The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #148595   Message #3451416
Posted By: GUEST
13-Dec-12 - 12:37 PM
Thread Name: BS: Fracking now give the go-ahead in the UK
Subject: RE: BS: Fracking now give the go-ahead in the UK
"...in truth if there was an ounce of sense in the government we would be investing in R&D..."

Sense and government in the same sentence, Sugarfoot Jack? Shome mishtake, shurely.

"Wind farms are partially the answer, it's just for some reason the toffs want to destroy that particular industry"

I'm afraid that wind-farms are not even a partial answer. (A) they don't produce when the wind isn't blowing which is in most cases when we need them most, as in the last couple of days (UK), and (B) they require 100% backup for when the wind isn't blowing and that backup has to be kept spinning inefficiently even when the wind is blowing as it can't be brought on-stream immediately from cold. I've seen estimates that windmills make no net reduction in our fossil-fuel usage.

And on planet Earth, the toffs seem to be all in favour of windmills: take Sir Reginald Sheffield, Baronet (who just happens to be the Prime Minister's father-in-law) who has 400 turbines on his Lincolnshire estate, and draws from them £1K a day in rent; nice if you can get it. Your sound-bites seem to draw more from Marx than reality.

"Oh, and there's a huge fuck-off nuclear fission reactor showering our beleaguered planet with nearly terrawatts of energy daily..."

If you're going to invoke science, get it right, FFS, otherwise you just sound like a prat. That's "fission" spelled "fusion." The same number of terawatts fall secondly, minutely and monthly as fall daily, just as a 1KW fire emits a KW between 5pm and 6pm on Tuesday, just as it does all day Tuesday. And the total solar radiation falling on Earth is something like a hundred thousand terawatts, not "nearly terawatts"