Posts by Peter2

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

it matters that the specific funding proposal would only allow you to build them at the pace I mentioned. In that context, it doesn't matter whose responsibility the costs of storage and disposal of waste would be, it only matters that the costs exist and weren't accounted for, therefore the total cost of the nuclear power generation would exceed the budget that would be made available by diverting renewable subsidies.

If you are following the discussion carefully then you'll note that even the Guardian says that the costs are built into the price of the minimum guaranteed electricity price, which is currently under half the current market level.

Given the ~£9 billion a year spent on wind subsidies is ok, and it costs ~20 billion for a nuclear plant then you could either build a new plant every two years paid for in full from the existing subsidies (and get the power ten years later) or build a batch of 5 nuclear plants and spread the cost over those ten years. Upon completion in ~2031 that's 16GW worth of fossil fuel generation that would drop off the power generation net forever; which given that at the moment we are drawing 16.57GW from gas turbines means that this would leave the largest CO2 emissions from power generation as being the 3GW worth of "biomass" generation, which in plain English is trees chopped down in South America, shipped to the US to be made into wood pellets and then shipped to the UK to be burned. This is of course counted as green renewable energy at the moment.

If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.

Wind is a strategy of committing to gas turbines forever with wind just used as greenwashing. Look at the chart on Gridwatch; it shows the level of productivity of wind turbines. Imagine that you quadruple the number of wind turbines, requiring payments to the very rich owners every year at a level above the defence or education budgets to keep the lights on. You still have entire months where the power is coming from gas because the generation line will simply be 4x above where it is now for wind, and four times nothing is still nothing.

With battery storage, this is an IT site so i'll assume that you are familiar with a bog standard UPS. If not, google it. A typical UPS provides around a kilowatt hour worth of electricity. Multiply that by a thousand. That's a megawatt hour worth of storage; so you need to multiply that by a thousand again. That's now one gigawatt hour; which gives a rough idea of the amount of space and expense required to store one hours worth of electricity.

1*1000*1000=1,000,000. So your looking at approximately the space and expense of one million UPS's. For one gigawatt hour worth of power. To smooth out small daily variations of about 5GW for 24 hours would therefore require 5*24=120GW worth of battery storage. How much space would 120 million UPS's take up? The mind boggles. And that's the low end of the useful requirement, as if you were running purely on wind power given it effectively vanishes for a month at a time you'd want a months worth of power stored; 40GW*24*30=28800 Gigawatt hours, which would be a requirement of 28,800,000,000 UPSish size and cost equivalents.

A kilowatt hour UPS cost is about four hundred quid. Let's arbitrarily reduce the real world cost by a factor of eight to £50 each allowing for what out in the real world is an absurd and unachievable efficiencies of scale and cost. But just for the sake or argument; multiply by the requirement of 28,800,000,000. The rough cost of a months power stored would be £1,440,000,000,000. That's one trillion, four hundred and forty billion quid. And it'll last about about one thousand charge cycles before the amount of energy stored drops by >70%. That's typically about 6 years in service which is why things like laptops and smartphones are always replaced on a five year cycle.

That amount would pay for 72 nuclear reactors of the Hinkley point type assuming no efficiencies of scale in cost, generating >230 GW of power which is enough electricity to totally decarbonise transport and heating for the entire of western Europe and would last the next century instead of for about 5 years.

Even 24 hours worth of storage at that scale would buy you 2.5 nuclear plants of the Hinkley point type. And frankly, I doubt that you could ever do it at that price; that's based on £50 per kilowatt hour. Musk says his solutions through life cost is $300 per kilowatt hour on his new Tesla Megapack.

So yeah, unviable.

For instance, your own earlier tossed-in idea about water wheels. I've no idea if that's at all practical, but again for the purpose of argument, let's say it's a genius idea that would entirely solve the problem: why don't we just do that now? It would still likely be a lot cheaper and faster than building a bunch of new nuclear power plants.

Because while individually the cost is low so is the generation capacity added. It's a stupid idea, just less stupid than wind turbines which are positively idiotic, and it at least has the virtue of adding capacity that works 24/7 unless the rivers freeze, run dry or burst their banks, which I think everybody can agree are reasonably uncommon occurrences relative to the wind conditions required for optimal function of wind turbines.

It also sensibly makes use of the engineering of the rivers done to facilitate waterpower that date back beyond recorded history. (the 1066 doomsday book lists 6000 waterwheels...)

If it turns out that it's not possible to solve the problem with wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, and battery storage, sure, nuclear's the next least worst thing to add to the mix (unless I'm forgetting something). But you should probably at least work through all of those first.

Wind we've done to death, and I trust that in light of the figures above you'll see how absurd battery storage is.

Hydro is lovely, but gives the term "expensive" a bad name and we don't have enough valleys etc to dam and flood, and besides the people living in them tend to complain somewhat about being forced out of their homes. The proposals for tidal power are feel good pipe dreams to distract from the reality that they are several orders of magnitude too expensive to deploy at a useful scale.

With regards to geothermal, we aren't exactly Iceland. In the UK you can get a reasonable list of cost effective locations by looking up where we have hot springs >30 degrees. That leaves 6 sites, 5 of which are in a world heritage site and grade utterly untouchable listed. That leaves one reasonable site which might possibly be able to generate "up to" 0.1GW if it roughly doubles what Iceland manages from similar sites.

Solar? IN THE UK?! Have you perhaps confused our near perpetually overcast weather conditions with Saudi Arabia? Do you even want to do the sums on it?

Suffice to say that it makes battery storage look sensible. It only make sense when your have a solar system installed and are getting paid several times what it costs for the utility company to produce the power; which means your bills go down for the power you "feed in" and then get basically "free" power later on in the evening and get a lower bill. This has the effect of increasing every other users electricity costs to pay for the chap with the solar panels and so only works when a handful of people have them. What happens when everybody has one?

(Answer; the feedback costs would exceed the generation costs of the electricity; and see the current crisis with energy companies collapsing when required to sell for under the electricity cost as to why solar feed in schemes have been closed to new entrants...)

Which brings us back to Nuclear as being the sole sensible option if you want bills under half today's level rather than at the current level or even double this.

Don't get me wrong; you can generate sort of enough power otherwise and you could even do it in a way that could be described as green if one was willing to indulge in sufficient denial of reality (cough, biomass, cough). It just requires not eliminating CO2 emissions and taxing the poor on their electricity bills to pay the rich subsidies (to generally not produce electricity) on a level equivalent to several multiples of the defence budget. And making transport and heating things for the top 40% of the population and beyond the grasp of the other 60% unless they impoverish themselves.

Which given that everybody gets a vote each creates conditions that outright require the creation of a British populist analogue of Trump, and hands this putative politician about a 60% vote share on a platter when he demands that the policies of "tax the poor to create the rich" cease and completely fairly points the finger of blame at the hippy types who have impoverished the majority of the population.

Should this come to pass then you'd assume that when the future populist gets voted in then he's going to want to deliver lower electricity prices within his term. Since nuclear build terms are 10 years or 2.5 political terms if you start immediately he won't do that; he'll probably build a quick and cheap option that can be up in 3 years from commencement and deliver lower electricity prices immediately thereafter; coal plants, and probably fracking for cheaper gas prices. The green types protesting against building them at that point will probably very literally get lynched.

Which brings us back to Nuclear. ;)

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

Well, that covers the cost of building them, I guess. (Over a period of rather more than 30 years, or, at least 10 years too many)

The physical building time is 10 years. Hinkley point spent ~20 years worth of political arguments about if it should be built, how it should be financed and who should be involved.

Now account for the costs of handling and storing (short-, long- and very long- term) nuclear waste, and the costs of decommissioning the plants at end of life.

Oh comeon, even the Guardian says that's a cost to the operators.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/30/hinkley-point-c-developers-face-72bn-cleanup-bill-at-end-of-nuclear-plants-life

edit: I should clarify, if it turns out we actually need nuclear power to supplement or act as base load for renewables in the long run, then we should use it. It's still a better choice than fossil fuels. But based on its track record so far, I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's ever going to turn out to be particularly cheap, in full life cycle costs. If newer reactor technologies can finally help with that...great. But let's wait and see.

You can use a website called Gridwatch to see what our current electricity requirements are, and how they are provided. It's live to the current minute. Previous data is stored in the graphs below in week, month and year.

The first and most obvious point is that the UK has 24+ GW worth of wind turbines. We have never generated 15GW worth of energy from wind, ever. It's noteworthy when we produce half of the nominal capacity of the installed wind capacity; eg 12GW. As can be seen by looking at the "yearly" graph wind turbines produce more than 10GW perhaps a third of the the year at best. No possible storage technology could deal with that sort of shortfall, even if you quadrupled the installed capacity.

When they are not working, which as you can see is effectively all of the time the capacity is generated by CCGT; combined cycle gas turbines. A strategy of generating power via wind turbines is nothing less than a deliberate policy choice to use gas turbines as the primary power generation and then using wind turbines as occasional partial load reduction on the gas turbines with the wind turbines used as greenwashing.

Quite why people thought wind turbines was a good idea eludes me; refitting every waterwheel in the country for electricity generation would have at least delivered usable power consistently and constantly as long as the water continues flowing through rivers; a more common thing in the UK than it blowing a gale.

As a policy choice though the existing strategy precludes mass adoption of electric vehicles because we don't and won't have the power generation available, and it prevents using existing technology to decarbonise heating by moving from gas central heating to electric heating which could easily be done with technology which was boring in the 1980s such as electric storage heaters backed up with fan heaters on a thermostat. This would work if electricity was cheaper than gas; which it won't ever be when the electricity is generated by gas and then has transmission costs added on top.

Denying this in face of the obvious facts is willful ignorance. There is no storage technology either invented or looking promising in the lab that can work on the scale required even if you increased the number of wind turbines by a factor of ten.

Therefore it is obvious that the only carbon free electricity generation we have on a workable scale at an acceptable price is nuclear; ergo if you want carbon free cheapish electricity to decarbonise EV's or heating without impoverishing 80% of the population (all of whom have a vote; and who will not vote for anybody impoverishing them) then there is no current workable alternative to building nuclear plants quickly and on a large scale.

If you are enraged by this logical statement of offensive yet irrefutable facts then consider a downvote in lieu of doing something constructive to help the situation, such as admitting the existing situation is absurd and supporting changing it. ;)

Re: Lack of comprehension and imagination ...

The thing is, this is actually more of a policy question than a technical one.

The nuclear plants we are building in Britain now are 3.2GW output and cost 20 billion each. We spend ~9billion quid a year on subsidies for renewablesthat generally don't produce the energy promised.

Hypothetically, assume that you built a new nuclear plant every two years instead of paying that. 15 plants later that's 48GW; 5GW more than current demand according to gridwatch.

At that point 100% of your power is coming from a source with well known and predictable costs that won't rise, so offering an unmetered fixed rate contract for electricity would be entirely feasible in the same way it is for water.

Oh, and that unmetered profitable price? The Guardian et al screamed about the government guaranteeing that the power generated would be bought at a minimum price of £90 per megawatt hour in exchange for UK PLC not paying anything towards the building price. The Guardian et al stated that due to good wishes and promises from green marketing electricity prices would fall to far below £90 per megawatt hour making it a terrible deal for the future.

At the time of writing electricity prices are over £200 per megawatt hour, apparently good wishes and promises from marketing are worth about as much as you'd expect.

Re: OneWeb must be coming online soon too...

Well, it looks like it's part of the plan:-

https://oneweb.net/media-center/oneweb-and-bt-sign-agreement-to-explore-rural-connectivity-solutions-in-the-uk-and-beyond

Though personally i'd prefer that somebody other than BT gets involved to provide some competition to Openreach. There's nothing like competition and the eventual threat of impending corporate bankruptcy and unemployment to drive activity, which notably is absent at the moment.

Re: OneWeb must be coming online soon too...

If they were renaming OneWeb it would probably be something along the lines of "Final warning: If BT Openreach doesn't deploy something better than a 56k modem to villages before this goes live despite the billions in public money they've been paid to do it then we'll spend the money on satellite connections for those villages instead".

This admittedly is a very unwieldy name, but probably a more accurate description than the "KnockOffGPS" that you appear to be assuming.

It's also actually a good deal, BT were last paid £1.5 billion for network upgrades to villages etc a few years ago; OpenWeb cost UK PLC 0.4 billion and will probably actually deliver a heck of a lot more capability to low population density areas.

Re: On the Ocean Blue

Piracy is operating without government sanction. As long as you have government backing you can do what you want in international waters (privateering)

Every civilised country in the world agreed to abolish privateering back in 1856 as it was thought that private interests arming ships and men and using them for their private gains outside of any control on the basis of "might makes right" was as stupid as it sounds described in that manner.

The purpose of the trident missile armed submarines is precisely to make nuking the host country pointless; because the weapons are anonymously hidden at sea. This reduces the point of a first strike to zero as the submarines might be a bit put out at the country that's nuked them.

As the Trident can be tossed at a target over 7500 miles away unless you can be certain that you can find all of the subs then it could prove expensive; each sub can each fire up to 24 missiles, each of which might be carrying up to 8 warheads. So missing a single nuclear missile submarine could mean that 192 atomic fireballs might brighten up the day of the country that started playing with them.

Any rational person can see it's idiotic, which is simultaneously why nobody has ever been inclined to press the button and why people are worried about religious fruitcakes obtaining nukes as some of them might think that God will protect them from retaliation, upsetting the rational basis of deterrence.

R&D in the US is a lot more expensive

Actually it costs about the same

It appears intuitively obvious that an American scientist is likely to be paid more than a Chinese one, and that materials required for an experiment will be more expensive in the US than in China which means that running the same experiment in both countries will mean that it is more expensive in the US.

Re: My email wasn't blank...

Some of us would require more than "I doubt" when dealing with companies that hoover up data into massive databases of information on people that has previously only existed when countries national security apparatus had reason to suspect that you were a spy.

The difference being that the national security apparatus only used it in a limited number of cases for a specific purpose, and while they might have kept the information, generally the only time you'd be aware of it was if you were requesting some form of top secret security clearance, which is to say that nobody ever had any real reason to care.

These days companies gather far more information than security services ever aspired to obtaining. They probably know more about every part of your life than you can readily recall. It's also likely that they will sell this information or any part of it to anybody interested in purchasing it either now or in the future with unknown and unknowable consequences.

This being the case, "I doubt" what a corporation can do is not good enough for those of us who wish to maintain a level of privacy in vague approximation to that which existed when we grew up.

Re: Technically-minded typical geek

Just because we can learn a new interface doesn't mean we must do, especially when the change does not improve productivity.

Re: "servicing the HST is no longer viable"...

Yes, I understand the background, it was in some sense a sensible decision to retire the Space Shuttle fleet. In space exploration "sensible" or "cost efficient" should probably be less of a main driver, though.

It cost ~ 2 billion to build and launch Hubble.

The space shuttle programme had a budget of $196 billion for 131 launches, a cost of $1.45 billion per launch.

5 shuttle launches went to Hubble servicing, so just the launches for the servicing (excluding the parts cost) cost $7.25 billion.

An Ariane 5 rocket launch cost €139–€185 million; so doing the servicing jobs with a disposable rocket instead of the Space Shuttle would have saved enough money to launch a pair of replacement hubbles. Or hell, just don't service it at all and launch a fleet of three new hubbles with a slightly improved design.

The Shuttle program was excellent at providing well paid mass employment and terrible at achieving the titular aim of the project; to get things to space in a cost efficient manner.

Its not that long ago that in the UK, society as a whole was very mysoginistic, women wearing head coverings was the norm.

Woman haven't been required to wear hair coverings in the UK for as long as we have recorded history, which encompasses at least two and a half millennia.

Showing bare hair is largely a function of modern shampoo making that particular look viable for those who could afford it. Prior to that impossible to wash and style greasy hair didn't really look that attractive and wearing a hat or wig with hair powder was the fashion pretty much back to antiquity for both men and woman.

.. and of course the UK, was involved in a lot of historic religious wars (ironically quite a few of those against Islam)

The UK (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and [Northern] Ireland has existed since 1800. The number of religious wars we have been involved in is zero, although you could possibly consider the anglo-Sudan war a religious war if you squinted; A chap who successfully launched a rebellion against the government of Sudan took over the Sudan, before then (simultaneously) invading the Empire of Ethiopia, Empire of Italy, Egypt, Eritrea and the Congo free state, before being crushed by the combined forces of all of the above plus us, and we only got into it due to the Egyptian government skilfully getting us involved rather than any religious motive on our part, so I doubt that you mean that?

Prior to that you have the nation of Great Britain (being the union of England and Wales) which takes you back to 1707, which fought zero religious wars. The glorious revolution of 1688 hardly qualifies as a religious war so presumably you don't mean that.

The Commonwealth of England fought zero religious wars, and going further back the rest of Europe didn't care much about fighting a war with England over creating our own church so Henry VIII could have divorces on demand.

In fact the last religious war England was involved in would have been the Crusades in the 11th century? Presumably that's what you mean. Of course at the time England was being held as a conquest by the House of Plantagenet (eg the family of William the conqueror) by a King of England and France who spent perhaps six months of his entire life in England as it was only part of his [French] empire and he had a lively sense of self preservation and didn't fancy being bumped off by the locals in England. In that war we were at best a source of tax income for the Plantagenet kingdom/empires war securing their southern borders.

So presumably that's what you mean, although i'm not really sure how it qualifies as much of an involvement and i'm not sure why the (near complete lack of involvement) in religious wars is actually ironic.

Re: "design paradigms from those devices could successfully carry over into a new Start"

The thing is that the developers could quite easily put their "new, improved" interface as the default; and then allow everybody else disagreeing that using a mobile phone interface designed for a 8" screen on a pair of 24" screens is an improvement could perhaps select "classic" from a menu and just use something akin to the interface that looks and feels familiar to people who used NT4, 95, 98, ME, 2k, XP and Win7.

Now when Microsoft was trying to force their way into the mobile phone market it did make some sort of sense to piss off all of the desktop users by forcing a mobile phone interface on them; some people might have then been happy with a Microsoft phone because of familiarity with the interface.

But Microsoft have abandoned this strategy; so what's with forcing a pointless change to a mobile UI?

Cryptolockers only work in a windows configuration that is identical to *nix admins running everything as root. Windows doesn't have to be run this way; the tools to change this are available free of charge out of the box. The problem is simply that people don't bother to use them.

If people can't be assed to figure out how to secure a windows installation then I suspect you'd find that if Microsoft went out of business then the same people wouldn't bother to figure out how to secure a *nix installation either, and the problem would just move between vendors with the users.