Hinkley Point nuclear reactor approved, with a legal framework for other new plants which I don’t quite understand.
I just want to poke fun at this graphic.
I’ll give BBC a pass since they’re at least 50x better than our media, but would think they could come up with better metrics to show it generates a lot of power.
Plus they never say if it will generate that much power each hour, or each month, or each year, or over its projected lifespan. If it’s the latter, then that’s not very much power. 58 million people watching TV for an hour seems really low, so it’s probably not over its lifespan. Perhaps they meant every day? Even then, if it generates enough power in a day to power 58 million people watching a one our show, that’s not much either. So by process of elimination, maybe it will generate that much power every hour?
That’s how much power it can generate continuously (at peak); those are references to power (total wattage), not energy (watt-hours). In other words, a lot.
Ah okay. That makes more sense. They just used weird metrics and confused me. I thought they were using Bake Off as an example since it was a one hour show.
God save you if you’re the 85,333,334th guy to start boiling water for your tea. You just caused a nuclear explosion, bud. How do you feel about yourself, now?
/s (because this is the god damn internet)
Yeah, power is by definition a rate over time. But it’s still a stupid, insulting graphic.
I guess they assume that no one is watching bake-off alone? Because 56W seems like a small amount for a “big TV”. It’s also a little arbitrary on the light bulbs - they have wildly varying power consumption (though I guess 11-ish watts is reasonable for modern ones). Anyway, a silly way to break down power consumption but perhaps a decent way to bring home to people how much power it is relative to their daily lives. I mean there’s only like 65m people in the UK, so they are saying it’s enough to let almost every man, woman, and child boil their own cup of tea at once.
Three point twenty oh jigawatts! Great scott!
One each eh? ;-)
I don’t think it was a terrible graphic, though I think it trivializes the importance of power in our society. I would have preferred it to show how many homes it would heat in the depths of winter or (personally) how many fewer tons of carbon per week it will pump into the atmosphere compared to a coal or gas power plant.
This is the UK. We don’t have depths of winter. Obviously, London /= all of the UK, but I literally never turned on my heating last winter.
This doesn’t belong in the climate change thread, but it’s the closest we have for environmental issues, but in a rare bit of good news a bipartisan bill passes Senate to combat wildlife trafficking (which is at epidemic levels for many species):
In truth boiling water is a major energy user and maybe I can offer a tip.
Kettles on their own are possibly our most efficient appliance on earth, in that likely 99.999% of the energy input is used to generate heat (some is lost to the air and kettle itself of course). But if we boil too much water, then the efficiency is thrown away.
My wife and I have gotten into the simple habit of using our cup to fill the kettle, that way getting the exact amount of water wanted. That’s my tip :).
I think it also matters how big the kettle is - especially with electric kettles, it’s not great to boil a tiny amount of water. Someone should figure out how to recapture the heat as the kettle cools down ;)
My thermodynamics prof never tired of reminding us that if you needed to heat something, heat pumps could exceed 100% “efficiency” in this sense by transferring some of the additional heat from a different location, rather than creating all of it purely from work. Though pushing against a temperature gradient high enough to boil water would not be one of those high performance cases.
Yeah I do that when I’m using a kettle that I’m unfamiliar with (!) but at home my girlfriend and I know almost exactly how much to fill it up to for two. I’ve had people grumble at me for bemoaning how much energy/money is wasted boiling too much water but I don’t think they realise just how much kettles use. Even if we’re doing pasta or rice or some stock or whatever, we use the kettle before pouring it into a pan because gas is more expensive and it’s not that efficient on a hob.
I remember some years ago there was this really big push to get people to have subsidised solar panels fitted to their rooftops and I recall one agent asking how much electricity we use per week. We did the maths after consulting our bills for the last couple of years and it worked out at £5-6 a week. The agent was gobsmacked, which we were surprised by because we don’t exactly live in the dark or not use our TVs and stuff, we just, y’know, keep an eye on our usage. Switch to energy saving bulbs, don’t tumbledry, use our toaster instead of the grill, boil the right amount of water etc. Just dead simple things.
Ultimately, even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment, there’s a money saving here too so it’s win-win.
Yeah, that is why geothermal heating should be looked at a lot more than it is, though it is expensive because sending a waterline 30 feet into the ground is expensive. Say here in Toronto, go deep enough and the ground is around 6 degrees C. This is a good ‘free’ headstart for cooling in the summer, and for heating in the winter. Plus in more complex systems the waste heat can actually be used again for hot water.