Wind Farms in the Canberra Region?

Plug the excercycles at the gym into the grid.

And for Thumper, make people who eat McDonalds do at least 20 revolutions on the bike before they can eat it.

personally i’ve always thought pebble bed reactors had a lot of potential.

the point is that there are a great n umber of different ways nuclear power can go and the conventional reactor as we know and loathe it is unlikely to be the final form.

Conventional nuclear technology is no real answer – there’s a far better alternative in thorium reactors.

(Taken from Cavendishscience.org

What is special about thorium?
(1) Weapons-grade fissionable material (uranium233) is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from the thorium reactor than plutonium is from the uranium breeder reactor.
(2) Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste than uranium or plutonium reactors.
(3) Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U235.
(4) Because thorium does not sustain chain reaction, fission stops by default if we stop priming it, and a runaway chain reaction accident is improbable.
Besides, the priming process is extremely efficient: the nuclear process puts out 60 times the energy required to keep it primed. Because of this, the device is also called, (quite inappropriately) an “Energy Amplifier.”

I’d say overall we need to harvest all the renewable resources at our fingertips – when even the Federal Environment Minister is acknowledging that there is a serious global warming problem, you know that the time for action is now. )

Moving towards a hydrogen based energy grid may be more efficient, particularly when generating capacity is either intermittent or sited away from load. Using electricity to convert water to hydrogen, and then storing and transporting the hydrogen may work out more efficient than carrying electricity over lossy cable.

Of course, a plentiful source of water is needed but if you can solve the electricity generating problem then you could desalinate sea water. End result is electricity and pure water where the consumers are.

I’m backing nuclear as the best technology, at least until something much better such as fusion or space based solar is feasible. China’s progress in pebble bed reactor technology will hopefully lead the way for large scale re-adoption of nuclear as an efficient and safe power source.

it is indeed a paradox.

i want all the nice things that industrial age brings, such as power, sanitation, roads etc.

but i’d rather it happened somewhere else.

i mean really, isnt there some place where the locals dont have a view ?

There’s a new windfarm development at Snowy Plains just north of Berridale next to the Kosciuszko National Park. There’s also talk of a 200MW development down the Monaro Highway between Cooma and Nimmitabel. Locals are pretty antsy about the whole idea, considering the scenic beauty of the Monaro plains.

Yeah yeah, wind is not ‘the’ solution, it’s ‘one’ solution, as in a part of the solution, and from what I’ve heard it’s a hell of a lot more viable than nuclear.

A vested interest perhaps but some thoughts from a distinguished Australian scientist (and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

‘In the USA, direct subsidies to nuclear energy totalled $115 billion between 1947 and 1999, with a further $145 billion in indirect subsidies. In contrast, subsidies to wind and solar during the same period amounted to only $5.5 billion. That’s wind and solar together. During the first 15 years of development, nuclear subsidies amounted to $15.30 per kWh generated. The comparable figure for wind energy was 46 cents per kWh during its first 15 years of development.’

He also said:

‘The fourth, related, problem is that high grade uranium ores are comparatively scarce. The best estimate is that the known high grade ores could supply the present demand for 40 or 50 years. So if we expanded the nuclear contribution to global electricity supply from the present level, about 15 per cent, to replace all the coal-fired power stations, the resources would only last about a decade or so. There are large deposits of lower grade ores, but these require much more conventional energy for extraction and processing, producing much more greenhouse pollution.’

Read the rest (if you want) at:

http://www.acfonline.org.au/news.asp?news_id=582

windfarms are an excellent idea and id be happy to have one out the front of my place. the majestic industrial triffids turning to face the wind like giant sunflowers and whirring away, making power for you and you and you as well.

i dont regard them as a blight on any environment, how are they any more intrusive than a farmhouse or road ? they will enahnce your view.

the bird death issue is a furphy. the research has been truly over-egged by opponents. they dont make that much noise either. i was staying in a house in herringsand with windmills less than a km away. unless you got within about 100 feet of them you couldnt hear them.

the power argument is an intersting one. no i dont think they will totally replace conventional power generation, but every little bit helps. i am convinced that if you took advantage of these types of installations then you could power towns and areas like tarago, collector, goulburn even.

if you truly feel that these wind turbines will ruin your view try and look at it another way. sometimes we all have to make a sacrifice for the greater good.

Thinking outside the square, wind power has been used in the past to power such things as grinding wheat into flour etc.

To say that you wish to use wind power under the sole auspice of generating electricity so you can run an engine that will grind wheat into flour seems to be defeating the purpose, and introducing somewhat irrelevant levels of control.

If we were to think smartly on this issue and not grind down into the monoculture of wind farm = electricity, but expand the idea into using the wind to power alternative structures, such as pumps, turbines, shafts and all manner of rotating things that don’t necessarily need to be run all day, every day (which is what electricity is really good for), then I might consider that we were moving forward.

As it is, I agree that not a lot of thought has gone into the process of wind farms and the functions they provide since they were first conceived as a viable alternative all those years ago.

OYM, fluid markets are not magical, they do work.

Having said that transmission losses are probably going to work against major plants in the absolute middle of nowhere.

What you will see however is industry setting up near to where new plants are built to get the cheaper guaranteed juice.

Micro-power generation combined with the ability to sell power back into the grid could well see all sort of cool things happening.

But I’ll bet you whatever you want to bet that we don’t run out of power.

If fossile fuels go up in price then electricity will rise in price and alternatives will become economical.

Also energy efficiency will become more attractive.

what we really need is sane electricity pricing to consumers.

so once again gutless politicians become the problem.