage for the times when we need them.

if the SMR was a container sized device that just needed hookup to (ship) power grid, monitoring and cooling - i could see it working if electric drive was used. Then, as you say, the module could be craned on/off fairly easily and exchanged for a factory fresh unit whilst the old one went back to be refueled.

A good friend is an expert (as in one of the guys the MoD call when they want to know about radar) and has specifically looked at this. His answer is "there are effects but nothing that causes a problem". The radar issue is one raised by non-experts (repeatedly) but is not a concern of the people who are actually in charge of operating our radar. And as for birds, cats kill far more than wind turbines (which don't kill many at all)

For the UK the fossil fuels are running low now. Oil and gas are currently 50% of consumption and that will halve or worse *in the next decade*. Not the next 100 or 50 years but the next 10 years. Unless we want to be dependent on importing gas and oil when 20% of the world supply can be cut off at the whim of a power mad dictator we need another way to power the UK. Nuclear takes ages to build. Far longer than the 10 year time frame. Solar farms are the cheapest form of energy generation and they are quick to build. Yes they are intermittent but one thing they do provide is lots of power when it is sunny, which is also when hot countries (which the UK is becoming) also tend to see highest demand due to air conditioning. Batteries are also becoming cheaper year on year. Right now solar is providing 30% of our electricity, 2x that of gas. At a time when gas prices are high we are saving 2/3 on our national gas bill (of which we import abiut half).

From the OP article "The Energy Secretary on Wednesday said he had granted planning permission to the One Earth Solar Farm development to be built on prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire." (emphasis mine) So prime farmland eh? Must be some of the most productive land in the country. We'll starve without the breadbasket of thr East Midlands that is Newton-On-Trent. Let's have a look at the map of agricultural land quality. The project is the area south of Newton-On-Trent either side of the river. As you can see the land is green which is grade 3 "good to moderate" Grade 3 is 2 sub grades A and B the maps don't distinguish but here's the description Grade 3a (Good): capable, but notable limitations that reduce cropping flexibility or consistency. Grade 3b (Moderate): more restricted: typically fewer arable options and/or less reliable output As you can see neither of these could be described as "prime". Every single time anyone tries to build anything on farmland people start banging on about food security and the land as though it were the best soil in all Europe. In reality nobody is going to put their solar farm on grade 1 land when there is lower grade and available.

The thermal plant (fossil fuel or nuclear) issue during hot weather is more regulatory than technical. These systems have delta T's of several hundred degrees, the increace of 10nornsondegrees at the cold side isn't a major technical problem. But all thermal plants have limits on the temperature of the "used" cooling water. This is for ecological reasons, if you started dumping thousands of m3 an hour af 80C water into a river or the sea you'd kill everything downstream. There are also limits on the amount of water they can take. During hot weather there is a much smaller window between the maximum water temperature leaving and the regulatory limit. This is particularly acute for river cooled plants that may also experience low river flows at the same time.

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