George Monbiot on nuclear

TJ, do you really not have anything better to do today?

(Semi-serious post. I do think you’d do well to stop arguing so much. Would make you a happier smilier person! 🙂 )

Zokes

I have but you don’t want to hear,

this

Especially given the logical supposition that transport and heating will increasingly rely on electricity for their energy demands.

is pure supposition. Teh tech is simply not available

Dr Lovelock has a very simple solution. Build nuclear. That’ll give us the 50 years we need to develop renewable to be a viable replacement. Then turn off the nukes.

CFH – well its certainly pointless isn’t it – no one wants to listen for sure so its al rather pointless.

Zokes – do you actually want to try to understand or is all you are interested in is trying to argue me down.

if you are genuinely interested then I will take the time to explain

is pure supposition. Teh tech is simply not available

I have a fan heater and an electrical immersion heater. I believe these have been around for some time.

Several cities have fleets of hydrogen-powered buses, and the city council here use electrically-powered cars.

I have but you don’t want to hear,

So what is it that I don’t want to hear (apart from your wilful lack of sentient thought on the topic)?

I’m pretty sure more people die falling off ladders but we don’t suggest burying them in the ground for 10,000 years and then get all worked up about what if someone in the future digs up a ladder, tries to climb up it and falls off?

Nuclear kills very few people e.g. a Tsunami and Earthquake strike an ageing reactor and 4 people die from the wave impact – deaths / serious injuries from the reactor melting down = 0. Deaths from car crashes in Japan each year >>>>>> 4.

my parents have an electrically heated shower, imagine that, an ELECTRIC shower.

it gets better, they’ve even got an electric hob (or 4).

it’s like an episode of star-trek at their house…

i’d be curious to hear how much more electricity we’d need to produce if we replaced all the gas hobs/showers with electric ones -which is something we’ll have to do eventually.

CFH is right.

So suddenly some way of making electric transport viable is going to appear?

Zokes – you appear not to want to hear how energy conservation will work. are you interested in this? I can explain it to you and point you to decent studies on it. However if all you are going to o is rubbish me on the basis of what you claim I say not on what I have said then its pointless.

So suddenly some way of making electric transport viable is going to appear?

Just a bit longer 😀

So suddenly some way of making electric transport viable is going to appear?

tada!

no, sorry, electric trains are dangerous, they’re un-proven tech, they require more different maintenance, we’ll just have to write them off as a bad idea.

clearly, they just don’t work.

i’d be curious to hear how much more electricity we’d need to produce if we replaced all the gas hobs/showers with electric ones -which is something we’ll have to do eventually.

That was my point, even if energy consumtion drops, electricity consumption is going to skyrocket. There are a few electric cars available now, and probbaly many more in the not too distant future. BIL works for Tesla and says they’ve finished development of the loss making but public perception changing sports cars and now concnetrating on 4 door saloons with ranges comprable to a tank of Petrol.

In an ideal world everything would be solar, win, wave, tidal powered, but that like saying we should go back to the good old days of making stuff ourselves in the shed rather than working in a factory making better more reliable and larger quantities of ‘stuff’. You’d need a lot of sheds/ineficiency/wind turbines to compete with one facotry/not quite so nice power station/nuclear project.

We supply ‘bits’ for Nuclear power stations and looking at the tenders flying round the office in the last year there are going to be new plants built.

thankfully.

There will be more built Monkey Boy. I think that’s due to the people in charge of this type of thing living in the real world. As opposed to on a magically, tidal-powered, winged dream carpet

We supply ‘bits’ for Nuclear power stations and looking at the tenders flying round the office in the last year there are going to be new plants built.

Good, I was seriously beginning to worry that this countries energy policy was being driven by badly researched Guardian opinion pieces and Daily Mail-esque “we’re all going to glow in the dark” hysteria. Maybe there is some hope after all. I bet most of the work and profits go to overseas companies though.

Nee nukes? Ordering parts before planning has been granted or contracts signed?

here is an interesting bet – Scotland is going down a very different path in major investment in renewable and there will be no new nukes in Scotland. England is going for nukes not renewable. ( neither is going for conservation in any meaningful manner)

Which way will the electricity be flowing across the border in ten years? 20? I bet Scotland is supplying England significant amounts of electricity in ten years

STW runaway thread powers entire city shock !!
rabid posters to be harnessed for future projects 🙂

For God’s sake TJ we’re not trying to argue you down, we’re trying to help you understand.

We need energy reduction AND nuclear, in my view. Simple.

why?

We don’t just need to reduce CO2 emissions, we need to get them as close to zero as possible. We might be able to meet those from renewbales, but why not work on nuclear as a solution?

And yes I know you’ve posted up your answer to this before, but I don’t consider your answer satisfactory.

Which way will the electricity be flowing across the border in ten years? 20? I bet Scotland is supplying England significant amounts of electricity in ten years

In 20 years the financial system will have gone into meltdown and we’ll be bartering with chickens so the the whole arguments irelavent.

My moneys on Salmond not being in charge in 20 years and Scotland building nuclear power stations allong with the rest of the world, wither that or it’ll join the arc of prosperity with Iceland and Ireland and be bartering potatoes for haggis.

Most of the new plants will be built ‘next to existing ones by the look of it, havent read much of the above but if nuclear waste is your deal check this out….(probably seen it anyway)

there was a programme about it few months back on TV, one part of it was discussing what ‘signage’ they would have outside once it was finally sealed from the outside world.

WASTE

After the Finnish Nuclear Energy Act[22] was amended in 1994 to specify that all nuclear waste produced in Finland must be disposed of in Finland, Olkiluoto was selected in 2000 as the site for a (very) long-term underground storage facility for Finland’s spent nuclear fuel.

The facility, named “Onkalo” (“cave” or “cavity”)[23] is being built in the granite bedrock a few miles from the Olkiluoto power plants. The municipality of Eurajoki issued a building permit for the facility in August 2003 and excavation began in 2004.[24]

The plans for the facility consist of four phases:[citation needed]

Phase 1 (2004–09) will focus on excavation of the large access tunnel to the facility, spiraling downward to a depth of 420 metres (1,380 ft).
Phase 2 (2009–11) will continue the excavation to a final depth of 520 metres (1,710 ft). The characteristics of the bedrock will be studied in order to adapt the layout of the repository.
Around 2012, Posiva Oy, the agency responsible for the facility’s construction, plans to submit an application for a license to construct the repository and any adaptations it requires. This is expected to take up to three years.[citation needed]
Phase 3, the construction of the repository, is expected to begin about 2015.
Phase 4, the encapsulation and burial of areas filled with spent fuel, is projected to begin in 2020.

molgrips – Member

For God’s sake TJ we’re not trying to argue you down, we’re trying to help you understand.

How patronising!

From my point of view its you that does not understand. I do understand that there is not enough nuclear fuel to power the world and that the nuclear powers will not share the tech. I undersatnd that fast breeders and thorium have never produced a stable electricity supply on a commercial scale.

I do understand that there is not enough nuclear fuel to power the world

Yeah but the point is that with different tech (ie not cold-war tech) we could change that.

And I don’t see anything wrong with trying.

I undersatnd that fast breeders and thorium have never produced a stable electricity supply on a commercial scale

Does that necessarily mean they never could? (note don’t answer that, it needs a scientist involved in the research, not a nurse or a computer programmer)

I undersatnd that fast breeders and thorium have never produced a stable electricity supply on a commercial scale.

Nor has wave power, but you have faith in that.

I undersatnd that fast breeders and thorium have never produced a stable electricity supply on a commercial scale

I refer the honourable gentleman back to where we answered this a few pages back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor

There probably does exist enough potential across Europe to meet demand through renewables alone. (Scotland, Norway, Denmark – wind, Spain and Greece solar. Tidal has a a lot of potential too)

Trouble is this would require serious cross goverment co-operation and huge infrastructure projects not just to generate the power but to distribute it as well. Pan European intergration on this scale doesn’t exactly have a brilliant track record. Also politically would the UK government be happy with having to rely on sunshine in Greece to guarantee power to the houses in the Home Counties when its a calm day in the Highlands?

Also what about China, India, Brazil etc. Do we just say sorry lads the the party’s over you can’t have any cheap energy. I abso-fricken-lutley guarantee they will be using nuclear. So we can either embrace it as a technology and work on better more effecient reactor tech for ourselves and potentially to export to massive new markets. Or we ignore it and stand by the technological sidelines – again

Nuclear energy must be great. The Iranians are hell-bent on developing it. And they’ve got ****-loads of oil and natural gas!

richmtb – where is the fuel for this massive expansion of nuclear going to come from?

We could of course instead become world leaders in renewables if we put all that money and R&D effort into it

richmtb – where is the fuel for this massive expansion of nuclear going to come from?

Isn’t the whole point of IBR/FBR and many other similar reactor designs that they use the 99.2% of the fuel that previous generation reactors didnt use, thus providing 99x more energy and solving the waste problem.

As for becoming a leader in renewables, whenever a developing coutnry builds a renewable project (I’m thinking 3 Gorges Dam etc) we decry them for killing millions of inocent lesser spotted rarified dung beatles. Theres not much we can do to make renewables more efficient, the best we can do is build loads of them, and that takes, time, money and countryside.

We could of course instead become world leaders in renewables if we put all that money and R&D effort into it

Why are they mutually exclusive?

Did anyone say that you need to use a lot of carbon fuel to extract mine and refine your nuclear fuels? especially as you can’t rely on a steady stream of decommissioned warheads any more?

Oh I did – last time we had this discussion.

If we allow the wholesale cost of electricity to rise naturally it’ll reduce consumption. I reckon this has already happened with Petrol…

Did anyone say that you need to use a lot of carbon fuel to extract mine and refine your nuclear fuels?

For which reactor design?

If we allow the wholesale cost of electricity to rise naturally it’ll reduce consumption. I reckon this has already happened with Petrol…

Yes because energy poverty is a great idea. Hypothermia anyone?

Did anyone say that you need to use a lot of carbon fuel to extract mine and refine your nuclear fuels? especially as you can’t rely on a steady stream of decommissioned warheads any more?

Physics fail? In general the reactors convert uranium to plutonium, plutonium being used in warheads.

If there realy was more energy used getting uranium out of the ground and into a reactor than it produced in the reactor we’d just fuel the power stations with diesel!

And the whole point of FBR over erlier genration reactors is they use the WASTE from the firt gen much more efficienctly so require NO NEW FUEL.

Its very simple to make mechanisms to prevent fuel poverty while penalising excessive consumption

thats easy for you to say

you have now changed tack on each successive page of this thread.

seek help.

Me?

How have I changed tack?

Its very simple to make mechanisms to prevent fuel poverty while penalising excessive consumption

A brief summary purleez Uncle Jezza…..

Its very simple to make mechanisms to prevent fuel poverty while penalising excessive consumption

Yes, but we generaly hate it. The news last month was full of stories about how energy tarrifs were overly complicated, can’t see increacing that complexity making any new friends.

Agree with you on principle though as the current system of chageing X for the first few units then Y for the rest (where X>Y) is a regressive system, even if it does accurately reflect the energy suppliers costs.

binners – domestic consumers as consumption rises so does the price.