Greenpeace take over a coal train in Nottinghamshire

[SpookyFrank]

But that does not mean the risks are constant. An isotope with a long half-life gives off less radioactive energy per pound per day than a radioisotope with a shorter half-life.

Yes I know, but you seemed to be suggesting that there was some kind of reprocessing which could make nuclear waste more energetic so that it would be radioactive for a shorter time period. Which to me suggests that you're planning to shorten the half life of the stuff, not lengthen it.

It doesn't matter which of those you were suggesting though, because both are effectively impossible. You can't make something 'more energetic' without adding more energy. And the whole point of nuclear power is to take energy away from the fuel and use it in a different form somewhere else.

If we could make a given substance more energetic without the input of energy, then we'd have invented a way to make energy from thin air and we wouldn't be having this conversation because the whole issue would have been solved.

 

[SpookyFrank]

And 'not all that long' when you're talking about the decay of radioactive isotopes could still be hundreds if not thousands of years. And mostly those isotopes will decay into other radioactive elements, which will in turn decay to form other radioactive elements.

Uranium eventually decays into lead, oddly enough. But there are several intermediate stages and the whole process takes, IIRC, a non-trivial number of billions of years.

 

[equationgirl]

Meanwhile in other news, Heysham and Hartlepool are both going to be shut down for 2-3 months for checks so they won't be on-stream over the first half of the winter and the UK has lost 4% of its generation overnight.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...-closed-until-winter-amid-blackout-fears.html

So much for nuclear's ability to "keep the lights on". When a nuclear plant has a shut down it's for months and it takes out a great bite of total production. They're inherently risky with regard to supply.

The boiler spine checks are required for safety reasons, because they were found in another plant of a similar design. The cracks aren't in the nuclear reactor.

The problem with our generation capacity is due mainly to older plants being taken offline permanently under the constraints of the EC Large Plant Directive without replacement baseload capacity being built. New gas plants have been built but are now deemed uneconomic to run because of the price of gas.

 

[co-op]

The boiler spine checks are required for safety reasons, because they were found in another plant of a similar design. The cracks aren't in the nuclear reactor.
.

I know. I didn't mention the reactor.

My point is that when you have a problem with a nuclear plant it is (a) likely to remove a much larger chunk of capacity from the network, and (b) the plant shuts down for a much longer time than any other form of generation because the complexities of stopping and starting a nuclear plant. So nuclear plants (which have the same or greater risks of engineering issues) are inherently more problematic in terms of reliability - a.k.a. "keeping the lights on" than other forms of generation.

When they have a problem, it's both bigger and longer. So they are more likely to lead to lights going out at some point in the future than the alternatives are.

 

[SikhWarrioR]

Ah the benefits of allowing the so-called free market crapitalism to arrange your country's energy supply needs Instead of say a unified state owned system that plans ahead long term regarding such things as renewals or capacity upgrades using the most suitable generating technology and factors in such things as fuel supply and where it comes from and climate change. I can just imagine the the disaster that politicians make of running their country who think "The Market" can deliver a sustainable reliable energy supply

Answers on a postcard to
Sikhwarrior
22 acacia avenue
Amritsar
Khalistan

 

[coley]

Ah the benefits of allowing the so-called free market crapitalism to arrange your country's energy supply needs Instead of say a unified state owned system that plans ahead long term regarding such things as renewals or capacity upgrades using the most suitable generating technology and factors in such things as fuel supply and where it comes from and climate change. I can just imagine the the disaster that politicians make of running their country who think "The Market" can deliver a sustainable reliable energy supply

Answers on a postcard to
Sikhwarrior
22 acacia avenue
Amritsar
Khalistan

Wind farms, nuff said

 

[tbtommyb]

I don't really get the arguments about nuclear waste, tbh. I understand that its initial creation is bad, but surely once one site is contaminated all you have to do is put all the rest there? we seem to have managed to store it ok so far.

 

[coley]

I don't really get the arguments about nuclear waste, tbh. I understand that its initial creation is bad, but surely once one site is contaminated all you have to do is put all the rest there? we seem to have managed to store it ok so far.

Costs millions to store it and who wants it?

 

[Wilson]

I don't really get the arguments about nuclear waste, tbh. I understand that its initial creation is bad, but surely once one site is contaminated all you have to do is put all the rest there? we seem to have managed to store it ok so far.

Aye, it's great! and if it does go wrong we can have a nice big wildlife area without any people in it.

 

[tbtommyb]

Costs millions to store it and who wants it?

but once you're storing some any increase is a question of quantity rather than quality.

 

[coley]

but once you're storing some any increase is a question of quantity rather than quality.

The " quantity" being the fissionable materiel itself and anything that has come close to it, a lot of stuff to be contained, accounted for and guarded for god knows how many years, and guess who picks up the bill?
Now, it's just an unqualified opinion but I suspect that a fraction of the money that is being proposed for Hinkley would find a solution to burning coal in an environmentally acceptable fashion.

 

[coley]

Aye, it's great! and if it does go wrong we can have a nice big wildlife area without any people in it.

Chernobyl comes to mind

 

[free spirit]

The boiler spine checks are required for safety reasons, because they were found in another plant of a similar design. The cracks aren't in the nuclear reactor.

The problem with our generation capacity is due mainly to older plants being taken offline permanently under the constraints of the EC Large Plant Directive without replacement baseload capacity being built. New gas plants have been built but are now deemed uneconomic to run because of the price of gas.

I hesitate to challenge you on your specialist field, but the EC large plant directive isn't responsible for the plants being taken offline now as such, what was responsible for it was Osbourne implementing a carbon tax on generators that's ramping up each April, so several of the generators took the decision last year to use as many of their remaining hours up as possible while coal was cheap and before he carbon tax came in.

Without that tax the coal plants would mostly still have been available for winter peaking up to 2016 as per the original schedule.

I point this out because the government has been allowed to get off entirely with this by journalists blaming the LCPD for the closures, when it is actually their tax policy that nobody had really been calling for (as half the plants were closing down and on limited hours anyway), that has directly caused these early closures.

The other point being that it's not just the price of gas going up, but also the price of coal dropping significantly, which in turn was due to a glut of gas in the US that couldn't be exported, resulting in US gas plants replacing significant levels of coal generation, which then meant there was a sudden glut of US coal that could be exported to the world markets.

Gas prices have dropped recently, and last I looked there had been a significant swing back from coal to gas.