Solar Panels - verifying the numbers

[The Natural Philosopher]

Exactly.

The green position is 'all pollution Bad. So, no nuclear no fossil, =no people.

Cos the job cant be done with current levels of population AND totally renewable technology.

Energy s all about turning low entropy materials (coal, gas, oil, uranium) into high entropy waste (hot carbon dioxide, hot air, hot radioactive materials).

Its always been a source of mystery to me why a dirty radioactive planet will be 'saved' by using JUST the energy off a dirty radioactive sun...that is anything BUT renewable.

[news10paul]

Worth less of what, exactly? Other money? The values we place on physical and non-physical artefacts are culturally determined, and we exchange these artefacts with yet another virtual non-physical cultural artefact ("money").

The economy is largely a giant hallucination with no real physical existence. After all, we are in some kind of credit crunch or recession, but it's not because we are suddenly short of energy or materials or skilled humans or food supplies or because we're all watching the footy rather than doing or making something. We're in a hallucinated recession because the hallucination tells us we are.

With 1W/m2 I could probably do some useful work. With £1 I have to pull a con trick on a suitably deluded passerby.

#Paul

[Dave Liquorice]

Ice is a pretty good insulator. An iced up heat collector is no longer in contact with the nice, releatively warm, moving air from which to extract more heat.

True you but once frozen you have extracted that latent heat and you now have an insulating layer on your collector.

[Tim Streater]

So go back to a barter economy then and see how far you get.

[NT]

less ability to buy goods & services.

... And yet money & the recession are no less real

NT

[NT]

I've sometimes wondered why heat exchangers on refrigeration arent made partly from bimetal or designed asymmetrically so that they move slightly with each run cycle, helping to reduce ice build up to some degree.

NT

[dennis]

Which is why you need the scraper and/or de-icing boot.

[news10paul]

I'm not saying money isn't a handy concept to have. But that doesn't mean its value isn't entirely imaginary.

#Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

when you get down to it, modern physics and philosophy could say that about everything else too.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] saying something like:

This one's rumbled it. Keelll heem, before he tells others and ruins it.

[Man at B&Q]

The metropolitan, guardian reading, middle classes, especially. Throw in "celebritie" such as Carol Vordeman jumping on things like the anti- MMR bandwagon and you can see why we're in such a mess.

The Guardian does, however, carry the excellent Bad Science column.

MBQ

[Man at B&Q]

I'm more worried by the apparently open ended cost of public sector final salary pensions. Anything else pales into (almost) insignificance.

MBQ

[Man at B&Q]

Let's just burn money then, simples!

MBQ

[Man at B&Q]

Why did you snip "pumping heat into it in summer using the system as aircon"?

MBQ

[Tim Streater]

Media-fuelled ignorance doesn't help. Yesterday morning (I think it was) there was a piece about waste storage on the Today programme. Even they repeated the old canard about "some of this waste has a half-life of millions of years" without apparently understanding that this means that it's *less*, not *more*, radioactive.

[Tim Streater]

Because I wasn't responding to that aspect of the matter.

[The Natural Philosopher]

What is the half life of the Universe?

well yes.

essntially if its hot enough to be dangerous, its worth reprocessing and burning.

That's as far as fuel rods go.

The more contentious issues are what to do with a mildly radioactive reactor housing that is full of strange isotopes of reinforced concrete, due to radiation absorption, that's probably pretty safe, but is not something you would want to live inside for the next 500 years.

really, if politics and paranoia didn't get in the way, you would simply fill them up with concrete cover with soil.. and leave them..for 500 years. A sort of modern Stonehenge to be puzzled over by archaeologists in 2500 years..but that doesn't satisfy the greenies, so no one has really come up with a solution.

If you cut them up, you have to them move them somewhere else, and do the same. Which in itself releases far more radiation than is needful. And introduces unnecessary risks in transportation and dismantling.

[Tim Streater]

Dump it in a deep ocean trench. It will then be subducted into the mantle.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh indeed, but the greenies wont have that either.

In short the green position on old nuclear reactors is

1/. You can't leave that there 2/. You can't put that anywhere else,. either. 3/. Nuclear energy is unlimitedly expesnsive because no one has yet come up with a decomissioning solution that satisfies 1/. and 2/. 4/. Ergo all nuclear power must be stopped, because of the 'waste problem'

All other lines of attack having failed.

[Tim Streater]

They've mostly never heard of the Oklo reactor in Gabon either: