I will start adding what I think are the more interesting posts to my journal. This one on alternative power..
.. I just showed you that by covering half
my roof with the best solar cells available on the market, I
cannot even cover my own electricity needs. What do you suggest,
covering the countryside with panels?
I am not saying that Solar tiling would always be the *only*
source of power - but that if houses did have solar tiling we
would save a huge amount of power. Top that up with Wind power,
Tidal power, Hydro-electric, then make sure houses use energy
saving lightbulbs, are well insulated, etc, and you can have a
national energy system wihich needs little or no
coal/oil/nuclear.. This is not some sort fantasy - it is already
starting to happen. Maybe we shouldnt cover the countryside, but what about the
deserts of the world ?
>Such projects are up and running around Europe now, and
pay back for themselves in a few years, even comparing to cheap
"dig it up and burn" electricity.
Where, pray tell? Publications to defend your assertions?
Plenty, just Google "solar roof tiles estate"
Zero
annual electricity bills for these guys - the tiles make as
much electricity as they take from the grid. (ok with gas
heating). Check also This
link, This link
, This link
or This
link
I scheme I recall quoted a break-even time of about 5 years -
ie, even at todays prices, the houses will pay for the extra cost
of solar tiling on the roofs in 5 years in terms of electricity
savings - I will have to dig that link out again..
>People are scratching their heads and saying "hang
on, what do you *do* with plutonium that is going to be
radioactive for centuries, and has to be guarded in case some
terrorist digs it up to make a dirty bomb.."
The solution is well known and widely used: you get your
plutonium and you mix it with regular fissible U235 to make a
combustible called MOX. Then you feed MOX into nuclear reactors
for energy production. The plutonium is degraded into
shorter-life elements (mostly Americanium 241) which are less
toxic and need to be stored for a few years instead of a few
millenia. That's what the French and other Europeans are doing
since the 80s. Big bonus: You can also use plutonium coming from
disarmed nuclear warheard.
You would not be suprised to learn that Greenpeace
do not agree with that. The technique you describe sounds
good in theory, but in practice reprocessing still generates
unacceptable levels radioactive pollution and waste that is still
very difficult to deal in
practice. BNFL have had particular problems with liquid waste
products that are very expensive to handle and dispose of safely
- its the practical details that are the problem. Furthermore you
have not talked about the price of nuclear. The UK (and many
other countries) has squandered truely huge amounts of money on
nuclear, now, it appears, with no positive end result - they are
going to be left with a collection of reactor sites that are
going to be very expensive to decommission and
clean up. If they had invested just a fraction
of that money on renewables, we would be burning a heck of a lot
less coal/oil/gas now. There are actually parts of the world (ie
Chernobyl) that are too radioactive to live, thanks to
mistakes/miscalculations made by the nuclear power industry..
And the point is - why bother with nuclear, why take the risk?
It is becoming very apparent that alternatives really can deliver
cheap electricity, without the same level of pollution and waste.
Furthermore, costs of solar cells will drop as
volumes increase. Case in point - look at the monitor you are
(probably) looking at now - if it is TFT - and think how much the
price has decreased in the last few years as manufacturing
techniques have improved and volumes increased.. Push the
production volumes up, and have every house in the country use
solar tiling..
As for your wind power argument, wind turbines are useful
if noisy, but again, we are talking a few megawatts here, not the
gigawatts that are currently produced by thermal plants. Wind
power can not scale a thousand-fold.
Not true - the UK is setting a target of getting 20% of its
power from re-newables by 2020, and a lot of that will be
wind-power. There are soon to be huge
offsiore wind farms in construction.. And they are not noisy,
nor do they upset wildlife - same site documents the evidence.
Like with so many things, it pays to actually step back,
forget your politics for a while, and take a pragmatic view of
the science.. Ok, I will get off by soap box now.. :-)
