Derek Geldard wrote:
On Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:38:24 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:


Only in a few places does geography favour you and allow cost effective
pumped storage to work.

I dont know of an and I cant think of any possible new sites.

Obviously the head of water needs to be up a mountain.

The lake at Dinorwic was built in a disused quarry.

A disused quarry on top of a mountain, that's something everyday you
don't see. And how many of these did you say we would need ?

Total reliqance on renewables would have an impact on the landscape more
or less akin to that which happened when the ice age retreated and
humans settled here and totally deforested the place. It would be
industrialisation of the landscape on a scale so massive it would be
completely unrecognisable. Forget trees, wilderness and beauty spots.
The whole landscape would be covered with power grids, windmills, solar
panels and every mountain would have to have a lake and a dam.

David reckons ten percent of the land area would need to be covered with
SOMETHING. at 100% efficiency.


All such "Wastelands" currently have a sparse population eeking out a
miserable,very basic existence, but surviving.

What incentive could we conceivably offer them for them to accept all
this crap electrical generating hardware, when all they have by way of
compensation is a beautiful unspoiled environment, so that we in the
cities 300 -600 miles away can live comfortable (nay luxurious) lives
with 9 to 5 desk jobs in "marketing" with electric cars and electric
central heating with air conditioning.

Now currently 23% of te land is used for agriculture. So what happens
when another 20% goes to develop power generation?

Or 100 nuclear power stations on coats and estuaries. Yup, we can
deliver electricity to supply the whole countries TOTAL energy needs
with 100 large nuclear power stations.

You tell me which makes more sense.


What would have made more sense would have been for the politicians
not to have paddled us up this **** creek to keep green**** and the
other ultra lefties happy for the sake of clutching on to their vote
as a drowning man would clutch at a straw ...


It all goes back to the Cold War. Soviet money went into trying to
disaffect populations from governments to halt the nuclear weapons
campaign. CND was one way or another, an organisation funded by the
Soviets to make everybody so scared of nuclear anything that they would
be the only ones left with a Bomb.

So its ingrained in the Left, who used to be funded by the same place,
that a weak defenceless country, without any nuclear power stations that
could breed plutonium, was what was the ideal society should be.

Put like that, it wasn't a message that could be sold, so a campaign of
fear, uncertainty and doubt was launched against everything nuclear.

The result, alongside the essentially soviet style government we have
today, is what was desired..long after it was desired by the Soviets.

They no longer care, apart from ensuring we need lots of cheap gas to
back up windmills.

Green**** and to an extent FOE and things like the Animal Rights
movement are simply the logical descendants of those sorts of movements
and people.

More or less well meaning but very naive people, who believe a bunch of
lies pushed down at them by some very cynical people, and some utter
fanatics, to whom the truth is simply what people can be persuaded to
believe.


It wasn't worth risking confronting them with nuclear energy, so it got
dropped from the political agenda. At the price of capital vis a vis the
cost of coal, oil and gas, it wasn't cost effective anyway.

Now the supplies of coal oil and gas are scarcer, the world is competing
with the West on price, and CO2 is coming back to haunt us, it suddenly
becomes the best option.

BUT the history of FUD is still in peoples minds. There is no rational
case against nuclear power, but there is a huge IRRATIONAL one. There is
no rational case FOR windmills, but there is a huge irrational one.

Its sold as a 'back to nature' clean power. Its anything but. Its
industrialisation of the landscape on a scale that has never been
attempted. Its unbelievably inefficient of manpower and physical
resources. But its proponents seek to make those its BENEFITS fer chrissake.






Derek