For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876432
This is a bit simplistic to put it mildly but in principle:

Government should be able to determine the "what we need to achieve and why"

Academia and industry then work on the "how and when" and there's dialogue on damage limitation if "when " looks like being too late.

There's a big difference between government capital spending and revenue spending. Capital can be (and in some cases should be) effectively conjured out of thin air. So long term investment in energy strategy is perfectly possible and sensible.

In the short term there is often a case for subsidies to get over a problem, furlough during the pandemic was such an action and fuel subsidies make perfect sense at present.
By NigelC
#1876441
Flyingfemme wrote:
VRB_20kt wrote:The only winners will be those that can hang on until most of the competition have been killed off and then reap bumper profits through having large volumes of customers paying the maximum charge.

The ones who are being "gifted" customers from companies that did go bust are in a pretty good position. My rate is doubling, to Shell's "standard" rate, and I am unable to switch anywhere else.


However many of the remaining companies don't want the domestic customers, see inability to find a better deal than Shell standard, because the cap means they lose money on every one, adding to their own loses.

The real problem is we believe that bought in gas and coal doesn't count for "climate change" so it's fine to import but we can't produce our own. Hence Polish coal for steel production rather than our own and Mr Putin's gas rather than North Sea or fracked gas.
Unfortunately the green lobby / Government haven't realised that windmills don't work when there's no wind , solar doesn't work at night, Mr Putin is marginally less reliable than the DVLA and we are incapable of building anything major, let alone a nuclear power station and the people contracted to do it for us, EDF, make Putin look utterly reliable while threatening to plunge the Channel Islands into darkness unless their fishermen can continue to pillage their waters.
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By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876452
We have very limited control over most of our infrastructure and industry because it is owned by overseas entities of all sorts. This slow self off sometimes referred to as “selling the family silver” has been going on since the 1980s

So if we want to progress a strategy we have to spend ages horse trading before we can start.

There is no base load technology that doesn’t involve emissions apart from nuclear and the Holy Grail is fusion, which is working at a prototype level and there’s some work on getting fusion to work at scale, but it lacks serious funding at this point.
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By Dave W
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876458
johnm wrote:... the Holy Grail is fusion, which is working at a prototype level and there’s some work on getting fusion to work at scale, but it lacks serious funding at this point.

Surely net power generation from fusion has not yet been demonstrated by anyone.

AIUI, the world record for fusion power is held by the European tokamak JET (in the UK, at Culham). In 1997, JET produced 16 MW of fusion power from a total input heating power of 24 MW.

There is certainly some very serious funding going into attempting it e.g. >$22Bn into the 35 Nation ITER project - just one example of many around the World.
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By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876478
@Dave W Yes indeed that's right, the focus now is on superconductor tokamaks AIUI but $22bn is a mere bagatelle in this context :-)
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By Pete L
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876490
It does seem a lot easier to make better use of the energy that already arrives from the one local working fusion reactor. We really don't want to add to total energy in the system.
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By kanga
#1876505
Five sites shortlisted for new STEP fusion plant, including one at 'Severn Edge', ie present Berkeley power station site presumably (with associated R155!)

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Arti ... sion-plant

https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/glou ... ion-plant/

[some irony, while Russian gas supply reliability is being discussed, that tokamak is a Russian portmanteau word from '50s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak

тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками
toroidal'naya kamera s magnitnymi katushkami
toroidal chamber with magnetic coils;

or

тороидальная камера с аксиальным магнитным полем
toroidal'naya kamera s aksial'nym magnitnym polem
toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field ]
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By Flying_john
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876875
I see the Drax coal fired power station is going great guns and the share price rising too.


We'll be opening old british coal mines next, Shouldnt have destroyed all those power stations and be reliant on French Nuclear and Ruski gas !!
By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876876
Flying_john wrote:We'll be opening old british coal mines next, Shouldnt have destroyed all those power stations and be reliant on French Nuclear and Ruski gas !!


While French nuclear is undoubtedly a factor we get gas from Norway :-)

The chances of us getting a coal mine open is zero. We'd have to import miners from Poland and China :-)
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