Siso

As I understand, submarines use weapons grade enrichment. Heaps of spare current reactor fuel by the time it is down blended. Sweden have recently started building underground storage as well.

Interesting video on the make up of spent fuel. This bloke also has interesting videos.

As far as the grid forming inverters go, I was talking about black start capability as in at Broken Hill when they had the blackout. They had all the wind and solar but the part on the inverters for black start hadn't been commissioned. It would have been a good opportunity to test it. We can store the waste, the facilities still need to be built. Again the more we do the better we will get. Meanwhile it is just sitting on site getting less dangerous every day. I enjoy this blokes videos even though he exaggerates how dangerous the long lived waste is. A uranium fuel pellet can be held in your hand with no protection. Technicians wear cotton gloves to protect the pellet from the oils on your hand. These 2 elements have half lives of millions of years as was quoted in the video. Generally the longer the half life the less dangerous it is. I wouldn't eat it though. The amount is always quoted in tonnes. A lot of the spent fuel is still U238 which weighs approx. 20 times the weight of water so the actual volume is a lot less than you would think.

Just saw this on linkedin

Decommissioning and waste disposal has been solved. It is a political and public perception problem. Most of the waste is long lived waste. Easily managed by deep geological storage or for fuel in a fast reactor. Long lived because it is not very radioactive. The deep storage completed in Finland is costing a part of a c/kWh. Having looked for an update, the 500MW test reactor in India went critical in April this year. Most of the shorter lived waste is dangerous for between 300 and 500 years depending on who you asks. Can also be stored under ground. Shorter life because it is more radioactive. If something happens on the earth that this becomes an issue, I reckon there will be other things to worry about. The big ones as far as decommissioning goes in the west are Sellafield and Hanford. These were built to supply bombmaking material during and after the war. Decommissioning would not even have been thought of. I would think new builds would be built with this in mind. and there is so little of this waste. Synchronous generation does this as a part of it design so it is essentially free. Traditional hydro does this as it is synchronous generation. Not sure about pumped hydro though. It may have inverters to allow reversing pumps etc. Not sure grid forming battery have really been proved yet. We had an opportunity in Broken Hill last year but the inverters didn't have that part commissioned I believe.

You are right, India is building a lot of renewables along with their nuclear. Look at Germany as well. Lots of renewables but still have the interconnectors with the countries that have synchronous generation. The Baltic states are the same. India have also loaded fuel into a 500MW fast reactor which will lead to being able to breed fuel from Thorium and U238.(not sure how they are progresing) They are looking at this because they have limited access to Uranium. Australia isn't even looking at having any synchronous generation apart from gas for backing up the intermittents. It would be good to replace the black and brown line with Nuclear and let wind, solar and gas play with the rest of it. It wouldn't be easy, but not much is. Snap shot of Europe today as well.

Have enough synchronous generators on the grid and quick response isn't an issue, they all take part of the load. This what has happened previously. Realistically you would have some batterys still for that. You would still have solar and wind as well, but you would prioritise the synchronous generators. Being available when the demand is there is worth it. Nuclear does not need much more water then coal and can easily be handled with sea water. We may be able to research the real cost of NP, pity we can't with renewables. As we saw last month in SA, we still need close on 100% gas/coal for intermittents. This in the state that is "leading" the way. Confusing NP with nuclear bombs is so 70's

The feed in tariff has nothing to do with reduction in power bills. I am doing OK with my power bill, but its not really the point. There is only a couple of forges across the world that can do a Nuclear pressure vessel as I understand. The transmission is not just less, It is a lot less. The windfarm I worked at probably had 40KM of underground HV cable for a plant of less than 150MW. which is less then 50MW by the time you put the capacity factor in and that is not including the lines for the transmission. The South Koreans would need to be involved in building them. We had no-one that could build submarines either but we successfully did that. There is enough regulatory systems around the world that we could take the best parts out of all of them. We already have one for the reactor in Sydney, It would just need to be expanded to include NP. It is going to have to be updated for the new subs anyway if they ever come on line. None of these things are insurmountable and other countries have done them. Bangladesh is even getting NP although it looks like it will be built by the Russians. At least with NP, coal and gas we won't be asking (paying) our industry to slow down production. We are shifting from a demand based system to what ever the generators can do depending on the weather, time of day system. Not ideal for a modern economy. Speaking of timeframes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today!

Remember $275! How much is the intermittent system going to cost? We have the modelling and get told intermittents are cheaper. I received a letter from my supplier the other day telling me my prices are about to go up. I know someone will say shop around but I shouldn't have to spend half a day on a computer looking for the best electricity deal every 6 months. It is an essential service and should be affordable for everyone. The government keeps misleading consumer saying intermittents are cheaper and they quote the wholesale price of electricity. There is a lot more to delivering power to the consumer then generating electricity.

It kind of makes a joke of the gencost report that gives NPP a life of 30-40 years. What else have we been misled about. Investment is slowing down making the targets the government for 2030 pretty well impossible to make. The LGC have come down from $40 to $6 at the moment. Maybe you are correct about intermittent generation has gone too far, but we should open the door for NP incase/when the system falls over.

We probably will need it to if we want to reach net 0. Sizewell B has had a life extension to 60 years. Nuclear states doing alright in Europe at the moment. Baltic states doing OK with their interconnectors to Sweden and Finland and small grids. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sizewell-b-power-plant-given-lifetime-extension-to-2055

Things have changed

The newer ones still had a hard stop at 40. The derating started earlier. Blades dont make a difference to coolant temp, maybe the fan at the front can be made to blow more air over the radiators😁

Unless they have changed in the ladt 4 years. Fot the wtg i worked on the older ones use to be a harx stop at 40 degrees, but often use to stop on hot gen coolant or converter temp. The newer ones would start to derare in the 30s and stop at ambient of 40. They wrre dedigned for europesn summers.

Coal can be flexible as it use to be beforr parasitic intermittent generation came on the seen. If you had enough plants they all didnt have to move much to make a large change on the grid

Sounds like a wind turbine except they dont need to be old. Hot windless days! Hot windy days. They derate, cooling water for genetator and converter get too hot causes them to stop. When we most need them!

Scotland they are paying windfarms not to produce electricity because of transmission constraints. Government is paying to keep Eraring power station open in NSW. The worst thing it is probably still making money, just not enough.

We may need to disagree on that. Worker safety and then $$$$$. Less energy security = more money from governments to fix

I think it infers exactly that.

They don"t care aboyt Australias energy security either

Does matter as the threads name says it powers it. A few years ago when i was working with wtgs a friend who worked for tge council said that the ACC used completely renewable power. I told her when there is no wind at night the oower was coming from gas 15km down tge road. Not her fault, just had been mislead. One of there supplies was a solar farm at Streaky Bay about 700 km away. The issue is it hides from the public how hard the transition is going to be as we get more intermittent generation on the grid and it takes away from the communitys that host these sites and are really using rnewable electricity. You can't even see a wtg from the adelaide metro area. You can see plenty of instaled gas as you cruise around the NW of the city.

There is a lot more to a grid then just the electricity. Your figures dont allow for storage, artificial inertia, tranmission gt back up. Otherwise Sa would have the cheapest electricity in the country. So you cant give me a country. Sa grid is smallest on the NEM (maybe Tassie) so a big difference to a country

Doesnt really matter what is backing up getmany but it shows how far intermittent generation is behind. Sweden was considering not signing a contract for an interconnector to Germany because it pushes electricity prices up in the south of the country. Not sure what ended up there, haven't heard. All those countrys you mentioned have a heap of traditional hydro or geothermal. I specified wind and solar like Australia is attempting to do. Aust has only 8% traditional hydro and not likely to get more. Again name a country that has cheap power delivered to the consumer and close to net 0 using a wind and solar dominated grid? Have a look at electricitymaps and see the countrys that are doing the best with net 0

France would be supporting them even with fossil fuels. They thing is they are supporting their failing intermittents with carbon free nuclear. On Australia's situation, name me a country anywhere in the world that has cheap electricity deliverd to the consumer and got close to net 0 using a grid made up of wind and solar. Australia has only 8% traditional hydro. Germany has 170Gws of instaled wind and solar for a max grid demand of 65 GW and still imports from other countrys. We have no other country. SA last week had a few days where we could have doubled our wind and solar and it still would not have been enough, yet we say we are 70% intermittents. How much is that last 30% going to cost and if we did triple our generation to get that last little bit, there will be a lot of plant laying around doing nothing in the part of the year when the fuel for the intermittents is good. Underutilised plant = $$$$. Ask any earthmover, aircraft owner