Potential for powercuts in UK this winter

[Fluff]

They could need to switch off a few gas fired power stations. Have no links at the moment.
In UK we have very few gas storage facilities, most of it is piped out of the North Sea. Production is down over the past 10 years.

The pipelines that are planned to bring gas in from places like Russia aren't finished as of yet. AFAIK.

It is easier to cut supply to power stations than switch off consumer gas supplies since once you loose pressure air will get into the system and be awkward to get out.

If there is a power cut candles are quite frankly lame . What you want is one of those gas lamps that runs off a canister, to get decent light.

Cheers Maggie, for allowing the use of gas fired power staions in the 70's. When we should have copied France in installing standardised Nuclear power plants.

Knowledge acquuired in a pub over weekend so may not be completely accurate

[Dr Mordrid]

The US started using gas fired plants in the 70's because of the anti-nuke weenies. Thank you Jimmy Carter

Now prices are artificially high because of the competing demands of home heating and the power plants, plus the hurricane problems in the gulf.

We too need some standardized nuke plants, hopefully a distributed array of PBMR's.

Dr. Morrdir

[Brian Ellis]

Plus Natural Gas, viewed holistically from the wellhead to the consumer's flues, is the fossil fuel contributing most to climate change (or "global warming", if you prefer) per unit of energy produced. This is in contradiction to the energy suppliers' claims, which are based only on pollutants produced at the point of combustion. See http://www.cypenv.org/world/Files/methane.htm

[Umfriend]

Course, the UK could have built storage facilties as well. Moreover, in the 70s, did we have nuclear tech as safe as PBMRs?

What was the joke again? Oh yeah, somthing like Gorbatsjev complaining about the insafety of russias nuclear business. Thatchers solution: "Just call them all Sellafield".

Never did get why that would've been funny, but Sellafield AFAIK is _still_ a drama.

[GNEP]

There ARE massively enormous storage facilities for natural gas. It can be piped back into the relatively empty north sea fields. In fact the Rough (IIRC) field off NL is already used in this way. As are others.

[Fluff]

Am I worrying about nothing and that our infrastructure will probably be fine this winter?

[Brian Ellis]

Never did get why that would've been funny, but Sellafield AFAIK is _still_ a drama.

The whole of the UK civil nuclear programme has been a drama, almost from the start. This is because it was run by Whitehall functionaries and not by anyone versed in the intricacies of nuclear energy. This engendered total incompetence and a handsome drain of billions of taxpayers' money with rivalry between different organisations trying to get the upper hand (UKAEA, CEGB, BNFL, AWRC etc.). My job, at the time, took me several times to Windscale (including a few days after the Windscale "disaster" when there was a small leak of radionuclides due to a graphite fire: because Windscale (UKAEA) and its neighbour Calder Hall (CEGB) thus earned a dirty name, it was decided to change the name of the whole complex of several reactors to Sellafield!). I was impressed at how badly the whole thing worked.

I was working for an instrumentation company at the time. It was decided to add more temperature recorder/controllers to a cooling circuit. I supplied them with a quotation for six units, the function being to simply set a first echelon alarm in motion and to remove the lock on the emergency moderator rods, without activating them. Normally, the safety procedures called for three identical instruments and if one showed an abnormal situation (higher or lower value than the other two), a light flashed on the control panel, causing the operator to follow a verification procedure (most likely an instrument fault). If two or three showed an abnormal condition, this caused a first echelon alarm and, if other instruments also showed faults, the control rods were dropped immediately. The important thing is that 2 out of 3 instruments had to register abnormal conditions. When the order arrived, it was for 4 instruments for 2 positions, not 6, with instructions that the wiring was 2/2 to cause a first echelon alarm, so that an instrument fault could have masked a serious condition. I immediately phoned up the engineer there to query this and he told me that the London whizz-kids had cut the budget. It had taken only 15 months from the submission of our quotation to receiving the order (safety is always something that has to be implemented rapidly) . Money saved? About £1,500! I think it was a couple of months after this that the fire happened, but in a different kind of reactor, an experimental one.

I have a friend (unfortunately now with Alzheimer) who was a chemist at Windscale. In the 1950s, PPE was almost unheard of. He was preparing an acid solution to leach the uranium salts out of an ion exchange column when an exothermic reaction caused a vessel to crack, resulting in a squirt of acid into an eye. The bright sparks in charge had no adequate first-aid and he was transported to a sick bay with a nurse who called a doctor (GP) from Gosforth (about 5 km away). The doctor gave him a massive diamorphine injection for pain relief and called an ambulance from the nearest town, Whitehaven. On arrival at the hospital casualty dept, the doc there took one look at him, sent him up to Carlisle, where the same thing happened, and he was then shunted to the opthalmological department of the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle, where he had the eye removed. The specialist there said that if he had had immediate eyewash treatment, his eye could probably have been saved. After he was fit for work again, the UKAEA thanked him and gave a month's salary in lieu of notice on the grounds that a one-eyed chemist was too big a risk to have in a nuclear site! After several years of fighting, he obtained a small sum in compensation. He finished his career at British Aerospace as chief chemist in the missiles business, where a one-eyed chemist was, apparently, acceptable.

I have no illusions about how the UK nuclear industry works or, rather, doesn't work.

[rylan]

Yeah using natural gas for generation plants was a horrible idea. Gas should be reserved for home heating and other similar use, and stick to cleaner types of coal or nuclear for electricity.

[Brian Ellis]

All coal is dirty. There are more radionuclides emitted from coal-fired power stations than has been emitted by all the nukes, Chernobyl included. Not to mention the megatonnes of sulfur and other noxious gases. All electrical power should be either from renewables (with qualifications) and nuke (also with qualifications). No fossil fuels should be used for this.

[Fluff]

I wish the US, UK + EU could decide on say 4 different sizes (in terms of power output) of nuclear reactors and stick with one standard design.

So they can be made cheaply and be easier to maintain. They should have about 2-3 years to come up with a design and then have the first to go live within 10 years.

I assume gas was a nice option because of the ability to ramp / reduce power output quicker and easier than the nuclear type, for daily fluctuations.

Decisions should have very little to do with governments , leave it to the engineers / scientists.

[Brian Ellis]

There is a standardised 1.6 GWe design, the EuroPWR, a low-cost French/German/Canadian turnkey system with ultra-safe features. It uses MOX fuel. However, it cannot be used in the USA, because Jimmy Carter forced the ban on recycling spent nuclear waste, which was a stupid act. Finland is currently building the first, with France following. I have refs if anyone wants them.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup, another Jimmy Carter special.

How in the name of God that moron gets any credit at all is a mystery to me. IMO he was the worst president of the 20th century. Foreign policy, economics, energy policy etc. etc., he screwed them ALL up.

The only good thing he ever did was make damned sure that Reagan got elected

Dr. Mordrid

[Nowhere]

Brian, do you have some insider info regarding the type of reactor that will be built in Poland? All Google finds for me is "OOOOHHH!!! WE MUST BUILD IT, WE'LL RUN OUT OF ENERGY!!! BESIDES IT'S SUPER SAFE" and "OOOHHHH!!! NO, NOOOOOOO!!!!!! WE'LL HAVE TWO-HEADED CHILDREN"...

[Dr Mordrid]

MOX fueled reactors use a mix of plutonium dioxide recycled from retired weapons and uranium dioxide. The process of conversion into MOX renders the plutonium less useful for weapons and therefore less likely to be hijacked or otherwise diverted. MOX can also be made by recycling spent nuclear fuel rods, providing a way to recycle them as well.

Of course Greenpeace and other enviro groups swear to the high heavens that MOX is a more dangerous technology than existing reactors, but then they'd say that no matter what fuel is propsed for expanding the number of reactors.

Dr. Mordrid

[Tjalfe]

MOX fueled reactors use a mix of plutonium dioxide recycled from retired weapons and uranium dioxide. The process of conversion into MOX renders the plutonium less useful for weapons and therefore less likely to be hijacked or otherwise diverted. MOX can also be made by recycling spent nuclear fuel rods, providing a way to recycle them as well.

Of course Greenpeace and other enviro groups swear to the high heavens that MOX is a more dangerous technology than existing reactors, but then they'd say that no matter what fuel is propsed for expanding the number of reactors.

Dr. Mordrid

not quite true.. I saw a show with an interview with some greenpeace person who said that their scientists ( I use the term loosly) agreed that the only method of power generation they agreed with was solar power.
Now I suppose she must have forgotten about night time, cloudy days, the energy needed to fabricate this massive solar array, and if we are to have power at night, we would need a massive battery bank.. does lead acid sound environmentally friendly?