Mel Gibson was extremely hot back then as well. Wouldn't be much of a hardship....

The problem with nuclear power is that the technology seems to be largely stuck in the '50s with some strange binding to PWR technology. Even the latest nuclear power station systems being installed in France are still PWRs.

There are significantly better designs available now - such as integral fast reactors and liquid sodium reactors which are so efficient that they can burn the waste from existing PWRs meaning that only a small fraction of the long term waste we currently produce will ever need to be stored.

these newer designs are also significantly safer, because they don't require massive water pressures to cool the reactor - this was the problem at Fukishima - as soon as power was lost to the cooling system, the pressure dropped and the reactor was no longer cooled. A liquid sodium reactor would have self cooled owing to the negative reactivity coefficient, and the residual heat would have kept the liquid metal coolant working through convection.

It's a huge shame that there is no leadership in this issue, though the UK are considering the PRISM reactors developed by GE for Sellafield. This could be a huge boost to getting greater deployment of fast reactor technology.


S

Great you can keep Mel and I'll keep the car. Serendipity.
You can't just bring an informed, rational views to a nuclear debate.

True - particularly in Australia. It's usually an emotive issue, but generally one fueled by ignorance and fear than actual facts...


S

Garry. I can't tell if you are working at being unpleasant or it's your basic nature. You would be more persuasive if you were just a bit less abusive. The fact that your opinion of AGW is different from Christopher Booker's doesn't of itself make him "scum". Settle down, boy!

By the way, I wonder if you do in fact mean Chris Booker of the Daily Telegraph, or Chris Brooker, an invention of your very own. If the former, then you have a credibility problem caused by carelessness, at the very least. Are you equally careless with your AGW facts?

Nope. I lost patience with those climate denier scum many years ago. Frankly, when you consider that they will be responsible for millions of deaths, I think I'm been more that nice to the genocidal vermin.

This isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of a certain sector of society wilfully ignoring the evidence and promoting a course of action that makes EVERYONE suffer, and millions die. The same lies, peddled year after year, even when it's demonstrated that the deniers are wrong and are faking up their 'evidence'. It's, not to put too fine a word on it, evil.

<snipped an unnecessary comment>

Isn't that how all of us express our views of the world, as an opinion? I mean Gina Rinehart has opinions on many, many...many things really. It's a persons grasp of a subject that weights their opinion, not if they choose to express it.

I believe we are contributing to warming - we certainly contributed to CO2 - which is itself a contribution to warming...

There's also a lot of debate about how we are measuring the data.
There is a debate going on in the BOM about how they interpret - and correct data going back years - and allowing for past errors.

The point that gets me exercised is that there are far too many people spewing complete b*llsh*t on this - like the "there a lot of debate" canard above.

Nope, there's not any serious debate - as I say the "is it" question got nailed down decades ago. We know the Titanic is going down, the questioning now is is it 1.5 or 2.5 hours before it sinks, and what do you do then. Anyone still spewing the 'debate' view is either massively ill informed, or actively rejecting reality for delusion. If they really had 'new' science, well there's a nobel prize and a pair of kocks prepared to shower money on them - it NEVER happens. They just repeat bull that's been answered decades in the past.

If this were about "is Kim Kardashian a talentless whore, or a smart whore on the make" it wouldn't matter - it's ephemera. However, failure to take serious action on this means we go over the tipping point (somewhere between 1.5C and 2.5C) and so kicks off feedback effects that push natural processes to 'switch' the climate mode into a high CO2/greenhouse mode (prob 6C+). And that wouldn't switch back for centuries to millennia, no matter matter what. The end result of that is not the tens of millions of deaths we have already guaranteed by our failure to act before, but hundreds of millions to billions of deaths.

Climate deniers are literally part of the biggest potential genocide ever.

Given that, I don't give any quarter with such people. If it's ignorance they need to get educated, and if it's delusion, they to get locked out of the decision making process. Either way they should be viewed with scorn and contempt.

It's pretty clear being nicey nicey hasn't worked.

I was chatting to the manager of a North Brisbane resort village recently and they told me that Energex won't allow them to install any more solar because they don't make enough money from them.

I thought the idea was to encourage the use of solar so brand new power plants wouldn't be necessary.

Executive summary: It's rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic .

Full: The cost of electric distribution services are fixed, this means as you approach "grid parity" (where as much electricity is being generated as used) large parts of the grid are not used at capacity which makes them an underperforming asset.

Electrical distribution companies have been operating in a highly regulated market as a middle man between generators and consumers with returns effectively guaranteed. In many countries however demand has stagnated or been reduced as efficiency of use improves so distribution companies are trying to defend their traditional business model by impeding people who would sell electricity back to the grid in any volume.

I'm a sceptic re MMGW as well, but cant see the leftist plot side of things... Surely there is more money to be made from installing and constantly upgrading green energy world wide than purely maintaining and increasing current infrastructure ?


Plus Here comes Tesla...

This new Tesla battery will power your home, and maybe the electric grid too - The Washington Post

Thats just the beginning of the 2nd generation of home storage.... It's bound to improve at a quantam level like all electrical solutions.

I agree with you entirely. I did some reading up on this very subject a little while ago and it's baffling why countries like the UK and France are still installing Gen II PWRs when Gen III LWRs are available. I can only presume it's a knock-on effect from the PWR reactors that power our nuclear submarines. However, as you say, it's the Gen IV reactors that close the nuclear fuel cycle like PRISM which are most interesting.

If the UK planned for a future energy mix of PRISM reactors together with a variety of renewable sources then we could decommission our coal-fired power stations and reduce our need for natural gas as the North Sea reserves start to run out. The speed with which Tesla has developed and matured their electric car design has shown that our dependence on oil could also be hugely reduced within a generation.

As an aside I though this was interesting: U.K. National Grid status

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get me!

The sheeple have spoken