Uranium is now a renewable source ? Incredible !

http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes.html

FortySeven

That's great. Except what do you do with the concentrated toxic nasty you end up with?

Speedwell

For certain values of "renewable" that don't include, you know, reusing the material.

We once thought petroleum was inexhaustible (said my teachers in the oil industry). Then we found all kinds of uses for it.

FortySeven

FortySeven wrote: »

That's great. Except what do you do with the concentrated toxic nasty you end up with?

I'm sure they'll deal with it in time, turning it to glass like they do in Sellafield is a pretty good way of storing it.

Techniques for dealing with nuclear waste are getting better. And There's a whole new raft of nuclear reactor designs that are so much safer and much more efficient outputting far less waste all in development.

I'm not denying renewable i.e solar/wind is good but our ever increasing energy demands will never truly be met by renewable energy.

Look at the amount of data centres cropping up all over the world , insanely power hungry establishments and Ireland is seeing an explosion in these data centres, the more transport is electrified will also mean our electricity consumption will explode.

Speedwell

I apologise in advance; I must be overtired. But when you said "the more transport is electrified will also mean our electricity consumption will explode", I had a flashback to the 60s and the rural electrification programs in the US and the TV commercials with shiny space-age kitchens and smiling blonde women explaining gleefully that you could Cook! With! Electricity! Still looking for an electric hob that cooks worth a plugged nickel. OK, end of tangent

AngryHippie

Speedwell wrote: »

Still looking for an electric hob that cooks worth a plugged nickel. OK, end of tangent

Ceramic induction stoves work well with the right pots and pans:rolleyes:

I think the time would be better spent creating a fiber that could filter out and remove all the sh!te that got leaked from Fukushima.

Clean as you go and all that....

It's a bit hypocritical of the Irish to dismiss nuclear despite we buying British Nuclear power at certain times of demand.

Coal fired stations are killing much more people than Nuclear. The real danger is that because Nuclear is not a popular form of energy generation at this time that older plants are kept in production because New contracts are not given and without these stations an alternative will have to be provided and that will drive up the cost of energy.

L.F.T.R using Molten Salt, discovered in the 50's/60's in the U.S but abandoned because Nukes were very hard to produce from the waste, a terrible tragedy if you ask me because of the safety and efficiency aspects such reactors provide. More R & D is now being put into this and other Nuclear technologies.

renewable is great but it currently can't be stored, which is where electric cars will have a major impact. And the Government want to give half a Billion to these renewable energy companies to line their pockets giving nothing back to the public. They want to increase the PSO by 35% to give to them and to Bord na Mona but mainly to wind energy investors. Corruption and we stand for it but only protest against water charges despite paying much more for energy.

This PSO should go to providing a grant which does not exist at all in Ireland to install domestic wind turbines and solar PV and also to provide a F.I.T to give money for each Kwh sent to the grid. But no, give it to the big commercial companies instead.

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm not denying renewable i.e solar/wind is good but our ever increasing energy demands will never truly be met by renewable energy.

http://www.ecoworld.com/energy-fuels/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth.html wrote:

In full sun, you can safely assume about 100 watts of solar energy per square foot. If you assume 12 hours of sun per day, this equates to 438,000 watt-hours per square foot per year. Based on 27,878,400 square feet per square mile, sunlight bestows a whopping 12.2 trillion watt-hours per square mile per year.



With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year.
In case you haven’t heard, a “quad Btu” refers to one quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy, a common term used by energy economists. The entire human race currently uses about 400 quads of energy (in all forms) per year. Put another way, the solar energy hitting the earth exceeds the total energy consumed by humanity by a factor of over 20,000 times.

Wind, hydro, tidal, fossil fuels are all solar power.

eeguy

Deleted User wrote: »

Look at the amount of data centres cropping up all over the world , insanely power hungry establishments and Ireland is seeing an explosion in these data centres, the more transport is electrified will also mean our electricity consumption will explode.

People have been saying that for a while, but electricity increases have been slowing in developed countries due to energy efficiencies in technology.

A 19" CRT from the early 2000's uses the same power as a 42" modern TV and the same holds true for nearly all electrical appliances. You get more bang for your energy buck.

Electrification of transport simply means that cars move from being 25-30% efficient on gasoline, to 60% efficient when powered by electricity generated from gas power stations. The cars themselves are upwards of 85% efficient. Local generation is also increasing to offset losses in power transmission.

Although I haven't looked into it much, a study here showed that the increase in US energy demand is actually slowing.

There is no energy crisis only an energy problem. Technology is improving faster and faster and more countries are exceeding their renewables targets.

Electric cars are 85% efficient give or take and will also improve a little but you completely underestimate the amount of electricity required to electrify transport.

While pumping petrol or diesel will go unnoticed charging cars is another matter completely.

If you got 100,000 + cars / vans/ light trucks charging at 6 Kw over night that's an awful amount of energy on the grid that has to come from somewhere.

85% at converting stored energy into motion maybe. It's not that high from generator to load.
If you used the energy spent drilling, transporting and refining fossils on electric drive you'd have plenty and more besides.

Sir Liamalot

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

85% at converting stored energy into motion maybe. It's not that high from generator to load.
If you used the energy spent drilling, transporting and refining fossils on electric drive you'd have plenty and more besides.

Yes without refining oil into petrol/diesel etc a lot of electricity would be saved but we don't refine any oil in Ireland.

100,000 + cars charging at say 3.5 to 6.5-7 Kw that's a lot of energy.

Our Current demand at this time is 4.5 Gw and going up because people are coming home and starting to cook.

I am forgetting the off peak load will go down to about 2 Gw or a bit below from about Midnight to 6 am.

So there's room for xxxxx amount of electrics charging off peak but this greatly depends on EV take up.

It would be great if the Government supported Micro generation and provided money for FIT and Installation of domestic wind and solar PV, Solar PV has real potential in Ireland but the Government will give our carbon tax and PSO on our electricity bills to commercial investors instead and we are forced to pay higher electricity bills, something isn't right with that !!!

SeanW

Speedwell wrote: »

I apologise in advance; I must be overtired. But when you said "the more transport is electrified will also mean our electricity consumption will explode", I had a flashback to the 60s and the rural electrification programs in the US and the TV commercials with shiny space-age kitchens and smiling blonde women explaining gleefully that you could Cook! With! Electricity! Still looking for an electric hob that cooks worth a plugged nickel. OK, end of tangent

Where I live and in my family home, we have electric hobs and ovens. They are grand. Would be nicer if we were like France/Sweden/Switzerland, having a healthy mix of nuclear and hydro, our cooking would be CO2 free (nearly).

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

Wind, hydro, tidal, fossil fuels are all solar power.

The problem with this analysis is that while each area may indeed receive an average of 12 hours per day of sunlight, both the amount received per day feeding the average, and the strength of said sunlight, will vary dramatically.

In an equatorial desert, you will get much stronger sunlight, and you will get similar number of hours each day. Further from the equator, the sunlight will be weaker and the hours will vary more widely with the seasons. Nearer the poles, the sunlight will be very weak, and you will have the "midnight sun" 6 months of daylight followed by 6 months of night. Also places like Alaska will have very significant needs for energy for heating and the like when it is cold (i.e. the amount of solar radiation available is negligable).

So while in theory you could build a whole load of solar farms in Arizona and send large amounts of solar power thousands of miles North to Alaska to stop them from freezing over in their hard winter nights, it might make more sense to use U3O8 at $100-$200/pound to generate the energy locally.

Solar PV does indeed have a good future in Ireland, I worked out that based on the solar PV calculators I would need 9 Kw/p to run the house and drive the EV. The problem is the ESB only allow 5 Kwp into the grid for single phase connections.

The Issue is the Feed-in-Tariff , or lack of. All the excess in Summer you send to the Grid and buy it back in Winter.

A grant towards installation would be a good idea too but no, they want to give our Co2 and PSO money on our electricity bills to wind energy company investors for them to line their pockets instead and give us nothing towards micro renewable installations.

I heard on BBC R4 the other morning driving home from work talking about a new Nuclear reactor they're building in the U.K, in all honesty, Ireland could never afford it. So I've no issue with Eirgrid taking it from the U.k, the more the better.

Future Nuclear technology they're working on today will mean , possibly within the next 30-50 years there might be much safer and much cheaper Nuclear reactors.

I firmly believe the future will rely more and more on Nuclear.

At current consumption there is around 70 years of known oil reserves left, can't remember the exact source , I think I heard it on the radio.

http://www.eirgridgroup.com/the-grid/projects/celtic-interconnector/the-project/

We'll be buying French Nuclear in the not so distant future too by the looks of it.

I keep reading "renewable" but In reality I bet this is being done to secure our growing hunger for electricity that we probably won't be able to meet in the not so distant future.

Deleted User

Deleted User wrote: »

I heard on BBC R4 the other morning driving home from work talking about a new Nuclear reactor they're building in the U.K, in all honesty, Ireland could never afford it. So I've no issue with Eirgrid taking it from the U.k, the more the better.

In all honesty the UK can't afford it either. :pac:

Sir Liamalot

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

In all honesty the UK can't afford it either. :pac:

No one can afford to burn Oil and Gas forever, I'm sure that Power station will have a 40-50 year life, that's a lot of electricity generation Emissions free.

The waste will be turned to Glass in Sellafield, no major problem these days, it's the stuff stored from years ago that can cause problems. Besides coal causes a lot more health problems.

I can't watch that now, what's the general gist of it ?

CFO of EDF resigned over the "financial insanity" of Hinkley Point C

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm sure they'll deal with it in time, turning it to glass like they do in Sellafield is a pretty good way of storing it.

Techniques for dealing with nuclear waste are getting better. And There's a whole new raft of nuclear reactor designs that are so much safer and much more efficient outputting far less waste all in development.

don't forget that environmental restrictions are getting more stringent all the time.

There are different types of nuclear waste

There's the really nasty short half life glow in the dark stuff, but it decays quickly so physical protection is manageable

there's the very low activity stuff, like what they was pumped out into the Irish sea, it increases the background radiation and hard to measure what effects it has, unless of course you have leaks or are falsifying the data. The volume of this stuff means it can't be stored.

Then there's the stuff that going to be nasty for geological timescales. 15,000 years ago this part of the world was under ice sheets and glaciers make great bulldozers, but meltwater floods are possibly worse. The truth is that apart from Finland there aren't any long term repositories for this class of material. Germany , UK, US and others will all have to clean up existing dumps and move them to proper repositories when they get them operational.

We can deal with the waste, we can't deal with running out of oil and the health effects from burning fossil fuels isn't small by any means, more people are dying from fossil fuel related illness than from nuclear energy.

There's an enormous amount of homes in Ireland that still burn Coal for heating........ this is rather shocking.

With Nuclear energy there is no reason we can't heat our homes on electricity, we need a lot of energy for the electrification of transport and for the growing number of data centres being built but if we can get this from France then so be it.

There is a lot more R&D going into nuclear technology today , not as much as there should be. Thorium in a molten salt reactor promises enormous safety due to them not working under pressure and also the safety aspects of the reactor itself and the fuel is in a liquid form, there can't be a meltdown, there is around 1% of the waste of current reactor designs because they're so efficient and the waste is a lot less dangerous and can even burn existing waste. The benefits are tremendous, they can be turned on and off much much faster depending on demand and can be made as small as 1 Mw and they need much less concrete.

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

There's an enormous amount of homes in Ireland that still burn Coal for heating........ this is rather shocking.
...

There is a lot more R&D going into nuclear technology today , not as much as there should be. Thorium in a molten salt reactor promises enormous safety due to them not working under pressure and also the safety aspects of the reactor itself and the fuel is in a liquid form, there can't be a meltdown, there is around 1% of the waste of current reactor designs because they're so efficient and the waste is a lot less dangerous and can even burn existing waste. The benefits are tremendous, they can be turned on and off much much faster depending on demand and can be made as small as 1 Mw and they need much less concrete.

The heating problem can be best dealt with by insulation. And it could be rolled out faster than a nuclear plant.

You can get passive homes that don't even need heating so you wouldn't even need the mythical economics of a 1MW reactor.

just an aside - if you were to enrich uranium enough you could also reduce nuclear waste to 1% of its current volume

Even if you could solve the problems thorium isn't going to be rolled out any time soon. How long is it taking to built the EPR's ? and they aren't new technology, just a higher pressure version of previous reactors.

You can't just lob Thorium into a reactor and away you go. You have to convert it to uranium first in breeder reactors. ( or use some magical neutron source but they use a LOT of energy, more that you'd get out of the fuel directly , maybe you could "store" renewables that way ?) At present the best we have done in a breeder is slightly over break-even.

To double the amount of uranium from thorium would take ages. And you can't use most of the existing reactors as they aren't designed that way.

Thorium has been tried full scale in at least four power plants. It didn't work. Fort St Vrain was converted to use natural gas to raise the steam. Shippingport worked OK but conversion efficiency meant it was never going to be a breeder. . It's also used as a fuel extender in some plants where you convert spare neutrons into fissile fuel.

Of course the problem is getting those spare neutrons. Nuclear fissions produce 2.3-2.5 neutrons (cba looking up the exact figures per isotope) on average per collision. Uranium reactors only need to capture 1 neutron. To breed fertile uranium to plutonium or thorium to fissile uranium in a breeder you need to capture 2 neutrons per collision. (one to breed , one to continue the cycle) and that's only breakeven, to breed more fuel than you consume you have to capture more than two neutrons on average. eg: Shippingport generated a surplus of 1.39% fuel over five years. Great in a sealed reactor in a submarine so you reduce handling costs. Not so great when you need enough to start another reactor.

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

There is a lot more R&D going into nuclear technology today , not as much as there should be.

ITER is getting less money than Hinkley C.

Not sure what R&D is needed. Canada was trying out Thorium in their Zeep reactor as far back as 1947. So the physics has been well understood.

Thorium in a molten salt reactor promises enormous safety

The nuclear industry has always promised enormous safety. At this stage they sound like economists, and every generation learns the hard way that no, they didn't understand all the risks.

The US atomic bomb project was delayed several months because they knew best. General Groves asked for the first reactor to be run for an extended time, it wasn't and the first reactors suffered from Xenon poisoning. History might have been very different had Japan surrendered before Russia got involved. Manchuria and North Korea might not have been handed to over to communists.

Most Irish homes are poorly insulated even today, a bit of foam int he cavity and some fibreglass in the attic and that's a well insulated home in Ireland.

It would cost a lot to retrofit homes to passive standard and to be honest it doesn't have to be passive standard just proper external and roof insulation would make a huge difference.

Deenameh

Deleted User wrote: »

Most Irish homes are poorly insulated even today, a bit of foam int he cavity and some fibreglass in the attic and that's a well insulated home in Ireland.

It would cost a lot to retrofit homes to passive standard and to be honest it doesn't have to be passive standard just proper external and roof insulation would make a huge difference.

Totally agree, and the houses built during the boom were built with even poorer insulation to cut time and cost.