Seems the retro fad continues - sail power

[Rod Speed]

No such animal.

Fantasy

[Rod Speed]

Name one. ALL you need is the carbon, stupid.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well then stop dissing them. Sour grapes innit?

[Tim Streater]

I think Andrew is also overlooking the 10,000 cargo ships that were sunk in WW1 and WW2 by U-boats, and the 1100 U-boats that we sank. None of which have turned out to cause a pollution problem, AFAIK. Plus all the other warships, of course.

[blacky]

Ignorant lie with Norway.

[Sam Plusnet]

Back then, the problem with operating both engines and sails was 'the overheads' (literally in this case) the rigging made access for loading and unloading difficult, and it needed extra crew to 'operate' all those sails and maintain the sails & rigging.

I assume modern systems would need neither rigging nor extra crew.

[Sam Plusnet]

And for many decades, the published mpg figures for IC engined cars assumed you were travelling downhill with a following wind (not actually, but I think you know what I mean.)

Everyone fudges the figures.

[Sam Plusnet]

We ought to find some way of getting usable energy out of those 11+ billion people. Maybe Soylent Green took a too limited approach.

[alan_m]

Today it's the range figures for EVs - and 97% of 21 people surveyed agree.

[Rod Speed]

In fact the Club Med 2 does have stays for the masts

does need lots of crew because its a cruise ship.

Sail ia just not feasible for a container ship

[Spike]

The Marshall Plan provided plenty of money, we spent it on nuclear weapons and the NHS.

[Andrew]

You mean the cost to society when the highly specialised plastics used to make blood collection and processing bags is no longer available, forcing the NBTS to turn the clock back 50+ years and resume using glass bottles with rubber and glass tubing for the taking and giving sets .

I remember those days. My first job was with the regional transfusion centre that was, even in 1971, still using glass bottles and rubber taking sets for 10% of its donations.

You are utterly clueless if you think the NHS and all its associated supply chains can manage without 'plastic' from oil.

[Andrew]

Dohh, And how many of them were nuclear-powered ?.

[Andrew]

The EU has invested a lot of money moving the reactors from those ex-soviet subs to a safe location where they can be monitored. They are no longer 'rotting away'.

Uranium is not a problem. It's the highly dangerous and long- lived by products in spent fuel and containment systems that are the problem.

[Tim Streater]

They were full of oil, petrochemicals, armaments, explosives, all of which might be imagines to cause pollution. Adding 100 tons (say) of uranium to the

4 billyun tons already in the oceans is, errm, a drop in the ocean.

[Chris Hogg]

Never heard that before. Do you have a link?

Depends on what you mean by 'long lived'. AIUI the by-products in spent fuel are not _that_ long lived. A hundred or two years, certainly, but they do decay to safe levels eventually.

[Rod Speed]

Fantasy, those plastics will always be available. All you need is carbon atoms and other atoms which are available from other than oil.

Fantasy

You are utterly clueless about what those plastics can be made from instead.

[Pancho]

I think the point is that we can manufacture plastics, polyurethane, etc from plant oils.

[The Natural Philosopher]

There is nothing special about 'plastic from oil' .You are utterly clueless if you think that a simple long chain hydrocarbon can't be produced from an organic feedstock that hasn't sat in the earth a million years, but was grown a year ago instead.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh dear.