We the government fast track Nuclear power station thingy being approved, it looks like we could be recieving a number of new nuclear power stations over the next decade or so.

Friends of the Earth have naturally come out and said that this is bad for the planet, but is this method of power generation the most viable option available to the UK, assuming we never get the offshore wind farms really going.

The argument against nuclear power is obvious - it's dangerous (see: Chernobyl) and leaves behind vast amounts of nasty waste product.

But.......is it? Chernobyl was nasty, but it's been the only recorded case of a plant melting down in this manner - 3 Mile Island and the Windscale Fire are 'minor' in comparison.

And if there is lots of nuclear waste product being generated from existing power stations, wouldn't that mean a lot more fuss being made about it by FOTE?

bastards make a right mess of the tuna nets.

When I was at school I invented a perpetual motion machine... you take small electric generator, use that to rotate the electromagnets of 3 other generators, which in provide power for 3 more generators each... and so on. You could could power the UK theoretically from the initial power source of a AAA battery, or even one of those square batteries.

I know a fella in my local village that has one and he reckons that during summer, when he uses less energy, the excess generated by the windmill gets fed into the grid and he gets paid by the electrics company for it! He says it pretty much offsets his energy bill for the entire year. Which is nice :)

Funny you should say that. Check out Dounreay up in my neck of the woods.

There have been so many issues with leaks over the years that it's beyond a joke.

theres a windmill on the m4 @ reading that never stops turning, i heard it has ball berrings in the blade that move a tiny amount to keep it turning, also heard it saves the buwery(owner) 750000 a yeah, put them all along that motor way job done!!

But the windmill needs to be at least 11m higher than the surrounding buildings to avoid wind transients due to buildings, traffic and trees, to give an idea of scale, most houses are about 5m high to the eaves, so to get another 10m means you need to nearly triple the height of your house.

Also, last month there was a period of 3 weeks where an area of low pressure sat over most of western Europe, from Portugal through to the Ukrainian border. Denmark and Germany (often held up as good examples of wind using countries) had to buy electricity from their neighbours that still use fossil and nuclear plants. The problem is the difference between energy and power. In a year there is easily enough energy from the wind to meet our requirements, the problem is that the power doesn't come when we most need it!

There are way around this, by using storage stations and the like, but trying to create storage on a national scale that allows for a month or more (just in case) of no wind is no mean feat.

The long and short of it is that if you want a culture which can pick and choose when to put the telly or immersion heater on then you simply cannot live with renewable energy. It just doesn't work.

Nuclear is a belting alternative, France has managed it with little in the way of disasters - so much so that they own half of our energy now in the form of EDF.

Providing we can blast the glowing residue into space there's not really much in the way of a downside.

Now if someone could come up with an energy efficient way in which to extract the two hydrogen molecules from water and burn them - producing water, etc etc, then we'd be in free energy territory. Unfortunately at the moment water doesn't burn. Else that's the answer. Unless the big oil giants already own that technology and just won't realease it until all the oil is burned up. But that's X-files territory.

bollocks


energysavingtrust.org.uk

energyenv.co.uk


im talking about using solar energy and wind power to REDUCE your carbon footprint/ consumption of electricity - not totally replace it with a wind turbine - in which case, yes you would need something much bigger.

as a money saving exercise and to potentially increase the value of the property (as it costs less to run per year) then things like this are good and the also help the environment.

All this energy saving technology has been around for years.. so why is it now that we have such focus on it?

Some could say that it's because we're running out of fossils fuels faster than we had originally intended.

However I have a theory.... as we all know greenhouse gases, long with our disgustingly wastefull habits are fucking over our planet and we know if we don't do something fast, that'll be it. We'll be done for.

Well who's to say it hasn't already gone that far and the recent foucs on energy saving is not to preserve fuels, but to buy us more time e.g slow down the global upheaval that will happen once pollutant levels get too high.


Anyway this is just a theory, but it makes you wonder... how many years do we really have left on this planet? 1000? 10,000?... 100? (btw if you believe the world is going to end in 2012, then.. wtf are you doing reading this?!?! you've got 2 yrs left mofo!! go do shit on your bucket list!)

No one has mentioned yet that making lots of massive nuclear stations, is a great gold mine for the terrorists, stick a load of explosives around them and we got a catastrophe.

fuck all that shit anyway. Check this out!

Making fuels from sunlight, CO2 and water by way of engineered little beasties cannot be bad!

algae fuel FTW

"unlike algae and other current biomass-derived fuels, the Helioculture process does not produce biomass, requires no agricultural feedstock and minimizes land and water use. It is also direct-to-product, so there is no lengthy extraction and/or refinement process."

:D

Cooling towers are avoidable if the plant is built beside the sea as then the coolant systems are fed with seawater. See Dungeness, Hunterston, Torness etc.

If cost was no object then you could also bury the whole station.

No, to avoid wind transients the lowest sweep of the blades needs to be 11m higher than anything else nearby. Scientific fact:

"only 10% of households can realistically install small-scale wind turbines. If this happened, up to 1.5 TWh of electricity could be generated, and 600,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided.

This amount of electricity is a mere 0.4% of total UK electricity consumption."

carbontrust.co.uk


That will be ineffective in the global scheme of things and analogous to trying to bail out the titanic with a teaspoon: inference.phy.cam.ac.uk

Just to clarify this point, since I'm sure you'll ask - electricity generation is responsible for 4% of the UK's total carbon dioxide emissions. This means that even if everyone that could viably switch to wind did then it would only offset 0.016% of the UK's CO2 emissions.

to save the planet, kill all the cows and sheep that are farmed, everyone become veggie and i think that will reduce (if i have remembered the right figure) co2 emmisions by almost 60%.

however, im not talking about it being global, just on a personal level, to reduce your own personal bills, and increase the market value of your house, yuppies love all that shit, not save the planet.

ah but if everyone was helping with their teaspoon ;-)

their :)

corrected :)