Re: OT No more wind farms on land.

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:27:24 +0100, Andy Burns
<usenet.aug2009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Java Jive wrote:

I note that you don't support your argument with a reference, so here
is one:

Because I thought this was a friendly discussion, rather a lecture with
handout notes?

But you still need to support your arguments with facts.

So then it's only of limited use to us, because we don't appear to
have any significant sources for it within the UK, any more than we
have of uranium. This means that, just as with uranium, we will be at
the beck and call of producer nations

We currently import uranium, oil, coal, gas, liquefied gas, wooden
biofuel pellets and electricity itself, why should we expect thorium to
be any different, diversity of supply and all that?

But you said ...

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 20:22:15 +0100, Andy Champ <no.way@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I didn't say it was infinite. It's worth a few centuries though, which
ought to give us time to do something else.

.... whereas, here in the UK, we don't know that it's going to last
*US* a few centuries at all. For all we know, it may NEVER be cheap
enough to use. Investing billions of pounds in thorium reactors now
might be money thrown away if we can't guarantee the supply and price
of fuel, whereas with all the other things you list, except uranium,
we have some sort of indigenous supply which we control.

whereas we have forty plus years of oil and gas where we would be the
supplier, and therefore in control.

Forty years is hardly long term, about the life of a single generation
(hah!) of power stations, we need to think in terms of types of
generation with centuries of fuel available,

Only renewables can offer that.

If India is to continue growing, it has to sell something to someone,
for now it might be rent-a-bods in call centres, or out-sourced software
development, why not at least see if they want to sell Thorium, rather
than assume they won't?

We can see that they won't, because they'll need it themselves.

Strategically, we can't decide to go all-nuclear without having firm
answers to the following questions. In the long-term future:

1) How much of the world's available nuclear fuel is likely to be
available for export to us?

2) How much will it cost us?

3) How long would it take to implement a UK generating system based
on the type of fuel that we can get?

We don't have firm answers for other fuels for the first two at least,
once fuel becomes *truly* scarce, humanity is essentially buggered
anyway, back to tiny populations in caves.

On the contrary, we do have some answers for the non-nuclear fuels.
For us to learn to live within our energy income, we know that for
*US* lying within *OUR* control, there is at least a potential 40 year
breathing space based on oil and gas, still quite a lot of coal, and
potential from other technologies such as shale gas. Given the scale
of the problem, it's not much, but just about enough, provided we
buckle down to it now, and don't fling good money after bad by
researching alternatives that the simplest back-of-an-envelope
calculation shows will in the ultimate long-term be a dead-end.
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT No more wind farms on land.
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