Do dimmer switches work with Low Energy Bulbs?

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are not power stations.

[The Natural Philosopher]

100 nuclear power stations = 100,000 windmills, each one occupying the land area of a nuclear power station more or less.

Thats the basic maths for a totally fossil free britain.

about 40% of all the land area doing renewable energy farms, competing with all the other land uses like wilderness, ssi's housing. agriculture, etc etc. Probably employing at least a million people to keep running.

Or 100 concrete block scattered round the coast the size of a couple of football pitches. Run by maybe 30,000 skilled people.

[The Natural Philosopher]

oh no. that's *capacity*. In reality it only GENERATES about 30% on average. So make that 10GW at best.

97% to go.

[<me9]

A windmill will occupy less than the amount of land in square yards that a nuclear site occupies in acres. It takes little land to plant a pole.

[Adam Aglionby]

Calder Hall is part of the Sellafield site only stopped generating power in 2003.

Dounreay was a nuclear power plant, both are central in their own ways to nuclear power past , present and indeterminate future.

Notice you don`t disagree that they both have safety records that could reasonably termed ` of concern` ;-)

Cheers Adam

[Bruce]

I agree that what is generated is a surprisingly small proportion of their nominal capacity, but the two figures I quoted were defined on a similar basis, so we are only 11% there, with another 89% to go.

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that most of the future capacity will be built off our coasts. It therefore won't have the same visual impact as the wind farms that have already been built, mostly on land.

Of course it will be a lot more effective at spoiling our coastal views. :-(

[Adam Aglionby]

Thats because we can`t mine uranium in the U.K. currently rely on Australia and South Africa, if only there was somewher closer, somewhere we have to fight a war against terror to in reality protect interests in strip of uranium ore, somewhere like Afghanistan,

It dosen`t buy energy independence or security, nuclear is a fossil fuel that we do not have natively, clean burning coal technology looks like something we would be well placed to become a world player in, something we arent in wind or nuclear.

Cheers Adam

[Bruce]

Why on earth should it take 10 people to keep 1 turbine running? They are remarkably maintenance-free. It is more likely to take 1 person per 10 turbines.

Among those 30,000 people, what is the likelihood that a handful of them will display the same lack of judgment and disregard for risk that was demonstrated at Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island?

Almost a certainty.

Those who consider nuclear power as a "no-brainer" solution to our energy needs probably have no brain. ;-)

[Bruce]

Calder Hall never delivered any power to the National Grid. It was synchronised to the grid only to ensure that it worked in conjunction with power imported from the grid to supply the Sellafield complex.

Calder Hall's primary purpose was to produce plutonium for making nuclear weapons. Electricity was a by-product. Its generation was a good use of the reactor's waste heat to drive turbo-generators, and saved British Nuclear Fuels some money, but it was never the primary purpose.

From the mid-1960s, as demand for plutonium reduced, Calder Hall had a role in the production of fuel for the CEGB's nuclear stations, but plutonium continued to be manufactured in smaller quantities for another three decades.

Like Calder Hall, Dounreay was not primarily a power plant. None of the five reactors built there ever generated any significant quantities of electricity for the Grid. The site was a research and development centre for fast breeder reactor technology. It was a failure, as no commercial fast breeder reactor was ever built. There was also a section that developed the reactors for the Royal Navy's nuclear-powered submarines.

Calder Hall had a good safety record. The major problems were at the original, adjacent Windscale site, where the 1957 fire in Pile 1 was the worst nuclear accident on record until Three Mile Island and later Chernobyl.

As with Pile 1, a prime example of what supposedly capable, responsible and highly trained professional people can get up to when they think they can get away with it. Over several decades they dumped all kinds of nasty nuclear waste - some of it strongly radioactive and some with very long half lives - down a shaft in the ground. Hardly any records were kept, and those that exist contain many lies.

The site is grossly polluted and will have taken several decades to clean up by the time it is finished - currently projected for 2025 but likely to take very much longer. The cost will be far greater than the cost of all the research, development and construction and operation of facilities that have gone on at Dounreay since 1955.

Nuclear power? No thanks!

[Bill Wright]

I really can't see the point of sending aid to these places. After all, they are about 400 years behind us in most respects, with medieval standards of behaviour and morality, so why should we interfere? They've got to where they are just as we've got to where we are by our own effort (or lack of effort in their case). Our superior civilisation, work ethic, and intelligence has made us wealthy, so one up to us. You can't say it's a lack of natural resources because Africa has more than most places. No, it's the people. When we had the Empire we did what we could to teach them civilised standards, and when we withdrew we did all we could to encourage them to set up proper governments and so forth, but of course as soon as our backs were turned they all became dictatorships and started murdering each other. It's like educating pork.

All that happens is that we pump in aid, they use it to make things easier, the population goes up, then they're all back to square one but there are more of them. It's like feeding fish in a barren river.

Money we spend on foreign aid should be used to search out and eliminate all the illegal immigrants in this county, not thrown into the bottomless pit that is the third world.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

So you'd be happy to live right next to one, below the whirring blades? Id you did you might wake up one morning with a rather severe haircut.

Bill

[John Rumm]

In theory, SIs are good for repealing stuff fast as well - tis what they were designed for, things that occur annually and just get swapped with the last one like the budget.

Don't hold your breath. legislators of all colours often seem to think they have failed if they don't produce new legislation! Its a shame none of them have an engineering background and could derive satisfaction from achieving more with less!

[Derek Geldard]

So it might. AIUI the whole Sellafield site was never a net exporter of electricity.

Calder Hall was designed and built to generate weapons grade plutonium.

None of the three reactors on theUKAEA site could be described as a commercial power reactor design. And none of the designs are likely to be repeated in future commercial reactors.

I think you would be better informed if you read the Wikipedia on Dounreay.

They were not designed and built as nuclear power stations. Their requirement came from the political and military desire for us to have cold war military toys.

Derek

[Adam Aglionby]

Hoi, Col. Blimp , dont lecture to the Royal Society on subjects you nothing about in your spare time do you?

Adam

[Adam Aglionby]

Reasonably well informed about Dounreay, its toxic shaft, its liquid waste tankers getting busted for bald tyres on public roads, the radioactive hotspots on the shoreline and the classic JCB through the power cables incident, through main and backup run beside each other in the same trench.

Dounreay was fast reactor research but still generated power at some point and crucial to learning how to clean up, the shaft is the wolds most expensive crane grab game.

Short memories about safety at Sellafield, apart from Cockcroft`s Follies on Calder Hall that saved Cumberland from still being uninhabitable, what about the falsified records at the MOX plant , nuclear industry civil or military is not good at telling the truth.

Cheers Adam

[Bruce]

"Cockcroft's Follies", the large filters at the top of the concrete chimneys, were on Windscale's Pile 1, not Calder Hall.

[Bruce]

You are Nick Griffin and I claim my £5.

[Derek Geldard]

3 accidents worldwide in 52 years would be regarded as exemplary in all industies I have been associated with.

I could be wrong but it has been my experience that whenever a technical innovation looks like being important with significant budgets to spend and lots of big new Empires to build then in UK the "Anyone for tennis" cads / hooray henries / chinless wonders move in with their arts degrees at the prospect of cornering the kudos for a significant and important achievement . We would be better off without them.

I have no idea if it would ever be possible to achieve this in the UK or we are doomed by virtue of out social structure.

A pity, some of (maybe all) the alternatives are worse.

I'd like to see the Yorkshire pits re-opened but when it comes to power station coal they were more or less exhausted when Maggie closed them, and since the land slopes down from the Pennines to the sea any newer and bigger mines would have to be impracticably deep and then get deeper still as they went out under the North Sea.

Derek

[Tim W]

Bruce wibbled on Thursday 29 October 2009 20:35

Bill makes some interesting arguments. I agree partly with his points. The africans (generalised, exceptions noted) do seem good at producing corrupt regimes beyond their fair share. Not all of africa is a parched wasteland and just look at the mineral resources in South Africa.

I'm not sure if I'm completely happy with saying sod 'em and let them rot though. If "we" are amongst the more "civilised" peoples, we should not stop trying to help people who are less fortunate. However, we may need to learn the best way to do that, and giving a massive pile of dosh that instantly gets usurped into el-generalissimo's mucky mitts may not be the best way...

[Bruce]

If Bill Wright had been trying to start a reasoned and balanced debate, that would have been fair enough. The country needs one - we have never had one, at least not since Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech in April 1968 removed any chance of rational discussion, and we have never been consulted on immigration policy by any government, Labour or Tory, before or since, which cannot be right.

But Bill Wright's rant was in no way reasonable, nor balanced, but based entirely on ignorant prejudice and the politics of hatred. It was an attempt to kill any chance of debate and impose bigoted views that have not been considered acceptable since the end of World War 2.

It is exactly the tactic employed by the BNP, who are not interested in debate, but wish instead to build on and generate irrational prejudice and hatred towards anyone who doesn't fit some arbitrary (and quite unsupportable) definition of "White British".