On safety - one of the places I had the opportunity to visit had a car park where you were only allowed to reverse in. I'm not sure if it was a holdover from a previous establishment, but I think they kept something on site that was volatile enough (like a lot of gas) that if a swift evacuation was required, they didn't want people futzing around getting out of spaces.
Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
51–60 of 269 posts
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#52Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants. I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time be…
Accelerando is geek bait. His best work is the Laundry series which he's still working on. Disclaimer: no idea what his opinion of his work is.
I personally liked the Eschaton stuff but he pretty firmly rebuked himself there.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#54"nothing like this will be built again" ITER / DEMO / PROTO plants planned to eclipse everything previous in scale. And with nuclear fission now classified as green tech by the EU, maybe the political will is finally here ;) https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220109-europe-nuclea...
ITER will generate no power. No liquid-metal neutron-absorber "blanket", no steam piping, no turbines. DEMO / PROTO will, if not cancelled, be absolutely monstrous, but generate no more power than a wee fission plant. Until they destroy themselves with their own neutron flux. (They should build them underground, so they will already be buried when it is time to abandon them.) It is inconceivable that any such project…
> It is inconceivable that any such project will ever produce enough value to pay for the absurd level of capital investment and operational costs just to make them operate at all
In and of itself that may be correct, but they could provide valuable stepping stones to future systems that are much cheaper, simpler, and more efficient, which could not exist without first creating these large expensive projects.
The value isn't in the project itself, but in the legacy it creates in terms of future iterations.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#55I miss images.
Daily Mail has better images but worse text https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2927910/You-radiati...
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#56French power grid agency RTE made a report[0] forecasting 2050 France energy mix, and because of loss of knowledge and increased security measures, even with strong political will, France won't be able to maintain its 70% nuclear power electricity share. Most nuclear-intensive scenario in this report is max 50% nuclear energy. [0] https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-12/Futurs-Ene... in french
Even if you didn't have loss of knowledge or increased security measures, unless future French nuclear power can lower its costs, it will inevitably have a lower share in the French energy mix.
The CO2 cost is low though. You don’t need to fire coal and gas power plants when it’s dark and not windy.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#57Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong. Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal…
I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants. I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time be…
I think of Accelerando sort of the same way I think of Snowcrash. They're both just avalanches of mind candy barely contained by enough thin narrative to pretend they're novels.
They're both incredibly fun reads, but awful fiction. Both authors got significantly better at the craft with practice, although one of them still seems to have an ideological aversion to endings.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you didn't have loss of knowledge or increased security measures, unless future French nuclear power can lower its costs, it will inevitably have a lower share in the French energy mix.
The CO2 cost is low though. You don’t need to fire coal and gas power plants when it’s dark and not windy.
One would hope that by 2050 energy storage and/or long-range transmission will be a non-issue for renewables, rendering this argument moot.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#59On safety - one of the places I had the opportunity to visit had a car park where you were only allowed to reverse in. I'm not sure if it was a holdover from a previous establishment, but I think they kept something on site that was volatile enough (like a lot of gas) that if a swift evacuation was required, they didn't want people futzing around getting out of spaces.
I spent some time at an active petroleum refinery a few years ago and one of the safety things that surprised me a little was that every vehicle inside the complex must have the keys in the ignition at all times. Not turned on, but in the event of an evacuation they didn't want anyone to have to futz around looking for keys.
Re: Nothing like this will be built again (2002)
#60French power grid agency RTE made a report[0] forecasting 2050 France energy mix, and because of loss of knowledge and increased security measures, even with strong political will, France won't be able to maintain its 70% nuclear power electricity share. Most nuclear-intensive scenario in this report is max 50% nuclear energy. [0] https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-12/Futurs-Ene... in french
That's 28 years away. People not yet born will be trained nuclear engineers by then. On what basis does RTE regard the loss of knowledge as already locked-in?