Mr Gus wrote: ↑Tue Nov 09, 2021 1:56 pm
Joe, we ought invest in Archimedes screw small scale we'd hydro to all up our 24/7 renewables, weirs are everywhere a river is at, many are suitable, ...& ought be implemented, the one put in at Bedford I imagine is now cost effective with current prices having reduced its payback period significantly (installed 2012 for £500,000)
It grinds away producing around 320,000 units per annum (has fish & eel channels to the side)
15kW PV SE, VI, HM, EN
42kWh LFPO4 storage
7kW ASHP
200ltr HWT.
73kWh HI5
Deep insulation, air leak ct'd home
WBSx2
Low energy bulbs
Veg patches & fruit trees
Forget to say 320,000 = 876 units per 24 hr period (not to be sniffed at)
1906 ripplewatts @wind Turb-ine-erry
It's the wifes Tesla 3 (she lets me wash it)
Leaf 24
Celotex type insulation stuffed most places
Skip diver to the gentry
Austroflamm WBS
A finger of solar + shed full more
Am I missing something here?
This so-called "Small" modular reactor has an output of 470MW - that's basically as big an output as the Magnox plants?
If they're going to build 11 of these, that gets us a fleet of 5GW, for £22 billion. Actually not far off the same price as 1x Hinkley C?
Hiya Moxi, I'm too lazy to go back 5yrs and check all of this, so it's from memory, but what I recall about SMR's, the Rolls Royce 'brochure', and the articles and reading around it at the time, basically agree with what you've said, that it just doesn't seem to add up any better than older promises. It could work ..... but ....!
I think RR estimated a World market of 60-85GW's, which sounds semi decent, till you consider that's a hoped for upper figure, and just PV generation alone at the time (back when capacity had reached ~500GWp) could match that, and is still growing fast.
Then there was the hoped for final cost of around £35-£40/MWh for generation, which again is great, I have no problems with that 'hoped for' price sounding attractive, but it seemed that around 2-5GW of capacity would have to be built and sold in order to 'hopefully' reach HPC price levels (around £100/MWh at the time), and I've no idea who exactly is expected to buy these early expensive units, to subsidise future lower 'hoped for' costs. Nor how much more capacity was thought to be needed to get costs under HPC, and on the way towards £35?
It seems to me that the 'hoped for' best prices and capacity just won't be good enough to even matter by the mid 2030's, so it's just a distraction.
Speaking of distractions, hiya Desp - nope I don't agree with the throw the kitchen sink at it, approach. That would come under my distractions list, and creates the risk that better/faster/cheaper solutions don't get the attention they deserve. It also makes assessing progress against targets harder since for example, a hoped for reduction in 2035 that may not arrive is too late to correct, v's annual targets with assessments and policy revisions that are possible with planned rollouts of RE/storage and technologies that take months to ~5yrs for completion (such as negawatts from energy savings programmes, right through to off-shore wind farm commissioning).
There is no bottomless source of money, so every penny spent on SMR's is a penny that could have gone to RE and/or storage instead. No nuclear, of any type, currently looks to be economically competitive against RE and storage. So given that we are against the clock (well behind the clock in fact) then spending monies on new nuclear, instead of RE and storage, will actually make the problem worse, since we will have to wait longer, to get less for that money.
Even the theoretical argument of investing in nuclear on top of any and all monies spent on RE and storage doesn't work, since that additional nuclear spending would buy more generation from RE and storage, and arrive sooner. And if after that redirected investment in additional RE/storage we then invested in nuclear, we would benefit more from spending those new additional monies on RE and storage ...... and so on and so on ...... every time.
The only way we would benefit from nuclear investment is if it was guaranteed to be cheaper than RE + storage in the future, or if RE + storage could not be scaled up enough. Since both of these arguments appear to be utterly busted already, then nuclear doesn't bring anything to the table, and waiting/wasting 10+yrs for further confirmation of this will only make matters worse.
8.7kWp PV [2.12kWp SSW + 4.61kWp ESE PV + 2.0kWp WNW PV]
Two BEV's.
Two small A2A heatpumps.
20kWh Battery storage.
Mart wrote: ↑Tue Nov 09, 2021 10:22 amMy prediction - by the middle to late 2020's, interest, quickly followed by funding, will dry up as the uncompetitive economics of the behind schedule LSMMRs, continue to attract little interest outside of Gov officials.
Call me a skeptic, but if we want to invest money, then it should be in new ideas that may work (or may not), not old ones that have failed for 60+yrs. Every penny spent on nuclear now, is a penny not spent on cleaner, greener energy and storage, that would deliver more energy and FF displacement sooner.
My prediction is that as soon as long-haul air travel starts to recover, Rolls-Royce's interest (and the requirement for the government to funnel them money to keep the R&T spending going) will quietly dry up and we won't hear any more of this. It's no coincidence that this work started to assume importance just when RR were in financial trouble due to the fall in widebody air travel...
Mart,
there's no shortage of money should the GOVT really commit to combatting the climate emergency, and your argument works well enough only assuming we can build enough RE plant without the NIMBIES holding it up for years. I think the GOVT assume (probably correctly) that building far fewer big plants is easier than many thousands scattered about the country.
TBH it's moot in any case, I've been having these discussions for 40 years now, 1981 I joined friends of the Earth, back then it was inconceivable that we would be in this state ever. COP26 looks like it will be a cop out so nukes, turnips, hydro is all just irrelevant noise
