Interesting blog on fracking

[Steve Firth]

Yes and all the oil will run out in 1978.

[Steve Firth]

Don't top post, it makes the baby Jesus cry.

[SteveW]

There are 200 years reserves of U-235 at current usage levels. Breeder reactors can use U-238, of which there is 99 times as much. These have not been perfected for civil use, but have long been used for military purposes.

SteveW

[Java Jive]

'Rather'?! Congratulations, you have just won the prize for the understatement of the year !-)

I have no idea whether the pylon or the houses came first, but it's Tyndrum, in Scotland, in, would you believe, the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park! What has happened here is that the park was only recently created, and the pylon pre-dated its creation - otherwise I hope we can take it for granted that the pylon just wouldn't be there.

The town has also recently been the centre of a heated c>

[Steve Firth]

And you put so much effort into proving it.

[Java Jive]

I've always hated them, but not seen fit to mention it until others started going on and on about turbines. In the interests of balance, I then thought it time to mention them, because in everyday rural reality they are so much greater an eyesore.

There was a massive campaign against it all half a century or go, with famous people wanting them buried then. Consider how different things would be now had they succeeded! Yes, it would have taken a lot longer to do and been massively more expensive, but it would have created jobs, have preserved our countryside, given us a more reliable system, and who now in 2013 would be bemoaning the cost of it 50-60 years ago?

No, there is nothing new since I moved in. The simple truth is that in many rural parts of the UK generally, Scotland in particular, they have ALWAYS been a devastating eyesore.

I will if anything is planned here that would be a worse eyesore than already exists.

You just can't seem to get it! Their functionality is utterly irrelevant to how much of an eyesore they are!

The real problem is that it is absurd to complain about wind turbines when pylons and other electrical hardware constitute a much greater eyesore right on the doorstep of rural communities. It is very much the complaint of townies who only see what they drive past.

Eh! Do you really mean to applaud the fact that many of his posts are less than "the whole truth and nothing but the truth"? Are you actually in favour of his misleading people?

Don't you think it somewhat irrational to denigrate what this particular one has said when you are not in a position to actually contradict it with your own estimate, and when you have no particular reason to suspect him of bias or other malware.

So it's pie in the sky as usual then. If I or harry made such a bland statement about any vaguely green-tinged technology, almost everyone else in the ng would immediately jump down our throats, but apparently it's alright to hype nuclear technology without a sensible fact or figure in sight.

Already seen it thanks, and yes they are.

[Java Jive]

Sorry Steve, but that's just bollocks:

The World Nuclear Association's own figures suggest that uranium ore may run out as early as about 2025. This is accepted in a report authored by former Chief Scientist Sir David King:

(p8 pdf) "Using a uranium reserves figure of 6.3MteU (which the report determines as the amount of ?reasonably assured and inferred uranium resources?), it shows that used in LWRs, these uranium reserves would be consumed by the end of 2023." ... and ... (p24 pdf) "the reserves of uranium is not a problem, but extracting it at a reasonable cost and with acceptable environmental impacts would be a challenge. In particular, the use of poorer grade ores using energy provided by fossil fuels would increase the emission of carbon dioxide and decrease the effectiveness of nuclear as a low carbon technology."

Nevertheless, the UK has chosen to build >

[Bill Taylor]

In those days most people accepted developments with little objection. Authority knew best, and they benefitted society as a whole. Now anything will be objected to by someone and they'll make as much noise about it as they can.

I've always found pylons visually objectionable, but so are wind turbines in quantity.

How about The Pylons by Stephen Spender?

[tony sayer]

In article , Java Jive scribeth thus

Well I ask because I looked that up on Google maps. Now unless there is more than the one village of that name which was the same as in the JPEG naming, there only seems to be a few main roads, some cart tracks the odd mobile phone mast, some 11 kV overhead lines an odd LED type road sign but nothing else.

Those pylons as depicted are 400 kV ones and carry a lot of power and I did wonder quite what that type would be doing in such a sparsely populated area, not just the local area but that would be carrying a LOT of power and from where to where up there?..

Now unless I'm very much mistaken that line doesn't seem to exist there?.

Can you see it as I cannot?.

There is or should be a smaller line a bit to the north of that carrying the output of a Hydro electric scheme but its not that size....

Not the best map but should illustrate ..

[charles]

No, I don't think you can.

[Steve Firth]

You have to be joking. There were plenty of objections to pylons in the 50s and 60s. It even featured in Giles cartoons around 1963 I think.

ah, 1965.

[Java Jive]

You were right to raise the question, because, prompted by you, I couldn't see anything on Google Maps either! So I asked myself what could have gone wrong, and, as the pic was originally from a page about Dalmally, I reasoned that probably the picture had been misnamed, probably due to some confusion or other on the part of the original photographer, or someone using it since.

So I looked in Dalmally, and I reckon it's actually where the satellite dish marker is here. All the details that I checked fitted perfectly:

BTW, Dalmally is not far down the road west from Tyndrum, which probably expla>

[Java Jive]

[dennis]

How does that fit in with the fact we already have enough fissile material stockpiled to last us several decades?

[The Other Mike]

You appear to be missing the obvious, cable buried underground *does not* last forever. Existing cables such as those installed in the 60's and 70's have around a 40 - 50 year life some being derated very significantly towards the end of their asset life. Newer ones installed from the 90's onwards are expected to last 50 - 60 years and possibly up to 75. The land around them has to remain sterile, no builidng and limited agriculture or be placed in tunnels with water cooling or forced air. There is also massive disruption to roads and farmland when it requires replacing. It cannot be easily upgraded as has happened with newer overhead line conductors. A restringing on an overhead line can be simply and quite quickly done, often with little more than access to the pylons and an area to position the cable reels and tensioning equipment. More time is spent erecting protective scaffolding over roads houses and railways than actually restringing. Conductor spacers can also be replaced 'live' Underground cables can fail at any point so 100% access is needed along the entire cable run length. Maybe your grand scheme is advocating cable tunnels for all routes? Is this going to be the first multi trillion pound project in history?

You'd expect more load in urban areas, bulk supply points in large cities are often in the middle of urban areas, the only practical way to get a supply to them is underground.

Three times? You lucky lucky bastard.

Skye 1656 km2 Population 10000 (from wikipedia)

So about the population of a small market town spread over an area 30% that of Greater London.

You cannot expect that to be undergrounded. *Ever* not even with the SNP's famous 'unlimited' resources.

The wind blows, so what? It's often as strong over the Pennines and South Wales as it is in Scotland.

[The Other Mike]

In the UK there have been a few partial collapses of conductors, the odd failure of tower arms and insulator strings, but not iirc any where the entire tower was brought down.

[The Other Mike]

No one really minded paying for waste heat being lost up the stack at 4p a unit delivered. Now we have to subsidise the parasites extorting up to 50p a unit when system demand is at its lowest.

[The Other Mike]

Your source for this being ??????

[The Other Mike]

Pixie Dust exists.

[The Other Mike]

Source??

Are you disputing OFGEM and renewable UK's figures?

Source?