"SNAIL' Tidal Energy innovation na Alba

[DevineHerring]

Does anyone here have more detailed information on this or know any of the researchers/developers ?

http://www.rgu.ac.uk/news/disp_NewsP...=11178&vmenu=2

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/04/09.html#a802

I have always been interested in methods for producing reliable energy from tidal currents, and deep sea currents as well. From what I can gather this looks to be a very inovative approach but I would like more technical details on it's operation...

[kathyv]

Fascinating! Thanks for posting the links! I can't help you with more info, good luck finding it. When you do, post it! This SNAIL sounds like a good idea.

Maybe you can contact Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen for more info?

[Artoo]

I don't know Bryden but I'm sure he'll tell you more if you email him.

I'm not convinced we'll meet the target for renewable energy - except by throwing money at it - and even then it will never supply the base load. Previous tidal energy devices have simply been broken up by the sea while wind farms are expensive and unreliable. Of course, there's always a place for top-up generators, especially for local use in remote areas, but many countries are finally facing up to the inevitability of nuclear power. Fusion would be nice, but that seems to be a long way off.

[DevineHerring]

Agreed on all count, but I think it is well worth the effort to seek clean renewable energy sources and I like to promote them in a any small way that I can however daunting the technological problems. I firmly believe if as many resources and as much funding were dedicated to these ends as to the development of fossil fuels that there would be a great deal of progress made that would do a great deal to reduce our needs oil/Natural Gas/ coal.
There is just very little immediate financial incentive to do so, whereas the current structures for the production marketing and consumption of fossil fuels along with resurgence in the nuclear fission reaction industry (especially in the USA) are quite well established and profitable. We can get into the current geopolitical reasons for this some other time…
As for fusion and fission well I follow these pretty closely too.
Fusion is a long way off indeed. Containing and sustaining a fusion reaction is grossly problematic to the point where having a useful reactor in our children’s lifetime is in all probability unattainable except to the most optimistic. And then you better hope it is bloody well contained because even though, in theory the reaction shuts down when the containment field is compromised, and accident could have some pretty impressive results.
Nuclear fission reactors may be inevitable, but I can't say I like the prospect. The problems with waste disposal are a huge messy problem already. The bigger problem is the potential for abuse, both intentional and by neglect. Intentional abuse, sabotage by adversarial parties, using fissionable material for weapons can be handled by regulation and treaty as long as the social structure encompassing these is stable, I have my doubts in the current state of affairs though. Neglect is probably the worst problem and we've seen the results at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and a few smaller accidents and near catastrophies.
Understanding that the reactors in both cases were by contemporary standards poorly designed, and in the Chernobyl case even primitive, I believe it naïve to think that any technological improvements can do more than marginally ameliorate the human factors that increase the entropy of systems and the tendency toward chaos.
So when a private concerns bottom line is marginalized, an entrenched bureaucracy is threatened or complacency in the workforce acts to the detriment of proper operation and maintenance, or any of the myriad unplanned disruptions of social order results in an unscheduled event we will end up with a whole lot of places that look like Chernobyl http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/
in spite of the sophistication of out technologies. Which truth be known become more and more fragile as they become more and more complex.

[Artoo]

Powerful images, brave woman! It's staggering to think how geopolitics has changed since then - for better or worse.

I was trying to find something about modern reactor design - specifically whether the claims about safety, etc are overstated. Have you any good references - either on-line or in more traditional format? I read a decent piece in either New Scientist or Scientific American some time ago but haven't been able to track it down.

[DevineHerring]

Well, most of the really useful and interesting details are, classified/proprietary/ protected intellectual property so… no I don’t have anything you couldn’t find on your own except for anecdotal information acquired from a few people in the industry in my corner of the world http://www.tdh.state.tx.us/radiation/southtx.htm .

My field is systems design and software development so what I find most interesting, least available and most problematic, are the details of the control and event containment systems and the software embedded and otherwise that are used to control the systems. The number of critical fault points in the development and implementation of the operational systems is very large, (we would need the details of the number of individual components, physical redundancies, number of operations and et al to come up with a number but just taking a shot in the dark we can easily exceed 3500 critical lines of code per 10^6 lines), and the consequences of complementary errors are staggering. I used to not worry about someone hacking these systems because I took it for granted that no sane organization would have their operational systems physically connected to a server attached to the outside or even using non proprietary protocols… I was wrong…

I do remember a good Scientific American article from a short time ago but cannot find it on-line. You can Google up any number of articles about the major events and general reactor information and there used to be a lot of information available through the US NRC but most of the links on reactor construction details have been taken off line. There is also some good information here http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html but like most Industry / government related sources it’s a marketing site with all that that implies and the assumption is made that the industry and regulatory bureaucracy will remain intact and functional through the life of the facilities like this ANS safety statement http://www.ans.org/pi/ps/docs/ps51.pdf . But there are also items such as this http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/n...cfm?pageID=190 which is admittedly a bit alarmist but generally closer to reality (IMHO).
If you dig around here http://www.irsn.fr/index.htm there is a lot of good information but it takes some time and effort especially if your French is a rudimentary as mine (Hey Deirdre, would you translate this for me ?). Not all of it is in French though. http://www.irsn.fr/va/04_act/04_act_...ct_031030.shtm

[Artoo]

Thanks for that DH. There's been some debate in the UK IMechE journal about the merits of different renewable energy strategies. About the only concensus is that tidal power (as opposed to wave power) looks viable. So perhaps SNAIL is a go-er.

BTW, I looked up Ian Bryden's homepage:

http://www.rgu.ac.uk/cree/general/page.cfm?pge=10741

I know distance is no object with email but I'd be happy to make contact via the ac.uk net - after all he's only 150 miles away.