Severn barrage

[kay]

hey, you can't have it both ways! If we're the nether regions you'd be pumping downhill, not uphill.

 

[Peter Burgess]

Ah, but they are metaphorically nether regions, not physical ones.

 

[gus horsley]

Going back to the environmental impact of such schemes, I remember someone posted a reply saying that the wildlife would happily relocate itself.  I've just read a report by the British Trust for Ornithology on the impact of the Cardiff barrage on the resident redshank population.  The Cardiff redshanks did indeed relocate (to Rhymney Marshes) but didn't fare as well as the Rhymney redshanks.  After a year they were about 70% lighter in bodyweight and their survival rate had dropped from 85% to 78%.  It doesn't sound like a lot but represents about 350 extra fatalities.  So there you have it, even if the birds do manage to relocate, they aren't a bit happy about it.

Let them write a letter of complaint then like you will when the lights go out. Whats missing out of them stats is a timeline, 5 years down the line the birds might be loving the new habitat. Stats are meaningless.

Stats may be meaningless but sometimes they are the only thing we've got to go on, and the scheme will be monitored over a long period of time.  Initial results are disturbing and mirror research done in other parts of the UK and Europe.  As far as "the lights going out" I assume you mean "what are we going to do without renewable energy"?  My answer is that the only really viable way forward is to go nuclear.

 

[cap n chris]

For more on this topic visit:

http://uk.theoildrum.com/story/2006/7/11/132257/917

Interesting points were made last week in an FT article on recycling.

Put simply, if you are serious about saving the planet here's what you need to do:

1) never fly again
2) stop buying stuff
3) if you must drive, drive a noddy car
4) don't have children
5) die young

BTW, it was stated that simply by trading down from an SUV to a normal saloon car you do the equivalent "good" as recycling your bottles for 400 years.

 

[hoehlenforscher]

BTW, it was stated that simply by trading down from an SUV to a normal saloon car you do the equivalent "good" as recycling your bottles for 400 years.

Another meaningless statistic! Don't you just love em. Its statistics like this that taint public opinion so that whenever I venture into town in the farm Landrover I get stared at like public enemy number one. I have had verbal abuse from ramblers while out on the hill checking on the sheep and regularly get the finger from people on the roads. And that is a (very) battered 16 year old landie.  Just shows how powerful public (mis)conception of the situation can be. Now if everyone drove a 15 year old Land rover rather than a state of the art hybrid (with all those heavy metal batteries and a life expectancy of 5-8 years) then it would surely be the equivilant "good" of recycling your bottles for 1000 years, closing a small nuclear power station, and fitting half the countries cattle with catylitic converters on their arses.

I rest my case

 

[cap n chris]

By simple deduction it is possible to immediately conclude that the planet cannot be saved. Therefore why bother trying.

 

[AndyF]

Don't see why they should mess up our end of the country.
Try the Thames instead - that's where all the people live who need all this extra energy.

Yep, all you have to do is close the Thames barage when the tide is in!!!!! 

 

[AndyF]

By simple deduction it is possible to immediately conclude that the planet cannot be saved. Therefore why bother trying.

Absolutely correct.

it is unlikely man will exist on this planet in 100,000 years. It's unlikely to be honest that we will survive 10,000. If we are here we will have reverted to an agrarian economy and be back carrying spears.

In time, the planet will recover, given a few million years it will once again be a pardise as new species have evolved to replace the ones we've killed off, and the climate will have got back into sync.

The best thing for the planet is mans extinction, so, in this respect, the Yanks are doing the planet a favour by burning all the oil as fast as they can. Bush is an eco-hero after all... Blair is going to do his bit with nuclear, as long as the US tells him it's o.k.

I haven't got kids, so I don't give a stuff........just off to book my £6 Fly'n'scair ticketes to sunny France, gee it's warm down there......

 

[whitelackington]

BTW, it was stated that simply by trading down from an SUV to a normal saloon car you do the equivalent "good" as recycling your bottles for 400 years.

Another meaningless statistic! Don't you just love em. Its statistics like this that taint public opinion so that whenever I venture into town in the farm Landrover I get stared at like public enemy number one. I have had verbal abuse from ramblers while out on the hill checking on the sheep and regularly get the finger from people on the roads. And that is a (very) battered 16 year old landie.  Just shows how powerful public (mis)conception of the situation can be. Now if everyone drove a 15 year old Land rover rather than a state of the art hybrid (with all those heavy metal batteries and a life expectancy of 5-8 years) then it would surely be the equivilant "good" of recycling your bottles for 1000 years, closing a small nuclear power station, and fitting half the countries cattle with catylitic converters on their arses.

I rest my case

I think Tony Blair should stick his nuclear power stations up his arse

 

[AndyF]

Of course we are going to have some more nuclear power stations!! It goes like this:

1) UK is about to renew trident. Trident is US missiles, but UK warheads

2) Therefore UK needs new fissile material to build them.

3) Therefore we need new reactors to provide it, as all the old ones are knackered.

4) Public will never swallow the cost, so the "reason" given is reliable power/low CO2/emissions etc. etc.

The only reason for the 50's reactors was to provide warhead material, the electricity benefit was a spin off (My dad worked in the nuke industry and at Aldermaston)

The coincidence of nukes back on the agenda at the same time as the Trident decision -ooohhh what a coincidence  :

Why aren't the papers ripping them apart on this, why are the public so docile as to not even be bothered. GRRRRR

 

[emgee]

BTW, it was stated that simply by trading down from an SUV to a normal saloon car you do the equivalent "good" as recycling your bottles for 400 years.

But recycling bottles isn't a good think to do the sensible thing to do is reuse them. But that was a battle the environmentalists lost more than twenty years ago.

 

[cap n chris]

Errrr, and there was me thinking that nuclear is the way to go since oil is running out and is expected to become £5/litre by 2015.

 

[tubby two]

AH, nuclear is theoretically the way to go though, and practically its pretty good too- its just a hard decision to take.

It's main problem is a very bad press. I read something this weekend claiming chernobyl was the sole reason why there was a large increase in acute childhood leukaemia across western europe in the '80s and '90s, and even called scientists ridiculous for claiming it was something called 'population mixing', when the truth is it was, and has been proven to be, mainly due to population mixing- whereby commuter populations move into small towns and villages, or large factories (e.g. sellafield) bring in a large migrant population int otwns (e.g. seascale) and the incgease in population mixing, and germs etc, leads to increased disease, especially acute leukaemia, essentially a disease of the immune system. It really pissed me off to hear some one claiming to be 'informed' about the dangers of nuclear power spouting such utter lies, how are people meant to make an informed choice when MP's (think it was michael meacher  :chair: ) cant even get it right?

Oops, ranted a bit. Oh well. Other than that if we invested in getting nuclear right it would be the answer to all our energy needs, the activity of the waste produced, if correctly distributed, would be a few orders of magnitude less than that we get from the earth and sun... the problem is the distribution phase...

tt.

 

[AndyF]

Errrr, and there was me thinking that nuclear is the way to go since oil is running out and is expected to become £5/litre by 2015.

Nuclear doesn't replace oil or reduce emmisions. The reasons is simple. First Uranium is very expensive to mine (mining consumes oil and has it's own carbon footprint), you have to remove a good bit of mountain per gram of Uranium.

Secondly it has to be enriched before it can be used. This uses the infamous "gas centrifuges". These basically are very big things that spin real fast and use up lots of energy in doing so.

To be worthwhile, you have to produce more electricty from the uranium you've enriched, than you've used in enriching it. A typical centrifuge spins for a year to produce about 25 grammes of enriched material, way below the "unity point" of energy expended seperating it.

It is this simple equation that the politicians don't get/admit, and is the reason why the nuclear power option is so dumb-ass it beggers belief.

So why are we going nuclear? Well, lots of reasons - firstly because we can. Engineering groups like N.E.I. can build a whole nuclear plant, and a subsidised program is a great way for the govt to prop up jobs in industrial northern towns without falling foul of the EU. Second, well...er....new bombs please...... When you see that we ARE in fact going to renew the nuke deterrent, you will know where the material is coming from.

As a rough "statistic" (don't we love em) for the cost of a nuclear plant you could insulate enough homes to reduce electricty demand by....er....about one power station.

So why aren't we doing that.....  

 

[AndyF]

I read something this weekend claiming chernobyl was the sole reason why there was a large increase in acute childhood leukaemia across western europe in the '80s and '90s, and even called scientists ridiculous for claiming it was something called 'population mixing', when the truth is it was, and has been proven to be, mainly due to population mixing- whereby commuter populations move into small towns and villages, or large factories (e.g. sellafield) bring in a large migrant population int otwns (e.g. seascale) and the incgease in population mixing, and germs etc, leads to increased disease, especially acute leukaemia, essentially a disease of the immune system. It really pissed me off to hear some one claiming to be 'informed' about the dangers of nuclear power spouting such utter lies, how are people meant to make an informed choice when MP's (think it was michael meacher  :chair: ) cant even get it right?

Don't know what report you read, but it was clearly some propoganda. Luekemia is a cancer, not a disease, nothing to do with germs...and in any case, it is closed genetic pools/populations that suffer more with genetic/inherited disorders, rather than mobile, mixed ones.

Also, look at the USA, which has had a hugely mixed up population for decades. Why is the central European level so much higher?  :-\

 

[tubby two]

True, leukaemia is a cancer and not a germ bourne disease, however it still has numerous risk factors- including childhood disease, caused by population mixing...

http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v81/n1/abs/6690664a.html

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/heather.dickinson/kinlen.htm

... are better at explaining it than me! Interesting though.

To be worthwhile, you have to produce more electricty from the uranium you've enriched, than you've used in enriching it. A typical centrifuge spins for a year to produce about 25 grammes of enriched material, way below the "unity point" of energy expended seperating it.

It is this simple equation that the politicians don't get/admit, and is the reason why the nuclear power option is so dumb-ass it beggers belief.

I've heard things along this line before- but have never seen any sums to prove it... anybody have them? Or can find them...

Best i can find is this which i've only skim read as i should be working (as usual when on here ;o)), which appears to argue the other way and shouldnt be too biased...  depending on the views of melbourne uni.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm

Fell free to read and give a synopsis of salient points anybody!

tt.

 

[AndyF]

OK.

First point, these figures are from ERDA mostly, the Energy Reserach and Development Association, an organisation with a vested interest in building power stations, so an unreliable source of data IMO.

The gist of the article says that input energy is 1.35% of output energy.

I can't refute the actual figures, haven't got access to the data or three years to study them, but think about this: If the input equation was SO good (far better than oil/coal/wind/SP according to the article) then why aren't energy companies queing up to build and finance nuclear plants themselves. You would be on a goldmine if you could really produce electricity at 20% of the cost of the gas fired stations. You also would not need to asking for government subsidy.....!

This isn't happening, because the industry knows to itself that the economics don't work. That is evidence in itself. No one has built a nuclear plant in the UK without govt. funding, yet many gas fired/oil fired ones have been built. There is a reason, and therin lies the answer.

There is an additional major factor missing from the tables, and that is cost... for instance you may only spend 6 PJ in energy decommisioning, but you are also spending a huge amount of money. That money represents an opportunity cost, you could have spent it on insulation, renewables etc etc which in turn have a representative energy production (either generated or saved). This article does not address this.

 

[Dep]

Re comments about Chernobyl radioation issues:
Did none of you see Horizon last week? (Thu 13th July)
Some interesting figures there on post-Chernobyl cancers.
I'll see if I can dig out a link on the BBC website.

 

[gus horsley]

OK, so we're in two minds about nuclear fission.  What about nuclear fusion then?  The French appear to be doing a fair bit of research on that.  Is it merely because they want to come up with a more novel way of blowing Greenpeace ships out of the water?

Incidentally, I don't subscribe to this "the world is doomed so let's just accelerate/accept it" situation. Even if the planet is on a one-way ticket to destruction, the least we can do is attempt to slow it down a bit, so that something has a better chance of survival.

 

[whitelackington]

I belive that there is enough carbon burried in the Earth to last us centuries but most is quite deep.
The Knoty Head Number One Well, 170 miles South East of New Orleans has hit oil at 10,420 metres below sea level, tempreture 138degrees C  pressure 29,000 lbs/square inch but estimated reserves  1/2 billion barrels.
This Global Warming malarky, in the last interglacial there were apparently hippos and crocks sunbathing in Manchester,
so presumably 135 thousand years ago it was a lot warmer than is now,
also warmer soon after the last glaciers melted.
We humans weren't greatly altering the climate on either of those occasions :icon_321: