Join The Dots
By Paul Homewood
There have been three bits of news today, all totally separate, but all also intimately connected.
Nuclear Energy
We start with the following story from the Daily Telegraph.
For years the Labour government refused to commit to building new nuclear capacity, to replace the capacity coming soon to the end of its life. The problems were then further compounded, first by the disastrous decision by Gordon Brown’s decision to sell off Westinghouse in 2006 to China, and then when he sold British Energy, who ran the nuclear plants, to EDF in 2009.
After two years of prevarication, even Chris Huhne accepted the need for new nuclear. But the UK is now in such a weak bargaining position, that potential nuclear operators, such as EDF, can hold the country to ransom.
As of now, the government is refusing to pay price asked, but, at the moment, we are between a rock and a hard place. With the rest of the UK’s energy strategy in tatters, we are faced with a choice – pay up or go without.
Wind Power
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Over the last few days, we have had a high pressure over the UK. Now I know, and you know, and even the village idiot probably has a clue. When you get high pressure you don’t get much wind.
As a result, over the last 24 hours, wind has contributed just 1.1% to electricity generation, and is currently even lower, down to 0.4%. Over the year, we would normally expect wind to provide about 4%, though this itself is much less than rated capacity.
Meanwhile, coal continues to provide nearly half of all electricity, because it remains by far the cheapest fuel. Due to EU emissions regulations, most of the UK’s coal plants will be forced to shut soon, despite having plenty of life left in them.
Global Temperatures
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
UAH have just released their global temperatures for February, which are down by 0.33C, thus reversing the rise in January. Both February temperatures, and the running average, are at the level seen between 2002 and 2006, when similarly neutral ENSO conditions predominated.
Roy Spencer has also published the latest Sea Surface Temperature Updates, which give a similar message – SST’s are currently bang on the 2003-06 average.
I sometimes think I’ll wake up, and it will all have been a bad dream.
Comments are closed.
Gotta tell ya I burn up inside when I read this stuff and more. It’s like I’ve landed on the set of a zombie film. Honest to God this country is being screwed from within. Words cannot express the frustration Myself and others feel about this situation.
Paul,
Here is a summary of the dots from the evaporation of Hiroshima in 1945 to the release of Climategate e-mails in 2009:
The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Aug 1945 scared world leaders into forming the United Nations on 24 Oct 1945.
Society reaped many benefits from that decision – reduction in the threat of nuclear annihilation, nationalism, racism, etc.
But world leaders have been prevented from being able to meet the basic needs of society because of 1946 decision to hide information on the source of energy (E) [1,2] stored as mass (m) in cores of
_ a.) Heavy atoms like Th, U, Pu
_ b.) Planets like Jupiter and Saturn
_ c.) Ordinary stars like our Sun
_ d.) Galaxies like the Milky Way
The first nuclear scientist to inspect the ruins of Hiroshima, Dr. Kazuo Kuroda of the Imperial University of Tokyo [3], realized while standing in its in Aug 1945:
“The sight before my eyes was just like the end of the world, but I also felt that the beginning of the world may have been just like this.” (page 2) Climategate emails in Nov 2009 show the futility of trying to hide the nuclear explosion that birthed the solar system five billion years (5 Gyr) ago.
That same nuclear scientist presented calculations at the AGU meeting inApr 1956 in Washington, DC to show that self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions, “nuclear fires”, burned spontaneously on Earth two billion years (2 Gyr) ago [4].
Kuroda’s calculations were criticized in 1956, and his findings were limited to two, single-page reports [4]. But the discovery of self-sustaining nuclear fission reactors in the Oklo Uranium Mine confirmed Kuroda’s calculations in 1972 [3].
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
PhD Nuclear Chemistry
Postdoc Space Physics
PS – By coincidence, it looks like the snow falling here in Missouri today should blanket Washington, DC in time for the House Subcommittee hearing tomorrow on “global warming !“
http://science.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-environment-policy-relevant-climate-issues-context
1. ”Neutron Repulsion”, The APEIRON Journal 19, 123-150 (2012): http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V19NO2pdf/V19N2MAN.pdf
2. “Yes, the Sun is a pulsar,” Nature (submitted 12 Dec 2012): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/Yes_the_Sun_is_a_pulsar.pdf
3. Paul Kazuo Kuroda, The Origin of the Chemical Elements and the Oklo Phenomenon (Springer Publishers, 165 pages, 1982) page 2:
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Chemical-Elements-Oklo-Phenomenon/dp/3540116796
4. P. K. Kuroda, “On the nuclear physical stability of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 781 (1956); “On the infinite multiplication constant and the age of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 1256 (1956).
Hey Oliver, I love your stuff. Makes more basic sense to me than some of the rubbish we get fed, but then I’m just a stupid engineer, and must learn to stop looking for simple solutions to problems that must be made more complicated.
Paul Did you see on Reuters that we only have about 2 weeks of gas reserves if it doesn’t warm up soon!!! I think its about to get cold again as well.
This is an interesting read where this guy demonstrates that energy is the key to measuring economic activity and confirms what we all know that the government is not only shooting itself in the foot, but cutting off its legs above the knee.
I don’t share the guys pessimism about energy and our ability to turn things around because we are awash in energy. Shale gas will pull the UK from the brink, but it is NOT the answer. Nuclear power is. But here is the difference. It is no good us just building 3 or 4 zillion GW Uranium reactors. They are over priced and consume too much up front capital. The way forward is to industrialise the manufacture of small reactors such as those we put in subs. better to have a dozen on one site than one big one. Also we need diversity of fuel, so we can first burn the plutonium, we have a 1000 years of the stuff, then we run it through various uranium reactors, (their are several different types) and finally through a molten salt thorium reactor, which has the ability to completely burn all the nuclear material leaving us with basically harmless material.
This will be our new industrial revolution and at a stroke will obsolete and render un economic all other forms of producing electricity.
Now the only thing we lack is a political system that will allow an open debate and reality to check in. This is needed to get over our unscientific obsession with low does radiate that all the evidence tells us is not only beneficial but probably necessary for a healthy life. But I can assure you that there is a ground swell feeling for a change, and not of the type that UKIP are offering but of a far more fundamental type that will put the people back in charge. We are further along than this path than many realise.
Have negotiations failed yet? (2 months later).
No, I expect they will drag on for months yet, Brian