But we would be left with nowt everytime the wind drops, now even if we covered the British isles in windfarms so when the wind blows we actually produced enough energy to meet our demands the minute the wind drops we would be cream crackered, the big fault with wind generation is that it needs conventional fossil burning PSs to be ticking away in the background.
Firstly, I don't think anyone has suggested that we should use windfarms exclusively - there will always be something else - hopefully several different sources.
Secondly, the windfarm output won't drop out instantaneously over the entire country, windfarm output will have a steady decline over hours/ days as the weather-system moves off - which can be predicted and the conventional PS (be it nuclear/fossil/other) can be spooled up over those timescales to meet demand. We already have Powerstations 'ticking over' in the background to cover short-term fluctuations in demand which happen faster than a PS can be spooled up, and wind generators won't change that (e.g. when an (alleged) 2million people switched on the kettle after the royal wedding).
This country is going to be hit with blackouts in the near future unless something is done PDQ and blackouts will hit us a lot more severely than the three day week, due to our much higher reliance on gas and electric, spend a few minutes visualising the consequences of regular and major power cuts.
Well, as I said in my last post we probably will have nuclear for the near future. If the Thorium cycle plants are developed and live up to their press they will be much better than existing technology (much less waste, and they failsafe instead of going into meltdown), but like wave & tidal power, the technology is still in its infancy.
The main problem (as I remember) was caused mainly by the failure of back up diesel pumps for the coolant, which doesn't indicate a very through degree of preparedness given the incidence of tsunamis and earthquakes, given this incidence why was the PS built so close to the sea?
That's right! But that's the point - they were the LAST backup system bar the battery (which kept the pumps running for 8 hours). I think they call it a 'common mode failure' - when something happens that takes out ALL the backup systems along with the main systems; historically, people who plan for disasters tend to overlook the common mode failure.
Power stations have to be built with access to large quantities of cooling water (they're typically less than 30% efficient, so need to dump a lot of heat). This is a bit speculative on my part but I think nuclear plants are usually placed by the sea as it was historically considered a 'good' place to dump contaminated cooling water in an accident (gets dispersed quickly - away from humans).
Sorry Coley, I hope you don't take all this personally, but as the pro-nuclear voice in this debate it all seems to be directed at you.
IMHO there should be more gov't effort directed at reducing consumption of energy, then development of new technologies for generation, transmission and storage of energy.
