On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:12:02 GMT someone who may be Mike Scott wrote this:-
Historically such research has always been close enough to producing usable machines not to cut off funding, but not close enough for questions to be asked about when the breakthrough will be made.
On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:09:45 +0000 someone who may be The Natural Philosopher wrote this:-
Ah, a change from, "anyone who doesn't agree hasn't studied the facts for long enough", approach to the, "anyone who disagrees with me is wrong", approach.
Not in that particular posting.
I will rebut anything that needs rebutting, at a time and in a method of my choosing.
I think however in real terms real progress has been made.
But the size of the problem has become perceptibly greater as well.
Instead ofg how dp we contain a small H bomb, its now a series of smaller priblems that are just as horrendous. It ca be contained, by magnets. But its unstable. We can get stability if we find the right shape and feedback. etc.
One is almost tempted to sy 'why not stick an H-bomb underground, and then tap of the heat for a year, and then set of another one'
I am fully willing to have my mind changed by FACTS but not by religious opinion, or wholly qualittaive 'surely it musts be trues' or 'the guardian says'
Well I am glad you feel that the last post did not need rebutting. I take you agree with me then that in the overall context of preserving what we call civilzation, we have no option but to build loads of nuclear sets and windmills are basically unable to do the job?
Umm no that really wasn't the problem. Not that Zeta was intended to produce electricity anyway since it was just a research rig for the problem of containment of fusion.
Mm. I don't get my electricity that cheap. more like £62...but if its replacing GAS of course, thats a fair crack.
I make that an average output of 35W/sq meters
That' actually quite GOOD .
let's see..about 2KWh per day, So I could save that much by..mmm. in winter I need about 5KW continuous to heat the place if its freezing, so putting on a jumper and living at 16C instead of say 19C would save about 15% of that..say 750W..or about 540 kwh per month.
How much does a set of thermal underware and a wooly pully costs? cant be over 100 quid a year. OTOH the electricity/gas would be cheaper. Certainly for a family. Dang., there goes another theory. Its cheaper to heat the house than buy thick jumpers..
What about simply NOT watching TV..well there's a 100 quid plus license gone for a start, and 70W for 4 hours a say. 365 days of the year.
Thats 102Kwh saved. Except dang it, I'd need to replace that 70W in some other way...Ditto CFL lightbulbs. You gotta admit it, when it comes to all these popular green ideas, solar panels ain't the worst by a long chalk. I guess windmills on yer roof have to be as crap as it gets.
y'know, the best bet has simply got to be signing up for every brochure you can find, ans using a special name like 'Mr Freenergy' and simply sorting your mail every day and putting all those straight into a woodburner. Along with as many free supermarket plastic bags, and egg cartons and anything else you can find.
Sod the dioxins. We are saving the planet aren't we?
How long it will take to get a commercial fusion reactor is purely a matter of funding. I believe the total UK budget for fusion research is ~14m per annum. Compare that to the subsidies that go to wind power, which are of the order of 100s of millions - projected to be 1 billion by 2010, and the number gets lost in rounding errors. When fusion eventually produces power, it will be one of the best investments society has ever made.
By the way, fusion fuel produces about 10,000,000 times the energy of fossil fuels per kg.
If you do the calculations assuming that no energy is being added into the core then the Earth would cool down in about 10-30 million years.
The fact that it seems to have been staying rather hot is down to some extra energy begin generated in the core.
I have not done the calculations or found the links but the debate seems to be between whether the energy is derived from radioactive of heavy elements or whether there are (relatively) high density pockets of fissile elements allowing for some naturally occurring reactors.
I agree Mary but I was trying to show that your idea that the problem arose from poor insulation was not the case.
Going back to the original post in this thread; it was about an elderly gentleman that had been sold a solar heating panel with no recourse to canceling the agreement after a large deposit had been taken.
I described how a similar thing had happened to my father and worse it didn't even contribute to his heating, because there were a number of things wrong with the installation and how it was used.
So to my mind there were three problems, it was a hard sell and once the sale was made there was no interest in helping the customer use it properly, it was too expensive to make a decent return on the investment ( but my father may not have minded that) and the equipment was not matched with the gas central heating system.
Again referring to the original post I gave the opinion that it did not add its cost or any value to the house.
I've no prejudices against renewable energy, I work in the field, but I see no reason to promote firms that are the follow on bandwagon to dubious double glazing installers.
I have no idea. I was merely making the point that fossil fuels won't stop 'overnight'.
As fossil fuels rise in price then all other forms of energy are promoted. (Provided they can actually save/produce energy).
What's really weird/sad is that if I had to place a bet on which fuel will move back into the spot light, I'd reckon that coal will be the most obvious choice. Possibily reprocessed into gas and/or oil for convenience. No matter how much noise is made about this it will simply happen because it's there, it's possible and it's economic. Unless of course some sort of holocaust/extinction event occurs first.
Nuclear (fission) will of course be an option, even in democracies govts just do what they want to anyway, so as soon as they see it's a winner (rather than merely a front for their military Pu production) they'll do it even if most people object.
Hard cases make bad laws, I believe that there are more good companies than bad ones. It's up to an individual (aided by his/her family and friends if s/he's not confident) to make decisions and not rush into things.
We've never been approached by a company selling anything 'green'. We thought long and hard about investing in our dhw solar system and we certainly haven't been disappointed. There was no hard sell at all, on the contrary, the company explained what might be seen as drawbacks and bent over backwards to answer every question.
When we asked a local company about wind power they said that we didn't live in a suitable area for one and couldn't recommend it.
Indeed so. However IME when dealing with the far simpler requirement of setting up a conventional heating system the combination of user misunderstanding, incompetent installation and inadeqaute design and broken controls is a large proportion of /all systems/.
The situation that AJH describes is absolutely typical of type of error that users bring on themselves. With a solar assisted HW system the possibility for errors are greater still.
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