New nuclear plants get go-ahead

[Mama Sumae]

Stick it on a rocket and blast it into the sun?

You always have Iran...

[malfunction]

Hmmm... I shall have to read up on this as I have long held the view that something like the severn barrage is (despite the cost and impact it would have on the local environment) preferable to building a nuclear power station. Same goes for the eyesore argument for wind turbines - yes they may look awful but a nuclear power station isn't pretty either and I don't see a wind farm increasing cancer rates in the local area.

[[GSV]Trig]

*cough*

Oh look a three eyed fish, wonderful, I'd google for a picture of a beach overed in oil from a tanker that was on its way to a powerstation but I cba

[[GSV]Trig]

Stick it on a rocket and blast it into the sun?

That'd be my answer too tbh, or blast lots of them out to pluto or somewhere as a bit of an experiment to see about creating another sun at the other end of our solar system to increase the number of planets that are warm enough to be habitable but lets not go there

[[GSV]Trig]

Howstuffworks "Problems with Nuclear Power Plants"

Theres the problems, worth a quick read for people that are a bit sub-knowledge on the nuke front.

[pollaxe]

Stick it on a rocket and blast it into the sun?

All's fun and games til the rocket breaks up either on or shortly after launch...

Unless we could all agree a place that it could fall on without anyone minding much of course.... (runs away!)

[MadduckUK]

All's fun and games til the rocket breaks up either on or shortly after launch...

Unless we could all agree a place that it could fall on without anyone minding much of course.... (runs away!)

i was just thinking that. obviously you would need some kind of ejector seat for it in case all went pear shaped. we know containers can be made strong enough to withstand a train so a bumpy landing should be ok.. then you try again.

just dont contract the work out to India

[steve threlfall]

All's fun and games til the rocket breaks up either on or shortly after launch...

Unless we could all agree a place that it could fall on without anyone minding much of course.... (runs away!)

Heh, just what i was thinking. Who needs terrorists when we are launching our own giant dirty bombs

[iranu]

It's necessary imho. By 2020 the UK would only have 1 station working and nuclear produces about 20% of our energy needs so that gap needs filling. It's a strategic, political necessity and if we are talking global warming then it's also the only realistic short to midterm mature technology that's capable of reducing emissions now.

Accelerator driven sub-critical systems (worth googling) are the way forward for reducing the amount of waste from conventional nuclear plants and the large amount of decommisioned cold war warheads. I looked into this a few years ago and it's an excellent system for providing power, after all it is impossible for a meltdown to occur. It also has other benefits with regard to the end product and what it contains i.e rduces half-lif and heat produced in storage. Iirc there was an experimental system being built at an Italian university.

Shooting it into the sun is a nice idea but I think a bit dangerous bearing in mind that probability would suggest that some of those rockets would fail.

[Lucio]

Wonder if the nuke people have thought about putting nuclear powerstations under the sea, not near anyone and a ready supply or water just on the off chance theres a cooling issue they can pretty easily vent cold water straight from the sea into the core..

It's a nice idea, but I'm pretty sure most of the seabed is far too tectonically unstable to be considered for a nuclear powerplant. Maybe if you put one out on an oil rig type platform it could work, or float one over the sea.


Still, what no one has pointed out yet is that the waste from these new plants is unlikely to be an issue, as a good chunk of it will be weapons grade plutonium and we can guess where that'll end up

[chicken]

i was just thinking that. obviously you would need some kind of ejector seat for it in case all went pear shaped. we know containers can be made strong enough to withstand a train so a bumpy landing should be ok.. then you try again.

just dont contract the work out to India

The trouble is, with it safely sealed in the containers they transport the waste in it weighs tons. As far as I can see 4 tons sheilding for every 1 ton of waste. So blasting it into space isn't really feasible due to the small payloads they could take and the enormous costs incurred. But it's a nice idea!

Roll on wormholes!

[pollaxe]

Space payload = roughly $10,000/kilo IIRC.....? (Someone in the know is more likely be able to give a more accurate figure.)

[weegie.geek]

I'd prefer to see wind farms but I accept that a NPP is way more efficient.

[Saracen]

Good thing? Bad thing?

Dunno about good, but as others have said, essential.

There are real problems, and like most things, it's certainly not 100% a good thing. It's just that I can't see we have any real, practical alternative. The biggest problem is going to be that we should have started doing this a decade ago.

[Lee H]

What about underground?

They build huge safety containers to store all the "waste" underground for years for safety, so why not have the stations underground.

First of all theres less chance for a terrorist threat to attack them because we all know once they get built you have some extremist nutcase on the job saying they're going to blow it all up.

[Saracen]

I'd prefer to see wind farms but I accept that a NPP is way more efficient.

Wind, and other renewables, ought to be part of the solution. But it's not just about the total generating capacity, it's also about different types of generating capacity. You have a certain baseline need for power. That, typically, comes from power stations that run as close to 100% of the time as possible, and are the cheapest in terms of unit cost.

But you also need the ability to bring extra capacity online, sometimes quite quickly, when demand changes. And it's naff-all use having a sudden demand surge needing to be met by wind if the wind isn't blowing .... unless we can work out how to make it blow when we need it.

That's why we need a mix. We need high utilisation low cost generators for the baseline, but we also need to be able to kick in extra generation (such as bringing gas or coal generators off standby) when demand increases.

Oh, and on top of the basic need to be able to meet a heavily varying demand (unless you regularly want the lights, and worse yet, TV, going out), we also have the rather different problem with energy security. Do we really want to be heavily dependent (and some degree of dependence is probably inevitable) on the goodwill of Russia, and a variety of other states with which relations aren't entirely cordial and who would (and do) have the ability to flip a switch and turn the UK off?

Oh,and despite my flippant remark about the lights going out, it isn't just about domestic comfort and convenience, but about the ability of industry to produce, and the economy to work, so it isn't simply about whether the switched is flipped or not, but about the price we are charged for it to not be flipped. Countries like Russia probably won't want to flip the switch, because they want the revenue, that that doesn't mean they won't play silly beggars (like OPEC did) over price.