A “Lib Dem” minister just told Sky News he was approving new nuclear power stations to promote green jobs. If anybody ever votes for these lying bastards again I shall be disconsolate.
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The Earth isnt much of reactor, only a few watts per square meter are theorised to come from beneath the ground compared to a 150 or so from the sun (average day&night). And the core is slowly cooling, so the million tons of earth for every square meter of surface, actually makes a remarkably low amount of heat.
That image of a naturally radioactive earth is a PR fairytale, it is hardly radioactive at all, radioactivity is anyway as natural as cancer, in the realest sense.
As human potential is almost unlimited, it is possible to dream of safe nuclear power, as it is possible to dream of peaceful supportive economics. But safe nuclear is never going to come first, its not on the books to be built.
We might convince an idea of safe nuclear power, faithful that it is possible, spread the likelyhood of contamination thinly enough across the world to appear as insignificant in assessment charts…
Even on the measure of non-radioactive toxic chemistry, nuclear power plants are no doubt some of the most worst or most difficult to build and maintain without causing the nastiest kinds of pollution.
And the reaching arguments for safe nuclear power, just talk over the cleanest most straightforward possibilities. Wind, Tide and Solar.
Wind, Tide and Solar. No high security requirement, no leaps of faith, no intentional and unintentional uninhabitable zones, no nearby curious childhood leukemia rates to shrug off, etc.. Just known and plentiful self renewing clean reserves, all around us, to get on with harnessing and keeping fertile and clean.
Build majestic reservoirs, green the deserts, decorate the hills, develope estuaries and oceans. The only threat from these things are of clumsy aesthetics and the possibly of some unnecessary incompetent damage along the way. But better that happen (as it will) with a few wrong windmills and planes of mirrors, than more and more Chernobyls and Fukushimas.
Thanks Clark for that and for all your valued info. Good to see you back.
I heard a radio programme in which some old chap was talking about his longstanding campaign for the reuse of plutonium and he seemed convinced it was a viable process. I cannot now remember his name. The programme was either in the Material World or Costing the Earth series.
This is an item from Material World on nuclear waste storage following Cumbria CC’s decision to reject a £12bn!! underground store. I believe Romney Marshes was another suggestion. The Mad Men cometh!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21253673
More on MOX http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/03/sellafield-mox-plant-close
~~~
Caroline Lucas has just said her piece on Hinkley Point again in a question to Cameron who replied…right decision…no worries…everything in the garden is rosy..etc etc/
Now Gideon is on his feet announcing his further austerity measures. He is shouting. Useless. Should have stuck to towel folding at Selfridges.
Nuke processing also demands lots and lots of security and authorities to protect it doesnt it. Ideal for power freaks.
I linked to Adam Ingram earlier and Mk 77 weaponry. I could not sleep. Last night I had watched a film about what happened in Fallujah.
This is more on him. Tags – P Andrew, Lord Trefgarne, Thatcher’s defence procurement minister, BP and BAE and of course Bliar gets a mention.
Bomber release ‘will lead to contracts’
24 August 2009
Now that the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, has been freed, new defence contracts should begin to come into the UK, according to some observers.
Following years of sanctions, Libya’s defence equipment is said to be out of date and in need of major upgrades. One company being named as a potential beneficiary of this is BAE Systems, who Robin Cook once famously said had “the key to the garden door at Number 10”.
Some reports are claiming that MBDA Missile Systems, partly owned by BAE, recently signed a contract to supply Libya with anti-tank missiles. The former chief operating officer of MBDA Guy Griffiths went to Libya with Tony Blair in 2007.
We asked BAE to comment on this story but they didn’t come back to us.
Other recent developments include Prince Andrew co-hosting an event with the chairman of the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio in June at St James’ Palace, and a delegation to Tripoli in May led by The Libyan British Business Council, whose chairman is Lord Trefgarne, Margaret Thatcher’s former defence procurement minister.
It has also been revealed that Adam Ingram, who stepped down from his post of armed forces minister in 2007, is paid up to £25,000 a year from Argus Libya UK LLP, a company that specialises in seeking out commercial opportunities in Libya. Back In 2006, the Defence Export Services Organisation, which deals with arms exports at the Ministry of Defence, opened an office in Libya.
Another company being named among potential beneficiaries of the improved relations between Libya and the UK is BP, which recently won a £900m contract to drill wells in the Gulf of Sirte and Ghadames basins.
http://www.defencemanagement.com/news_story.asp?id=10487
Dr Adam Lucas from the University of Wollongong –
“Doubling the current nuclear capacity across the world by 2035 would mean building more than 600 new plants, but would only result in a 6.5% reduction in CO2 emissions on 1990 rates by that date. Tripling the current worldwide capacity by 2050 means building more than a thousand new plants, and would only reduce atmospheric CO2 loads by 12% to 20% on 1990 levels.”
“France is often held up as a model for nuclear energy development, as almost 80% of its electricity is generated from 59 nuclear power plants. But the reliability of its large-scale nuclear program has come under pressure from climate change. In the summer of 2003, French nuclear plants were unable to operate at design capacity due to a lack of cooling water, which contributed to major blackouts in continental Europe.”
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/nuclear-energy-a-panacea-for-climate-change/3049300#transcript
. . . .
Provided that they don’t consume water, there still might be a strong case for micro MSR type plants owned and operated by a government energy utility. At least they could be deployed faster than those ridiculously large behemoths that run over budget and time.
Water and energy supplies should be considered together. This is a link that comes from a site posted some time ago by Clark.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/10/the-energy-water-nexus/#more-1242
Crab, I’m in favour of developing renewable energy generation, but what do we do with the existing “spent” nuclear fuel, and the 112 tonnes (in just the UK) of existing plutonium? For decades, the establishment has recommended burying it, but despite tens of billions spent, has not found a single suitable site. I wouldn’t trust any site to safely retain these radiotoxic materials for hundreds of thousands of years in any case.
The only way of getting rid of these actinides is to put them in a reactor and fission them. Since we really should do that anyway, we may as well have electricity as a by-product.
Hi Clark,
I dont disagree with he logic, but i think it is best described as “easier said than done”
I recommend encasing/burying it for a few hundred years at least, and that can be done a hell of a lot easier than Egyptians building a pyramid.
Choose a site and build a large structure, store it in the center. Eventually we will have the technology, and more importantly the integrity to put it to safe use.
We are really really short on integrity at the moment, getting on with some clean honest industry is part of recovering some. Spinning and selling the next great hazardous klondike is what a certain kind of industrialists do, the kind who i least trust process hazardous waste.
Campaign for safe sensible futuristic nuclear and we’ll get more industrial nuclear. There is no real doubt. Maybe after a revolution of sorts, some safe distance afterward. We cant lead a clean energy revolution with a nextgen on the science and culture of nuclear power. Nuclear power should never have developed been beyond limited scientific experiments. But we know why it was. The cultural conditions have not improved. Everyone campaign for safe, least exclusive, technologies. Radioactive processing and power generation is for better days and ways than these. Put it away i say.
@ Mary, who wrote :
“Resident Dissident. No I do not think Davey is Jewish and nor was I suggesting it nor care. Stop your slurs.”.
OK, now we’be established that you’re not anti-Jewish could you please give us a concrete example or two of policies put forward by Ed Davey which could indicate that his loyalties lie with Israel rather with the UK as you suggested might be the case (cf. your post at 18h27 yesterday).
Thank you very much, Mary.
@ Mary at 09h31, who opines :
“Obama arrives in Israel on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war to plan more war against Syria and Iran at the Zionists’ bidding.”
The bit about “to plan more war” has aroused my curiosity. What is the basis for that rather serious charge?
Thank you.
Also at 09h31, Mary posts :
“PS Did you hear the German finance minister saying to the Cypriots ‘Your banks may never open again’! Coming to us and other European countries in the not too distant future??”
No, it is not coming to other European countries in any sort of future.
You need to read up a little on the development of the modern Cyprus economy and on the structure and weight of its banking sector.
Crab, sorry, I meant to say…
Yes, I agree.
I accept your point about integrity. I’m only in favour of prototyping MSRs at this stage, to see if they really can live up to the promise of destroying actinides, and storing these “wastes” is current policy in any case.
Jemand, yes, MSRs can operate without water because they run hot enough to use closed-loop helium turbines. But they still need to dispose of heat on the cooler side of the thermodynamic cycle, and to do that with air instead of water requires a bigger, more expensive heat exchanger.
Here is a answer to the worlds energy needs.
How to solve the worlds energy problem .By Heathcote Williams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTEld9AVpc&list=PLLM58ROhsS8OvM67p-huT_m3v9z8qqRf_&index=3
Or this
http://internationaltimes.it/the-moon/
Obama on first Israel trip as president vows ‘eternal’ alliance
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-21854164
I wonder how long their version of ‘eternity’ lasts? Amerika is going down and Israel, on whom it depends, will accompany it.
All off to Yad Vashem now. Toodle pip!
Oy, didn’t you go about knocking on doors telling people to vote for those bastards not so long ago even though all of us warned you not to. warned you exactly what they will do if they form a coalition?
anway, side issue. In the olden days when I was in Uni, one of my teachers was talking about ethics of engineering.
He told us in his olden days, he was the Engineer incharge of making a well known nuclear power station(Not going to mention it by name, else you will all know who he is).
Anyway, he said he deleted it from his CV so his grandchildren will never know he did that.
Another teacher worked on another nuclear powerstation. He was teaching us about management and communication. When he worked on his, the civil Engineers worked on the building, and the mechanical engineers worked on the reactor. While building it, they noticed the reactor was bigger than the building that was being built to house it.
If they can make such a fundamental mistake, just imagine all the other mistakes it is possible for them to make?
@Craig “If anybody ever votes for these lying bastards again I shall be disconsolate.”
What’s the alternative? The Tories? New Labour? The Lib Dems, like Churchill’s democracy, may be the worst except for all the others!
I can understand peoples repelance to Nuclear energy generation but nobody will accept the lights going out when our demand outstips supply. The power must be generated somehow, shail gas and wind farms are all being protested against as are Nuclear plants. That only leaves Coal and PV. Is that what everyone wants.
LOL Mr Murphy ‘apologosises’ to everyone under the sun for his office junior leaking the front sheet of the budget before Gideon had even squeaked a word of it. Murphy is the political editor of Lebedev’s second organ, the Evening Standard.
http://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/747257093.jpg?w=480&h=581
Joe Murphy @JoeMurphyLondon 59m
… 2/2 We are so sorry to the House of Commons, to the Speaker and to the Chancellor for what happened. We shall be apologosing to them
Joe Murphy Joe Murphy @JoeMurphyLondon 1h
I wish to apologise for a very serious mistake by the @EveningStandard earlier which resulted in our front page being tweeted. 1/2…
When you design a heating device in order to have additional purposes such as a bomb ingredients device or a job creation device or a profit making device or a heat dissipation device, then you will sacrifice economy to those other purposes.
I recently put my stolen car’s engine in my back garden. You don’t realise what a massive solid object it can be. They have conned us with labels of eco and renewable and with styling, into imagining that our personalised Victorian traction engines we call cars are little fairy, light-weight things.
When the lights or heating goes out we will get back in touch with reality, 1/ that we have wasted our resources and 2/ we have wasted a lot of human resources in not solving the problem of efficiency. Cars could have danger warnings like fags. Using your car results in death to the economy.
If there were restrictions, the ideas of governments profiting from fuel tax and making vehicles status symbols would go. At present we are addicts to oil.
More bad news for the environment and the planet.
March 20, 2013 2:33 pm
Budget 2013: Support for shale gas sector
By Guy Chazan
George Osborne said in his Budget that he would introduce a “generous new tax regime” for shale gas, part of efforts to transplant the North American shale boom to the UK.
Mr Osborne said the package of support for the UK shale gas industry included a new shale gasfield allowance, as well as other tax breaks.
In depth UK Budget 2013
The government will also produce technical planning guidance to provide clarity around planning for shale gas during the exploration phase, and launch proposals to allow local communities to benefit from shale gas.
The gas industry welcomed the changes, saying they would help shale gas in the early exploration phase. “Anything that brings down the cost of exploration will really help get the industry off the ground,” said Ken Cronin, head of UKOOG, the UK onshore operators’ group. “And the quicker we can get the exploration phase done, the quicker we can work out how much of our gas is technically recoverable.”
Supporting documents said the UK shale gas industry had the potential to “provide new employment and support UK energy security, benefiting the economy, taxpayers and communities”.
The documents said that by the end of the year, the government would produce guidance for the industry to ensure the planning system was properly aligned with the licensing and regulatory regimes.
The Budget also provided clarity on tax relief for decommissioning costs, a key concern for the North Sea oil industry. It said the government would enter into contracts known as decommissioning relief deeds with oil and gas companies to provide certainty on the relief they will receive when decommissioning assets, and added that the first contracts with industry would be signed later in the year.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca8ce446-9162-11e2-b839-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2O5nE4qn8
Dave lawton
I am sorry to have to say that your links amount to a collection of unsupported claims about ‘cold fusion’ (from the first post) and some impractical whimsical stuff from Heathcote Williams about wrapping the moon in solar panels (from the second)
It is also clear from your own website that you have very little scientific education. One example of drivel that any decent GCSE student would laugh at (from the light bulb section)
“The Scope picture on the left shows the Standard tungsten light bulb with no electromagnetic radiation.”
Honestly if you don’t know better than that……
Fusion has always seemed like the Unified field Theory or Hermeticism….out of reach….a fantasy. This very expensive project has come under fire for going over budget……http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
Is it a boondoggle, or a boon?
Clark; Molten Salt is intriguing, but I have a couple of layman-type questions;
Is the cost comparable? How about the lifespan? The key advantage is being able to dispose of the waste by throwing it into the salt, correct? When that crucible is full, what happens with the waste issue? The other advantage Is ‘vapors’…
Does that cover the advantages?
We might already have a solution to humanity’s future energy needs –
http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/
Jermand
I followed your link to a lot of unsupported assertions and highly speculative ideas. I also noted the name Dave Lawton. Tell me is this the very same Dave Lawton who doesn’t know that light is a form of electromagnetic energy? Am I supposed to take this stuff seriously?
@MarkU
It is also clear from your own website that you have very little scientific education. One example of drivel that any decent GCSE student would laugh at (from the light bulb section)
“The Scope picture on the left shows the Standard tungsten light bulb with no electromagnetic radiation.”
It`s a comparison Stupid.Have you ever built a LENR ?
I doubt it! Have you ever worked in real world of advanced Physics ? I also doubt that! My guess is you have read a few scientific books.
@ Mary :
Reminder : Ed Davey possibly more loyal to Israel than to the UK – basis for saying that? – concrete examples?
********
La vita è bella, life is good! (Habbabkuk says put up or shut up)
Dave Lawton
“Its a comparison stupid” is no excuse for writing scientifically illiterate drivel, no sane scientist would have written “tungsten light bulb with no electromagnetic radiation”. light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, a light bulb which does not emit electromagnetic radiation is not a light bulb.
If you want to be taken seriously then don’t write drivel.
Hi Abe Rene, the alternative is you, not any party that just acts on its vested interest supporters and their traditional dogma, just you standing up for a principled corner, an Independent that works with his community and for them.
pen nominations for county council elections is 25.March. Just look in your local pa[per and see the desperate pre election spending sprees on pothole repairs and community projects, making out that their generosity with our money will somehow be enough to vote for more of the same pain, less, not more local say in matters, less democratic accountability, not ‘being in it together’ with cabals making decisions.
Fraud in public local Government has reached 2.3billion, and no political party will change what they are thriving on. I have the local Conservative going round signing people up for postal votes when it is becoming clear and obvious that postal voting fraud and large scale ‘persuasions’ feeding the hundreds or fettling them is becoming the norm.
Its all very well to say oh we are loosing this and that and we can’t do anything about it, when we can, when we don’t want to do anything about it, would be more closer to the truth.
@MarkU is no excuse for writing scientifically illiterate drivel, no sane scientist
Why don`t you reply to my question,that makes me think your just full of BS. Also you are very stupid to jump to the conclusion to assume that I`am a scientist when I`m not .So get you facts right before you start slagging people off.
I agree that we should start up, or join a research consortium that develops and builds a MSR reactor, taking note of the multiplicity of role’s this device could tackle.
I am also very smitten with fluidbed gas-plasma plants that have been developed by APP and Machiels, with such advances made in recycling and syngas production, with no emissions and possible 70% heat recovery from material, ending up with inert plasmaroc, with applications in the building industry.
These modern plants in conjunction with enhanced landfill mining, is technology that has even a market in China, where air pollution and waste is a great limitation to their life’s.
Incinerators should not be build anywhere, never mind in the main wind direction of Kings Lynn and West Winch, they are inefficient jobs burners. Nuclear power stations are cash cows. I will never agree to any price that is being haggled out in advance, not one Watt of it.