I guess you must have all seen or read about the government's plans to build loads of new nuclear power stations all over the UK. Personally I find this somewhat alarming... what does everyone else think ?
The muslims will have a lot of places to bomb! Heck, they plant a big enough one they can take out half of Europe...
Theres another thread in the UK section about decreasing carbon emissions, which is a very positive thing. This is one of the best ways to do it, Nuclear Power is much cleaner then coal or oil/natural gas, and is much more sustainable. It also has a much much much higher saftey record then combustion plants, and since wind and solar power don't produce enough energy to be effecient yet, nuclear power is the cleanest, most economical and most enviornmentally sound way for the UK to meet it's energy needs to stay productive. Green nukes light the way to our future. Also nuclear waste isn't nearly as much of a problem as it was in the 70's since about 95% of the fissionable matireal lost as 'nuclear waste' is recoverable. I'll post some more about this tommorow if I get a chance.
very stupid idea, great target , I dont trust the nuclear industrys safety standards if you look at what happened in Chernobyl you can see that just one accident could destroy this country so I would prefer any other form of power . http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html nice site about a ride through what was once some of the best farmland on earth and will now be uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years
hmm chernobyl was the result of a badly run power station that decided to perform an experiement when the reactor was fully operational. it takes a team of scientists to cause something on that scale....not a bomb
i think it is great that we are lookinbg into alternatives and actually making moves with the environment, however i am a little wary of nuclear power being the key, lots of nuclear waste is not the best thing for our environment, and a risk of accident is a little worrying. i think if it is one of the only actions to replace fossil fuels we should use it along side mass re-newable sources such as wind/solar etc peacex
i think that some on a small scale would be good whilst other techniques are being researched (like hydrogen fusion), but a chenobyl style disaster IS possible (despite them fact that chenobyl was caused buy a series of errors, that could happen again) so im just nto too sure about the whole tihng.
Like I said, solar and wind energy are fine in principle, but they don't produce nearly enough energy to make them an acceptabe replacment for fossil fuels. Maybe this will turn around someday, as technological improvments continue, but for right now it's simply not viable. Meanwhile, nuclear technology is rapidly imrpved over the past few decades. Most nuclear waste can be reused for the next fuel process, and having sealed containers containing nuclear waste contained, sequestered, and monitered like it is now its certainly better then dumping all our poisonous chemicals into the air. *like coal and oil plants do* oil plants create twice as much radioactive waste as nuclear plants. only they dump it right into the air.Containg the waste is also positive because future generations will be able to deal with it much bettter then we can. Chernobyl couldn't happen again. It was a series of mistakes that is studied by every nuclear plant operator. More importantly improved technologies in plant construction make meltdowns almost impossible. But the big reason chernobl could never happen again is the way nuclear plant are built everywhere follows IAEA mandates which means if a meltdown did happen, it would be comtained in a giant diaper and would be much less severe then Three Mile Island. Flying a plane into a nuclear plant couldn't cause a meltdown and definatly not an incident like chernobyl. The improvments in nuclear energy are such that while years ago they could only be run at 70% of the time and the rest as cool down, now they can be run 90% of the time much more saftey then in the past. If you want to compare number of casualties, or damages fossil fuel plats have explosions all the time, while there are only a few incidents of nuclear meltdowns. Chris is right though, fusion not like fission we use today is the energy of the future. A meltdown is impossible for a fusion reactor, as it only has enough fuel feeding it to sustain it for an instant. It also leaves behind negligable amounts of radioactive matireal. And the almost non existant radicactive matireal has a half life of only about ten years, not the hundreds of thouands with the by products of modern fission technology. Google ITER if yuo want to learn more about fusion power. The first plant being built in France. If our energy demand remains like it is now, theres about 600 billion years of tritium fuel in the ocean. That's going to be around a lot longer then the sun. Untill wind and solar can compete, nuclear is the best option for a cleaner tommorow. Energy conservation is never going to happen. Higher energy taxes may articifcially lower demand temporarily, but it will ultimatly make a country less productive. You can draw a pretty simple chart between energy consuption per capita and GDP per capita. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp
Even beyond nuclear fusion, hydrogen fusion could be developed, and if that could be done, the only bi-product would be water.
A lot of people seem to be talking about Chernobyl but what about Sellafield, which used to be Windscale. Look at this map showing ceasium deposits across the UK: http://www.mnetz.fsnet.co.uk/sellafield.gif Most of it is from Chernobyl, but note the concentration around sellafield - there are huge amounts over the mountains, though a country wide survey was only taken after the chernobyl incident which exposed the excess contamination in the lake district. It's basically a result of the Windscale fire in the 50's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire Now, this was in the early days of nuclear power and they tell us it could not happen again. However, a leak occurred at the latest sellafield reactor only a few months ago! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield Having said all this - I'm not sure we have much option. There are any many new exciting projects on the horizon but none of them will sort out our problems over the coming decade. As for green energy... well, 90% of the hills of Wales which do not fall in a national park are to become one great wind farm, but they will only power 10% of the homes and none of them in the more densly populated regions in the South (they did try to build a single turbine out at sea by Swansea but everybody complained!). England has 20 times the number of people so sadly I'm not sure what other options you have?! Another factor is that wind turbines do not reduce the number of power stations you still have to have for when the wind speed is too low (this seems obvious, but it took me a good few months to get it into my head until I saw some turbines on a windless day!). I'm a big believer in everybody having their own little turbine and batteries (as common as a satellite dish), plus maybe some solar panels too - all subsidised by the government! Nobody seems to be pushing for this, and local councils will rarely give you planning permission! Which is a shame because I think they could make a bigger impact than 10%, and people who have got their own devices have been to use much less electricity they still have to pay for.
it is possible to create energy enough for us and in excess via renewable means, but financialy it would be a huge step up from our current fossil guzzling habbits, and with the new pipelines being installed, it's unlikely to be needed for another 20+ years nuclear in principal is grand, but their are many negatives, but research must continue, as if there are ways to decomition (sp?) and deposit/dispose of waste are found, it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread however, suddenly throwing all we have at nuclear will cripple renewable energy, development will on the whole cease aside from small scale eccentrics....and we will become reliant on nuclear. a balance needs to be drawn up, currently the government has swung from pro-renewables to pro-nuclear in quite a short time, though there is time puting alot of preassure for solutions to the energy problem, there is still a bit of time on the clock for sensible decisions to be made
there have been plans for years to create a severn barrage from brean down near weston super mare over to wales . They think this would be able to provide 20% of the countrys electricity, but for some reason they have never gone ahead with it http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/tidal.htm this and other wave and wind power projects I feel would be much more sense
yeah, ive heard of the severn barrage plan....it wouldn't be financialy viable unless they charged people going accross it, they're pretty tough to build, and whilst they're being built and afterwards they can change the local ecosystems....there's one that's been up and running up the river that runs through st malo in france
as I understand it our nuclear powerstations all go over budget and they have problems decommissioning them so wouldnt it be better to have barrage
alot better as for decomishening....that's a glorified word for pouring thousands of tonnes of concrete on the core and praying that levels of radiation are minimal
