I was surfing on the interweb today looking for nothing in particular and you know what happens, before you know it you are looking at things like wind turbines and nuclear reactors (did you know Betz law limits a wind turbines efficiency to 59% max?, or that the Severn barrage could generate 15,000 Mega Watts (6% of the UKs energy needs)). Sorry about nesting parenthesis but there's so much more where that came from, including this:
GWe = GigaWatts electrical energy. The average nuclear power plant produces around 600 MW (0.6 GW). UK electricity capacity is currently 81 GWe.
It looks like we've got or are going to have so much energy laying about that may be cheaper to dump it than use it for the next 700 years. At least assuming the Macro-economic chaps are proper qualified people and not shiny arsed bureaucrats with sociology or politics degrees/diplomas? Flip, if I were in charge all the unemployed and public sector workers would be starting work on building the Severn barrage tomorrow and we'd get people trained up to be world leaders in leading edge nuclear reactors too.
In June 2007 a report for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) focused on the 100 tonnes of reactor-grade plutonium and 60,000 tonnes reprocessed and depleted uranium which will be available by 2012...Three options are considered: treating the materials as wastes destined for deep geological disposal, storing them long-term, or using them as fuel (or selling them others for this purpose). In the last case, the energy content is enough to run 3 GWe of new PWR reactors for 60 years, or 12 GWe of fast reactors for 700 years.
The Uranium and Plutonium: Macro-economic Study provides an economic analysis of the options. It makes no recommendations but notes that the waste option is lowest undiscounted cost with low uranium prices and re-use is profitable above about US$ 80/lb U3O8 price.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf84.html
The Uranium and Plutonium: Macro-economic Study provides an economic analysis of the options. It makes no recommendations but notes that the waste option is lowest undiscounted cost with low uranium prices and re-use is profitable above about US$ 80/lb U3O8 price.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf84.html
GWe = GigaWatts electrical energy. The average nuclear power plant produces around 600 MW (0.6 GW). UK electricity capacity is currently 81 GWe.
It looks like we've got or are going to have so much energy laying about that may be cheaper to dump it than use it for the next 700 years. At least assuming the Macro-economic chaps are proper qualified people and not shiny arsed bureaucrats with sociology or politics degrees/diplomas? Flip, if I were in charge all the unemployed and public sector workers would be starting work on building the Severn barrage tomorrow and we'd get people trained up to be world leaders in leading edge nuclear reactors too.
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