Well - it's not a myth, it's just not implemented yet, it's theoretically possible to run an electric car from 100% nuclear, or for hydrogen thermally generated from nuclear. Not near term admittedly.
This isn't really a myth. If you have an extra cup of water in the kettle, it goes cold 3 times a day, that's boiling 300l of water, or about 3 quid. If you boil an extra litre, it's 12.
Well - unless you use electricity to heat your house, it does lead to a significan net reduction in power use, at least 100W for me.
It's a small part of it. I'd not be surprised if when adding up all the crap I've got on standby to hit 100W. (VCRs, sky box, DTTV box, computer, ...)
Not really, but it is unpopular.
This is an option to reduce usage - it will hurt the economy somewhat though, as you'd probably need to put petrol at around 5 pounds a litre to get really significant reductions.
This would be a very short term solution - about 20 are going offline in a couple of decades.
More like 400 (of similar capacity to existing ones), to totally replace fossil fuels in all but transport applications.
Biodiesel production directly makes food more expensive in many areas, by creating yet another 'export only' crop.
and about £6 off your heating bill. More probably.
£6 is certainly irrelevant in terms of a heating bill here of around £2000 a year at todays prices..about 6000 liters. Our combined mileage is about 10000. say 400 liters of diesel. Of course tax and insurance adds up to far more than the cost of the diesel.
100W? again, big deal. Simply take one less shower a week?
Take another less shower a week, or turn the house stat down 0.01 degrees C.
I think not. At current prices we have certainly found that order online and pay carriage charges is far more cost effective than driving to a shop.
Indee. Then build another 20.
Or bigger ones.
So let them eat cake. we need exportable crops anyway.
Umm, no. Here, the heating does not run for 1/2 the year. And electricity is 3 times the price of gas. So, 50p-2 pounds, depending if it's the 1 cup, or 1l.
And if you're already cutting back as much as possible on those?
Biodiesel crops are not really economic in the UK. The best current biodiesel crop is (palm oil), which is grown primarily in very poor areas of the tropics, where it often displaces much more valuable habitat. And it increases food prices for those that can't afford it.
I sugest you look out of the train windows the next time your St.Pancras to Sheffield Midland Mainline is passing through Stuartby in North Beds. You can tell where you are because of the brick kiln chimneys, the awful smell emitted therefrom and ... the *huge* holes in the ground where the brick clay used to be before it became Wimpey housing estates.
My house 150 miles north was built of LBC "Heather" bricks.
I used to comfort myself in the thought that I could see the chimneys of the brick kilns from the M1. They seem to have gone now.
The "running out of landfill" tosh is a load of rubbish. *Huge* slag hills have been moved, landscaped, and redeveloped all over the North of England.
Landfilling of quarries and opencast mines could provide plenty of landfill, trouble is sometimes there are more lucrative options, such as creating leisure facilities such as caravan sites around an artificial lake.
The government (EU ?) doesn't let the market find it's own level, it just taxes landfill.
Big piles of rubble is, and thats not in short supply, and currently gets landfilled.
Now, why pile the rubble against the shore when it can be piled up
10/50/100 yards out, and the area infilled with garbage. The garbage is topped with something heavier to prevent plastic film floating about, perhaps a layer of smaller sieved rubble. Decay may reduce the garbage level, possibly permitting another round of dumping, and the decayed soil will help stick everything together. Sow seed of saltwater tolerant species and the roots lock it all together, and you have the beginning of permanent new land. In time it would become stable secure farming land. This would make it possible to build right up to what is now the edge of the land.
Instead of all those landfills costing money in land value, no land is used, and land is gained at the end.
Those are all small steps that cost the govt nothing, and make people feel involved in the solution, and make them think the govt is at least trying. Theyre also a way to put across the message that its not the govt that needs to act, but the people. None of that strikes me as govt stupidity.
that would hit the economy hard. Not a good idea.
trouble is virtually no-one employs home workers. Its one of those things that needs to take off somehow, but no employer wants it. Perhaps some research on that would be beneficial, and make hm govt look good. Your tax break idea might help it get going, and might provide private companies a reason to figure it all out..
would take more pedestrians off the road and into cars, fuel use would go up, especially with more congestion. I'm no fan of nannyish pedestrianisation choking traffic flow, but eliminating all of it wont help.
Nothing is free. Either we pay the service provider for it or we pay tax which pays for it. Youre suggesting a huge spend there: is it really economically advantageous? And are railways the best bet today? For most loads I suspect not. Since the govt spends so much on roads and so little on rail, I guess they think the same.
Would be nice. But again who will pay? Its way cheaper to let the private marketplace do it all.
I think thats not an option, as fibre cable is so fragile. There has been much trouble with putting it in new developments because of this.
We could get more speed & bandwidth by parallelling technologies. Phone wires, power lines, rf, satellite, laser link, microwave link, & fibre in situations suitable for it.
With only half the population netted it would be possible to use neighbouring phone & power lines too for more capacity. Say you had a village of 100 houses, new wiring for a vilage is pricey, sat is too costly. With updated exchange technology, most of the bandwidth of all those 100 lines would be available, without interfering with anyone's normal phone service. At least some of that bandwidth could be made available to each household. 100x56k = 5.6M shared by 50 houses. If ave
8 are online at once, and each is passing data on ave 1/4 the time, thats ave thruput of 2.8M each, peak 5.6M, just using phonelines. Add broadband over power line for more bandwidth... the point is its doable without laying anything. That thruput is enough to make work applications work (even 56k is usable for basic quality teleconferencing).
There are issues with the assumptions in the above, but the point is we're not short of wires, we're short on people wiling to pay the cost to upgrade the equipment.
I hope so. It wont make energy cheap though. A lot of what we have will keep going long past its sell by date, the end of life dates have never been realistic for nuke here.
Biofuels cost more and displace more valuable food crops. This doesnt seem to me a positive move.
There are ways to cut energy use without losing out, but theyre different to the above imho, and there is quite a bit of disagreement on the details.
Cars are pointlessly overpowered, and a serious purchase time mpg tax would improve that. The perceived issues with low energy bulbs are simple to resolve. Cart lanes would dramatically congestion and fuel use in towns. Extending grants from cavity walls to also include solid walls would help bring heating energy use down. Taxing air flight fuel use would reduce journeys and encourage maximisation of fuel efficiency to a limited extent. A govt backed research project on solar space heating would test and publicise its utility and payback. Introducing a clear binbag scheme for reusables would reduce landfill costs, increase reuse, and make those less well off better off. (People would be permitted to take items from clear binbags, and they would be disposed of as normal on collection day. A few clear bags would be issued with each roll of black bags.) A paper statement supplied with new houses stating what opportunity was present for fitment of various energy saving devices would generate buyer awareness and possibly preference.
When people with no lack of resources and expertise at their fingertips, eg governments, act dumb, sometimes they are, and sometimes theyre acting dumb. I dont see how we can really know which in this case.
Unfortunately, not every hole in the ground meets the requirements for use as a domestic waste tip. Factors such as the leaching of waste products into local ground water make many of them unsuitable. Currently approved sites could be full within the next six years.
Crumbs, no. There are still some 7 or 8 chimneys. Only one kiln is operating, though. Hansen have been given a year by the Environment Agency to do something about the vile filth that comes out of the chimneys, or they will have to close.
Precisely. Thereby generating large amounts of fly tipping, which ends up in the fields round here.
It's all the typical sound bite stuff which is glib and easy to say and slippery shoulders to the next person.
That's nonsense. While still not widespread, it appeals to employers once they figure out that
- there is a reduction in cost of office space
- there is not long term commitment on office space so no issues of it being a problem to acquire or a millstone as the workforce size flexes up and down
- with people given objectives rather than hours of work with bonuses for achievement and over achievement, more likely to put in the effort to make it happen.
More than anything, it is a cultural issue in companies with the old fashioned belief that employees need to be seen in the office for them to be "known to be working". Of course this is nonsense. There are people who attend the office daily and fill their time with meetings and looking busy but actually achieve very little. If they were to be measured on objectives and outcome rather than hours and location worked, the results would be better anyway.
I haven't worked in an office permanently for more than 10 years. Either it has been home working or occasionally hot desk use in larger companies.
It's mainly a matter of culture
It really doesn't need any more research.
Tax breaks for both companies and individuals would be beneficial, and allowing individuals to claim for use of space at home for work use without incurring a tax penalty.
That's not technology, simply incompetence. There are countries such as Sweden and Denmark where FTTH (fibre to the home) is provided in cities and even towns of quite modest size. 100Mbit is quite typical with the links being used for integrated services such as video on demand as opposed to nearly on demand.
That isn't a good solution in general because a lot of applications do not tolerate well packets being delivered over widely differing links in terms of latency, symmetry and bandwidth. For example, satellite downlink and PSTN uplink.
That and not very suitable apart from broadcast services.
This isn't very useful for a number of applications especially voice and video, which is where the money is for the providers.
That depends on the availability of products and services that customers are willing to buy.
Bedfordshire has more landfill sites than any other county, and most of the other clay pits have been used for this.
I agree that recycling can be good idea, but only when it's economically justified. If it costs less to make new than to recycle old, it isn't worth doing the recycling - as Milton Keynes council discovered, to the immense cost of its charge payers.
The big downside is it actually requires managers who actually mange, rather than going around being important and having 'meetings'
I.e. work needs to be assessed, split up, parceled out and monitored.
instead of castigating employees who simply come in 10 minutes late, the managers have to learn how to manage.
In todays climate this is an almost insuperable task.
Yus, and it needs a bit more airtime and a lot of attitude adjustment to make it work.
Yes. There are also inusrance implications, and security implications.
Optical cable is not fragile, and it is used as the major backbone for all data communications over a certain bandwidth, Railtrack already has thousands of miles of fibre laid alongside its tracks, but is inept at marketing it. Compare energis, who laid a grid over the neutral lines of the national grid and sold it as data channeling.
Optical fibre is the backbone of the world data networks, running under the atlantic and so on. Microwave is not as good, bandwidth wise, by a large factor. Its used really because the whole problem with physical links is getting permission to lay the stuff. Microwabve links are relatively cheap to install, but they suffer drop outs and low bandwidth.
Indeed. No one today would lay telephone wires if starting from scratch. DSL is a bodge - a clever bodge - to leverage existing twisted pair installations.
Ours hasn't even come on yet ... mind you (getting out fingers) yes, it might well be partially on for six months. We don't use the timer (we don't have regular lives), instead the thermostat is set to 10C. It certainly isn't on often.
It's gas fired. As is our kettle - Spouse's grandma's kettle (I keep seeing them in 'antique' shops, mind you I see a lot of things we use in those shops).
The kettle is the thing I feel most wasteful about, rather the gas it uses. But I hate electric 'jug' kettles.
In 30 years of drinking I've only seen a couple of instances of violence in, or outside the pubs I frequented - many of which would never have been classified as 'family pubs'. The average pub, and it's customers, is no different today than it was 30 years ago. However I don't frequent pubs that cater for 500/1000 customers a night.
There are tens of millions of people who drink each week who are not part of the problem yet we are all being tarred with the same brush.
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