Green will cost.

[child of Thor]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4256011.stm

So are you ready to pay the price of a more enviromental friendly policy? In the uk we may have no choice on the matter.

[RGBVideo]

Wtf is "green energy"? Energy harnessed from green grass?

[Dinner]

The cheapest way would be to folllow France and Japan and go nuclear. Solar isn't a good choice in a cloudy country and wind needs lots of big open spaces which are hard to find in the UK. That means those two wil remain niche players while others like geo-thermal are totally unfeasable in the UK. I doubt there are rivers big enough to make hydrodams and even if there were the UK enviro nazis would freak out at the idea.

Nuclear is the way to go.

[Starchild]

Originally posted by Oerdin
The cheapest way would be to folllow France and Japan and go nuclear. Solar isn't a good choice in a cloudy country and wind needs lots of big open spaces which are hard to find in the UK. That means those two wil remain niche players while others like geo-thermal are totally unfeasable in the UK. I doubt there are rivers big enough to make hydrodams and even if there were the UK enviro nazis would freak out at the idea.

Nuclear is the way to go.

Like our vast coastline? Most wind farms are being planned off shore.

[RGBVideo]

Great, that's gonna be cheap.

And it'll take only really small amounts of energy to create such things.

[Starchild]

Sarcasm is unbecoming when wielded by an amature of the art.

[Last Conformist]

Is the spelling reminicent of "immature" intentional?

[Starchild]

*zen like silence*

[RGBVideo]

Sarcasm is unbecoming when wielded by an amature of the art.

Does that mean you don't have any counter-points?

If you're going to dip those plants on to North Sea, it means that not only you're going to spend a large quantity of the energy you gain from those to transform it to the places where you need, you're also going to have to fix them something like every 5 years because of the bad weather there.

My guess is that you'd be wasting 3 to 4 times more energy on creating and maintaining to those plants than gaining from them. Why do you think it's so expensive? It certainly doesn't require any manpower as supervisors (okay, I was lying, yes it does; but my point is that it requires much less operators than, say, coal plants do) when it's upkeeped, unlike normal power plants.

[Mr. Harley]

The greens also went ape-s**t over the French solution to the nuclear waste problem. They vitrify it in long, pointed cylinders (essentially mix it with a glass-type material into a solid). The cylinders are streamlined, and you drop them into an ocean trench. I wa first incensed by the headlines, "French ocean dumping of nuclear waste." Then I found out the facts, and disliked intensely being manipulated that way.

The cylinders drop down several miles and bury themselves quite deep in the ooze. Please note this is on the lower plate of the subduction zone, i.e. it's going to end up in the earth mantle. The greens argue we don't know what goes on 75 plus feet in deep abyssel ooze, which is an anaerobic cold environment that is a biological wasteland.

The other idea that got them incensed over nuclear waste disposal was burying it inside the pre-Cambrian shield on the tribal lands of one of the native American groups in Canada. All kinds of charges of Environmental Racism, etc. were leveled. The formation has been stable for 500+ million years. PRE-Cambrian, for god's sake. They are as bad as our local creationists.

[RGBVideo]

Re: Disposal methods.

The other idea that got them incensed over nuclear waste disposal was burying it inside the pre-Cambrian shield on the tribal lands of one of the native American groups in Canada

This is much better idea than just dumping it in the Ocean and wishing that mother nature's gonna create dust (or ooze) on it to bury it deep enough (or did I misunderstood the article you described, they just dropped those cylinders to deep waters, right?). We're using the same method, digging holes deep enough into the Baltic plate and leaving the waste there in neatly organised piles.

[child of Thor]

Originally posted by Oerdin
edit....

Nuclear is the way to go.

well Nuclear would have been the way to go in the uk......ten years ago. Apparantly we've left it too late now, as most of our ageing nuclear power stations are due to be mothballed over the next decade(being in service longer than they should), and no new ones have been planned!
We're going to be faceing an energy shortfall in the next few years, 'green' energy isnt cost/productive enough in its current roll out.
Its one of the reasons i've been doing research into how to produce my own power(que visions of coT household all on treadmills a few hours a day ) in the future.

and why i keep posting links to this place in these kind of discussions - they are good people and give free info+advice on becoming a more 'green' energy userhttp://www.cat.org.uk/index.tmpl?refer=index&init=1

[RGBVideo]

well Nuclear would have been the way to go in the uk......ten years ago. Apparantly we've left it too late now, as most of our ageing nuclear power stations are due to be mothballed over the next decade(being in service longer than they should), and no new ones have been planned!

My guess is that you're going to do like we're doing because of hippie influences: Dance on your moral high ground of not using much nuclear power while buying >5% of your power from neighbours producing power from much less safe nuclear reactors

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc


The other idea that got them incensed over nuclear waste disposal was burying it inside the pre-Cambrian shield on the tribal lands of one of the native American groups in Canada. All kinds of charges of Environmental Racism, etc. were leveled.

And completely justified, especially given the history of what has been done to many reserves in these situations. There is a reserve near where I live (on the cambrian shield) where there was a sulfur processing plant. The unused sulphur was simply dumped on the open ground in giant yellow piles. During the supposed "regreening" effort that was done in the region (which was sparked by the crazy histerical greens of the 70s ), they simply dug holes and dumped the sulphur in it, so that it was out of sight. The government made no qualms about their objective and explicitely said they where restoring the aesthetic quality of the land (as opposed to actually restoring the damage done) and now the sulphur mixes into the soil and they still have problems with sluphuric dust burning holes in clothes that are hung to dry, and the soles of their shoes being corroded by the soil.

And then there was also an actual uranium mine, in the same place. When it was in opperation, it dumped a great deal of waste into the river (as did the sulphur plant, I might add) and to this day there has not been one single study done to measure the contamination in the area, despite pleas from the community for there to be one. They have a high rate of cancer and birth defects, probably due to living in an industrial dump, but the government won't study the damage done, and when pushed enough to clean it up, will simply bury it out of sight (and out of mind) rather than actually fix it.

[Sikander]

You can't count on wind or solar for more than a small percentage of your electrical needs in any case, as both generate power on a sporadic basis in sporadic measure. What are you going to do for the other 90% of energy that you need on calm evenings?