http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ate-change

Gonna have to forward that to my Kindle, keep reading the same sentence over and over again at the moment

wind power out, sun power in
absolute crap

start building power stations that can burn house hold rubbish
instead of land filling

then we can start to move forward ...

I produce about one carrier bag of waste in two months. That's not going to keeps the lights on.

I think it is a good idea, and we need to reduce waste. There is so much unneeded packaging around products these days and we don't make products to last any more.

This week's Click on BBC news (and BBC 2 10:30AM tomorrow) was a special on tech in Iceland - I'm sure one forumer would be very interested - and one of the points was they plan to go to entirely self-suffient for power within the next 10 years. They're lucky because they have a lot of geothermal but they're also investing heavily in burning refuse for power. It's not particularly green but it's better than coal or importing fuel.

Whether it would be able to entirely compensate for the generation gap we're coming to I don't know - after all Iceland's population is a fraction of the UK's - but it would certainly solve a couple of problems. We make too much rubbish and we don't have enough power generation.

I suspect that in the future, our energy solution's are going to come from a variety of sustainable resources, some of them large scale, some of them more personal.
There's a team working at Glasgow Uni on cracking a chemical system that'll release energy during the night in much the same way plants do, enabling us to harvest solar power during the day, and still keep the lights on at night.
Fingers crossed and all that.

They are already doing that. Though many areas struggle to build because of NIMBY's. It should be used as an option. It should be included along side renewables, but the problem is that it releases CO2 which will have to be sequestered somehow.

Reducing waste is also very good as it reduces energy needed to create and move it. Though companies will resist better quality as they can sell the same crap again and again.

So, unless someone invents either high-temperature super-conductors or industrial scale graphene production, it's a dead duck.

Total ar$e

Dear World, we need Nuclear. Stop f***ing about.

Solar cells in labs are now up to 44% efficiency and in sunnier climes solar is already comparable to fossil fuels. Though I think we need wind solar and thorium reactors.

+1 for thorium.

So they'll be available in about 20 years? Great.


No it's not.

It never will be.

Solar depends on the weather - burning stuff doesn't


No.

We only need thorium reactors while we wait for fusion.

Wind and solar are Fisher Price solutions to an adult problem

I read an article recently which said thorium had recently 'gone positive' on world metal markets. Essentially, thorium is a residue product of rare earth extraction and the people extracting those elements previously had to pay for disposal of the thorium, which cost more than the thorium was worth. So it was a cost, in jargon a 'negative'. But recently somebody has been buying just about all the thorium that's being produced and is willing to pay so much for it that it's now profitable to sell i.e. It is now 'positive'.

The obvious question is why? I can only think of two reasons. Either someone is building a large scale thorium reactor, or somebody thinks someone else is and is buying the thorium in the expectation of selling it later at a higher price when that third party wants it.

The thing is if you were building a thorium reactor, why bother to keep it quiet? Yet I haven't been able to find reports of anyone doing so at the kind of scale that would require buying enough thorium to affect the price on the world market.

Puzzling.

That's interesting, because Thorium is practically everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9Ll5EX1jc

From here


And that will continue for a while. Current solar cells are around 20% efficient. If you can more than double that it will be cheaper than



also
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/may/12/solar-energy-price-fall