Nuclear Power Stations

Nuclear Power Stations

Carrying on from http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/fridaythe13th/

So - Are these the answer for our dwindling fossil fuel supplies?

Greenpeace say we should ditch them all straight away - so what do u we fill the void with? Wind turbines apparently make hills look unpretty... fools.

What IS the real alternative to nuclear, coal and oil? No one seems to have an answer. More to the point, are the developing countries gunna stop using it cause the rich west says so? i.e. China? are they fuck.


Thoughs

errr my mum says that we'll all be dead from the holed ozone layer before we run out of petrol any way so what's the diffrence

Nuclear fusion is the future but they can't create the conditions to do it safely yet.

At the moment we don't have a credible alternative to nuclear.

We are running out of fossil fuel at an alarming rate - did you know the UK has been a net importer of gas for the last two years? Also, our future gas imports are more than likely to be coming from politically unstable areas, and look what happened recently with Russia/Ukraine.

Renewable electricity technologies are just not advanced enough to cope with our increasing demand. Furthermore, most of them are intermittent and as we can't store electricity, this will cause us problems without reliable back-up. Part-loading coal and gas power stations increases emissions (compared to running them full tilt), and nuclear is just too difficult to turn on and off at relatively short notice.

Regarding China and India etc, 'western' nations (including the US) have signed agreements to help them develop cleaner power stations than they have been recently, which helps to sort out the emissions problems, but their economies are growing so quickly they need power from somewhere.

So yes, nuclear it is. For now anyway. And for information, I am a massive supporter of renewable technologies and wish they were advanced enough to cope, but they aren't. Governments should have been starting to deal with all this 30 years ago.

50 years till there's no oil at this rate... death from the ozone? nar, drown maybe. could be good for some of the board

sounds like a daily mail exclusive story

Well now there's a reasoned argument if ever I saw one.

aww his mam told him... bless

Greenpeace are mostly thick hippies by the looks of things

Do they REALLY know what the crack is with Nuclear fuel or do they just think of cartoons with barrels with the radioactive sign on dumped in rivers with luminous green fluid leaking out?

They want an alternative that has no possible danger and doesnt require any physical stucture to be built in the country...

What do they expect

morons.

I also agree that Nuclea is the most viable solution at the present time but it would be great to see renewable energies in more wide spread use.

On a different note there was some grenpeace hippy on TV a few weeks ago whinging about power lines 'ruining the country side'

It was decided that something £15M was to be spent to put them underground. Which aswell as costing a fortunre, requires half the country side to dug up and be swarming with diggers, lorries, and big holes for a few years....what an ideal solution that is

Hippies

Hydrogen is the answer!

Definetly. That's how the sun gives out its energy. Problem is you need a really high temperature to do it

That Greenpeace video was stupid. They were using an extreme case of someone trying to deliberately blow up a station as a reason for not using nuclear.

Hydrogen is a way of transporting and storing energy, using fuel cells, but it actually takes input of energy to produce it etc. It is not an energy source in itself.

If you fuse 2 hydrogen atoms it forms a harmless product which is lighter than the sum of its parts. The difference in mass is released as energy. It is potentially far more energy than what they do now of breaking down a heavy atom into several parts as nuclear fission does

pity they couldn't think of a way to harness some kind of geo-thermic energy... all that energy stored just 70* or so miles underground...




* if my 1st year geography memory serves me well...

It isn't to do with weight, it is to do with energy released when the atoms bond. And we don't have the technology to do it at the moment anyway; it takes more energy to do it than you get out. So, nice in theory but not entirely practical.

There are ground heat extractors available at the moment, which can be used for heating. You don't even have to bury the exchangers very deep (as in feet, rather than miles). The only problem is you need a lot of land to get a little bit of heat out, so again it isn't practical.

I think they have some parts of sweden heated like that. I bet my last 50p that the american governement has something up their sleeve energy wise. I think other wise there is no other alternative than nuclear.

yeah - build up their armies and weapons - then take over whoever has the resources!

Mad-Max-tastic....