Get those construction contacts signed!
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.
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.
Unfortunately, renewables cannot do it alone
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.
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.
Another person who doesn’t understand power-grids being anti-nuclear, wow!
So educate me, if you can. Your comment contributed nothing of value.
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.
Oh no, we will have to buy it from that evil super state Australia!!!
How many dollerydoos do they want for it?
Ya know, wind and solar are independent too, and much cheaper.
They’re great technologies and we should be building them out. Unfortunately, they struggle with intermittency. Renewables like wind and solar would best complement base load, always-on, capacity of a nuclear generating stations.
I’m honestly surprised the UK hasn’t invested in wave power. Plenty of crashing waves all around it. Can’t cost that much to build. I remember seeing some pilot projects with vertical turbines installed at the base of shoreside cliffs.
There’s been a lot of research into this area because many people, yourself included, can see there’s energy to be had. From what I remember from classes on it, the issues with capturing power from waves has most to do with ecosystem damage and scalability. Not to mention, they’re build on waterways which are already being used for things like fishing and shipping.
But with lots of solar and wind we can store the extra to smooth over dips. We can also import/export power (as now) as it’s not going to cloud and windless everywhere. Southern Europe could be big solar exporters and we can be big wind (and wave) exporters.
Then do it. Fight for it. I have trouble seeing a 100% renewable solution at the moment but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. Don’t back down when people dont want generation in thier backyard or when you’re “pretty close” to 100%. We must decarbonize energy.
I believe nuclear is a way to do that and advocate for it by writing letters to my governor and lawmakers to remove the moratorium on building new nuclear facilies in the state I live: Illinois. However complete decarbonization is done, doesn’t really matter. My experience and formal training on the subject matter influences me to believe in nuclear and your a person with an equally valid opinion. Fight for what you believe.
I’m not anti-nuclear, it’s just more expensive than wind/solar/wave/hydro + storage (and hydro can be storage). Give it a few decades and V2X is going to be common and with have a large amount distributed battery. You can make money today doing V2G with a Leaf. I’m just not sure we’ll need much nuclear. I’m only against nuclear in geologically unstable places. Maybe politically unstable places… which you never know were will destablize. Lots of crazy popularlism since 2008 crash.
