Is it time to go nuclear?

Capt'n Midnight

SlowBlowin wrote: »

Counties like Iceland have a huge surplus of cheap abundant energy from ground thermal, a global incentive to help turn this into fuel, maybe for standby loads elsewhere in the world, seems a sensible thing to do, this technology needs to be advanced and it seems Iceland would be the perfect place to do it..

cheap Icelandic hydro is used for aluminium and bitcoins.

You can recover a lot of the energy in an aluminium-air battery. Or aluminium oxygen because IIRC the alkaline electrolyte doesn't like carbon dioxide and stuff.

Aluminium is useful too to reduce the carbon footprint of transport.
Also about 3.4% of GDP is spent on corrosion. So there's that too.

Producing bleach from salt and water is a handy use of power too.


BTW the Birkeland Eyde process is very inefficient.

Which is why we use the Haber process instead and you can get hydrogen and heat from electricity easily.
BTW the heat is mainly used to speed up the reaction. If using the power opportunistically you might get away with lower temps. Also newer catalysts could change everything there.

And you can extract energy from ammonia fuel cells.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon

Capt'n Midnight

gozunda wrote: »

Hypothetically If we did choose to go nuclear at some point in the future - where would the best place to build it?

West coast? Midlands on previously cut over bog? Near Dublin?

Afaik theres nothing stopping the UK building one in NI. Would we get a say in that?

Thanks to Brexit and Henry VIII's Statute of Proclamations of 1539 Westminster can overrule the other national assemblies.


British nuclear waste facility could be located near Newry



DUP councillors have failed to back a motion opposing the dumping of radioactive waste in the Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon council area. :rolleyes:

"Those Protestants. Up to no good as usual!"
- Edward Crilly PP

Markcheese

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

All it needs is lots of energy and lots of money.

You could decarbonise electricity production by adding hydrogen from renewables to natural gas to reduce it's carbon footprint. Embrittlement of steel limits how much you can add. 10-15% shouldn't be a problem, 20-25% may mean small changes, 50% or more is doable with a good bit of work.


Beyond that the technology exists to make storable hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. It just takes too much energy to be economic at present. Methane is natural gas so store it in the network. Methanol is a liquid. There are other molecules too further up the chain but cost more. Methanol, ethanol or some esters can be used to stretch or replace petrol.

I remember a few years back there were experiments with adding 2 to 3 % hydrogen to the gas grid , in the UK , I don't know if it went much further ,
Adding hydrogen to natural gas to use as a battery means gas fired power stations ...as back up to wind ... And we already have those ...

Markcheese

Has anyone ever done offshore pumped storage ?

We have the kinsale and ballycotton gas fields with platforms ,. They're pretty much done now ... Drop sea water into the gas well through a generator on the sea bed ,to make electricity and then pump it back out when you've surplus

antoinolachtnai

Markcheese wrote: »

Has anyone ever done offshore pumped storage ?

We have the kinsale and ballycotton gas fields with platforms ,. They're pretty much done now ... Drop sea water into the gas well through a generator on the sea bed ,to make electricity and then pump it back out when you've surplus

These caverns are used for gas storage, are they not?

Everyone talks about pumped storage using seawater, but it does not seem to have been done in very many places. It's a complicated and expensive thing to do.

Markcheese

Not sure about kinsale,but the ballycotton one aren't ..
There was a proposal about 12 / 15 years back but it went nowhere ( think it was petronas )
To be honest ,I'm not even sure are the caverns ? Or gas trapped in a porous rock structure ..

antoinolachtnai

There was a concept to use compressed air storage in Antrim but this did not work out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-36945758

https://www.newpower.info/2019/08/ni-compressed-air-storage-application-withdrawn/

If you had caverns or porous rock structures or whatever that you thought could hold a fluid, I suppose this would be the way to go. But there are a lot of problems to overcome.

This seems to be the new new thing in compressed air:

https://qz.com/1711536/canadian-startup-hydrostor-is-storing-energy-in-compressed-air/

If you applied this technology at the Antrim site maybe it would give the technology the scale to be viable and make the site useful?

It would be a lot easier there than at Kinsale. At Kinsale, you would have to run out hundreds of megawatts of transmission to the gas field and maintain a load of equipment at sea. Maybe it would make sense in the context of an enormous offshore wind in the area, but I think the water might be too deep for that.