UK power generation

[Tim Streater]

Please suggest some viable ones, then. Hint: damming up the Lake District to 500 metres depth is not a viable solution.

[Java Jive]

But they're not posting here, so what relevance has this? It's my quantitive arguments to which are replying, and to which you seem to have no rational answer. Green-bashing may make you feel better, but it's not going to solve any problem. On the contray, it just makes them more difficult to solve, because it raises the emotional temperature and rational argument tends to be drowned in a whirlpool of emotional excrement.

I've read it all before. That's why I plonked him.

[Tim Watts]

You could have said that back in the early days of steam.

By progressing with nuclear power and research, we will find new methods and improved efficiences.

Or do you really want to live in a cave with candles made out of birds with wickes shoved through them?

And for christs sake, stop bloody top posting.

[Java Jive]

I'm already living somewhere with huge green potential - there's plenty of wind most days, plenty of rain, plenty of valleys to dam, and the tides race through the channel outside my window four times a day at several knots. Mind you, I'm not sure the locals bred and born here would be happy about me or anyone else expropriating their beautiful environment.

So why suggest it then? Could it be because you have nothing more useful to suggest?

As it has happened, I have no children of my own. It's not what I would have planned, and it hurts, but I have to accept it. It may be better for the world that there are a couple of children and their descendants less in the world to pollute it, but at least mine would have been raised to respect the planet, not to trash it, and so would hopefully have tried to minimise their footprint.

I've only been living here a month, but I've already seen locals throwing their garden rubbish in the sea, boats rotting quietly at their moorings, or beached to prevent them sinking, discarded mattresses by the roadside, rubbish thrown over the wall of a viewing platform at a beauty spot, Jewson plastic bags by the road alongside a beautiful stretch of water.

Humans trash the planet wherever we go, and there are far more of us than it can possibly sustain indefinitely into the future.

It's going to be a painful future, I'm glad I'm unlikely to see the worst of it.

[Java Jive]

[Java Jive]

And you could say something equivalen about carbon-sequestration to allow to burn fuel that we know we have. Your point is?

Except we didn't and haven't. The only nuclear technology that may, note the MAY, still be significantly useful after about 2025 is FBR, but most of the world, including the UK, has either abandoned it already, or is running into serious problems with it.

No, I don't wish anything of the sort. Again, just like most of the pro-nuclear lobby, you blame the messenger for the message. No one I know, however green, and there aren't many of them, wants to revert to the stone age. The only difference between you and me is that I accept what the maths is telling me about the future, whereas you rail against it irrationally.

Oh grow up and get a life!

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, but I look at it occasionally.

No,. but I could. I am always coy about that though because there have been one or two occasions when for whatever reasons the data from BMreports has been complete bollocks.

The peak demand in the database is for example 160GW. And the minimum is

0...if a garbled report gets through or no report I dont 'edit' the data.

the principle is established that the higher the slew rate the more plant that is hot and either producing sub peak efficiency or not producing at all, hold however, but establishing the actual increase in fuel consumption is an almost impossible task.

Some figures from Denmark suggested that with a potential 30% average wind on the grid they threw away 101% of it, exported 30% of it and ended up with only 5-10% reduction in fossil fuel usage.

All engineers also agree that multiple cold starts and high slew rates over a long period of time reduces lifetime and increase maintenance costs of their sets: But again, no one has a figure for 'by how much'

In short the whole underlying reason for adopting renewable energy has never actually been tested with real world data to see if in practice it is achieving any worthwhile emissions reduction at all.

The policy adopted was based on the fraudulent claim that every unit generated by renewable will save the equivalent amount of carbon based fuel. Its simply a lie.

>

[Huge]

Please stop top posting.

[Huge]

Please stop top posting.

[Huge]

Please stop top posting.

[dennis]

That is why he decided to overthrow an elected government then? Its also why he couldn't be allowed to win even if it meant closing all the mines. It was without a doubt scargills fault that so many mines were closed, you just couldn't trust them to work when they were needed.

That is why the power generation had to be diversified so that men like scargill couldn't even try to overthrow an elected government. The government was doing its job and they did succeed in controlling the threat.

That reason might not be a good reason though. Many miners said they went on strike out of *fear* of scargill's mob.

[Huge]

Oh, the irony.

[Huge]

Extraordinarily, I agree with you. But reducing our energy consumption isn't going to help unless we stop breeding.

[Huge]

Please stop top posting.

[The Natural Philosopher]

no we dont.

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 14/12/12 12:42, Java Jive wrote: The only difference between you and me is that I

No you don't accept what the maths is telling you. You accept what greenpeace is telling y6ou.

And their maths has been shown to be based on false assumptions.

WE are running out of many things, but fissile material to make electricity with is simply not one of them.

There is a far greater crisis in land area for farming, and in other minerals like copper and silver.

Fission power will solve the electricity problem for at least a couple of hundred years. Allowing us to move on and tackle population and food production.

Not using it will simply kill most of the world population. Which is another way of solving the food and population squeezes, I suppose.

No one with any sense denies we are in a crisis: the bone of contention is whether or not renewable energy (the fraud is in the name) will in fact help. The answer after dedicated study is simply 'not half or even one tenth as much as nuclear power will' and that is, in the end the point.

Luddites want to keep their whirling dervishes and bow down to the relgious gurus of Green. people who still have minds of their own realise its a dangerous fallacy. Its that simple.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Of course. Where perhaps the majority of politicians come from. They've always been very good at protecting their own.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The miners got the short straw. They would have accepted rational; phased pit closures. Scargill decided to flex his muscles and say no to any closures. Perhaps you could argue that was his job. But he accelerated the closure of even viable pits.

In the end it was merely about who ultimately was going to rund te coiuntry - the unions or the goivernment.

Today, ED milliband is about to make it a choice that doesn't exist. The country will be run by what amounts to the unions.

[The Natural Philosopher]

except that humanity is not infinitely sustainable on a finite solar system which is subject to the laws of entropy anyway.

Its not about achieving Eternity, its about getting thorough the next

100 years. Or in my case maybe 30.

[Chris Hogg]

There were two mines in Cornwall noted for their production of pitchblende: South Terras (aka Uranium Mine), near the village of St. Stephen, a few miles west of St. Austell in mid-Cornwall, and Wheal Trenwith, adjacent to the popular holiday resort of St. Ives in west Cornwall.

Output of pitchblende from South Terras in the periods 1873-81 and

1900-1910 was 736 tons of ore. Much of it was exported to Germany where it was used in the manufacture of green glass(1). The dumps are now overgrown, but are regularly visited by amateur geologists with Geiger counters. Plenty of radioactivity there to put the wind up the easily alarmed! Google for South Terras to get more information, and see also the early days of Wheal Trenwith, at St. Ives, say 1825-1850, the black pitchblende was mistaken for a black copper ore, which the mine also produced, and mixed with it. But its presence seriously interfered with the subsequent smelting, and when this was realised, the pitchblende was discarded onto the dumps. When the value of uranium was appreciated, in around 1910, the dumps were worked over and between 1911 and 1917, nearly 700 tons of ore were produced(1). Mme. Curie first discovered and isolated radium from pitchblende from Wheal Trenwith.

At neither of these mines was much of the pitchblende processed on site for the recovery of radium. Much of the Trenwith material went to Limehouse for processing. A lot of the dump material from Trenwith was used as building material for the houses and streets of St. Ives, including, one suspects, quite a lot of low-grade pitchblende. See also

but mostly copied from (1). Until about the mid-1970's, Trenwith mine was used as was water supply for St. Ives and neighbouring Carbis Bay. I've probably drunk quite a lot of it myself in my formative years!

Another mine in the St. Ives area that produced a small amount of pitchblende was Wheal Providence, at Carbis Bay, (3 tons pre 1846). Dump material from this mine was pushed over the cliffs onto Carbis Bay beach, and the drainage tunnel (adit) also discharged onto the beach. The adit was a great place for exploration when I was a lad, and years ago I read that the beach was significantly more radioactive than the beach at Winscale. See also

The metalliferous Mining Region of South-West England, H.G.Dines, HMSO, 1956. Bear in mind that the tonnages of pitchblende mentioned are of fairly impure ore, rather than pure uranium oxide, and would be contaminated by waste material.