View Full Version : Bloody Windfarms!
Ban them all!
Today i saw one sneak up behind an old woman and steal her pension!
whether we like them or not its the way forward we have to start thinking about the future generations beacause all your oil,gas and fossil fuels aint going to last for ever thats the bottom line
The Pepsi Challenge
12-Feb-05, 01:04
Disagree with you, Eddie. Nuclear power is the future.
I know very little about nuclearstuff but what about the enviroment with nuclear fuels in normal circumstances, accident at plant a possible terrorist target were be a wind farm, solar panels or even generation of power by sea is more envorment friendly on the long run
Personally I like the windfarms, what better place to harness wind power then Caithness, they are clean and quiet.... unlike the power station across the road from the Causeymire windfarm! They are bound to be less of a health risk too, unless one topples over onto you, I think they look lovely.
doreenhedgehog
12-Feb-05, 14:50
I am with you on this one Pepsi Challenge!
Believe it or not!
Julia
Some questions for you:
Firstly - what power station are you talking about being across the road from the C/Mire Wind Farm - do you mean the sub station? If so, what do you think is causing that noise?
Secondly - Have you spoken to anyone who lives near the C/Mire Wind Farm before you came to your conclusion on wind farms being quiet?
Thirdly - You think the turbines are clean - how do you think they are manufactured, transported to the site and secured in place?
Oh and BTW, your electricity bill is going to go up by 5% if you rely on power generated by wind farms and the like. Maybe you don't mind that, I do!
I studied all the fuel options at university nearly 20 years - to my surprise NUCLEAR was the fuel which would be capable of supplying demands over the decades.
Surprisingly, OIL has remained static over the last 20 years or so. I remember paying £200+ for 1000ltr heating oil in 1982, just filled up again & it is still around £200+ (inflation not calculated.)
What is annoying is the cost of road fuel, both petrol & diesel, which affects all of us and our lives. Given that it costs approx £40 for a tank of fuel and the government takes £30 in tax then that is a far more socially contentious issue than a few windmils blowing in the wind.
I have no problem with windmills - a few years down the road & they'll be gone, replaced by another scheme perhaps.
The Pepsi Challenge
12-Feb-05, 18:12
I am with you on this one Pepsi Challenge!
Believe it or not!
Why, thank you.
I guess it is a controversial topic. However, given the state of the world's energy resources, we're going to - most likely - have to put up with things we don't like for the benefit of the next generation. And so on.
307 - I have no problem with windmills either, it's the wind TURBINES that cause me some problems.
Zeus, check your personal messaging, i need some info...
Well excuse me for expressing my opinion...
I'd far rather look out over fields with windmills / turbines than onto a nuclear power station or electric power station / sub-station humming away...
I think that is the point Julia, with windfarms you will have more substations and pylons and more acreage dedicated to power generation.
~~Tides~~
12-Feb-05, 21:27
Disagree with you, Eddie. Nuclear power is the future.
Might sound nieve but, dont nuclear power stations use uranium, which is a ***Fossil Fuel*** :D :D :D
Uranium isn't a fossil fuel, it was formed before the Earth was created in nuclear reactions involving a star before our Sun was formed.
Colin Manson
12-Feb-05, 21:37
There are three major forms of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.
You better tell them that they need to add a fourth.
Nuclear power stations can use Uranium and Plutonium.
~~Tides~~
12-Feb-05, 21:49
Yeah, but it will still run out eventually.
Unlike wind or trees.
Colin Manson
12-Feb-05, 22:04
Fuel Consumed
A 1,000 megawatt electrical (MWe) coal-fired power station burning coal has a typical fuel requirement of almost 3.2 million tonnes of black coal a year.
A nuclear power reactor of the same capacity, (after its initial fuel loading of uranium), has an annual requirement of around 27 tonnes of fuel.
A 1000 MWe nuclear power station requires one truck-load delivery of enriched fuel per month, or an average of about 74 kg per day. An equivalent sized coal-fired station needs some 8600 tonnes of coal to be delivered every day.
Uranium is a slightly radioactive metal that occurs throughout the earth's crust. It is about 500 times more abundant than gold and about as common as tin.
We aren't talking about a solution for all time, just something that is much better than burning fossil fuel.
The Pepsi Challenge
13-Feb-05, 01:43
Yeah, but it will still run out eventually.
Unlike wind or trees.
Stay on Stroma, then, Tides, and you'll be fine.
That was the point of the Fast Breeder reactor Tides, to provide more fuel and hence a self-sustaining supply for future needs. Fuel reprocessing was an integral part of the FBR programme.
Bobinovich
28-Feb-05, 20:49
Having seen the images and text in last weeks Groat I REALLY don't want to see 500+ turbines of those sizes in an area the size of Caithness. The Causewaymire ones are not too bad in that they are on a relatively low lie of land - some of the areas listed in the Groat are quite high which is going to be a real eyesore...
Bring back Fast Breeder technology and keep Dounreay at the forefront of both energy generation and landscape regeneration technologies.
Disagree with you, Eddie. Nuclear power is the future.
Might sound nieve but, dont nuclear power stations use uranium, which is a ***Fossil Fuel*** :D :D :D
Uranium is an element....
And I don't care how many wind turbines they put up, I'm movin south soon....
But I do like Nuclear Power, rock on Dounray!!! :)
"Isn't Uranium a Fossil Fuel" [lol]
Surely you should try and understand what is being discussed before you discuss it on the message board?
As it says the whole point of the fast reactor programme was to breed fuel from the U238 i.e Plutonium that can be used as a fissile material to provide more energy etc etc hence never having the situation of running out.
The article in the Guardian at the weekend about wind power showed that it is only a small part of our overall energy programme and that Nuclear has to be the way to go. I'm doing research into this at the moment and I guess within 12 months of the election we'll have a reactor new build announced by the government. Most likely to be an AP 1000 designed by Westinghouse and currently being licenced by the regulator in America. Hopefully we will start to do something and not be left behind! Finland are building as we speak and France have so many they are selling electricity to the Germans who are shutting them down as they have a green government and the Italians who don't have the will power to build any more!
The whole Nuclear thing has been shot in the head by the fire at Windscale, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents but these must be taken for what they are. Chernobyl couldn't happen with the design of reactors that we would build today - they are passively safe in every respect. TMI happened but was contained so there was virtually no effect to people or the enviro - proving how good they are at containing accidents and windscale was because we were desperate to keep up with the arms race in the cold war.
Give it a chance as it's the only thing that will meet our energy needs until we master the technology behind Fussion which will hopefully solve all our problems in 60 - 80 years time?? :D
I think nuclear energy has gained a bad name, I think it should be renamed to 'Pre-solar Energy'
Personally, i think the council should be offering grants to enable individuals to install a small wind generator for every house. They cost about £1500 and have a payback period of 4-5 years after that your energy bills will be subsidised by 50% energy payback schemes. The small units are no more obtrusive than satellite dishes.
You heard it here first !
Personally I think that copicing is the answer, a steady reliable supply of energy 365
days a year with no need to have oil fired generators running for backup.
Combine that with green diesel to run our cars off and a place like Caithness with a
large area and low population could have an ample supply of energy without adding
to global warming.
Personally, i think the council should be offering grants to enable individuals to install a small wind generator for every house. They cost about £1500 and have a payback period of 4-5 years after that your energy bills will be subsidised by 50% energy payback schemes. The small units are no more obtrusive than satellite dishes.
You heard it here first !
They are a lot cheaper than that. here is the link
http://www.windsave.com
BTW You can get grants for ground source heating, up to a third off the cost.
All new houses with a decent sized garden should should have a ground source heat pump, they can cut heating bills by four times!!!!
FWIW I tend to agree with ajr. But why the Westinghouse design? I am not questioning your claim, I am just wondering why that's the one to go for. Did anything ever come of the pebble-bed idea that was in the news a few years ago? (For once I am too lazy to go googling; I'll just ask someone who sounds as if he might know what he is talking about!)
I can't see any major problems with small wind generators on every house, but I haven't thought about it very carefully. Without doing any homework on them, I am sceptical that they would last the 4-5 years needed to break even. They have too many moving parts, and moving parts are often the first to go in such things. Think cars, xerox machines, printers, etc.
But I am also interested in the coppicing idea. As far as I understand it, burning wood from sustained forests doesn't increase greenhouse gases because the new trees absorb the CO2 and pump out O2. Well, I think that's what I learned from a Rheghead post of some months ago. Is this correct?
How much power can be generated this way?
I don't know much about ground source heat pumps. Can someone point out a good website? The more technical the better -- I know about (delta T)/T and all that. Isn't delta T rather small here, so the thing will be very inefficient? Maybe that doesn't matter.
philupmaboug
01-Mar-05, 13:43
I think Dounreay was a great government idea, put it as far away as possible and use harmless elements to contaminate our beaches, seabeds and feilds. We should be getting another one built tommorrow.....NOT.
I think Dounreay was a good idea genuinely, not sarcastically. The only thing that let Dounreay down was a lack of environmental awareness and staff training. Today the contamination of sandside would not happen as the procedures for the disposal of radio-active waste is tightly controlled.
philupmaboug
01-Mar-05, 16:04
Procedure for the control of contamination was in place when it happened and the laws governing this were not broken as contamination levels found were divided by the area of the beach surveyed so as to bring them into regulatory levels! what has changed??
George Brims
01-Mar-05, 18:42
As far as I understood it, the reason the UK pulled out of fast breeder development was a realisation of what would be entailed in a fast breeder program, in terms of infrastructure, and especialy the amount of radioactive materials that would have to be processed and moved around. The whole thing revolved around the fast breeder converting U238 to Plutonium. The spent fuel would then have to be reprocessed to extract the Pu, which would fuel other types of reactors such as the AGR or the Westinghouse PWR. So do you move the spent fuel, or the reprocessed Pu? How do you stop terrorists from getting hold of the Pu? Nagasaki was destroyed by a ball of Pu the size of a grapefruit, and making a smaller amount than that explode is not a secure secret any more. Meanwhile even Dounreay, which had a much better track record than Windscale, wasn't able to reprocess its relatively small amount of spent fuel without contamination of the local environment. Scale the whole thing up to where the country is running on this system, and it just gets overwhelming.
As for the coppicing thing, I for one would not like to see the whole of Caithness covered in trees, though a few more would be good! I used to live on the Big Island of Hawaii, where the last sugar cane company closed a decade ago. The sugar plants used to burn the leftover fibre from the cane after extraction of the sugary sap, making steam to heat the sugar processes and also making electricity, some of which was sold to the local utility. The area that used to grow sugar is now covered in fast-growing eucalyptus trees, which are cropped and burned in the former sugar plant to produce power. It's a fine "green" idea, but the downside is that the coastal higway is just a canyon between trees for miles on end.
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