Global warming - a Bollockquilism

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Re: Tidal?

Well they ought to make him give it back.

He didn't invent it by a long chalk.

Have a look at Cragside House near Newcastle upon Tyne.

One Lord Armstrong built the house in the mid 19th century and installed a water turbine to provide power. So your man is about 150 years behind times.
 
Re: Tidal?

Don't get the argument that it has to be barrage. That's a symptom of engineering's fascination with giganticism. Smaller, factory produced units that could be installed in considerable numbers, in arrays at lots of locations, seems far more sensible. Just coming up the parts of the S Coast that I know - installations at Start Point, Portland Bill, St Aldhelms, Poole entrance, Needles, St Catherines, Selsey, Beachy Head, Dungeness. And Portsmouth, Langstone and Chi entrances. How difficult can it be, compared with building a barrage or a nuke?

Also, having a distributed system means no single point of failure/vulnerability, and puts generation closer to users, cutting out some of the considerable transmission losses.
 
Re: Tidal?

Its not a case of fascination with size.

Its practicality.

Lots of small instalations will cost many times more per KW to install.

You can't simply drop a turbine onto the bottom of the sea and expect it to last any realistic time.

They clog up with silt and dead fish and all sorts of other things.

They need maintenance which is difficult on the sea bottom - It can be done but the costs exceed what they earn in generated power.

And thats before you have the infrastructure to connect them to the grid. And if you don't connect them to the grid they will only generate a reasonable amount of power for around 50 - 60 % of the time and those who rely totally on them will only have power for that period or be connected to the grid which will again mean having to have additional grid capacity to ensure availability of supply.

You end up using more carbon to install support and maintain the things than you save in replacing conventional sources.

If you can get to something like 75% nuclear it becomes many times as much carbon - so you defeat your objective.

You simply cannot generate enough power to serve anything like the area you refer to. Look at the mate of Lakey's thing - does 2KW - not enough to boil an electric kettle. To match 1 big coal fired station would require 2 million of them.

Hydro is good but its all in hilly wet places like the Lake district whereas most power usage is in dry flat areas - so you have an inherent mismatch which will always limit the amount that you can supply from hydro

Lots of it in Scotland and they could come close to being self sufficient in Hydro power, but don't forget there are only 5M of 'em - They cant supply the other 55M.

Think along the lines of 1 GigaWatt to every million of population

Sorry but in power generation big really IS beautiful.
 
Re: Tidal?

In fact in terms of capacity of course todays computers are many many times bigger than earlier generations - for the same reasons broadly speaking.

Just as an afterthought to all this debate:

Assuming we do radically reduce the levels of CO2 can we be quite sure that some 22nd century Twister Ken wont be on some forum like this one complaining bitterly that the world is going to freeze and there's another ice age coming and what are you doing about it - Eh?
 
Re: Non Blind denial

>>>
Its ok in a submarine where the vehicle itself forms a barrier to radiation leakage. To use that type of plant in some sort of mobile unit is impossible the unit would be far too big and heavy to move.
>>>
I suspect that the above is self contradictory. We can build the outer containment vessel, doing so make jobs in Labour constiuencies, we call the place Vickers at Barrow in Furness. As the vessel needs minimal manpower, being mostly static, it needs little life support. It floats and we already have large tugs (running them via microwave power link of the leccy the thing generates is a bit Star Wars but I digress) In essence we have a non military nuclear submarine with no real need to submerge so locations like London Docks are quite viable from a technical viewpoint. We put the military versions of thse things into dockyards and put people around them so a fair number of educatd folk recon they are safe (none of my nuclear sub crew frinds have, so far, produiced double headed kids).

GW needs out of the box thinking and also flexible load solutions using technology available now, not something that may work with ten years of Manhattan Project style forced research where every posible corner is cut to get something, anything, that has some effect. Micronuke power stations are just such a possibility and no, with a suitable wayleave grant, I don't especially mind one in my garden, were it big enough. IMO wind and wave technology are not available now in anything like the same way.
 
Re: Non Blind denial

Difficult to make definitive statements about capacity of these things, information is not readily available. Looking at the containment vessel of a 1.2Gwatt PWR reactor and the size of a nuclear sub I would guess at something like 100Mwatt.

So you would need 10 of things to power medium sized city
It is unlikely that the safety standards for operating the reactors would come close to meeting civilian standards, if you look at the screening on a conventional civilian reactor its huge in comparison with a submarine. There have been numerous concerns expressed about the safety standards in nuclear submarines. A quick Google shows them.

Even then you are left with how you connect them to anything.

Putting 2 or 3 in London docks sounds good but what are you going to connect them to - and how.

How are you going to manage the load - what happens when the capacity is exceeded, or when Arsenal turn off their flood lights.

I admire your ingenuity in creating the idea but the practicalities and the potential for disaster rule the idea out for me.

It may be that collecting them together in what is now a coal fired station and adapting the existing infrastructure to match an installation of perhaps 10 or 12 of these in an acceptably robust containment structure.

PS

I would love to see the case made to Red Ken to plant 3 or 4 nuclear submarines in the London docks.
 
Re: Non Blind denial

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I await the "justification" from same as to why this would be a reasonable thing to expect me to suffer, but not the minister...


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Well, I would have thought it was fairly obvious really - unless you regard your own contribution to the day to day functioning of society as equally important on a time/cost/critical function basis of course.


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So its "do as I say" not "do as I do". With one fell swoop you make the moral element of the pro-GW position untenable. Notwithstanding the size of carbon footprint of the pol compared to, say, his constituents.


[/ QUOTE ] Moral position untenable? I don't think so, this is an irrelevant and illogical argument.

Hypothetically - if cheap air travel (hardly mentioned so far in this debate) becomes a thing of the past what you are saying is that if Joe Bloggs can't fly to the Costa for his two weeks pie, chips and sun then the PM and other members of the government can't use a plane to get to the next world climate conference.

That makes no sense at all, and if it isn't the politics of envy I don't know what it is.

Essentially, it isn't practical for the government to use bicycles all the time, and most people can see that - your argument that no-one should be prepared to give anything up unless government ministers do the same is seriously flawed, and anyway I bet that the odd occasions when ministers are seen doing something green you just shout 'gimmick' and 'opportunist'

Sorry to drag this up again when you have been putting some good points further down the thread, but it is a commonly raised red herring that should, I feel, be put to bed.

(He said, mixing his metaphors wildly).
 
Re: Non Blind denial

Nobody seems to have mentioned carbon Capture......

Sweden and Switzerland produce slightly more than half the COs per capita than the UK, How are they doing that?

Seems to me we need a multi faceted approach....
Hydro, Wind, Wave, Tide, Nuclear, Carbon Capture, Some Micro Generation, some Biomass, and a lot more passive solar in new build.....

I think you will find that the major generators (E.On, Npower, etc... ) are thinking along all of these line...
 
Re: Non Blind denial

Don't know about carbon capture - would have thought it was to do with having lots of trees and few people - but maybe more to it than that.

As for the idea of using all sorts of different types of generation I guess there is an argument for that but the problem with many of these "alternative" processes is that they have a significant carbon footprint to install and maintain for a relatively low output.

Although there are those who seem eager to take a money no object approach to this it is a somewhat unrealistic position, money is always an object and there must be a sensible business case to go for any particular power source.

For example there is a brand new power station a few miles from where I am sitting that has never generated a single watt of power.

The reason being that it cannot generate enough money to pay the cost of the capital used to build it. It is a "green" station meant to burn wood, some form of Willow.

There are lots of farmers who have undertaken to grow the stuff and are now stuck with no market for their crop.

This sort of thing does not help anyone - at the end of the day all these things have to be economically viable.

Generating small quantities of power at high cost isn't a solution - to anything.
 
Re: Non Blind denial

Not sure if anyone saw planet earth on beeb 2 last night? More carbon put into the atmosphere by one volcano erupting than man ever has and there are dimwits on here who think we can control the climate. Beggers belief...

During the period named SNOWBALL EARTH our planet went from around -40 deg to +40 deg in a few hundred years and still managed to sort itself out.

We are but a piss in the ocean within the atmosphere compared to what mother nature does by herself.

It seems some on here are so weak they need to be led by governments and haven't got the balls to think for themselves. /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif
 
Re: Non Blind denial

>>>
PM and other members of the government can't use a plane to get to the next world climate conference
>>>
Video conference, the "hot line" was relatively useful.
If folk must travel to their conferences (with associated junketing) then why not hold them in places requiring the minimum net air travel. Europe, for example, is eminently suitable as somewhere in which all delegates could go by train...

To reply to a different post, yes, I do rather find the idea of a few nuke plants in the London Docks, and the response of Ken, too good an image to lose:-)
 
Re: Non Blind denial

[ QUOTE ]
there are dimwits on here who think we can control the climate.

[/ QUOTE ]Actually no, there don't seem to be. No one here has remotely suggested that risk mitigation equals climate control. Unless of course you that demonstrate that.

Of course perhaps I'm one of your "dimwits", so that might explain why it isn't obvious to me.

[ QUOTE ]
our planet went from around -40 deg to +40 deg in a few hundred years and still managed to sort itself out.

[/ QUOTE ]Oh that's all right then. Let's see, according to the link you provided this happened, what, 2.3 billion years ago. And the early forms of mankind's ancerstors were, say, about six or seven million years ago....

[ QUOTE ]
It seems some on here are so weak they need to be led by governments and haven't got the balls to think for themselves. /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif

[/ QUOTE ]Was this something you saw on the telly as well?
 
Re: Non Blind denial

[ QUOTE ]
Not sure if anyone saw planet earth on beeb 2 last night? More carbon put into the atmosphere by one volcano erupting than man ever has and there are dimwits on here who think we can control the climate. Beggers belief...



[/ QUOTE ]

in 2 words .. total bollocks!!!


Carbon Dioxide

Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.

Sulfur Emissions

Andres and Kasgnoc (1997) estimated the time-averaged inventory of subaerial volcanic sulfur emissions. There inventory was based upon the 25 year history of making sulfur measurements, primarily sulfur dioxide (SO2), at volcanoes. Actual measurements of subaerial volcanic sulfur dioxide emissions indicate a time-averaged flux of 13 Tg/yr sulfur dioxide from early 1970 to 1997. [Note: a Tg is equal to 10E12 grams]. About 4 Tg come from explosive eruptions and 9 Tg is released by passivedegassing, in an average year. When considering the other sulfur species also present in volcanic emissions, a time-averaged inventory of subaerial volcanic sulfur emissions is 10.4 Tg/yr sulfur.

Volcanoes and other natural processes release approximately 24 Tg of sulfur to the atmosphere each year. Thus, volcanoes are responsible for 43% of the total natural S flux each year. Man's activities add about 79 Tg sulfur to the atmosphere each year. In an average year, volcanoes release only 13% of the sulfur added to the atmosphere compared to anthropogenic sources. Andres and Kasgnoc (1997) noted that the bulk of the anthropogenic flux is located in the northern hemisphere while volcanic fluxes occur in much more focused belts around the world.
 
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