Going nuclear.
What happened when two listeners came on iPM to talk about the government's nuclear plans. Hear it...and see a visual mock up here!
Jump to more content from this blog
About this blog
The blog for the afternoon news and current affairs programme presented by Eddie Mair.
Subscribe to PM
You can stay up to date with PM via these feeds.
PM Feed(RSS)
PM Feed(ATOM)
If you aren't sure what RSS is you'll find our beginner's guide to RSS useful.
Listen to PM
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~50~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
Post no bills.
Complain about this comment
Bill Posters will be prosecuted.
Complain about this comment
Bill Posters is innocent!
Complain about this comment
Is Bill Posters related to Bill Stickers?
Complain about this comment
Being awake early, I heard this interesting and measured discussion. There are so many things one could say about the nuclear power issue, but in the context of this application it would have been worth the lady from Cumbria mentioning the likely effect on this and many other nuclear power plants of predicted sea level rise.
Complain about this comment
If Bill Stickers or Bill Posters touches my property I will go nuclear.
Complain about this comment
Anne, I believe they are distant cousins, as are the Pasters and Fixers. ;o)
Complain about this comment
Given that nuclear reactors tend to be encased in several feet of concrete, I doubt sea level rise would do much to the reactor itself during its lifetime - unless the action of the sea undermining the cliffs led to it meeting the same fate as the Holbeck Hall Hotel (which admittedly failed due to a different cause)...
Complain about this comment
Ln 6, I'd go ballistic.
We have a company in St Albans called Bill's Removals. OK, we don't.
Complain about this comment
Don't worry about rising sea level. Ice has a greater volume than water, so the sea levels may fall.
Complain about this comment
Mittfh,
As ever, an understatement. Meters, more like, or kilotonnes, each of which involves a rather large carbon footprint.
It's also worth re-iterating the facts that
Complain about this comment
Facts:
Complain about this comment
LN (12)
Yep. I agree with you about that.
Complain about this comment
@10 - ?? nothing to do with ice?
Sea Level rise about the expansion of liquid water with increased temperature.
Some people say 'the Polar Ice will melt and Sea Levels will rise' but these are two seperate items and NOT related causally.
Like 'I am going to make a cup of tea and listen to the radio'....
Complain about this comment
Britain does have massive renewable resources.
I presume you mean wind power?
Slight hitch - offshore wind farms are gradually being built, and can produce more electricity per turbine more consistently than onshore wind farms, but are very expensive. Onshore wind farms have a very high NIMBY factor - even applications to erect a meterological test mast to see whether the wind speed is sufficient are met with huge opposition.
Hydro plants need a steep, empty valley - flooding villages isn't acceptable nowadays.
Solar energy? On anything larger than a domestic scale, is probably unworkable.
Geothermal? How deep do you want to dig?
Tidal? The Severn Barrage scheme has a high NIMBY factor.
-oOo-
Nuclear isn't an ideal solution and shouldn't form the basis of any long-term plans - the issues regarding fuel refinement, delivery and disposal are nightmarish in scale. However, it does provide a significant quantity of electricity from a relatively small ground take.
Imagine how much CO2 would be produced from a fossil fuel plant with the same generating capacity as a nuclear plant, or the vast area of countryside / sea required for wind turbines to generate the same capacity. Besides which, it may have escaped your notice that the wind is not constant. As it's impractical to float a turbine in the jet stream, we need to have a certain amount of 'always on' generating capacity for when the wind doesn't blow.
Complain about this comment
NN,
Maybe not Northern "polar ice", but the melting of Southern (continental) ice and Greenland (continental) ice is inexorably connected to sea level rise.
And Mittfh, The 'solution' lies in using less, and that from renewables. The actual material limitations in terms of nuclear fuel are far more severe than is generally recognised. There is probably less than a century's worth at present levels of use.
Disributed power generation holds far more promise than more big units at remote locations. Folk who generate even part of their own power almost always end up reducing their overall level of consumption. When it just comes out of a socket from a distant source, it's disposable, innit?
Complain about this comment
Bill Posters woz 'ere.
Complain about this comment
Strictly speaking, to make the most difference it isn't so much people that need to use less - for example, I get through about 5kW of electricity a day - but industry and commerce, which consume vastly greater quantities. Courtesy of a bunch of OWL energy meters, I know the air con in my office alone consumes 36kW - and that's used fairly conservatively, maintaining an average temperature of 23-24°C. A single supermarket freezer is rated at about 4kW - multiply that by the number of freezers they have - both on the shop floor and in the warehouse behind.
At a rough guess, even a fairly small supermarket could probably easily eat up 100kW of electricity (and I wouldn't be surprised if "Extra" type stores consume a megawatt or two) - so anything they can do to reduce their energy consumption will have a similar impact to dozens (if not hundreds) of houses. Yet I can't think of any that have advertised how they're reducing their energy consumption - even through simple things such as replacing T8 fluorescent tubes with T5, or perhaps by using more efficient diffusers so they need fewer tubes in the first place.
Complain about this comment
Mittfh,
1. Surely you should measure in kWh rather than kW, or do you use a constant average of 4kW all day/night?
2. The supermarkets and your office and the rest of "industry and commerce" consume the energy they do on your (and my) behalf, and it's false accounting not to allow for this.
Similarly, it's usual to allocate all of, say, the Chinese energy consumption to the Chinese, without acknowledging that much of that energy is consumed in producing and transporting goods for our consumption. Should we not allocate such embodied energy consumption to our own accounts in the interests of a fair assessment of participation in Earth-rape?
It is common, if not already the norm, that any mouthful of modern "food" carries more embodied fossil (and/or nuke/renewable) energy than it delivers in calorific nutrition. Do you reckon this is a situation with any likelihood of long-term continuation?
;-)
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS