Starmer's nuclear plan
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Slightly different use case though.
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There's a live one ten miles from me at the moment
Weapons grade uranium. And hideously expensive to maintain. Although taking it out of a tin can at the bottom of the sea might allow you to retain engineering talent and service it more easily.
They're also a bit small, around 100MWe I think.
All modern PWR reactors like HPC are ultimately based on PWR reactors designed for submarine use. They took the military design, scaled it up, switched to a lower grade of fuel and added more safety features and automation.
Trumps last term as president the managed to deliver destruction of the soya and pork farming sector due to his China trade war
this time he has already started to cause price of goods to increase
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I worked in the reactor room on a Swiftsure class, the actual reactor was the size of a small car, of course the other gubbins like heat exchangers took up lots of space
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The reason that Starmer is saying this is because he saw the Enron Egg advert.
But failed to see the truth of it:
www.forbes.com
But failed to see the truth of it:
Meet The ‘Enron Egg,’ An At-Home Nuclear Reactor That’s Totally Fake
A new parody product promises safe at-home nuclear power from a fake relaunched Enron devoted to solving the global energy crisis.
www.forbes.com
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Did you hit any
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No but this one did
HMS Sceptre (S104) - Wikipedia
That is indeed the idea. At present, each nuclear station is almost a one-off, with a lot of site-specific design - which means long lead times, and a partially new safety case for each one. Hence very long delivery times and expensive.
The idea with the SMR is that the basic design is standard, only a site-specific foundation layer needs to be designed, then a standard structure built on top of it. The reactor itself will be factory built and delivered by road - so that gives you an idea of the maximum size envelope.
The support & services can be built to suit multiple reactors, and the reactors can be slotted into place one at a time - so incrementally ramping up capacity.
Each unit would be sealed, and "just" lifted out and shipped back to the factory when needing a refuel.
Indeed, but that's not 100 sites, there would be multiple reactors on a site - otherwise the overheads would make it a non starter.
In any case, according to the well educated experts, we don't need all that much capacity because we've got all that wind and solar generation and that's getting more
Me too !
And that is a sad fact. Unfortunately, it also means we are creating a lot more "waste" than we need to - which also put the costs up.
We do in fact have the technology to use it (Fast Breeder Reactor) - safely ! But for political reasons (the only thing more toxic politically than the "N" word is the "P" word) it's not been allowed to happen. There is a story around that someone offered to build a reactor specifically to use up the "waste" currently in storage at Sellafield, but I've no idea how true that is. I have heard, from a source I'd take as knowing what he was talking about, that we actually have enough material in storage to supply our entire lecky needs for something like 100 years - if we actually used it.
If done sensibly, most of what is currently labelled waste would become fuel and the actual waste stream would be both less in quantity and less difficult to handle.
Agreed. But most of the security would be needed to avoid the PR problems rather than any real safety problems. The bit about "delivered by road" above might make people think a terrorist might drive into a site and drive off with a module. That won't happen: they wouldn't go on a normal sized lorry, you'd need to arrange the craneage, and then progress would be so slow (ever watched a really oversized load being moved
) it would be easy for the armed response to catch you.Similar thing with the rail transport of flasks. "What is someone hijacks a train ?" - well they can only go where the rails take them, and they'd need a big crane to lift it (or even the lid) so SFA chance of doing anything dangerous before lots of armed response people have arrived.
Also, the designs are for the reactor units to be inherently or intrinsically safe - basically you could switch off or completely remove all support services and you would not have a meltdown (the module might not be usable afterwards, but it would not have any risk of releasing any radioactive material.)
Thanks for the whole post. All very interesting. Specifically on this point, they are talking about outputs of about 500MW for these sites. Can a single reactor that big be moved in the way you discuss, or would that require several of these reactors.
In any case, according to the well educated experts, we don't need all that much capacity because we've got all that wind and solar generation and that's getting more
If we cannot rely upon the green energy we already have (see recent fall to near zero), what makes you think that adding more green capacity will make much difference? Near zero output, remains near zero.
TBH I don't know unit rating, just that the plan is "road moveable" and "multiple units per site". Imagine a giant multi-slot toaster.
I wasn't being serious. It's frightening that policy decisions are being made by people who do believe it.
