Is biomass usage sustainable and as green as it is made out to be?

[Watercourse management]

Over 2500 acres of maize went into one bio digester near wells off the holkam estate.

[MattyF]

The more I look at it the only obvious solution is nuclear.. sticking eye sore wind mills up in pristine areas of unspoilt land , messing up river eco systems with dams and shredding devices ,felling trees to burn in the name of green energy is not green really and when you look at it plus who gets paid for having there land used for these there is only one winner it’s just money making schemes and a con.

[Paddy1000111]

7 hours ago, MattyF said:

The more I look at it the only obvious solution is nuclear.. sticking eye sore wind mills up in pristine areas of unspoilt land , messing up river eco systems with dams and shredding devices ,felling trees to burn in the name of green energy is not green really and when you look at it plus who gets paid for having there land used for these there is only one winner it’s just money making schemes and a con.

Only issue we have at the moment is dealing with the waste. Nuclear fuel rods are removed when they lose something like 5% of their efficiency. We need to have reactors that can use more of the effective power or find a way to renew/redope rods. 

[djbobbins]

The more I look at it the only obvious solution is nuclear.. sticking eye sore wind mills up in pristine areas of unspoilt land , messing up river eco systems with dams and shredding devices ,felling trees to burn in the name of green energy is not green really and when you look at it plus who gets paid for having there land used for these there is only one winner it’s just money making schemes and a con.

The money for rent payments on all the really big wind farms (I.e. the offshore ones) goes to the Crown Estate. Which isn’t Liz and Phil, it’s the Treasury - so should offset other tax costs.

We have the best offshore wind resources in Europe and companies prepared to take the risk on how much the wind will blow, the costs of construction etc for a 15 year guarantee on power price of about £40 (subject to CPI inflation of about 2% per year). That is less than half of what the EDF consortium (as far as I know, the only ones brave enough to try to build new large scale nuclear in the U.K. after Toshiba, Hitachi etc pulled out) need, which was £92-odd.

The solution is to build as much offshore wind generation as we can, then use the surplus to electrolyse water into hydrogen for storage or conversion into synthetic hydrocarbons (for specialist applications like aviation which can’t readily be changed to run on electricity). Or store wind-produced gas in depleted offshore gas fields, empty salt caverns etc.

That hydrogen or synthetic gas can then be used to run gas power stations at about 55% efficiency when the wind isn’t blowing and it’ll STILL be cheaper end to end than new nuclear, even if you ignore the immense (incalculable?) costs of building a long-term repository to store high level waste safely - which depending on who you listen to could be anything from 50 years to a million years, with something like 10,000 to 100,000 being a sensible middle ground.

[Paddy1000111]

This is the thing with nuclear. It isn't a long term solution unless we find a way to store all that waste. Imagine 10,000 years of nuclear waste to store. The reason the time for storage is so variable is based on how the waste is handled. If the high level waste is re-processed, graded and re-used the remaining un-usable waste decays to the ore level of radioactivity in 9,000 years as opposed to 300,000 if it wasn't regraded etc. 

 

A typical nuclear reactor (1GWe) produces 25-30 tonnes of high level waste a year. That means that for a 9000 year cycle we need to find somewhere to store 270,000 tonnes of high level waste per reactor. 

 

We use about 61.9GWe per year at the moment in the UK and we aren't all driving electric cars etc etc but based on that in the 9000 year cycle we would need to store 16.7 million tonnes of high level waste which is about the same tonnage of coal we mine a year in the UK so that doesn't seem too unrealistic, so again, my calculations are garbage or we're being lied to.... 

[djbobbins]

This is the thing with nuclear. It isn't a long term solution unless we find a way to store all that waste. Imagine 10,000 years of nuclear waste to store. The reason the time for storage is so variable is based on how the waste is handled. If the high level waste is re-processed, graded and re-used the remaining un-usable waste decays to the ore level of radioactivity in 9,000 years as opposed to 300,000 if it wasn't regraded etc. 
 
A typical nuclear reactor (1GWe) produces 25-30 tonnes of high level waste a year. That means that for a 9000 year cycle we need to find somewhere to store 270,000 tonnes of high level waste per reactor. 
 
We use about 61.9GWe per year at the moment in the UK and we aren't all driving electric cars etc etc but based on that in the 9000 year cycle we would need to store 16.7 million tonnes of high level waste which is about the same tonnage of coal we mine a year in the UK so that doesn't seem too unrealistic, so again, my calculations are garbage or we're being lied to.... 

You’re confusing power (GW) and energy (GWh). The U.K. currently uses about 350TWh per year, ie, about 350,000,000,000kWh of electricity. The peak power on the system is closer to the 60GW you use, although peak demand has been coming down recently.

Given that the (relatively historically low) amount of coal we mine in this country is from opencast, it’s not a realistic option to assume we can dispose of high level waste in the same way - it needs to be able to be put in specific rock formations with low amounts of groundwater flow, 1000m or so below ground level. It’s not impossible but the fact we had the first civil nuclear power industry in the world in this country nearly 65 years ago and still haven’t found a long term solution of dealing with the waste is telling that it’s also not straightforward.

We could have some nuc plants to provide base load generation but I think there are other solutions which are lower cost, lower risk and will be a lot quicker to get built.

[Paddy1000111]

15 minutes ago, djbobbins said:

 

You’re confusing power (GW) and energy (GWh). The U.K. currently uses about 350TWh per year, ie, about 350,000,000,000kWh of electricity. The peak power on the system is closer to the 60GW you use, although peak demand has been coming down recently.

Given that the (relatively historically low) amount of coal we mine in this country is from opencast, it’s not a realistic option to assume we can dispose of high level waste in the same way - it needs to be able to be put in specific rock formations with low amounts of groundwater flow, 1000m or so below ground level. It’s not impossible but the fact we had the first civil nuclear power industry in the world in this country nearly 65 years ago and still haven’t found a long term solution of dealing with the waste is telling that it’s also not straightforward.

We could have some nuc plants to provide base load generation but I think there are other solutions which are lower cost, lower risk and will be a lot quicker to get built.

 

Maybe you're right but I'm pretty sure my maths was right. A 1GWe nuclear power plant creates that much waste. At the moment are peak draw is 61.9GWe so we need at least 62 power plants and they would create that much waste 

[MattyF]

The money for rent payments on all the really big wind farms (I.e. the offshore ones) goes to the Crown Estate. Which isn’t Liz and Phil, it’s the Treasury - so should offset other tax costs.

We have the best offshore wind resources in Europe and companies prepared to take the risk on how much the wind will blow, the costs of construction etc for a 15 year guarantee on power price of about £40 (subject to CPI inflation of about 2% per year). That is less than half of what the EDF consortium (as far as I know, the only ones brave enough to try to build new large scale nuclear in the U.K. after Toshiba, Hitachi etc pulled out) need, which was £92-odd.

The solution is to build as much offshore wind generation as we can, then use the surplus to electrolyse water into hydrogen for storage or conversion into synthetic hydrocarbons (for specialist applications like aviation which can’t readily be changed to run on electricity). Or store wind-produced gas in depleted offshore gas fields, empty salt caverns etc.

That hydrogen or synthetic gas can then be used to run gas power stations at about 55% efficiency when the wind isn’t blowing and it’ll STILL be cheaper end to end than new nuclear, even if you ignore the immense (incalculable?) costs of building a long-term repository to store high level waste safely - which depending on who you listen to could be anything from 50 years to a million years, with something like 10,000 to 100,000 being a sensible middle ground.

It could work then .. my view and that is I live off grid and rely on a large wind turbine for the bulk of our power the reality is different to what was sold to us on paper... if what your saying is possible then great though and definitely a better alternative to nuclear.