Rolls-Royce’s revised reactor building design.

If anyone mentions nuclear waste, let’s remember the toxic waste from rare earth mining and from used batteries, wind turbines and solar panels.
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A Rolls-Royce design for a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) will likely receive UK regulatory approval by mid-2024 and be able to produce grid power by 2029, Paul Stein, chairman of Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactors, told Reuters (via Euractiv).

The British government asked its nuclear regulator to start the approval process in March, having backed Rolls-Royce’s $546 million funding round in November to develop the country’s first SMR reactor.

Policymakers hope SMRs will help cut dependence on fossil fuels and lower carbon emissions.

Speaking to Reuters in an interview conducted virtually, Stein said the regulatory “process has been kicked off, and will likely be complete in the middle of 2024.

“We are trying to work with the UK Government, and others to get going now placing orders, so we can get power on grid by 2029.”

In the meantime, Rolls-Royce will start manufacturing parts of the design that are most unlikely to change, Stein added.

Each 470 megawatt (MW) SMR unit costs 1.8 billion pounds ($2.34 billion) and would be built on a 10-acre site, the size of around 10 football fields.

Unlike traditional reactors, SMRs are cheaper and quicker to build and can also be deployed on ships and aircraft. Their “modular” format means they can be shipped by container from the factory and installed relatively quickly on any proposed site.

Full article here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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April 19, 2022 at 12:48PM

A 2021 study appearing in Nature Communications by Buentgen et al reports on the results of a double-blind experiment of 15 different groups that yielded 15 different Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions. Each group used the same network of regional tree-ring width datasets.

Hat-tip: Klimaschau 108

What’s fascinating is that ll groups, though using the same data network, came up with a different result. When it comes to deriving temperatures from tree-rings, it has much to do with individual approach and interpretation. Sure we can follow the science, but whose results?

The 15 groups (referred to as R1–R15) were challenged with the same task of developing the most reliable NH summer temperature reconstruction for the Common Era from nine high-elevation/high-latitude TRW datasets (Fig. 1):

Cropped from Figure 1, Buentgen et al 

The 15 groups who contributed independently to this experiment all had experience in developing tree ring-based climate reconstructions. But as the study describes, each group employed a distinct reconstruction approach. In summary, the results ranged by as much as 1°C.

How could the groups come up with different results?

The paper’s abstract summarizes: “Differing in their mean, variance, amplitude, sensitivity, and persistence, the ensemble members demonstrate the influence of subjectivity in the reconstruction process. We therefore recommend the routine use of ensemble reconstruction approaches to provide a more consensual picture of past climate variability.”

via NoTricksZone

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April 19, 2022 at 12:33PM

 Here is the link:

Climate Strike: The Big Quiz (netzerowatch.com)

Good luck! I managed to get one wrong, so think carefully. 

via climate science

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April 19, 2022 at 12:04PM

via JoNova

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April 19, 2022 at 11:41AM