On 10/02/2012 15:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Nightjar wrote:
On 10/02/2012 10:30, David WE Roberts wrote:
...
Oh, and what are renewables?
One of the claims above is that biomass is no more green than fossil
fuels.
That probably leaves hydro, solar and wind.

The prospect of over 30% of the UK power demand coming reliably from
hydro, solar and wind is not looking good, especially on the still
winter nights.

Bottom line - if we want to be self sufficient in power generation what
alternatives are there to nuclear (and even then I assume we need the
fissionables from abroad)?

Like most people, you seem to forget about tidal flow generation (not
tidal barrier), which I think might actually be a viable technology,
unlike solar and wind power. Hydro is good, if you have the places to
build it, which Britain is fairly short of. I think nuclear is our
best bet, but it should include some fast consumer reactors, which
would reduce nuclear waste from around 95%, much of it high level
waste, to around 1%, mostly low level, but I'll bet it won't.

Colin Bignell
Agree with all of that except tidal flow, which is just another frigging
wind turbine, only this time buried where its
(a) bound to go wrong and
(b) guaranteed to be fearfully expensive to fix.

I would quite happily build all nuclear. However, I rather doubt that we
could get away without any renewable energy and, IMO, tidal flow
promises to be the best of of a bad lot. At least it is predictable.

Colin Bignell