Windfarm and renewable energy joke !

We are all sucking up massive amounts of energy in our homes and industry. No-one wants to reduce their use of it, yet we fear and resent those in the third world who want to raise their standard of living to match ours. Neither do we want to face up to the physical consequences to the landscape of our mindless urge to consume. It seems that everyone else has to cut down/give up/go without except ourselves.

Much as we may dislike it, the people of Romania presumably value access to dependable power more than preserving a pristine countryside. In the UK we seem to want both.

I think every house should have a wind turbine and every suitable roof should have solar panels and each household/organisation should be obliged to meet a certain percentage of their needs by these means. Above a certain percentage we should pay dearly. Then we'd see how many electric gadgets we really, really can't do without. Sadly, our government threw away control over our energy infrastructure some years ago so it is much harder to achieve joined-up thinking on these issues.

I think there should be more off-shore windfarms and small installations dotted about in non-sensitive parts of the countryside - which is already happening as far as I can see. There is a rash of them around here. Tidal and hydroelectric power should also be developed more.

I don't find wind turbines ugly. They have far more beauty and grace than the average pylon or factory yet we accept them without question. There's a certain rightness about their simple design.

If it was a 17th century wooden windmill we'd be cooing over it and slapping preservation orders on it.

The problem with nuclear power stations is not the day to day safety of them but the uncontrollable problems when something goes wrong, as we have seen in Japan. Disposal of waste also remains an issue. I am sure releases of radiation over the past 50 years are one contributory factor to the epidemic of cancer we are suffering worldwide.

 

I think as consumers we often don't have as much choice about our energy use as we like to think. If we could all be self sufficient then great, otherwise we have to buy in food, often in tremendous amounts of superfluous packaging, and its often done half a lap of the world to get here.

It also bugs me when just up the road from me there is one of Europe's biggest chemical sites. It has its own power station (for real), but that isn't enough, so they still have to buy in huge amounts of power from the national grid. Quite often the stuff they make isn't even fit for market (literally), with many thousands of tonnes of failed plastics just being disposed of. Then I get frowned upon for driving a large car.

Industry needs a good telling off. I hate that ordinary people are frowned upon for forgetting to unplug a phone charger, while (for example) chemical works can flare off, burning off flammable gases that are a by-product of their manufacturing process, just sending many thousands of kilojoules of energy straight up into the air. They should be made to stick a boiler on top of it and generate electricity when they are flaring.

I've heard that in Germany, where they are known for being more sensible than us (sometimes), the water that gets used for cooling heavy plant, gets pumped round the streets to warm warm houses and reduce the need for those households to buy in gas for heating. Here the cooling water just goes straight up in the air as steam from a cooling tower, or into the nearest river or the sea.

As for nuclear, old reactors are not inherently safe. New ones are. The very basics (as much as I understand) go like this. Uranium rods react with each other in a fission reaction to generate heat. Boron rods go in between and varying heights to control the rate of fission by absorbing the loose neutrons. A mechanical control mechanism inserts or removes the boron rods in order to regulate the reaction. To stop the reaction, you fully insert the boron rods, and fission stops.

Here's the thing. In old reactors, it took both energy and a positive signal to insert the boron rods to shut down the reactor. When Chernobyl went up in smoke, a fault developed, a signal came to the control room, and by the time the engineers reacted (very quickly but sadly not quick enough) the heat had already seized part of the mechanism responsible for inserting the boron rods, so they couldn't control the reaction and it went critical and became a very, very serious problem very, very quickly.

Things are different in newer reactors. It takes energy to hold the boron rods out. If power is lost, they fall under gravity and shut down the reactor. Also the computers that control them will warn an operator if things are going wrong, but wont wait for human intervention, and will automatically initiate shut down if anything goes wrong.

Fukishima was hailed by the media as another Chernobyl, but it wasn't. The reactor was casing was physically damaged by an extreme natural event, and the reactor was immediately shut down. Radiation escaped because the reactor casing broke and seawater got in. It was of course a disaster but in terms of radiation related problems, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the media portrayed.

Also in terms of radiation risk, I remember when I was at school, in physics one day. The teacher took out a very well secured tiny piece of plutonium, and a tiny piece of uranium. He pointer a gieger counter at each, and naturally it went crazy. Just when he'd finished scaring the living daylights out of us all, he then pointed the gieger counter straight up, and it went crazy again. He was demonstrating that we are being bombarded all the time, constantly, by naturally occurring gamma radiation from space.