Solving the UK's energy problems.

[timwilky]

Silly silly ideas

What we need is a few new clean coal power plants, carbon sequestration, etc. We went daft with the dash for gas in the 80s and forgot this rock was sat on a big rock of coal which we allowed to degrade because we could not be bothered to preserve the existing deep mines as "world" coal drift mined and shipped over from Austrailia etc was considered so much cheaper.

The past 20 years should have been spent putting us leaders in clean coal technology now we are having to buy in gas and building huge LPG ports and storage.

Still my company does the convential island for nuclear, or full turnkey for coal and combine cycle. So unless the world suddenly invents a new power source you are still going to need us. We even built LPG tankers until we sold the shipping building bit.

Thorium based nuclear reactors...

Thorium as a nuclear fuel

Thorium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. A thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle including much greater abundance on Earth, superior physical and nuclear properties of the fuel, enhanced proliferation resistance, and reduced nuclear waste production. Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), has worked on developing the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors. Rubbia states that a tonne of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.[14] One of the early pioneers of the technology was U.S. physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who helped develop a working nuclear plant using liquid fuel in the 1960s.
Some countries are now investing in research to build thorium-based nuclear reactors. In May 2010, researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, received a three-year Energy Independence Partnership Grant to collaborate on the development of a self-sustainable fuel cycle for light water reactors.[15] According to the Israeli nuclear engineer, Eugene Shwageraus, their goal is a self-sustaining reactor, "meaning one that will produce and consume about the same amounts of fuel," which is not possible with uranium. He states, "the better choice is thorium, whose nuclear properties offer considerable flexibility in the reactor core design." Some experts believe that the energy stored in the earth's thorium reserves is greater than what is available from all other fossil and nuclear fuels combined.[15]
[edit] Key benefits

According to Australian science writer Tim Dean, "thorium promises what uranium never delivered: abundant, safe and clean energy - and a way to burn up old radioactive waste."[16] With a thorium nuclear reactor, Dean stresses a number of added benefits: there is no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products, and will burn up existing high-level waste as well as nuclear weapon stockpiles.[16] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."[14]
The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years." [17] Reducing coal as an energy source, according to science expert Lester R. Brown of The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC, would significantly reduce medical costs from breathing coal pollutants. Brown estimates that coal-related deaths and diseases are currently costing the U.S. up to $160 billion annually."[18]






simples?

Originally Posted by Berlin

Here are the figures for the North West of Scotland and another section of tidal energy. Again it misses the point that if you spread the turbines, you spread the generating times...

Hands off you lot!! our tidal farms and wind farms are for us lot north of the border - None of this coming up to nick our production. We have to make something of the crap weather we get.

What happens when the coal runs out?

At some point energy from our finite resources has to be replaced.

Maybe you could argue that the longer we can burn fossil fuels, the better our engineering appreciation will be for alternatives such as tidal. Getting that past the greens would be a challenge.

Originally Posted by Quedos

Hands off you lot!! our tidal farms and wind farms are for us lot north of the border - None of this coming up to nick our production. We have to make something of the crap weather we get.

Might be north of the border, but a whole bunch of the power electronics for 'your' wind turbines was designed and built in the midlands.

We will loan them to you for a while though

Originally Posted by amnesia

Might be north of the border, but a whole bunch of the power electronics for 'your' wind turbines was designed and built in the midlands.

We will loan them to you for a while though

Damn - always one put waters on the coals!!

[andrewsmith]

Originally Posted by amnesia

Might be north of the border, but a whole bunch of the power electronics for 'your' wind turbines was designed and built in the midlands.

We will loan them to you for a while though

and Northumberland

Originally Posted by andrewsmith

and Northumberland

Northumberland? Who's that then?

sorry if im stating the obvious here but after seeing that pic berlin put up of the under water propeller, i just thought why not go double bubble and put a wind on on top, wave underneath wind on top

Originally Posted by davepreston

sorry if im stating the obvious here but after seeing that pic berlin put up of the under water propeller, i just thought why not go double bubble and put a wind on on top, wave underneath wind on top

With a thorium reactor in the middle?