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Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

bbc.com

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Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#251

Post by csours »

macspoofing wrote: post #161

Serious question, Britain's energy mix is ~80% Nuclear/Hydro and 20% Wind/Solar/Other ('other' must be either natural gas or bio fuels, garbage or wood) ... Why even bother with wind and solar? Why not just do nuclear and hydro and be done with it. I've noticed anytime there's an article that talks about some country reaching 100% renewable energy it is always due to Hydro (and maybe Nuclear). Wind and solar are neve…

There's a hard cap on hydro. You can't make it rain more. Wind and solar are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper and quicker than nuclear for initial installation.

Additionally, you can run energy islands from solar and wind.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#252

Post by stubish »

Scoundreller wrote: post #223
TwoHeadedBeast wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the way you say it so casually. In the grand scheme of things you are of course right, but I reckon converting a coal plant to gas is a non-trivial undertaking.

It's a lot quicker than nuclear. Dunno if it's cheaper to just raze the coal plant and build a natural gas one somewhere. I'll assume any hydro opportunities are tapped out. Conservation is already big in Germany. Wind and solar can only go so far. And natural gas would provide better peaking capacity to balance it out.

The article discusses the switch of a major plant in the UK to compressed wood pellets, sourced from the US. I would think that Germany (and most of Europe) would have a good climate for wood pellet production.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#253

Post by monadic2 »

icebraining wrote: post #237
monadic2 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have carbon neutral batteries yet? Last I saw the production chain for lithium-ion was not carbon neutral over the expected lifetime of the product but rather increased carbon emissions. I’m having a hard time finding numbers to compare with wood pellets or coal, though, so I’m curious if you know.

How could a battery be carbon-neutral? What does that even mean? A batter doesn't produce energy, how could it be carbon-neutral by itself?

Batteries are good for N cycles (to simplify) and take M carbon to produce. If it cycles N times and is charged with fuel that emits <M carbon, that’s going to be a net carbon output surplus. This is expected and desired from solar to have some carbon output as a tradeoff to supply bursts of demand, but needs to be compared with eg a comparable coal plant (or “wood pellet” plant I guess) in order to figure out how much improvement it gives.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#254

Post by dodobirdlord »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #231
renaudg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. For example, the 9TWh required to power France's high speed train fleet for a year produce 200kg of nuclear waste. Since the beginning of the country's nuclear programme, the total cumulative volume is 3650m3 of waste : one olympic swimming pool's worth of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996751

What percentage of potential energy is extracted? My (old, probably out of date) understanding is that (at least in Canada) nuclear facilities limit themselves to extracting some tiny quantity of the potential energy in order to avoid producing material that could be made into nuclear weapons.

This is the case in most of the world, but I believe that in France spent fuel is reprocessed.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#255

Post by dodobirdlord »

alex_young wrote: post #162
glogla wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main concern with nuclear power is that they still haven’t managed to create any active long term storage of the nuclear waste. And before that, we don’t know the full actual cost of the energy. That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel. Only, we're not building them. B…

> That's a red herring. The "waste" has a lot of energy remaining (otherwise, it would not be radioactive [1]). There are reactor designs that can use "waste" from current reactors as fuel. Don't these reactors produce nuclear weapons products? Seems like that may be a reason we don't want a lot of them around.

Rather, their fuel is plutonium. There's lots of plutonium in spent reactor fuel that can be extracted into more pure plutonium and used as fuel, but also to build nuclear weapons.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#256

Post by mrpopo »

ip26 wrote: post #233
heipei wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how any German in their right mind can continue supporting coal (especially lignite) even if you were to ignore all the fancy carbon emission calculations. Lignite is won using strip-mining here, and by here I mean in the most populous state of Germany between the major Ruhr area and Düsseldorf/Cologne, all major population centers. From where I live, I have to drive straight through these mines whenever…

I don't think anti-nuclear activists intend to support coal. They just don't consider what should replace the nuclear plants they wish to shutter.

Most do, they want to replace them with nothing, e.g. reduce electricity usage. And that may be a hard thing to swallow, but reducing energy usage is the only realistic pathway towards a <2deg world goal.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#257

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

jeromegv wrote: post #221
toyg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure we have. Basically we just bury it and hope for the best, it will be someone else's problem anyway. > The Onkalo repository is expected to be large enough to accept canisters [...] until around 2120.[13] At this point, the final encapsulation and burial will take place, and the access tunnel will be backfilled and sealed. We go from "dig it out" to "dig it in". Very sustainable. /s

Isn't carbon offset also someone else problem? Can't we argue that it is a bigger problem?

When talking about health effects from coal pollution, it's not about the CO2.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#258

Post by golemiprague »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #158
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like somebody needs to inform Australia that solar exists and they get a lot of sunlight.

Australians know. The government, however, behaves as if beholden to the fossil fuel lobby. South Australia installed the largest lithium ion battery in the world[0], and the federal government rubbished it as not fit for purpose and to small too make any difference. Have you ever known the government of any country to play down the installation of the biggest X in the world, in their own country, rather than using i…

I see in the first comment here that batteries are not a good solution yet and people seems to agree with it. Can someone shed a light on this issue? I find it hard to believe the PM was belittling it with no reason

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#259

Post by adrianN »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #231
renaudg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. For example, the 9TWh required to power France's high speed train fleet for a year produce 200kg of nuclear waste. Since the beginning of the country's nuclear programme, the total cumulative volume is 3650m3 of waste : one olympic swimming pool's worth of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21996751

What percentage of potential energy is extracted? My (old, probably out of date) understanding is that (at least in Canada) nuclear facilities limit themselves to extracting some tiny quantity of the potential energy in order to avoid producing material that could be made into nuclear weapons.

Normal nuclear reactors only extract single-digit percentages of the energy. You want to use breeder reactors to actually burn all the nuclear fuel. The "waste" still contains almost all of its energy. Breeder reactors are of course unpopular politically, because they create raw material for nuclear bombs as part of their normal operation.

Re: Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

#260

Post by hatboat »

mrpopo wrote: post #256
ip26 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anti-nuclear activists intend to support coal. They just don't consider what should replace the nuclear plants they wish to shutter.

Most do, they want to replace them with nothing, e.g. reduce electricity usage. And that may be a hard thing to swallow, but reducing energy usage is the only realistic pathway towards a <2deg world goal.

Perhaps you didn't mean it in a literal sense, however you and I have a very different opinion on the term realistic.

I believe a deus ex machina type carbon capture solution is a far more likely scenario than getting industrialised nations, let alone emerging ones, to actually reduce their energy usage.

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