Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
Collapse
X
-
- Mar 2008
- 20914
- The House with the Golden Windows
- Fast falling out of love for football.
- WasPlain Hobnobs
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
Would these "namby-pamby environmentalists" © Jim Henson / Sam the Eagle be the same people opposing the building of coal-fired power stations?
Where, exactly, is it suggested we get our electricity from in the future if neither of these are available?
Certainly shouldn't be from gas any more (not that gas should have been burnt for electricity generation in the first place) as that artifificially inflates the price for the consumer market.
Wind farms, tidal barrages - all well and good - but it won't meet total demand - and that can only be met by a balance of different generation methods.
And sorry kids, that means nuclear, fossil, and to piss off the nimby brigade, wind farms too.
-
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
Guy Potger wrote:
Where, exactly, is it suggested we get our electricity from in the future if neither of these are available?
Barring that, knock around the rural areas for a waterfall, on the scale of Niagara, that hasn't been noticed yet and harness it for hydro-electricity.
Comment
-
Guest
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
Linked to years ago on here, and worth linking to again.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/
Comment
-
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
Guy Potger wrote:
Would these "namby-pamby environmentalists" © Jim Henson / Sam the Eagle be the same people opposing the building of coal-fired power stations?
Where, exactly, is it suggested we get our electricity from in the future if neither of these are available?
Certainly shouldn't be from gas any more (not that gas should have been burnt for electricity generation in the first place) as that artifificially inflates the price for the consumer market.
Wind farms, tidal barrages - all well and good - but it won't meet total demand - and that can only be met by a balance of different generation methods.
And sorry kids, that means nuclear, fossil, and to piss off the nimby brigade, wind farms too.
Nuclear fuel sources are also going to get more and more scarce and again it's relying on a fuel source from another country, just like oil. So once we've denuded the planet of those, what else can we use?
Comment
-
Chernobyl - 23 years on...
There's a good book, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, showing the maths of all this, available online, by David J. MacKay, a very plain-speaking Cambridge physicist.
Here's the synopsis:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/synopsis.pdf
And the full book's available free at www.withouthotair.com
Basically, coal and nuclear won't be good enough in the long-term, but to get enough energy from renewables we need to make radical changes to both the amount of energy we consume (reduce massively), and the amount of intrusion we're willing to allow (e.g. acceptance of truly massive wind farms).
One of the more interesting options he looks at involves covering world deserts with solar panels.
Comment
Comment