U.K. takes down data showing footprint of nuclear vs. “renewables”

Ah, but it seems Fukushima was only a disaster in the media. Check this out: http://www.cfact.org/2013/10/12/physicist-there-was-no-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/ And if nuclear power plants can get off this easy in earthquake- and tsunami-prone Japan, then nuclear should be a viable option almost anywhere. We Have The Technology.

Question is what kind of nuclear will that be. There are 4th and 5th gen reactors that don’t need water for cooling and of those 2 or 3 can burn up the waste generated by the others.

Some will claim that because we managed to out men on the moon we can make renewables viable. I say that’s like trying to put men on the moon with a sling shot!

One thing is sure, twenty years from now Solar (of all flavors) will be far cheaper than it is now and far more efficient; plus the equipment being installed today will still be in operating safely…

The same cannot be said for nuclear, unless some amazing breakthrough is made and I believe the odds on that are slim to none… Time will tell.

More relevant info:

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/04/europes-fossil-fuel-exit-30-fossil-fuel-power-capacity-close-2017-ubs-analysts-project/

Solar panels should go on roofs, hogging no land, and on-shore wind farms can double as (hemp for blades?) crop fields. Nuclear reactors are much more efficient, but only needed where renewables don’t suffice, eg in space probes and submarines.

With all due respect to those reading anything i have previously and just now posted, my apologies. Sometimes one must throw the gauntlet down when confronted with arrogant pups. The internet was suppulosed to be a venue for knowledgeable exchange of knowledge – back when I punched twisted pair and spent time ducking asbestos filled steam pipes in order to bring knowledge to the world. Do have the balls to ask about that in an online debate with video from your mother’s basement or funded eco-office.

By the way, your real name is?

Austria gets its right. Says will sue if EU regulator clears giant subsidies for UK #nuclear plant plan http://reut.rs/1EgtUEq #NukeFreeCal

France is reducing their own Nuclear Energy reliance but are happy to make the UK pay huge Energy rates!

France Decides to Reduce Reliance on Nuclear Power http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1010082-france-decides-to-reduce-reliance-on-nuclear-power/ via @epochtimes

And even more Billion after to decommission old Risky ☢ Reactors!

Built in the 1950s to push forward the UK’s nuclear energy ambitions, Dounreay is now at the centre of complex £1.6bn demolition job.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-29535032

Seen This:

Sell-out on UK nuclear plan exposes Commission to legal challenges

Unprecedented public funding for Hinkley reactors waved through virtually unchanged

http://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/en/News/2014/Sell-out-on-UK-nuclear-plan-exposes-Commission-to-legal-challenges/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/29/closing-vermont-nuclear-bad-business-for-everyone/

And inside the article we find:

“National Grid says that its customers in western Massachusetts can expect a 37% rate hike on November first, due in large part to the early retirement of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. Next door in New Hampshire, a 50% increase in their customer’s bills can be expected in November. Customers of the New Hampshire Electric Coop, the state’s second largest utility, will face a 12% rise in their winter electricity bills.
What happens to those people this winter who can’t afford that increase?”

Remember one nuclear power plant is worth more than tens of millions of solar panels. See all the pollution solar panel construction commits every day:

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-chinese-solar-plant-is-shut-down-after-4-days-of-violent-protests-over-pollution-2011-9

Europe’s new nuclear experience casts a shadow over Hinkley

Peter Wynn Kirbyhttp://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/25/europes-new-nuclear-experience-casts-a-shadow-over-hinkley
snip

With two new UK reactors planned at Hinkley Point C in Somerset and three years after the meltdowns at Fukushima in Japan, it is worth considering whether the design, procurement, construction, and management of nuclear power plants is sufficiently reliable to allay public concern over radiation and value for money.

In the case of the reactor design chosen for Hinkley C, the French-designed European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), there is not yet a finished power plant to judge by.

The two plants closest to completion, in Finland and France, have been plagued by astonishing cost overruns and construction delays, along with a litany of complaints over design flaws, poor quality control, and construction lapses.

May I assume all of you saw this from the above article?

Acres required to power 6 million homes:

Wind 250,000
Solar 130,000
Nuclear 430

Sun and wind could finally make electricity ‘too cheap to meter’

http://theconversation.com/sun-and-wind-could-finally-make-electricity-too-cheap-to-meter-34166

snip

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

– Lewis L Strauss, chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954.

When Strauss first coined the phrase above he was thinking of hydrogen fusion, a technology that always seems to be a tantalising 30 years away. However even without futuristic new technology the British electricity system may actually approach this mythical situation of energy that is “too cheap to meter”.

In the future, the industry’s costs will be determined by the number and size of power plants and turbines that will be needed, rather than the fuel burned in them. This won’t mean an end to electricity bills – but it will mean some major changes in how they are calculated.

How to lose half a trillion euros
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros

snip
ON JUNE 16th something very peculiar happened in Germany’s electricity market. The wholesale price of electricity fell to minus €100 per megawatt hour (MWh). That is, generating companies were having to pay the managers of the grid to take their electricity. It was a bright, breezy Sunday. Demand was low. Between 2pm and 3pm, solar and wind generators produced 28.9 gigawatts (GW) of power, more than half the total. The grid at that time could not cope with more than 45GW without becoming unstable. At the peak, total generation was over 51GW; so prices went negative to encourage cutbacks and protect the grid from overloading.

Despite receiving an estimated $39 billion in annual government subsidies over the past five years, the solar energy industry accounted for just one half of one percent (0.5%) of all the electricity generated in the U.S. during the first 10 months of 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/despite-39b-annual-govt-subsidies-solar-produced-05-electricity

solar PV at 3 cents per kWH on small scale, cheaper on larger scales!

http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/renewable-and-energy-efficiency.html

Anybody seen how wind turbines not only survived the Fukushima tidal wave but they provided Energy that helped save Japan when their Nuclear reactors were shut down?

The Nuclear Utility “Gangs” run the Japanese Government and their media, so it really should be no surprise that it was not widely spread after Fukushima,

Battle-proof Wind Farms Survive Japan’s Trial by Fire

http://huff.to/gVTu8C

OMG! Ladies and Gentlemen, flee with us, while you still can! CaptD will lead the way!

The average radiologic profile of bananas is 3520 picocuries per kg, or roughly 520 picocuries per 150g banana. The equivalent dose for 365 bananas (one per day for a year) is 3.6 millirems (36 μSv).

Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at US ports

Another way to consider the concept is by comparing the risk from radiation-induced cancer to that from cancer from other sources. For instance, a radiation exposure of 10 mrems (10,000,000,000 picorems) increases your risk of death by about one in one million—the same risk as eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, or of smoking 1.4 cigarettes.

After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the NRC detected radioactive iodine in local milk at levels of 20 picocuries/liter, a dose much less than one would receive from ingesting a single banana. Thus a 12 fl oz glass of the slightly radioactive milk would have about 1/75th BED (banana equivalent dose).

Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 40 millirems per year on average, or more than 10% of the total dose from all natural and man-made sources.

However, we must flee from the use of nuclear power… Wait a tick… What is the radioactivity of fleas?

Flee the plaugue ridden naturally radioactive fleas!

The people that try to dominate online conversations with things they memorised from schoolbooks instead o taking the time to learn the material amuse me. They’re just like the people that proclaim that aeronautical engineers use equations that predict that bumblebees cannot fly. No, we simply use the sane Navier-Stokes equations including twens account for the relevant physics of bumblebees if that’s the problem to be solved. Most airplanes don’t fly that slow. Meanwhile, it is rather funny to be “challenged” by people that refuse to learn that atomic physics is easy compared to turbulence and quantum electrodynamics. Keep the refutable challenges up. That sort of thing is kitten play to me. (They know who they are, and so do you.). 🙂

Nuclear physics remains the preeminent triumph of human intellect. We have not had a global military conflict in over 70 years. Why? We created a weapon of such incredible destructive power that the human race ceased such wasteful and futile endeavours – something Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling vainly hoped to accomplish with his eponymously named rapid fire gun. For the first time since the dawn of civilisation the exponential increase in deaths by warfare came crashing down to an unacceptable, yet much diminished rate.

Would you rather the periodic armed conflict continue with mechanical and chemical means of ferocious maiming death, the toll rising up an ever increasing precipice? I think not.

Nuclear physics beat that sword into a ploughshare, and has provided electrical power in an atmospherically clean manner ever since. It is a complicated innovation, and things have gone wrong in our mastery of it. Thus is true of everything in our industrially advanced civilisation. People are fallible, and they will make mistakes, sometimes out of personal weakness, and in other cases even when they have the best intentions. We learn from such things, and we move forward, logically, despite those in every age who recoil against progress while having nothing demonstably better to offer as an alternate path forward. Snake-oil salesmen opportistically appear, prying on ignorance and technical illiteracy, promising much to the luddites, and deliver nothing when the day is done.

Nuclear science has done far more good than harm – by many orders of magnitude. The death toll alone from wat was worth the magnificent and noble effort put forth by what we now call “The Greatest Generation”. They rose to the occasion when all might have been lost to a new dark age and secured our future. Some may think it is a precarious present we have inherited, but it is far less precarious than the times they lived in in every respect. We should respect the advancements they accomplished with meagre tools like slide-rules, drafting tables, and intellect, and build upon their hard-won contributions toward the betterment of the human race.

“Betterment?”, some may ask – or swear and spit and proceed to spout a litany formed of provincial small-mindedness. They are the sort that don’t want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing, and think we should share in their ignorant view of the world.

Yes, betterment. If an end to global total war was not enough, consider the peaceful use of this incomparable knowledge: The diagnosis and healing of of disease, the ability to measure the universe, into the past with Carbon 14 and to the planets with nuclear powered systems aboard spacecraft that explore the furthest reaces of our solr system and beyond. We learned much about the Moon and about our own planet by devices powered by nuclear fission and its products. The list continues to grow, a cornucopia of benefits to humans everywhere. And again, an immense source of power that has and continues to ease the burdens and extend the length and comfort if our lives.

To those that are filled with irrational and uneducated fear of nuclear energy, I ask: Why not spend all that effort on something useful? I’ve seen the same people who were against the Concorde and what would have been its occasional sonic booms take time out if their lives to travel just to hear the same from a space shuttle orbiter. I’ve seen them whine about the crash safety of automobiles and then drve on public roads like some sort of personal NASCAR track. They get on line cursing the name of Edison with devices that run on direct current powered by storage batteries, and in the same breath applaud the name if Tesla, who never worked on improving storage batteries, DC motors, or the development of electric cars.

I don’t mind those that attack my contributions to a proper dialogue. They lack depth, eloquence, and a big-picture understanding of our universe. They pick a thing and condemn it because they cannot see the benefits of things and that we have such things _ because_ the benefits far outweigh the downsides.

What I do mins is all that wasted effort, which only serves to prevent the advancement of everything. Oblivious to the consequences of their irrational fear, they obstruct the arrival of the future that will be with dead ends and cul-de-sacs of unattainable dreams and blind faith wishes.

Someday, perhaps, this interconnectivity called the Internet may lead to proper discussion and free exchange of ideas, independently verifiable as is the way of Science. Until then, we will have to endure the counterproductive static issuing forth from people that not only cannot see the forest for the trees, but can’t even see the nearby trees because they myopically stand so close to just one, thinking it to be the entre universe.

There was an English chap they said would never build a self-regulaying clock that could determine longitude. He’d already used two materiala with different expansion rates to make self-regulating pendulum clocks with a “gridiron” suspending the pendulum. He also managed to work that into a mechanical system that told time so well at sea that sailors could know their longitude. Despite his success in terms of fulfilling the terns of the prize set forth by Queen Anne, he had to fight his detractors and finally win his just reward for fulfilling the terms of the contract.

John Harrison was the son of a carpenter, and practiced carpentry in clockwotk as a profession before moving into using brass. He designed self-regulating machines before the concept was even named.

Post WWII, nuclear fission still depended upon means outside their design to maintain stability. People today are quite happy to trust cruise controls in their cars, computers running their cars engines, sensors that bleep when they turn the turn signal onand there is a car alongside in the next lane. They don’t notice when they need to pay attention to the car in the next lane, when to change their oil or check their tire pressure unless told to, or simply to look in the mirrors when changing lanes.

I had a long stay, in a Midwestern town, that had a museum of clocks, with reproductions of major advancements in timekeeping since and before Harrison. The people stopped and stared in amazement that simple yet elegant mechanical devices could do what their wristwatch could do, be it a cheap one from a gas station or thousands of dollars from Switzerland.

Sure, nuclear power stations have run amok – because if failures in external control systems. Some had back-up systems that did the job, some were less intelligently designed. Despite that, they’ve served us well, these messages seen marvels performing alchemy beyond the dreams of proto-chemists.

Now finally, what if the vacuum tube and calculating machine infatuation was finlaaly at an end – and old Science was new again? Every aeroplane’s wings have dihedral, that angle the wings tip up at so they tend to stay level in flight. The forks of every bicycle bend or angle forward, which is why the front wheel allows you to use supposed talent to take your hands off the handlebars.

For the first time since the gridiron of Harrison, Luke the ancient Greek that pondered stability in the form of a Ball in a bowl always finding its proper place, we have this ability to build a stable, self-regulating energy release.

Are you the type that would get angry at someone that built a perfect campfire that in one go could take a mere spark and provide self-sustaining heat without stoking or tending? No, wait, thus is the time when television features stupid people watching stupid people that are “Naked and Afraid”.

There is a wonder of 20th century Science that is finally being realised. A seemingly simple device that does not need control systems to function – just like Harrison’s navigational chronometer.

Solar and wind have had four decades of attention during my life, and like the next ice age an then global warming, they have yet to happen. Old school self stabiizing design got left behind in the rush to embrace automation in the 1959s.

So I have to ask: What’s wrong with the molten salt reactor? 🙂