Interesting blog on fracking

I suppose JJ .. if you choose to live in such a remote wild area than that weather goes with the territory .. as they say;)...

It's a bit unfair on whoever's paying for it.

Hardly suprising. To satisfy the safety requirements, which are far more onerous than for similar risk levels in other industries, costs a lot and typically regulation changes over the design period, moving the goalposts so redesign is required. The changing regulations are probably partly justifiable, but also heavily driven by adverse public opinion, stoked up by alarmist reporting and stirring up by the anti-nuclear lobby.

The French nuclear construction industry is also notorious for closed shop practices and strikes. For example one project I know of was delayed for around three months, at great cost, simply because the welders for the pipework went on strike. Look at a whole powerplant and how many different trade area may strike at different times?

SteveW

The simple facts that cannot be changed are:

Wind turbines are necessarily sited in the most visually prominent locations; they are far bigger than any but a very limited number of pylons for special purpose locations; they are much more brightly coloured (is that for aircraft safety?); and the biggest one of all - they move!

Pylons may also be an eyesore, but being smaller; darker coloured, mainly not along the topes of ridge-lines; and stationary, you can, often without conscious thought, put them to the back of your mind. Wind turbines advertise themselves for your attention and you cannot avoid them.

SteveW

In message , tony sayer writes

There were some proposed for Linton but they fell to the Nimbys.

I guess the Gog magog hills are sacrosanct as well:-)

Curiously, I have just had notice that the last 1/2 mile of 11kV overheads to our village are being *undergrounded* this Autumn. The line was probably erected in the '30's and they held over the tower maintenance 3 years ago pending this job.

But the most important simple facts that cannot be changed you have conveniently omitted:

The other items of electrical grid hardware outnumber the number of turbines many times to one. There are 22 pylons for every turbine, and who knows how many poles.

All this other electrical hardware is much closer to where people live, and therefore tends to be more prominent in the view from those locations.

Apparently independent people with no apparent axe to grind rate pylons a greater eyesore that turbines.

YOU cannot avoid them, perhaps, but others such as myself don't have so much difficulty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe everything that's written about them by biased people here and elsewhere, and can therefore look at them with a more open mind, and see them as just another ateration by man of the landscape we have been inhabiting and altering for centuries. Viewed simply as such, they are a damned sight less ugly than many of the other things that have been done.

Unless I'm looking at the wrong thing, the UK 2010 section of your link indeed shows the highest price of new nuclear at 10.5p per unit. However the lowest is at 8p. Incidentally, if you take the lowest prices of all the technologies, only biomass and natural gas are cheaper and if you take the highest prices, nuclear is the cheapest.

Biomass can only ever be a relatively small proportion of the mix.

Wind power is too intermittent (as well as the low price shown seeming to ignore any subsidies).

We need reliable power, at an affordable price and under UK control - what options will give us that? Clean coal might, but has yet to be made effective and then proven over time; natural gas can't (unless fracking proves to provide plentiful quantities), as it is at the mercy of the international market and particularly Russia and any country in between us and them; only leaving nuclear as a known, proven, reliable source.

SteveW

Questions are normally denoted by a question mark.

People who have no known axe to grind don't agree with you.

I suspect that pylons produced a range of noises in the wind, but again that has nothing to do with how much they are an eyesore, nor does how useless or otherwise they are. Again, you are proving that you aren't judging them as eyesores, but by other criteria which have nothing to do with how much or not they really are an eyesore.

That's on average over the whole UK. What is odd about it, apart from the fact that it supports an argument that you don't happen to like?

Too flat, too expensive, too English.

He knows a thing or two, but the problem is that his obvious bias means you have double check every single 'fact' that he purports to give. When you do, a great many of them turn out to be rather less than "the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

When it comes down to the cost of nuclear power, who are you going to believe ...

On the one hand we have an apparently independent city analyst who presumably makes such calculations regularly as part of his job, and he comes up with 16.6p/kWh.

On the other hand we have someone who has some knowledge of the business, but not necessarily the financial side of the business, has a history of bigoted, biased, paranoid, and quite often abusive posts, is a self-confessed member of a neo-nazi party, who is openly biased in favour of nuclear power, and has NEVER, despite repeated requests by people such as myself, laid out his calculations in such a way that their veracity can be independently checked, and he comes up with 10p or less.

The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullius in verba", which is often translated as "Take no-one's word for it", but I think a more accurate translation would be "(There is) nothing in words", or in modern parlance "Words mean nothing". Hence, I would prefer to do my own calculations, and if I did so would reproduce them here so that others could verify them, but do not have all the required facts and figures at my disposal. Until I do, I, for one, will only take the word of someone of whom I have no reason to suspect bias.

The first thing that springs to mind is that cars commonly have accidents, but perhaps more importantly wrt the current discussion, I note that, like most people exhibiting a pro-nuclear bias, you pluck a straw out of the air without any supporting calculations or creditable links.

When you're next in rural Scotland, try and look at the landscape with unbiased eyes, particularly from the immediate neighbourhood of wherever it is that you're staying. You'll probably see plenty of pylons, but may not see a turbine at all.

That would be exactly the same here, so doesn't really change anything.

That may not be exactly the same here, so might be different.

However, neither point is exactly an encouragement for those who support nuclear power, is it? Rather the reverse, I would say - it tends to suggest that the reactor will be even further behind schedule and even more over budget by the time it's completed, and what will that do to the unit cost of the electricity that it will produce?

But none of them are actively advertising their presence.

Most of the pylons are running through the countryside, not through the towns and villages. No closer than the wind turbines generally.

Most of the people on this group are, I'm sure, capable of separating their thoughts on the cost and reliability issues from their thoughts on the visual and aural intrusiveness. Wind turbines (as far as I am concerned) will become a very useful part of the mix when there is a sensible and efficient method of storing the energy for release when required. That will, however, never remove the problem of masses of large, moving objects on the skyline.

Again, they cannot be avoided - even if you are looking in another direction, their movement can catch your peripheral vision and automatically pull your attention to them.

SteveW

`Short of some new science that we are at present unaware of, I don't see this happening. Not on the scale we need, that is, unless the Aussies make their molten salt proposals work.

It is exasperatiing how short the memories of the pro-nuclear lobby are ...

No form of generation can be relied upon unless you have your own native supply of fuel, for nuclear fissile fuel we don't (whereas we do have some coal, oil, and gas). Worse still, as I've linked many times before, global supplies of said fissile fuel are predicted by none other than the World Nuclear Association to run out somewhere around 2025, and this finding is apparently accepted by no less a person than the former government Chief Scientist, Sir David King. If we committed today to build new nuclear reactors in the UK, the earliest they could probably come on line would be about 2018, so that's about 7 years' certainty of use out of a planned lifetime of

No sane man would choose to do this.

I would certainly hope so.

Even if it does push up the price of electricity, do you not think that the price of fossil fuel based power is going to climb rapidly and that renewables can never replace it? Even if nuclear does turn out more expensive than predicted, the alternatives are likely to rise in price even faster.

SteveW

Nor do turbines, to me at any rate, nor apparently to those with an independent view.

It's untrue and you know it. AIUI, there are laws about how close turbines can be to homes, but there are no such laws concerning other electrical hardware. The people who actually live in the countryside of this country live much closer to pylons and poles than to turbines.

It seems not, because when people who can be presumed to be independent are asked their opinion, their opinion agrees with my assessment, not yours.

Doesn't happen to me unless I'm close enough for them already to be an eyesore through their actual proximity.

They have ruined five National Parks in the Apennines. The horrid things ruin the peace and quiet, look dreadful, kill migratory birds and achieve nothing of value.

even molten salt is unlikely to be much better than 50% efficient.

In article , Java Jive scribeth thus

It didn't seem to be a problem, Pylons that is, until someone has put some in your back yard!..

Jesus. You want every bit of electrical infrastructure in the UK buried then?. These have been around for years everyone uses electricity it will cost an absolute fortune to bury the HV lines.

Why is it suddenly such a problem?. Someone has obviously built a line where you can see it have they not?.

If it's bothering you that much as they don't bother me, why aren't you complaining to parlyment or your MP, newspapers etc?.

Nope .. I don't see them as eyesores there're not the most beautiful of things but they do a job and are functional..

Well it seems to be a rather odd and pointless argument. Most Pylons metal or wooden were around before the advent of Windy Mills so what's the real problem?..

OK stay there then:)..

He's got the right idea on a lot of subjects like that..

Well you can pull those estimates/figures around quite a lot and come up with what you want can't you. This is what you pay "consultants" for;!..

Fine..

Well there are a lot of people around other than me who are looking at that sort of "tech" and I just hope they have a shade more of an optimistic outlook than you do else we'd still be up in the trees would we not. Course there will be problems and the challenge is to solve them!..

I was back there in Sept. last year and it did indeed look its pretty self thanks..

I must go Pylon hunting sometime;)..

In the meantime here is some interesting reading re renewables, they don't produce a lot and need the rain but are the lines carting this off to the network really that bad?..

In article , Java Jive scribeth thus

Thats rather unfortunate. Where is that and who was there first the Pylon or the houses?..