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I read that the best material for turbine blades is Sitka Spruce timber. It's just it takes a lot of whittling to make a blade...

Thanks for your post Jooles. If Belgium is phasing out the nuclear electricity, what are they replacing it with ?

Trumpy, I tend to agree with you and DJK. Nuclear isn't the best solution, but we'll "bite the bullet". And with a bit of education we could use 50% less electricity.

C-H There is a wind turbine under construction in NZ with an 11m prop span ! ! They're just getting bigger & bigger ! Theres designs in the U.S. of 45M props

It would be nice if super-conductors could come in and solve our electricity woes. If this does happen, it would be a shame to have built nuclear reactors.

What for the future?

The clear thing is that they are putting up and up and up the price of electricity, to discourage its use as far as possible. This will relieve Electrabel of the need to generate such a lot. They say high tax is the mark of a civilised society, don't they :-)

They are studying the use of tidal power at the mouth of the Schelde to the English channel because it has the potential they say to take on about 10 per cent of the present load. It is very wide and very tidal indeed and there's obviously a lot of power there to be tapped.

They are looking at the use of more wind power to add to generation.

They are looking at storage of power by hydroelectric means and by electrolysing water to hydrogen+o2 at offpeak to be burnt in dual-purpose natural gas/hydrogen turbine plants.

They will be building more gas power sations.

The framework is they will stop the nuclear reactors when they reach 40 years of operation, and will not be building new ones. The reprocessing cycle was phased out years ago, so spent fuel now is stored on site. The last new reactor came on-stream in 1985, so the measures above need completion before 2025.

It all started perhaps from this point:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/1998/infcirc549a3.pdf

Then there was an update for the report for the OECD dated in 2001, which says:

"Belgium has made the political decision to phase out nuclear power, closing down the existing units when they reach forty years of age and building no new units. The report recommends Belgium to look for realistic and economic alternatives for large-scale energy production."

and

"One of the most crucial elements is curbing the growth of energy consumption, which exceeded 20% in all sectors in the 1990s. Federal-regional co-operation is essential for successful energy-policy development and implementation in Belgium."

A lot of windfarms are proposed for around here, and one of 66 turbines is being built within sight right now. Except that they have discovered an incompatibility with nuclear power stations. Since 9-11 the nuclear station down the east coast from Edinburgh has had an anti-aircraft battery controlled by radar, and this radar is affected by clutter from the moving blades of wind turbines, so they've had to limit the wind farm to the 44 lowest ones beneath the radar sweep. You can't have both, apparently!

The sun is nuclear. The sun produces radiation, both ionizing and non-ionizing, of MANY types. For pity's sake don't tell the activists this, they'll have it shut down, then it'll be cold.

I've seen some of the old newsreels from when Britain's first nuclear (or "Atomic" as it was often called then) station opened.

There was talk that in the future electricity would be so cheap ro produced that it wouldn't be metered -- Just pay a flat rate for service like manu of here still do for water. I guess that idea isn't going to happen now!

Being by the North Sea, we already have a good few windfarms on the Norfolk coast, with more planned.

That was I should think the opening of the first of the Calder Hall reactors in 1956.

The original Gas Cooled Reactor.

It was a dual-purpose design and was not very efficient at electricity generation. The later generations of GCRs were wickedly well-designed though.

They had four of those primitive magnox designs running at the Windscale/Sellafield site, and four almost-identical at Chapelcross in Scotland. The duality was that they had extra capacity in their cores for manufacturing tritium, needed in cold war times for H-bombs. But apparently, tritium was only available to the military from Chapelcross and not Cumbria. There exists still a need for tritium in the UK, for use in its arsenal, and it is a worry for them because the half-life is only quite short at 7.5 years, so you are running out, guys! And import or export of tritium is reasonably tightly controlled.

The fire in Windscale 1 pile was a taste of things to come with graphite-moderated reactors, as the distortion of the grahite bricks by neutron bombardment and consequent storage of Wigner energy led to Chapelcross eventually having a nasty accident; 24 fuel rods slipped straight through the channels and crashed to the hard-to-access area in the reactor sump, because the restraining mechanisms were no longer in the right places. Graphite apparently goes all puffy and strange in a tank full of neutrons flying about everywhere :-)

Chapelcross was then shut down, after being in operation at least 20 years beyond the planned shutdown in 1979, taking into account the 20 year lifespan when the first reactor there went critical in 1959. And Calder Hall, being the same design, was reassessed and deemed too risky also, so it closed too.

The whole trouble with Atomic Energy/Nuclear Power (nice distinction there PaulUK) appears to be summed up well by things of this type. Poor planning and poor and incomplete costings led to too much investment in large amounts of kit that just can't go on forever and which needs endless TLC after its useful lifetime in order to perserve public safety. Still; very easy to be wise after the event, eh?

I wonder. At home, I use gas as the main heat-providing fuel (cooking, heating, hot water). What do most people here do? It seems a bit wasteful, generating and distributing such a valuable resource as electricity, using scarce or polluting fuels sometimes, only to then plug big resistors into the circuit at a great distance for boiling a potato or something like that.

Kiwi,
That's a good point, NZ would have to be the worst country in the world as far as wasting electricity goes.
I mean, look at the number of people that leave lights on, heaters without thermostats on them, or my favourite, people that run thier AirCon with the doors and windows open.
When we had our last power crisis here, some people that I spoke to in offices thought you could destroy all the data in a PC,just by turning it off at night!.
One idiot I saw once was heating his lounge and kitchen by having the Oven on high with the oven door open.
I mean, the less of this behaviour we have, the less power gets wasted.
Oh and BTW Kiwi, if it's education you're talking about, people like I've mentioned above, deserve to be in kindergarten.

The answer to small-island power supplies may be arriving, in the form of High Voltage Direct Current. HVDC is not a new idea, indeed English Electric presented a 100kv machine called a 'Tranverter' in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. What's new is solid-state devices (triacs) enabling economic conversion and reconversion at the ends of the transmission lines. (The 'Transverter' was mechanical, although General Electric in the US were working on Thermionic Valve systems at that time). The point is, 400kv HVDC can be transmitted vast distances economically, our granfathers were no fools, (no reactance, no inductance), and it can be run as one cable, undersea if required. This opens the possibility of utilising the vast hydro-electric resources of Norway and Canada, currently making aluminium, to serve consumers in Europe and the US. In another forum we saw that electric locos of 1MW were using Triacs, so this is feasible.
The 'public' seem to think that you can transmit electical-power for free! No thought of the capital costs or transmission loss costs enter what few brain-cells they have. I remember once spending 45 minutes carefully explaining to a BBC TV reporter how we avoided killing the employees in our plant, with a series of logic devices, cctv, recorders, sensors, computers, etc, only to have the whole multi-million pound investment broadcast nationwide as a "black box" !!! In reality, it's actually cheaper and more efficient to transport coal or oil in a railway wagon or semi than it is to send it in a conductor, and that's a fact.

HVDC is precicely what the Cahora Bassa scheme uses to transmit hydropower to South Africa

see http://www.taprojects.co.za/media_articles/media_article_2.asp