Be Excellent To Each Other

Once they're up and running, yes. The process of building them is not entirely emission-free, of course.

Have they updated the projected timeline for finishing that bloody European fusion reactor yet? By "finish" I mean "get it to break even" of course. When we visited JET back when I was a sixth-former they reckoned fusion plants would be being built by 2015. Scoff scoff.

Indeed. London is in Ontario, and this is supposed to be Toronto. Deceives!

Fusion has been 25 years in the future for 50 years now. Still, they do make tiny amounts of progress every so often, and it's potentially one of mankind's most important inventions, so it's a good thing they are still pursuing it.

See, because they have made some amount of progress it therefore seems that there aren't any fundamental barriers to getting there. It just seems to be a lack of application of funds - and given the potential importance of it I'd have thought it would be a smidge higher up the list of things to give money to. Well beyond bloody French sheep farmers.

You'd have thought so, it might even be more economical than spending trillions grinding Middle Eastern countries into powder so we can get at their oil.

However, apparently not even slightly a short-term solution, which is what we need right now. So spend lots of money on renewables too.

And knock me down with a feather, the government says it's going to do (something like) that, as of yesterday.

@markg: That's not how you get the oil. You have to bury them first.

Not even if they really went for it, in a "go to the moon in this decade" sort of way?

Well, quite. But Ross Kemp bounding around a load of scientists sat at workbenches was much harder to pitch to the TV execs.



But one that *could* be a, perhaps, medium term solution were sufficient resources made available. But that's not going to happen, as not enough progress is being made. And so the vicious circle continues.



The CBI have been lobbying hard against all renewables but nuclear, recently. I have a feeling that's what we will end up with in the main (all ultimately owned by the French government, too), with some tokenistic extra windfarms oop north.

I could be wrong, but I don't think so.


Relatedly: let's say we've got unlimited free energy to use. It all ends up as heat. Where does the heat go?

Do you know how much is being spent on fusion research? I suspect it's a quite large amount. Perhaps not Manhattan Project large, but it'll probably be getting spent more efficiently than that.

Nuclear is "renewable" now? That's a pissed definition. Anyway, I've been saying since 1996 (when I worked in the industry) that we would see new nuke plants built in this country.

Interesting. Although I don't know by how much making energy free would increase our consumption of it. Seems like it would, but then again, what would we do with it that we don't already do? Maybe in developing countries, but the barrier to power consumption there is infrastructure, not generation capacity.

Nuclear has always been classed as renewable, as far as I'm aware.

Hmm, interesting.

ITER website says 10 billion euros over 30 years. Which isn't that much, really.

EDIT - @kalmar.

Doc - yep. Every time the government goes on about renewables, nuclear is one of them. I agree it doesn't fit in the idea of what "renewable" means, but there we are. Oh, and as well as nuclear, the CBI also wants more money in "clean" coal at the expense of windfarms, by the way. The twats.

Anyway. Nuclear, yes. A bunch of NDA-owned sites are being auctioned off for new reactors to be built by the French for us. Woot.

It requires very energy-intensive mining operations to supply a raw material which is turned into an unusable (and legendarily problematic) waste product.

That ain't renewable.

Yes, I know. I'm just talking about how it's classified.

Mr Chris: it's important for us to build new 'clean' coal-fired power stations to replace the ones that are being decommissioned, but I guess this isn't a discussion for BnB.

Any operation which is considered too energy intensive today suddenly wouldn't be. There would be little requirement to make anything energy efficient.

Mainly, You'd boil the sea to get drinking and irrigation water, I suspect.

This in itself would transform any arid country by allowing them to convert deserts into plantations, ending starvation.

You could build massive mega-cities out of laser-fused glass.

Populations would boom, and you'd end up with a Blade-runner style world, probably.

If all the waste heat doesn't build up and kill everyone first. Hmm.

Would the waste heat really be an issue? Have people already done calculations? Surely it would still be small beans compared with the amount of heat from the sun wouldn't it?

Dunno, I was just wondering

Actually, that bus is from Vancouver. Toronto's buses went in 1993, as they were downright ancient. I didn't think my plan to trick the Government into buying my amazing-but-actually-exists-already invention would work if I turned up with these buses which dated back to 1947!

(in fact, the old ones were falling apart so badly they had to lease buses from Edmonton's system to keep the service running while they decided what to do - and in the end decided to just withdraw the whole thing)

And to dudley - yes, obviously. That doesn't stop people pushing electric chargable cars and such despite the fact the majority of power in the UK is still coal fired. In Canada, however, the majority is hydroelectric, so much so that people tend to refer to electricity as 'hydro' (and the power company in Ontario is 'Ontario Hydro').

If it was a problem then you'd just tell all the electric powered robots to build a massive AC unit with pipes going out into space.

Excellent, I've used those busses in Vancouver.



But this doesn't mean that you have to use the coal-fired power to charge them, and neither should you.

However, even if you do, the emissions are lower than they would be with a normal car.

You can't take the sky from me.

Simple. You build your sky elevators as combined elevators/chimneys and vent into space.

Nuclear is the only non-fossil fuel that is of an equivalent cost to the fossil fuels, it's slightly more per Kwh, but cheap compared to all this renewable bollocks.
Wind farms can fuck right off, you need tonnes of them to produce the same amount that a coal fired or nuclear plant will produce.
People just still see nuclear as bad, because of probably chernobyl and the depositing with the waste, but chernobyl was a one off, and there've been no rabbits with 2 heads or anything around sellafield.
Wind farms are no zero emissions, they do produce some emissions aswell.
Also: Incineration of waste is a fantastic way to produce energy and get rid of a lot of rubbish. Public perception of the "smoke" coming off the stack is bad, where in truth it's actually clean air, and it's just steam, you get more dioxins coming off a BBQ then you do off an incinerator.

So, yeah, nuclear = good.
renewable bollocks = expensive.

That's just, like, your opinion, man.


And this is wrong, onshore wind, for example, is cheaper than nuclear and comparable to coal (cheaper than "clean coal" too).

Bollocks is it.

From what I've been taught, it's a lot more expensive comparable to coal.

Comparable is right. It's about 3p per unit for onshore wind. How much is coal? For a new plant with emission controls?

The problem is that renewables alone will not solve this country's power needs.

Except they easily could, with a smart grid, some more pumped storage and a bit more energy conservation.

But pragmatically (and economically), building it up while balancing it with gas and clean coal is the way to do it.

Total energy or are you just talking about electricity?

Wow, you're the first hippy I've met who'll concede that.

He's the first of a dangerous breed - the smart hippy.

This is why it annoys me that the crusties keep protesting about the new cleaner coal-fired power stations that need to be built. It's either that or keep going with the massively polluting ones we have now.

The other alternative is to switch out the lights. For good.

Of course if some of things that "crusties" or "hippies" had been saying for the last 25 fucking years had been taken on board a bit sooner then we'd probably all be a bit better off.

You mean wearing tie-dye t-shirts?

Don't forget he's a clear talking Scotchlander too!

Eeek!

What other form of energy are you getting from coal at the moment?

What would help is combined heat and power, and building thermal power stations on the edges of towns to heat them with.

Incineration, it works perfectly in sheffield

You were saying that all our energy could easily be provided by renewables. So to me that means everything, all cars, buses and trains electric, no gas heating etc. I'm not sure that is easily achievable.

Ah, yes, we were only talking about electricity there.
But a good proportion of transport can and should be electric too (surprise surprise) and equally pleasing is that the government announcements seem to acknowledge that too - high speed electric rail and that.

Heating is a big energy user of course, but it's also quite a good way of storing electricity in the short term (from daily-varying sources like tidal power). That's already done to some extent.

Then there's solar heating, bio fuels (wood chip etc), and waste heat from industry and incineration (nikachu )). And plenty more.

So not easy, but not impossible, it'll take a while to get there and there will always be things where you'll have to just keep it like it is for the short term.

They've got working hydrogen cars at Brum uni, Ive seen them, they are like real cars and shit, not some slow electric bollocks.

But that's still in it's infancy, and producing hydrogen that can be stored and pumped into cars will use a lot of electricity, but it is possible.

Don't get me started on those. They're complete and utter bollocks and will not help save the planet.

Hahahahahhahahhaa


They are still cars that don't use petrol.

It's a start.

Brum Uni?

Yeah, how much energy is used to disengage the hydrogen from everything else in order to be used? It's a complete non-starter. The reason it's being backed so much? It's being funded by the oil companies.

Birmingham uni, Im too lazy to type the full

Heh Brum uni..

Of course it's in its infancy - just like fusion it's always 20 years off.

Battery electric cars, meanwhile, are like real cars and shit (as in, you can buy one), and can also be fast. And each unit of renewable electricity goes about 4 times further in an EV than as hydrogen in a fuel-cell car, so why wait?

What a lovely way of putting it. Conjures up images of big steam pistons and shit.

Yes of course a tonne of energy will be used to get the hydrogen, but what do you expect, if we become fully sufficient on renewables then surely it wont matter?