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Reading a few things on the green thread, I was surprised by how many people were against it.
I was just interested in knowing what the alternative was? To me its probably the only realistic way forward that we have available to us now.
energy efficiency and renewables - which included wood fired - if you plant the trees its carbon neutral.
What are you going to do with the waste?
Store it.
How do you plan on growing trees quick enough to cut them down to burn them to provide enough energy to make it worth while? And you would need thousands of power stations, wood is pretty poor for energy.
Wood is rubbish as a fuel
Nuclear all the way. Efficiency of the latest reactor designs are way beter than magnox et al. The waste is a problem - though let's face it, if I managed to safely dispose of my back copies of Razzle and Escort using my own intuition, surely a hive mind of experts will come up with a way of dealing with the nookular waste.
Nuclear is the biggest white elephant going, mostly due to the waste management costs, but collectively this country has left itself in a state where we have no real alternative to make up the shortfall.
Energy efficiency should be legislated into product manufacture. That would cut our national energy demand by about 25%.
Renewables should be developed more comprehensively across the board - That includes gasification of municipal waste, CHP, and micro-generation, as well as just PV and solar thermal.
Even then we'll have a shortfall.
Exactly, cut our energy use by 25%, and you are still never going to make up what we need with renewable energy sources.
Nuclear is the only option, and hesitating to put it into effect is just going to hinder us further down the line.
I'm very strongly pro nuclear.
It is about time society actually listened to scientific consensus.
Mind you the flip side of me likes the idea of depopulation.
The french must be laughing like hell right now - 'hey!, Roast beef! Ha ha!'
scientific consensus
On the matter of waste there is no scientific consensus. Its a nasty legacy for future generations to have to manage.
Realman - store it is not an answer.
Derek - no one has come up with one yet
Wood - coppiced woodland - 5 yrs to get some timber, ten years for full production. There was a scheme that almost got off the ground then cancelled after the coppices were planted
With real energy efficiency massive savings could be made.
Make energy much more expensive - certainly in extravagant use will give incentive. Make energy per unit 3 times what it costs now and give every person £300 pa free energy credit
Factor in the cost of storage and waste disposal and let the market decide.
So you want to take the world backwards, when everyone wants to go forwards.
The world needs a realistic decision. They don't want to be told they can't charge their iphone because a tree hasn't grown high enough yet.
Storing it is an answer, because it works. How is it different from landfills? Out of sight, out of harms way, out of mind.
That, or ejecting it into space.
Realman - live up to your name - be real. You need an answer to what you are going to do with the waste before new nukes are feasable.
Coppiced woodland is just one part of the answer - it wouldn't work for London but it would for Inverness. Energy efficiency will go a long way.
As Druidh says - cost nukes realistically and they are soooooooooooo much more expense than anything else
So are you prepared to reveal to the rest of the class the other part of the answer? Or is that just for you to know?
😀
cost nukes realistically and they are soooooooooooo much more expense than anything else
I'm assuming this is just a hopeful statement, as its completely untrue. Almost all the results I've seen put nuclear power somewhere in the middle of the sources we have available to us now, sometimes towards the cheaper end, sometimes towards the higher end.
The thing with landfills is that under EU rules, they've effectively been dry tombs for the last 10 years - they will need management and care in perpetuity to prevent moisture ingress and control gas an toxin leakage.
The same is true of nuclear waste.
Infact, the lions share of nuclear waste is actually landfilled. Its only the highly active stuff that get stuck in swimming pools and juggled about to keep it cool.
Bury/store it - the waste has to be sealed and monitored - and that's pre-supposing you can find a suitable site. Of course, it also has to be guarded for the next few thousand years to prevent some terrorist or rogue state from getting a hold of it. How about we store it next to those who are consuming the energy. Is Battersea Power Station being used for anything useful? I'm sure we could line up a few decent sized barges on the Thames.
Eject it into space - at what cost? And when one of the waste rockets fails to reach escape velocity, what then?
nuke fusion, i think there are around a dozen different types of reactors in the world at the min,
much cleaner and uses less fuel, the way forward i think
yes we have to pay a nuclear fuel levvy as is for electricity as it is not actually economically viable without this. The storage legacy is costly and as yet has no solution that will last the required thousands of years nor site/country identified. The carbon costs are debatable once extraction, storage and the amount of concrete incvolved in construction are also factored in. To claim it is carbon neutral is BS
scientific consensus
they view it as safe because they think they can control all the variables and render it safe. Experience shows that there are disasters from time to time so the safety - given the consequences- cannot be ignored no matter how small the number or how infrequent they occur. Anyone care to name a man made ssafety ststem that is fool proof?
It is dangerous, expensive and as yet we have no solution for the long term storage of the waste product basically.
So you want to take the world backwards, when everyone wants to go forwards.The world needs a realistic decision. They don't want to be told they can't charge their iphone because a tree hasn't grown high enough yet
This will probably happen whatever we do the resources are finite we cannot consume our way out of this issue imagine India and china at US or westenr levels of comsumption ...there is not enough resources to go round so we need to use less however we generate power
Realman - that is because the figures you see don't include the cost of decommissioning the stations or storing the waste and use over optimistic estimates for how much leccy they will produce
TandemJeremy - Member
Realman - that is because the figures you see don't include the cost of decommissioning the stations or storing the waste and use over optimistic estimates for how much leccy they will produce
Wot he said
Thirded and sadly true.
TJ, have you actually got any knowledge or experience of what you're talking about or are you just recycling stuff you've read?
Wood burnnig is not an option at the moment, the specific heat capacity of wood is not as great as that of coal. Therefore far more acrage is required than you'd think. Also, having operational and design experience of biomass boilers I know what the inherent problems are. Massively unreliable, very difficult to obtain fuel for. Most have installed them for BREEAM points and then install gas as soon as they find out what a nightmare they are.
Trying to use wind power for the shortfall is like applying savlon to a sucking chest wound, a 15m mast will not supply the electrical energy for 1 house! Also we don't have the tech to store the energy, which considering the turbines have the largest output when we need it least (at night) is pointless.
Hydro is our best option due to the fact that we are an island but even then, we'd need to spend £££££s as we'd need lots and lots.
So, we;re left with big bad nuclear which seems to be the only short term answer. Renewables will get there (I hope) but we cannot hang our hat on them yet.
I'd like to suggest that we downsize the electrical supplies to all houses. Do we need 100A? Give people less and make them choose whether they want 4 TVs and all their lights on or the washing machine. Gotta go! bonfire night! Yay more carbons!
TJ, have you actually got any knowledge or experience of what you're talking about or are you just recycling stuff you've read?
😆 😆 😆
Rumbled again TJ 😉
Backhander - its secondhand knowledge - biomass / coppiced woodland has a place but its not the sole answer for the reasons you describe
Renewables have the potential to fill the gap in teh timescale for nukes.
Energy storage is an issue but there are answers out there - have you read up on the local thermal store stuff - thats interesting. Hydrogen generation at the point of generation - I know its multiplying loses but has potential - there is a small scale plant on one of the scottish island - wind generator, hydrogen storage for excess, burn the hydrogen on windless days.
Pelarmis wave generator
There is no one answer. It needs a rabnge of options including a massive efficiency drive and the right mix will vary with area. London could not be powered by coppiced wood but Fort William could - CHP improves efficiency
150A supplies are available now and becoming more common
TJ you really should stop making up facts lol, cause they are usually wrong.
Capital costs (including waste disposal and decommissioning costs for nuclear energy)
Part of the costs factored into the final results I was talking of.
druidh, its very hard to make a decent weapon from nuclear waste. You'd get a higher death count from hijacking a plane and flying into a building, and that seems to me the easier option to breaking into a nuclear waste storage facility, locating the stuff you need, finding a way to transport it out of the building, and getting away. And then making it into a bomb, all without getting yourself killed/caught. And then of course you have to transport the bomb, and make sure it goes off.
Nuclear energy isn't perfect, but it is the only realistic option. We will switch to it eventually, that is almost guaranteed. I just believe that sooner is better then later.
Right now we have no alternative. Microgen, efficiency and renewables would have been best had we started 25 years ago.
A few thousand barrels of problem is better than a whole planet of problem.
They're trialling some fast growing coppicable biomass for biopower across the way from me. I think it is a variant of willow.
The future has to be a smorgesboard of solutions, not just for energy generation but everything that feeds into - food production, permaculture, water, waste management. Rather than trying to roll out a single national 'solution' then binning the waste in as cheap a way as possible.
Consuming less has to be a part of that.
Maybe the government should look into making renewables compulsary for new build. Eg solar thermal and solar voltaic on the roof.
RealMan - who said anything about a bomb? Just dump some intermediate level waste into a public water supply.....
You can make a dirty bomb very very easily with radioactive waste
TheFunkyMonkey - Member
You can make a dirty bomb [s]very very easily[/s] with radioactive waste
T.FIFY
Nukes are the only realistic answer for the next few decades
The population as a whole won't voluntarily reduce their use by the massive amounts needed & no government that wants re-electing will force such measures through
Face facts, more nukes are coming & the green lobby can't stop it
Just dump some intermediate level waste into a public water supply.....
I wouldn't want to be quoted on this, but I don't think that would be very effective at all.
You can make a dirty bomb very very easily with radioactive waste
You've done it have you? Although to be honest, if you've got the explosives and the know how to make a bomb, and a protective suit, or you don't care if you yourself gets radioactive poisoning, I don't think it would be that hard. But you've still got to do everything else, and that's where it gets hard. And its a lot of effort, you can be a much more effective terrorist using other methods.
uplink - MemberThe population as a whole won't voluntarily reduce their use by the massive amounts needed
Which is why the cost per unit has to be increased to cover the cradle-to-grave cost of generation.
Which is why the cost per unit has to be increased to cover the cradle-to-grave cost of generation.
& the rest of my sentence was ............. [i]& no government that wants re-electing will force such measures through[/i]
That includes pricing
Bring on the nukes, I say
I remeber reading that fusion reactors will be available by 2025, so surely all we need is some stop gap answers, rather than long term solutions.
That, or ejecting it into space.
Will never happen. Care to think of the consequences if there was another Challenger with some high level nuclear waste on board? That & the weight of the vessels containing the waste would make it pretty prohibitive.
1kg of enriched uranium contains the same energy as 2.5 MILLION kg of coal. Thats alot of C02.
Nuclear fusion is available to us, but not in any useful way. We would need much larger reactors to get more energy out then we put in, and governments aren't prepared to invest, as it would be very expensive.
Although unless there's something science hasn't discovered yet out there, fusion is probably where this planet will get its power from after a few centuries.
Will never happen.
Two words.
Space. Elevator.
😀
Fusion is all well and good, however it's still firmly in the realm of science fiction. We know how fusion works, but currently do not have the technology make reactors on a useful scale. Nevermind the fact we have no way to utilise the energy created.
So you want to take the world backwards, when everyone wants to go forwards.
I don't want to get into an angry argument (maybe this is the wrong thread to post on :wink:) but...
It strikes me that this statement RealMan made is perhaps the fundamental problem we as a species are facing. The metaphor of us moving forward, further along a line of 'development' towards some vague and perpetually distant future, things constantly improving, is, I suggest, deeply flawed.
The notions of growth, progress and development will never allow us to stop destroying the planet, never allow us to maintain a population we can feed and house. I wonder if we have to take a step back and reconsider our society.
Just to balance how power generation can release radioactive elements in to the enviroment, it should be known that coal fired power stations pump out radiation into the atmosphere in the form of Uranium (incl U-235) and Thorium.
If we're not progressing, what is the point? Progression is what makes us human.
Maybe this planet is only temporary. Its going to die eventually no matter what we do. If we could move to another planet and have a better way of life, would we?
Define "progression".
Raping the planet, living way beyond the means that the planet has to support us in some forlorn pursuit of utopia?
The problem here is that there is no one solution to the impending energy crisis. Politicians in particular are far too short sighted, only interested in the next election, people in general are too selfish, only interested in being able to power their 60" plasma and the power shower, stuff the rest of the world.
Huge costly power stations generating toxic waste which will remain toxic for the next 10000 years, the energy generated then transported via a wasteful grid system is not the sole answer - it may well be PART of the answer but personally I think far more needs to be done to generate electricity locally be it solar panels, wind, hydro or whatever, get to a time when the grid tops up your own energy, not covers the whole lot. It'd certainly make people think a bit more about their waste and that will cut emissions/pollution straight away.
This was a massive bugbear for me during my time in the chemical industry when waste was rife - tens of thousands of litres of perfectly good drinking water down the drain every single day, massive power usage and not a self-generated watt in sight even though the area was perfect for at least SOME harnessing of wind/solar.
Huge costly power stations generating toxic waste which will remain toxic for the next 10000 years
does it matter that nuke waste stays toxic for that long?
I have a shotgun in the gun safe behind me, that will stay deadly for many years too, as long as no one does anything silly with it - it'll only kill what I want it to kill [clays]