When there is money sloshing around and a premium placed on time…
How expensive will the power be from the smaller scale nuke units that the likes of RR are working on? ie the bit bigger than a sub ones.
God knows, but you would lose all the economies of scale and still have to fund all the NRE many times over for each site. I’m assuming you would need several of these to equal one standard size PWR. Looks like they are selling as an option to countries that can’t afford the larger gear.
Looks to be unfunded atm, design will be immature and even if funded today a 2030 instal date looks racy at best. oh, an 18 month refuel cycle, that’s a lot of fuel to transport, especially if by road. Cant see us opting for it, can you imagine the nimby factor on these if you need one or two per city.
I assume the reactors would be imported, if not then it would be a massive investment required to make them in the UK.
They aren’t giving much away on their website. Looks like a kite flying exercise to me combined with a begging bowl for taxpayer cash to fund everything and no private finance for all that NRE.
Just noticed Lord Hutton fronting it up, it won’t happen:)
This is the output on a dreary morning in late November. Just about enough for half a lightbulb. Feel the powwwerrrrrr…
Reminds me of an idea I once entertained of a man powered power station where you could go and put KWh in the bank via exercise bikes. Maybe it’d have been a way for unemployed people to earn some money or credit. Until you work out how feeble we are, how little power we generate and how little we could earn in comparison to the cost of power derived from fossil fuels.
I would have thought a simple and cheap approach would be to convert all the gas power stations to hydrogen and use electrolysis to extract hydrogen from water, most of them are on the coast so water wouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Because electrolysis uses no power? 
Costing the Earth on R4 at 3:30
Apart from potentially triggering earthquakes, what could possibly go wrong?
Ground source heat pumps are amazing in Germany/Scandanavia where they use advanced building and insulation techniques to create houses that thrive on constant low output, instead of here where the breeze block is still the major technological advancement in construction of the last 30 years and it’s about throwing houses up as cheaply possible to maximise profit.
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Exactly. If we invested 10% of the alternative energy budget in finding ways to reduce consumption, it would be much better spent.
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Few years ago I had a client that installed them for commercial clients. They reckoned there was a 3:1 heat output to compressor energy input ratio.
It is not that far offshore, you can see it from the beach.
From up on the Downs it looks like a white forest.
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@MrKettle I am back looking at solar/battery as there is a system by givenergy.co.uk that is loads cheaper than Powerwalls and looks like it has a lot more functionality. E.on are using them for their solar and they are doing 36m interest free credit.
Looks to be less than £10k all in for a 4kW solar system and a beefy 8.2KW battery.
Interesting, will be moving in a few months and want to do exactly this.
The power wall is very pretty though
I will resist the opportunity to be too much of a @SAP7 fangirl over my Powerwall, on the face of it that is a good price.
Not sure I got much out of their website about how the inverter works, and any element of series panel connection will reduce output if there is shading or different efficiencies. 8.2kWh is unlikely to completely see you through a day like yesterday if that makes a difference, especially if there is a reserve for power cuts (it looked like the battery could isolate the house from the grid but it would be worth checking that).
Can you fit any more than 4kWp on your roof?
Possibly, I need a survey though. I’m not good a judging how many panels I could fit on. Maybe 14 at a guess.
We have 14 360W panels which gives 5kWp, the same manufacturer is now up to 400W per panel which would give 5.6kWp.
I am waiting for the Tesla like replacement roof tiles, I just couldn’t look at the ugly things that are available cheaply currently when tiles is a much better solution