The clean green energy thread - Lets talk about alternatives to nuclear power and how we can save th

SkScotchegg

SkScotchegg

SkScotchegg

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The clean green energy thread - Lets talk about alternatives to nuclear power & fossil fuels - Lets save the world!

People say that clean green energy currently cant supply the demand of the world we live in but what if people aren't thinking outside the box, like as an example scenerio what if we just had power for 6 days a week to each home in the UK, instead of 7 days, or what about the fact that most people work all day and arent even home, so why do we need the power to our homes if we arent even there.

Or even if it was just for one hour a day or 3 hours a day or whatever, I just think we could cut our demand down drastically if we did stuff like this.

I like to enjoy the things everyone else enjoys such as 50" tv's, projectors, PC's, laptops, xbox 360's etc etc and all the usual gadgets people in Britain like to enjoy, but if the government said we aren't going to use nuclear power anymore in the UK and so you'll only have power for 5 days a week and in those 5 days it will just be for 8 hours a day...I'm cool with that...Also I'm just talking about homes, not businesses and not hospitals obviously.

Obviously this is just an example, and this is just a crazy scenario, I dont know how they would do it and how big the cuts would be in this situation...but am just wanting to discuss this as I saw other people in the "Japan earthquake thread" talking about these things but obviously its best we make a separate thread instead of taking away what that thread was made for.

I know some people will reply to this and laugh and say "dream on!!" this will never happen. But fossil fuels cant last forever and we cant rely on nuclear power forever either. We have many green options available right now and we'll probably invent better ones in the future too.

I'm still hoping they will make huge progress with cold fusion, then we really would be sorted. They say there's more energy in one cubic mile of sea water then all other energy sources on earth combined, if we could only harness it!
 
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Well I was thinking we should get rid of nuclear power because of the dangers it poses and also fossil fuels because of global warming.

There's no reason why we cant be driving electric cars right now and no reason why we cant have power cuts.

EDIT: Also the power cuts would prob save lives because of lazy people sat in front of the TV when they could be doing something physical like exercising, since they say that the number 1 killer is heart disease due to obesity! All the information on the news saying the western world is turning into nations of fat people.
 
With current technology renewable energy = waste of time.
Turning off power to homes is unworkable
We need to invest heavily in research into proper alternatives rather than just paying lip-service to the green agenda.
 
vonhelmet said:
As said, you are begging the question of what is wrong with nuclear power.
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The waste you have to deal with, and there's always the chance that something can go wrong - no matter how small that chance is, if it goes wrong then it goes spectacularly wrong.

Personally i would be investing in exploiting the massive amount of energy we have access to already, in the jet stream. Supplement it with tidal energy and introduce stricter restrictions on energy use and efficiency, all while putting as much money as possible into developing cold fusion.
 
I think solar power is the only viable long term solution. Everything else is a distraction or a method to get us by until then (such as nuclear power). Current technology is not efficient enough, but there are lots of promising new technologies in the pipeline, they just need the research and money throwing at them. We also need to solve the problem of energy storage, but again, there are lots of promising new ideas coming. Nuclear is probably the best option until then, but it's still a finite resource. The sun has another 5 billion years give or take, so should outlast us.
 
SkScotchegg said:
Well I was thinking we should get rid of nuclear power because of the dangers it poses and also fossil fuels because of global warming.

There's no reason why we cant be driving electric cars right now and no reason why we cant have power cuts.
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What dangers does it pose?


Where does the electric for electric cars come from...? And yes there is, you know people live and work at completely different hours.

This piece of Swiss cheese has less holes in it than your power cut plan!

recipe3105.jpg
 
I think a lot of the answer lies not in how we get the energy, but in how much we need. If some thought was put into design then demand would be a lot less. Lights that are only on when there's a person in the room, for example. And lets be honest here, for 90% of PC users is there any real reason why they couldn't be using something like an AMD Hudson based platform, with a total system draw of less than 30W?
 
There's many schemes setup by the government now which are complicated and cost money, such as housing benefits and child benefits for single parents etc, these kind of schemes are down to individual needs for each person and am sure the government could make a database of which people work days and which people work nights and in that database it could say when people need power and when they dont. So as an example....say there is 5 million people that work nights and they work 6:30pm to 6:30am then they get in at 7 like go to sleep, wake up at 2-3 and they could have their power come on at 12-6 each day and this would all be in the database.

Everyone could just fill out a form for the goverment to say which time of day they need their power and when they dont and everyone could be allocated like 8 hours a day of power use to be turned on whenever they need it.

Sort of like in WW2 when we had rations and people would have tokens to go get milk/eggs/cheese/bread etc from post office or wherever they got it from lol.
 
There's currently a target of 40% of energy to be provided by renewable means in Ireland with the main method being wind power (though there are tidal schemes and current schemes being looked into).

Whenever the wind doesn't blow extra turbines at coal power plants have to be turned on to produce the deficit which in my eyes makes the entire scheme worthless.

Unfortunately we're stuck with either coal power, hydro-electric power or wind power at the moment meaning that in order to produce power we must pollute the atmosphere, submerge large swathes of land or destroy the scenery.

With regards to the tidal and current power I'm not sure if such schemes would be viable on a large scale, I realise that the sea has a massive amount of potential energy but if every country were to start extracting that energy I worry that it could have consequences to the weather and tidal patterns.

I would be pro Nuclear power, even if I ended up living nearby (so long as I didn't have to look at the damn thing :p). As it stands this country has laws against Nuclear Power generation (though we benefit from it in the form of the interconnector from England which generates Nuclear power). The other absurdity with this law is that if something were to go wrong it would most likely happen in the older British plants instead of a brand new state of the art plant and we would suffer the same consequences since a lot of Britain's Nuclear plants are on the west coast, right beside us.
 
masterluke said:
Holy massive pictures batman!!:D

Wind power is only ever going to be a tiny part of the solution. The payback for investment makes it largely pointless. Hard to see it making a real difference. The only reason it exists at all is because of massive subsidies.
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You sure about that?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12355-flying-windmills-could-harness-the-jet-stream.html

If we were able to tap 1% of the wind energy at high altitude, that would be enough to supply all the world's energy needs.
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Originally posted by Superewza:
Quote:
Originally Posted by masterluke
Holy massive pictures batman!!

Wind power is only ever going to be a tiny part of the solution. The payback for investment makes it largely pointless. Hard to see it making a real difference. The only reason it exists at all is because of massive subsidies.


Superewza:
You sure about that?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...et-stream.html]
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Thats amazing, so hope they develop that!
 
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