OT: grid upgrade?

around 90%.

There will be charging losses as well - fast charged batteries get quite warm.

Except that they are ultimately generating the energy from fission of U233 bred from the thorium. It might only be 8 grams, but at end of fuel life you have 8 grams of fission products, and they most certainly won't all be alpha emitters. The beta is easy to shield, of course; the gamma and neutrons less so.

Here is another point from the web:

"Irradiated Thorium is more dangerously radioactive in the short term. The Th-U cycle invariably produces some U-232, which decays to Tl-208, which has a 2.6 MeV gamma ray decay mode. Bi-212 also causes problems. These gamma rays are very hard to shield, requiring more expensive spent fuel handling and/or reprocessing."

Another alternative is the atomic battery:

OK, thanks, I'll check. FYI 'my' figures, units and all, were from the source you snipped:

I just spent a few minutes walking around a friend's house - just the kitchen, basement and lounge. At current prices she'll be saving about £2 per week by switching off and only using when needed 2 appliances. And she's a self-proclaimed 'green'.

I've been on the edge of this debate in the university sector for 20-odd years and it does get me how the focus (in literature/teaching/research, the running of estates, and banter) is on growth and consuming more for an apparently benign impact. We could consume *far* less with minimal - postive even - change to our lives.

Yup :-)

It all gets a bit marginal when we start replacing high power old stuff for leaner new. From cars to appliances.

Thanks, interesting. My sister's just had a major air heat pump installation - £10k after the grant I think. Her husband's a 'proper' environmental scientist but I do find it difficult to figure out what informs decisions like this. Anyways, it's a big place and so far so good. But early days and I'll be watching what happens . . .

...

I wonder how much better a BEV is than petrol if you live in a very hilly area where you can regenerate?

That's really not very much though is it! It's worth saving *if* there is no (or little) inconvenience as a result, i.e. there's a cost benefit analysis.

What are these 2 appliances? I can think of little in our kitchen which takes much (if any) power when not in use. The microwave and cooker have digital clocks which run all the time but that's about it (and it would be a bit of a pain to reset the clock every time they're turned on).

There is an energy cost to oil production. Saudi oil is (or was) close to the surface and high quality, whereas North Sea oil is an engineering marvel that it can be got at all, and it's comparatively poor quality.

No-one would extract oil if it cost more energy than it gained, but what is very difficult to find out is just how much it does cost.

Hyperbolically, if it takes nine gallons of fuel to produce ten gallons, you're quids in and can sell the excess gallon, but the true environmental cost of that one gallon is ten times what the buyer might be led to believe.

I'd like to see such a comparison between say fracking and drilling.

But it is the same basic "thermopile" physics as in the SNAP power supplies used in space probes.

Note this quote:

"The battery can be used to power devices and machines of any size, from aircraft and rockets to electric vehicles and smartphones".

You can't get around the laws of nature. If your nuclear car battery can give you, say, a year of motoring it will have to contain a *lot* of radioactive material, and good luck shielding that with

"multiple layers of synthetic diamonds, one of the hardest materials to damage or break".

Another media story today carrying the latest "fusion breakthrough" from an Oxford University spin-off. Can't find the media link but it is these people

That's just me and a couple of minutes - £100/year, maybe 7%.

An old BT HD TV box, and a dehumidifier set on constant/50% in the dry basement (as it should be with that thing clattering on). Also 3 CFL bulbs, and a chest freezer virtually empty (there's another freezer in the kitchen). I let the halogen spots go - 9 of them. I wouldn't be suprised if a good deal more could be saved.

I've said she's 'green' - her daughters, in their 30s, are vegan and visit regularly. They all seem completely unaware.

It's a feature of veganism.

I've seen figures and was quite surprised how high the flux is, but ICBA to go searching now.

I can, though, offer another story. Back in the 1970's when the CEGB had a proper research department there were several initiatives to look at renewables (including waves, windmills, and solar).

Real experiments were done from the Marchwood site on the Solent (I'm not sure exactly where the drilling was done, but it was into a region of recognised "hot rocks" in the Southampton basin).

IIRC they relied on a degree of fracking to improve the contact area. But they concluded that it was not a particularly good long-term option because after ~ 50 years they would have cooled down the "reservoir" so that it was no longer productive. I think this was with district heating in mind, certainly not to extract steam for turbines as done in Iceland.

If it's like our boxes, it'd need to be left on for firmware and programme guide updates, recording (and playback from other devices). Even if none of that applies, it's a pain to go into a kitchen, switch the TV and box on and wait for the box to boot up, before you can switch channels and get on with what you actually want to do there.

I presume that it does not have a humidity sensor, so that it would only turn on when actually needed.

Pretty efficient, although slow to come to full brightness, whch does tend to lead people to leaving them on if they are going to go in and out of the room a number of times in the evening.

If it's like ours, the second freezer is needed for anything new that comes in, as otherwise it takes a lot of re-arranging of items in the drawers to fit things in and even then, they may not fit.

We only have one halogen spot left and that only because the PSU for the

Our biggest consumers are the 24/7 of our home server - used to keep our email, music and other files available in or out of the house (including by our eldest son while at university), so it does need to stay on and instantly accessible; PCs (the living room one and those of the two younger children are on all evening, either in use of will be again very soon); Set-top boxes, but they need to be on for the reasons mentioned earlier and because they share the HDD of one box and (if necessary) share their tuners if a box is recording too much; and the electric oven(s) being left on by mistake.

North Sea oil is expensive to recover, but much of it is of very high quality - light, so easily processed into petrol and diesel - and low in sulphur, which together make it very valuable.

It is very difficult to work out and varies according to the base oil and the products required - originally oil was used for lubrication and lighting and petrol was a waste product (sometimes used to power the plant, but mainly thrown away. These days, processes are generally pushed to produce as much petrol as possible and some of the other fractions are re-processed to get even more petrol out.

I'd expect fracking to be cheaper, as it is (mainly) onshore.

Eh? North sea oil (Brent Crude) is the standard others are judged by.

She didn't know it did record, and agreed on the boot-up. She uses Netflix etc far more though, via a dongle.

It does - set to 50%. Far too low IMHO.

They seem to be on all the time - 14W vs. 3W LED? It all helps . . .

OK - just making the point that there might be possibilities. A mate just bought another fridge to, and I quote, store oat milk. Long life Tetrapacked oat milk.

I've set my server to switch off at 1am, and use a WoL app when needed (mainly only in the evenings - so it's only on a few hours a day). Saves about £40 a year for a bit of inconvenience (and hopefully not premature failure!).

Unfortunately I am up at about 07:00 during the week and my son in university is often working through the night on his projects (or getting back late from nights out) until 05:00 or even later, so it's a) not worth shutting the server down and b) not worth the extra risks of it failing to boot back up.

Or a sheet of paper.