China is building pretty much everything to generate lots of electricity, including hydro, wind and solar. They have a large population that wants lighting, refrigeration, electric cars, all the good things a First World country's citizen sort of expects to have at their fingertips but at the moment they generate a bit more electricity than the CONUS does to provide for four times the population. Future widespread use of electric cars, trucks, buses etc. will require even more generating capacity over and above that.
Continued development of nuclear power is but one part of that planned increase in generating capability but it's nowhere near enough in itself (ditto for wind and solar and hydro) hence the planned dependence on coal-fired power stations in the future even though they will be less of the total capacity in percentage terms. China has a lot of coal secure within its borders which is a big factor in its thinking.
China is also betting its future on coal -- the government there is planning to produce between 1TW and 1.25TW of electricity annually from coal, about half their increased electricity production target, by 2025. That will mean burning about 3 billion tonnes of coal a year, roughly the amount they're burning right now but in more modern, more efficient and less polluting power stations. The CO2 produced will still be dumped into the atmosphere though.
They're aiming have 300GW of installed nuclear power operational by 2030 although that target might be missed. They're bringing five or six reactors a year on-line, each about 1GW net of non-carbon electricity (the Taishan1 EPR produces 1.6GW net but they may not build any more of them after finishing the other EPR at Taishan).
I presume the 24GWh figure quoted is production capacity. If so, is that per day, per month, annually, what?
Reading the Fine Article it appears that it's an annual production figure but it's still not spelled out anywhere I could see. If so that's enough battery capacity for about 300,000 Tesla battery packs annually or maybe 500,000 cars from other manufacturers, including plug-in hybrids. A good start, but considering the numbers of cars built and sold each year around the world it's only a good start. That doesn't take into account the greater battery demand electric trucks, buses etc. either.
Not really. There are some local variations in uranium concentrations in seawater, off the estuaries of major rivers fed from granitic mountains for example. Japan doesn't have much in the way of granite.
The Kuroshio ("Black Current") is a strong oceanic current that runs north-east along the southern shore of the Japanese Home Islands. The original Japanese uranium extraction experiments used this current to substitute for pumps and pipelines. They suspended the plastic fibre mats in static rafts and allowed the current to do the work for them.
Assuming oceanic extraction of uranium is implemented at a large scale and replenishment from rivers isn't up to replacing the extracted uranium then as time goes on the process would become less efficient and the price would rise. It would take some time though, centuries or even millenia.
One concentrated source of uranium in dissolved water is in the waste pits of coal-fired power stations. The Chinese have investigated the idea of processing this waste resource to extract uranium as they have few native sources of mineable uranium within their borders.
The Indian plans to use thorium as a reactor fuel are based on mixed-fuel loads for PWRs and heavy-water reactors. The rest of the fuel mix is highly-enriched uranium (ca. 20% U-235) and LWR-derived plutonium, needed to provide the high neutron flux to breed thorium-232 up into U-233 which can be fissioned in-situ to produce energy and (eventually) electricity.
Thorium has previously been used as an adjunct in pebble-bed reactors, the engineering of which was not up to the task (the German THTR-300 and AVR). Proposed thorium reactors of the liquid-salt types run at very high core temperatures and high neutron fluxes in a small volume. The engineering problems this creates (such as steel pipes losing half their strength at the elevated temps in the core) are the reason most conventional breeder reactors which suffer from the same requirements have generally not been a success.
China is working on second-generation helium-cooled pebble-bed reactors which could use some thorium in the fuel pebbles but as far as I know the first pair of production reactors they've built (each producing 105MWe) aren't operational yet. They've had a smaller test pebble-bed reactor (10MWe) running for over a decade. I don't know if they've used thorium-mix pebbles in it though.
Can you tell me some of these "50%" improvements that you see coming? Cost-wise there's work being done to reduce and possibly eliminate the amount of cobalt used in lithium-ion battery cells but that's not the most expensive part of the cell.
One dated (from 2013) engineering report I saw suggested Li-tech batteries needed about 2.5 to 3kg of lithium carbonate per kWh of capacity. The minehead price for that material doubled to about $14,000 per tonne at the end of last year and it's only expected to fall to half that price in 2021, three years away as demand increases and more mining reserves are brought into production. I presume that efforts are being made to improve production techniques and reduce the total amount of carbonate needed per cell but they also need to avoid impacting capacity which is difficult as lithium chemistry is what retains the energy the battery pack can deliver.
Since batteries are getting about 5%-9% cheaper every year on average,
I presume you're talking about lithium-technology batteries here. Prices have come down over the past few years but that's no guarantee they will continue to fall in price at your projected rate. The minehead price of lithium carbonate, the main supply-chain feedstock for such batteries has doubled in price over the past year due to shortages and increased demand. New mine production is expected to come on stream to meet that demand and the price will go down again but that (temporary) price increase is going to keep the cost of new-production batteries from falling in the next year or two. Even after that, demand will buoy the price of lithium carbonate and hence the price of shippable batteries.
Home battery installations (including charging control and voltage conversion) of a sufficient size to make buffering worthwhile will cost at least 5000 bucks, probably more. Such a battery might save a couple of hundred bucks a year in metered electricity costs by storing lower-cost electricity and returninging it at times of higher cost. The maths don't add up.
Poor people who rent an apartment in the city rather than owning a suburbian McMansion and who can't drop five figures on a solar/battery installation will have to pay the higher metered electricity rates regardless, of course but they're poor so who cares?
Take Amazon, it had the most ridiculous negative P/E ever.
Amazon was growing out a lot of infrastructure, expanding their customer base and developing AWS among other things as it ran astounding deficits for a decade or more. The people lending them money could see where it was going, there was a roadmap to profitability. They could have failed but they're a success story now. Tesla has a single factory, a lot of debt and a track record of not meeting the Boss's production promises quarter on quarter.
If Musk is indeed overnighting at the plant, looking over everyone's shoulders while they try and fix what's wrong then they've got even more problems. Imagine coding under pressure and then the CEO sets up camp in your office...
I thought about something like that. See the Shuttle's External Tank for a working example of the technology, but...
"Pulling the styrofoam off" is another mechanism that could go wrong and possibly damage the first-stage tanks or maybe jam in place and prevent takeoff. It would be safer to launch the rocket with an insulating jacket in place (as the Shuttle did) but that adds weight to the stack meaning it uses up more fuel and reduces the payload to LEO, something the use of extra-cold oxidiser was meant to improve.
Everything is a risk, some things are riskier than others. Any modification intended to improve performance needs to be carefully examined for novel or increased risks -- SpaceX lost a rocket and payload when the use of super-cold oxidiser revealed a failure mode that should have been caught in the test lab long before it got to the pad. That sort of expensive and time-consuming testing is one thing that makes rockets pricey. Skipping the tests, trusting your suppliers and just running computer simulations of the hardware will be OK a lot of the time. Putting people on top of the stack without extensive and thorough testing of real hardware is another matter.
Also, NASA used cryogenic propellants for many manned missions.
Cryogenic fuel and oxidiser loading was complete before the astronauts entered the capsule or the Shuttle. Some extra LH2 and LOX was added as a top-up process during the rest of the countdown due to losses from warming.
SpaceX's ultra-cold higher-density LOX has to be loaded almost immediately before launch as it will warm up and expand and negate the advantage of its increased density if it's left too long in the rocket's tank. That requires astronauts on a man-rated Falcon 9 using higher-density LOX to be on board the capsule when the oxygen tank starts being filled. This is an extra risk over and above all the other risks of flying the cheapest bidder's hardware.
We have Big Dave, our Speaker to Electricians who does all the hand-off stuff between a site's electricians and our own kit when we set up shows and displays since he's a qualified and experienced sparky. He has a posse of knowledgeable but unqualified people who are allowed to plug stuff in on our side of the panels, and no-one else.
We told Sarah (not her real name) not to plug anything in to the exhibition centre's distribution box which was rated 6A per circuit. Sarah plugged a 3kW heater into the breaker box and switched it on because her photo-shoot models were cold. It cost us a couple of hundred quid for a call-out to the site electrician to reset the breaker on the exhibition hall side of the panels. Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong.
There's a reason for the seemingly-bullshit restrictions on working conditions and who can do what, where and how. Dunning-Kreuger is alive and well, unlike some of their victims.
The two reactors on the barge are pressurised-water designs which are typically 30% efficient in converting heat into electrical power so they produce about 200MW of heat in total. Only part of the 140MW excess will be extracted as process heat for use ashore, the rest will be dumped into the dock water using skin heat exchangers in the submerged hull.
Regular fossil-fuel powered ships use similar heat exchangers to provide a cooling solution for their engines as do nuclear-powered subs and ships -- the Ford-class carriers have two 150MW electrical reactors on board which again are about 30% efficient so at full power they'll produce about a gigawatt of heat requiring 700MW of heat dump although some might be used for heating on board. The Russian "Fifty Years of Victory" nuclear icebreaker that carries out tourist jaunts to the North Pole has two nuclear-heated saunas on-board.
Russian nuclear icebreakers such as "Fifty Years of Victory" have been taking tourists to the North Pole during the Northern summer for over a decade now. They're only really needed for serious icebreaking during the winter around the northern coasts. They use the same KLT-35 reactors as the floating power barge mentioned in the article.
A major reason for this project is to supply electricity and heat to communities on the northern coasts supporting oil and gas exploration efforts in the Arctic. The Chinese are looking at similar floating nuclear power plants to provide electricity for the artificial islands they're constructing in the South China Sea as well as developing their own nuclear naval capabilities. They're not actually building anything yet though.
Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
They're easy to make more of and there isn't a lot of isotopic waste around at the moment anyway, a few thousand tonnes total around the world. Most spent fuel is U-238, unburnt U-235 and bred Pu-239 and Pu-240 which is already recycled into new fuel in a few places such as Russia.
The interesting fission products from reactor waste tend to be short-lived and go away quite quickly, the longer-lived stuff is much like the regular elemental isotopes in chemical terms and the fission products non-radioactive brethren are a lot more abundant and easier to handle for nearly all common uses.
A while back I passed an American couple staring at their phone, a few metres from where I live. I asked what they were looking for. They mentioned the name of a pub/restaurant which was on their Google Maps display.
"Oh, that pub. They demolished it a couple of years ago to put in a tram line." I pointed at the ongoing construction works they were standing next to.
Julian Assange is still in the UK. The Equadorian embassy and its grounds are still British territory but the British government has limited powers under assorted diplomatic agreements codified in law to enter and otherwise interfere with what went on there.
It's a subtle distinction but important. When the US missiled the Chinese embassy in Belgrade its wasn't treated as the starting of a war between the US and China like the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, it was an attack on Belgrade territory.
I drove past the demolition site today. The car park was located behind the EICC, a conference centre which is how I expect it was supposed to get much of its business but most conference attendees would arrive by train (one station about 500 metres from the convention centre, the other station a bit over a kilometre away) or by bus or taxi from the airport rather than driving into the city centre. It wasn't ideally situated for shopping or business commuting either.
I didn't even know it was there to be truthful even when it was open for business back in 2002.
Manoeuvering fuel is essential for spy satellites for them to change their orbits. Once the fuel is exhausted or close to it the satellite's orbit is predictable and can't be altered to deal with new observing tasks so NROL spy birds, radio and radar monitoring satellites and such fly with as much fuel on board as the launcher can safely handle and get the payload into its desired primary orbit.
The Hubble is just going around in circles so it didn't need ten tonnes of fuel and oxidiser on board to change its orbit during its lifespan. Not so for a spy bird.
The "recoverable features" are optional and therefore don't "cripple" F9's expendable payload capability in any way. Just don't install them and you're fine. And by this reasoning, the Delta IV Heavy also hasn't gotten anywhere near the advertised 28 tonne payload either.
Several of the NROL payloads for the D4 Heavy have been in the 23-24 tonne range (mostly in-orbit manoeuvering fuel at a guess). I don't know the what heaviest SpaceX payload into LEO has been. The Full Thrust launches, the most powerful version of the F9 flying today have been much smaller than 20 tonnes into orbit in part because there are few 20-tonne launches required these days (we've got very good at putting smaller bits together in orbit) and in part because of the landing legs, guidance fins and required fuel and oxidiser reserve for recovery that have always been flown on F9 FT launches up till now.
Thanks for the info about the Protons, I don't track them much and there's no convenient info a.k.a. specific Wiki articles about Proton launches, or at least I couldn't find any.
the Falcon 9, the Ariane 5, and the Proton M+ are racing in a pack when it comes to maximum LEO payload
Ariane V ES can, and has put about 20 tonnes into LEO orbit to supply the ISS with ESA's ATV missions. Falcon 9 missions to the ISS run to about 10-12 tonnes docked at the ISS, the Full-Thrust launches have been crippled by the recoverable features added as deadweight to the booster and thus have not yet reached the 20-tonne-to-LEO target expected. I've got no numbers on Proton M series launcher performance with actual LEO payloads. The Wikipedia article on the Proton claims 23 tonnes to LEO maxed out but nothing delivered to the ISS orbit to give a fair comparison, and no details of any actual heavy-lift missions to LEO at all.
Hydrogen as a storeable fuel on Earth is pretty pointless, its use as a fuel in launchers is well-proven but usually with caveats and workarounds but there are reasons it was used in the past and will continue to be used in the future. Several space engineering operations are developing new H2/O2 motors such as ESA's Vinci, a restartable replacement for the existing H2/O2 upper-stage HM7B motor used on Ariane V.
The heaviest lifter in the US inventory (and the world too) at the moment is a pure H2/O2 cryogenic booster, the Delta 4 Heavy (28 tonnes to LEO). It doesn't get used a lot for various reasons, typically one flight a year for NROL missions.
H2/O2 has the best out-of-the-box Isp figure of all regular fuel combos but it suffers from low mass exhaust and at high atmospheric pressures close to the ground this results in reduced thrust due to back pressure. That's the reason the Shuttle, Ariane V, H-2 and other lifters have used it as a core stage fuel/oxidiser combo with strap-on solids to get it into a near-vacuum regime where its excellent Isp can earn its living. Even the venerable Saturn V's second and subsequent stages were H2/O2 for that reason. A number of other modern launchers use H2/O2 second and final stages, such as the GSLV MkIII.
Actually that's two nukes -- the Hinkley Point C station will have two EPRs, not just one. They're also larger than regular GenIIa PWRs being built today in China, Russia and a few other places so they put out as much power as three 1GW reactors or thirty typical wind-farms.
There's something gone wrong with the construction of EPRs but no-one who really knows is talking about it much. All four EPR builds in progress at the moment are very late to finish and none are yet operating. I can only hope lessons have been learned.
The Chinese are bringing 1GW GenIIa reactors on-grid in about six years from first concrete at about $6 billion each but they've got a production line and guaranteed orders for parts etc. reaching into the future for a decade or more. The Koreans are doing the same with their KPR1400 reactors but there are quality assurance concerns due to faked certification for wiring and general institutional corruption in that country.
The UK's re-entry into nuclear power construction is a dog's breakfast with many different reactor designs being chosen by private-public partnerships. This means no pipelines of parts, no interchangeability of operations staff, no standardised fuel supplies etc. I'd have preferred one or maybe two designs turned out like jelly babies but I'm not in charge.
Desalination has been done using reactors -- the Soviet BN-350 fast reactor (now shit down) used its high temperature loop to directly process seawater for desalination at about 700 deg C. Desalination is problematic though, the "exhaust" enriched brine stream pumped back into the sea from desalination plants smashes the local marine environment into an underwater desert, killing everything living nearby.
Global warming will result in more sea surface evaporation and more rainfall inland generally so desalination in the future isn't that useful a process anyway, sad to say.
There's a number of things "surplus" energy can be used for -- the Norwegians have a surplus of hydro power given their geography and small population and they use a lot of it to refine aluminium. Turning it into liquid fuels for aircraft and marine use is another possibility but at the moment fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful and no-one cares enough about CO2 levels in the atmosphere to really consider stopping extracting and burning them.
Slashdot Mirror
China is building pretty much everything to generate lots of electricity, including hydro, wind and solar. They have a large population that wants lighting, refrigeration, electric cars, all the good things a First World country's citizen sort of expects to have at their fingertips but at the moment they generate a bit more electricity than the CONUS does to provide for four times the population. Future widespread use of electric cars, trucks, buses etc. will require even more generating capacity over and above that.
Continued development of nuclear power is but one part of that planned increase in generating capability but it's nowhere near enough in itself (ditto for wind and solar and hydro) hence the planned dependence on coal-fired power stations in the future even though they will be less of the total capacity in percentage terms. China has a lot of coal secure within its borders which is a big factor in its thinking.
China is also betting its future on coal -- the government there is planning to produce between 1TW and 1.25TW of electricity annually from coal, about half their increased electricity production target, by 2025. That will mean burning about 3 billion tonnes of coal a year, roughly the amount they're burning right now but in more modern, more efficient and less polluting power stations. The CO2 produced will still be dumped into the atmosphere though.
They're aiming have 300GW of installed nuclear power operational by 2030 although that target might be missed. They're bringing five or six reactors a year on-line, each about 1GW net of non-carbon electricity (the Taishan1 EPR produces 1.6GW net but they may not build any more of them after finishing the other EPR at Taishan).
I presume the 24GWh figure quoted is production capacity. If so, is that per day, per month, annually, what?
Reading the Fine Article it appears that it's an annual production figure but it's still not spelled out anywhere I could see. If so that's enough battery capacity for about 300,000 Tesla battery packs annually or maybe 500,000 cars from other manufacturers, including plug-in hybrids. A good start, but considering the numbers of cars built and sold each year around the world it's only a good start. That doesn't take into account the greater battery demand electric trucks, buses etc. either.
Not really. There are some local variations in uranium concentrations in seawater, off the estuaries of major rivers fed from granitic mountains for example. Japan doesn't have much in the way of granite.
The Kuroshio ("Black Current") is a strong oceanic current that runs north-east along the southern shore of the Japanese Home Islands. The original Japanese uranium extraction experiments used this current to substitute for pumps and pipelines. They suspended the plastic fibre mats in static rafts and allowed the current to do the work for them.
Assuming oceanic extraction of uranium is implemented at a large scale and replenishment from rivers isn't up to replacing the extracted uranium then as time goes on the process would become less efficient and the price would rise. It would take some time though, centuries or even millenia.
One concentrated source of uranium in dissolved water is in the waste pits of coal-fired power stations. The Chinese have investigated the idea of processing this waste resource to extract uranium as they have few native sources of mineable uranium within their borders.
The Indian plans to use thorium as a reactor fuel are based on mixed-fuel loads for PWRs and heavy-water reactors. The rest of the fuel mix is highly-enriched uranium (ca. 20% U-235) and LWR-derived plutonium, needed to provide the high neutron flux to breed thorium-232 up into U-233 which can be fissioned in-situ to produce energy and (eventually) electricity.
Thorium has previously been used as an adjunct in pebble-bed reactors, the engineering of which was not up to the task (the German THTR-300 and AVR). Proposed thorium reactors of the liquid-salt types run at very high core temperatures and high neutron fluxes in a small volume. The engineering problems this creates (such as steel pipes losing half their strength at the elevated temps in the core) are the reason most conventional breeder reactors which suffer from the same requirements have generally not been a success.
China is working on second-generation helium-cooled pebble-bed reactors which could use some thorium in the fuel pebbles but as far as I know the first pair of production reactors they've built (each producing 105MWe) aren't operational yet. They've had a smaller test pebble-bed reactor (10MWe) running for over a decade. I don't know if they've used thorium-mix pebbles in it though.
Can you tell me some of these "50%" improvements that you see coming? Cost-wise there's work being done to reduce and possibly eliminate the amount of cobalt used in lithium-ion battery cells but that's not the most expensive part of the cell.
One dated (from 2013) engineering report I saw suggested Li-tech batteries needed about 2.5 to 3kg of lithium carbonate per kWh of capacity. The minehead price for that material doubled to about $14,000 per tonne at the end of last year and it's only expected to fall to half that price in 2021, three years away as demand increases and more mining reserves are brought into production. I presume that efforts are being made to improve production techniques and reduce the total amount of carbonate needed per cell but they also need to avoid impacting capacity which is difficult as lithium chemistry is what retains the energy the battery pack can deliver.
Since batteries are getting about 5%-9% cheaper every year on average,
I presume you're talking about lithium-technology batteries here. Prices have come down over the past few years but that's no guarantee they will continue to fall in price at your projected rate. The minehead price of lithium carbonate, the main supply-chain feedstock for such batteries has doubled in price over the past year due to shortages and increased demand. New mine production is expected to come on stream to meet that demand and the price will go down again but that (temporary) price increase is going to keep the cost of new-production batteries from falling in the next year or two. Even after that, demand will buoy the price of lithium carbonate and hence the price of shippable batteries.
Home battery installations (including charging control and voltage conversion) of a sufficient size to make buffering worthwhile will cost at least 5000 bucks, probably more. Such a battery might save a couple of hundred bucks a year in metered electricity costs by storing lower-cost electricity and returninging it at times of higher cost. The maths don't add up.
Poor people who rent an apartment in the city rather than owning a suburbian McMansion and who can't drop five figures on a solar/battery installation will have to pay the higher metered electricity rates regardless, of course but they're poor so who cares?
Take Amazon, it had the most ridiculous negative P/E ever.
Amazon was growing out a lot of infrastructure, expanding their customer base and developing AWS among other things as it ran astounding deficits for a decade or more. The people lending them money could see where it was going, there was a roadmap to profitability. They could have failed but they're a success story now. Tesla has a single factory, a lot of debt and a track record of not meeting the Boss's production promises quarter on quarter.
If Musk is indeed overnighting at the plant, looking over everyone's shoulders while they try and fix what's wrong then they've got even more problems. Imagine coding under pressure and then the CEO sets up camp in your office...
I thought about something like that. See the Shuttle's External Tank for a working example of the technology, but...
"Pulling the styrofoam off" is another mechanism that could go wrong and possibly damage the first-stage tanks or maybe jam in place and prevent takeoff. It would be safer to launch the rocket with an insulating jacket in place (as the Shuttle did) but that adds weight to the stack meaning it uses up more fuel and reduces the payload to LEO, something the use of extra-cold oxidiser was meant to improve.
Everything is a risk, some things are riskier than others. Any modification intended to improve performance needs to be carefully examined for novel or increased risks -- SpaceX lost a rocket and payload when the use of super-cold oxidiser revealed a failure mode that should have been caught in the test lab long before it got to the pad. That sort of expensive and time-consuming testing is one thing that makes rockets pricey. Skipping the tests, trusting your suppliers and just running computer simulations of the hardware will be OK a lot of the time. Putting people on top of the stack without extensive and thorough testing of real hardware is another matter.
Also, NASA used cryogenic propellants for many manned missions.
Cryogenic fuel and oxidiser loading was complete before the astronauts entered the capsule or the Shuttle. Some extra LH2 and LOX was added as a top-up process during the rest of the countdown due to losses from warming.
SpaceX's ultra-cold higher-density LOX has to be loaded almost immediately before launch as it will warm up and expand and negate the advantage of its increased density if it's left too long in the rocket's tank. That requires astronauts on a man-rated Falcon 9 using higher-density LOX to be on board the capsule when the oxygen tank starts being filled. This is an extra risk over and above all the other risks of flying the cheapest bidder's hardware.
We have Big Dave, our Speaker to Electricians who does all the hand-off stuff between a site's electricians and our own kit when we set up shows and displays since he's a qualified and experienced sparky. He has a posse of knowledgeable but unqualified people who are allowed to plug stuff in on our side of the panels, and no-one else.
We told Sarah (not her real name) not to plug anything in to the exhibition centre's distribution box which was rated 6A per circuit. Sarah plugged a 3kW heater into the breaker box and switched it on because her photo-shoot models were cold. It cost us a couple of hundred quid for a call-out to the site electrician to reset the breaker on the exhibition hall side of the panels. Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong.
There's a reason for the seemingly-bullshit restrictions on working conditions and who can do what, where and how. Dunning-Kreuger is alive and well, unlike some of their victims.
The two reactors on the barge are pressurised-water designs which are typically 30% efficient in converting heat into electrical power so they produce about 200MW of heat in total. Only part of the 140MW excess will be extracted as process heat for use ashore, the rest will be dumped into the dock water using skin heat exchangers in the submerged hull.
Regular fossil-fuel powered ships use similar heat exchangers to provide a cooling solution for their engines as do nuclear-powered subs and ships -- the Ford-class carriers have two 150MW electrical reactors on board which again are about 30% efficient so at full power they'll produce about a gigawatt of heat requiring 700MW of heat dump although some might be used for heating on board. The Russian "Fifty Years of Victory" nuclear icebreaker that carries out tourist jaunts to the North Pole has two nuclear-heated saunas on-board.
Russian nuclear icebreakers such as "Fifty Years of Victory" have been taking tourists to the North Pole during the Northern summer for over a decade now. They're only really needed for serious icebreaking during the winter around the northern coasts. They use the same KLT-35 reactors as the floating power barge mentioned in the article.
A major reason for this project is to supply electricity and heat to communities on the northern coasts supporting oil and gas exploration efforts in the Arctic. The Chinese are looking at similar floating nuclear power plants to provide electricity for the artificial islands they're constructing in the South China Sea as well as developing their own nuclear naval capabilities. They're not actually building anything yet though.
Same with nuclear waste. In the future, all those isotopes are going to be very valuable. We just haven't figured out how or why yet.
They're easy to make more of and there isn't a lot of isotopic waste around at the moment anyway, a few thousand tonnes total around the world. Most spent fuel is U-238, unburnt U-235 and bred Pu-239 and Pu-240 which is already recycled into new fuel in a few places such as Russia.
The interesting fission products from reactor waste tend to be short-lived and go away quite quickly, the longer-lived stuff is much like the regular elemental isotopes in chemical terms and the fission products non-radioactive brethren are a lot more abundant and easier to handle for nearly all common uses.
A while back I passed an American couple staring at their phone, a few metres from where I live. I asked what they were looking for. They mentioned the name of a pub/restaurant which was on their Google Maps display.
"Oh, that pub. They demolished it a couple of years ago to put in a tram line." I pointed at the ongoing construction works they were standing next to.
Julian Assange is still in the UK. The Equadorian embassy and its grounds are still British territory but the British government has limited powers under assorted diplomatic agreements codified in law to enter and otherwise interfere with what went on there.
It's a subtle distinction but important. When the US missiled the Chinese embassy in Belgrade its wasn't treated as the starting of a war between the US and China like the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, it was an attack on Belgrade territory.
I drove past the demolition site today. The car park was located behind the EICC, a conference centre which is how I expect it was supposed to get much of its business but most conference attendees would arrive by train (one station about 500 metres from the convention centre, the other station a bit over a kilometre away) or by bus or taxi from the airport rather than driving into the city centre. It wasn't ideally situated for shopping or business commuting either.
I didn't even know it was there to be truthful even when it was open for business back in 2002.
India is planning an unmanned lunar orbiter, lander and rover mission in 2018. The budget is about $90 million including launch vehicle.
Manoeuvering fuel is essential for spy satellites for them to change their orbits. Once the fuel is exhausted or close to it the satellite's orbit is predictable and can't be altered to deal with new observing tasks so NROL spy birds, radio and radar monitoring satellites and such fly with as much fuel on board as the launcher can safely handle and get the payload into its desired primary orbit.
The Hubble is just going around in circles so it didn't need ten tonnes of fuel and oxidiser on board to change its orbit during its lifespan. Not so for a spy bird.
The "recoverable features" are optional and therefore don't "cripple" F9's expendable payload capability in any way. Just don't install them and you're fine. And by this reasoning, the Delta IV Heavy also hasn't gotten anywhere near the advertised 28 tonne payload either.
Several of the NROL payloads for the D4 Heavy have been in the 23-24 tonne range (mostly in-orbit manoeuvering fuel at a guess). I don't know the what heaviest SpaceX payload into LEO has been. The Full Thrust launches, the most powerful version of the F9 flying today have been much smaller than 20 tonnes into orbit in part because there are few 20-tonne launches required these days (we've got very good at putting smaller bits together in orbit) and in part because of the landing legs, guidance fins and required fuel and oxidiser reserve for recovery that have always been flown on F9 FT launches up till now.
Thanks for the info about the Protons, I don't track them much and there's no convenient info a.k.a. specific Wiki articles about Proton launches, or at least I couldn't find any.
the Falcon 9, the Ariane 5, and the Proton M+ are racing in a pack when it comes to maximum LEO payload
Ariane V ES can, and has put about 20 tonnes into LEO orbit to supply the ISS with ESA's ATV missions. Falcon 9 missions to the ISS run to about 10-12 tonnes docked at the ISS, the Full-Thrust launches have been crippled by the recoverable features added as deadweight to the booster and thus have not yet reached the 20-tonne-to-LEO target expected. I've got no numbers on Proton M series launcher performance with actual LEO payloads. The Wikipedia article on the Proton claims 23 tonnes to LEO maxed out but nothing delivered to the ISS orbit to give a fair comparison, and no details of any actual heavy-lift missions to LEO at all.
Hydrogen as a storeable fuel on Earth is pretty pointless, its use as a fuel in launchers is well-proven but usually with caveats and workarounds but there are reasons it was used in the past and will continue to be used in the future. Several space engineering operations are developing new H2/O2 motors such as ESA's Vinci, a restartable replacement for the existing H2/O2 upper-stage HM7B motor used on Ariane V.
The heaviest lifter in the US inventory (and the world too) at the moment is a pure H2/O2 cryogenic booster, the Delta 4 Heavy (28 tonnes to LEO). It doesn't get used a lot for various reasons, typically one flight a year for NROL missions.
H2/O2 has the best out-of-the-box Isp figure of all regular fuel combos but it suffers from low mass exhaust and at high atmospheric pressures close to the ground this results in reduced thrust due to back pressure. That's the reason the Shuttle, Ariane V, H-2 and other lifters have used it as a core stage fuel/oxidiser combo with strap-on solids to get it into a near-vacuum regime where its excellent Isp can earn its living. Even the venerable Saturn V's second and subsequent stages were H2/O2 for that reason. A number of other modern launchers use H2/O2 second and final stages, such as the GSLV MkIII.
Actually that's two nukes -- the Hinkley Point C station will have two EPRs, not just one. They're also larger than regular GenIIa PWRs being built today in China, Russia and a few other places so they put out as much power as three 1GW reactors or thirty typical wind-farms.
There's something gone wrong with the construction of EPRs but no-one who really knows is talking about it much. All four EPR builds in progress at the moment are very late to finish and none are yet operating. I can only hope lessons have been learned.
The Chinese are bringing 1GW GenIIa reactors on-grid in about six years from first concrete at about $6 billion each but they've got a production line and guaranteed orders for parts etc. reaching into the future for a decade or more. The Koreans are doing the same with their KPR1400 reactors but there are quality assurance concerns due to faked certification for wiring and general institutional corruption in that country.
The UK's re-entry into nuclear power construction is a dog's breakfast with many different reactor designs being chosen by private-public partnerships. This means no pipelines of parts, no interchangeability of operations staff, no standardised fuel supplies etc. I'd have preferred one or maybe two designs turned out like jelly babies but I'm not in charge.
Desalination has been done using reactors -- the Soviet BN-350 fast reactor (now shit down) used its high temperature loop to directly process seawater for desalination at about 700 deg C. Desalination is problematic though, the "exhaust" enriched brine stream pumped back into the sea from desalination plants smashes the local marine environment into an underwater desert, killing everything living nearby.
Global warming will result in more sea surface evaporation and more rainfall inland generally so desalination in the future isn't that useful a process anyway, sad to say.
There's a number of things "surplus" energy can be used for -- the Norwegians have a surplus of hydro power given their geography and small population and they use a lot of it to refine aluminium. Turning it into liquid fuels for aircraft and marine use is another possibility but at the moment fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful and no-one cares enough about CO2 levels in the atmosphere to really consider stopping extracting and burning them.