this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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As far as I'm aware, we don't have any natural deposits of fissonable material in the UK so we'll bot be truly independent. Green energy is what we need for that, we have plenty of wind, waves and sunlight.
Raw materials are not the choke point for nuclear energy independence- enrichment facilities are, of which the UK has three that produce an exportable surplus. Even if it was, Canada and Australia are second and third in the world in Uranium reserves, which is convenient for the country that houses their King.
Nuclear energy is green- it's the only energy worldwide that internalizes its externalities and is made to cost what it costs to the environment.
Demanding tithes of nuclear material from commonwealth nations by royal decree is so wonderfully neo-feudal sci-fi, I love it.
And if the royal decree doesn't work I suppose we could pay them for it but it's better to not try that one out of the box just in case it works.
Sorry but that's an absurd way to construe the point I was making. "Energy Independence" when used in a geopolitical context involves essentially fuel-exporting nations exploiting their supply chain position in order to win political concessions from importers- such as Russia holding Northern Europe hostage over oil and fossil gas in response to European resistance to the invasion of Ukraine. Commonwealth nations share close relationships that are unlikely to degenerate to the point where Australia or Canada are invading their neighbors and holding the UK's electricity hostage.
I know, I was just having a bubble, I sware people are far to literal on thos site compared to Reddit.
I don't know if that's true lol, this is reddit we're talking about.
But yeah, I missed that you were pisstaking; my b.
I mean, we can't even build a rail line on time or to budget, I can't see us being able to build nuclear reactors any time soon.
Starmer Voice Where I come from, we're not great at building rail lines because we're too busy railing lines from the bosom of this beautiful nation
Nuclear power is green energy.
Technically yes, it still creates some waste to be dealt with. I guess arguably you have the same with decommissioned turbines, solar panels, etc with other forms.
It's the only form of energy generation that internalizes all of its own costs- including disposing waste and insuring cleanup.
If we forced oil companies to internalize the cost of fracking casualty and wastewater reinjection alone, gas would be $50/gal.
UK, plenty of sunlight? Edit: for the down voter, this is what the UK thinks of the sun https://lemmy.tf/post/538103
This year's been a bit odd with all the rain, but we've been having great summers of late. We get plenty of sun the winter too despite the temperature.
It's a bit of a meme that the UK is always rainy. It isn't always rainy, it does rain a lot but it doesn't rain anywhere close to all the time and when it's not raining it can get quite hot, quite unbearably in fact because we don't have air conditioning.
Anyway heat isn't really relevant to solar panels, what they really need is just sunlight in general, and we get plenty of that even if it isn't particularly hot. In fact solar panels don't actually like being particularly hot so they probably won't work very well in the Sahara desert. Despite what everyone may think.
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone and I wish that wasn't the case. Pairing renewables with emission free nuclear is the only option we really have to meet current and future demands without fossil fuels.
Google search found some uranium in England: https://www.nature.com/articles/246180a0.pdf
You can definitely achieve more if you can work the supply-side as well. In theory if the smart grid were well executed then it'd be possible for consumers to modulate their heat, charging, tumble dryers etc... to provide more elasticity.
Unfortunately in a lot of places the incentives aren't that high. I don't have that option where I live, but in denver the lowest consumer rate is around 7c and the highest around 17c/kWh. It's hard to invest in new appliances to exploit that difference, but if the off-peak number were 1c then I think you'd see much more take-up of smart car chargers and people delaying when they do laundry.
So how does modulation work? Does the smart grid turn off dryers until midnight? Does the dryer have to be compatible with the drig? I've never heard of this and am interested.
Yeah, you can get electric car chargers where you can set rules something like "Charge whenever power is under 5c/kWh, but try to make sure i've 60% charge by 8am each weekday". Logically you could have a thermostat control AC - we've been playing with that at work because our power goes up at 1pm, so we turn down the thermostat at 12:00 and then turn it up at 1:00 so it shunts some of the cooling a little earlier.
I've never seen a tumble drier that can do it, for some reason mine has WiFi but can't do shit like that. But, yeah I imagine the rule I'd want would be : Dry this anytime in the next 4 hours, and try to spend as little as possible.
They absolutely can when paired with storage. Nuclear is not needed.
Storage? Like battery storage? Lead? Lithium? Go on, tell me more.
Or will we flood river valleys? What are you thinking?
Batteries of all kinds, compressed air, green hydrogen, pumped storage, flywheels, etc.
I took graduate level courses in storage with these technologies at scale. Neat that this knowledge is useful again.
Pumped and compressed require specific geologic formations. Most of the sites for pumped have already been developed in NA. There's room for growth for compressed, but compressed also suffers from losses when the air that's pumped into the crust cools. Hopefully, there are undeveloped compressed sites near regions with energy demands.
Flywheels are a neat idea and still just that: an idea. It's yet to been demonstrated they can reliably do more than grid frequency moderation. The reason it's not very attractive to investors is that we don't have materials to match the energy density of other technologies.
Green hydrogen is also just an idea at the present. Nobody's pursues this because of losses incurred generating hydrogen from water. I want this one to work!
Finally, batteries. Do you think there are enough metals on the planet to build enough batteries for current and future demand?
Is your contention that a combination of all the methods I listed is insufficient for a renewable future that doesn’t include nuclear?
Yes, nuclear is the only one that's sufficiently developed, with a supply chain that's sufficiently developed, that's ready for deployment right now.
The others could get there some day, and I hope they do, but we cannot wait for that.
You have it backwards. Each new nuclear plant is essentially bespoke, that's why they cost so much. It's wind and solar that have an established supply chain.
I think we're misunderstanding. Nukes, like wind and solar, are made out of concrete and steel which have developed supply chains. It's the storage part that is not developed for renewables.
You need to look into how nuclear plants are built. They're custom made for each site, there's no supply chain there. Why do you think they nearly always end up over budget and behind schedule? A robust supply chain prevents those things.
By your logic I could say that pumped hydro storage has a robust supply chain because dams can be made out of concrete.
Nuclear plants are built like every other building is built: construction. "Construction" is what happens after the "supply chain" delivers the material. It assembles the materials into the thing. They're related and different concepts.
Do you really think a nuclear plant is just a building?
Wow.
Anyway, nice talking with you.
You're not completely wrong but neither is the person you're replying to. While the raw materials of construction may have an established supply chain, NPPs are unique in at least two ways:
Raw materials is only part of the supply chain: there's construction (as you mentioned), but also engineering and design.
The expense of NPPs, including going over-budget and having to adjust engineering designs for new regulations, is largely because NPPs are regulated to "internalize" their externalities. Whereas a coal plant is allowed to pollute in gathering the raw materials, is allowed to pollute in producing electricity, and is allowed to pollute in disposal, and has weak safety standards overall, NPPs must be mostly self-contained and over-engineered for safety. If coal plants had to control all of their pollution, be earthquake resistant, be airplane-hijacking resistant, etc they would also routinely be over-budget and have delays, and have unique designs for each plant. Now, there is something like a plateau here, where at some point we will have decided on a fixed set of regulations, and common design features can be identified and re-used more than they are now, and therefore NPPs could become less expensive. But we aren't there yet. Comparatively, we do have a practically fixed set of regulations and common design features for much of the renewable sources.
Currently, other renewables get to benefit from existing supply chains where NPPs can't really, but it doesn't have to remain that way, and there's reason to believe it will remain that way.
It's not. We HAVE to have baseline power generation. Today that comes by either burning fossil fuels, or nuclear, with hydro/geo etc making up a trivial percentage. Only oil industry propaganda conflates nuclear with solar/wind.
It's base load, not base line and we don't have to have it.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
Iron-air batteries seem rather promising for being cheap and scalable
Another person who doesn't understand power-grids being anti-nuclear, wow!
So educate me, if you can. Your comment contributed nothing of value.
Oh no, we will have to buy it from that evil super state Australia!!!
How many dollerydoos do they want for it?