If the price of carbon goes high enough, you would want to switch from gas / oil / coal heating to electric heating.

I suspect that winds from the north and east (which bring cold) tend to be weaker than winds from the west and south.

Try google.

THE FLOODING crisis may have a small silver lining for the economy in the longer term, according to a leading economist.

He said that consumption would increase in affected areas as restoration work began, providing a measurable boost. “As such there is a silver lining to the flood,” he added.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/1202/1224259892740.html

Really? Because while economists such as Richard Tol may extol environmental disasters as a plus (in that the resulting remedial works require investment), I’m fairly sure that the rest of us don’t agree.

Free of OIL. Free of debt. Free from war. Freedom is spelled NUCLEAR.

You’ve actually seen ‘Dr. Strangelove’, I presume.

Would dispute the nuclear bit with you. Too energy costly to build-out, maintain, repair and decommission. We do genuinely need to build-out and update our electricity generating system - I’d target conservation first, then land-based wind, then hydro-storage. Then see how we are fixed.

Since I hold that our economy may never ‘recover’ to ‘grow’ again: electricity use might stabilize. However, we will need to have a complement to fossil-fueled (road) commercial transport. Agriculture is a real predicament. They may have to provide their own liquid fuels [biodiesel + ethanol] from their own resources.

B Peter

For half the cost of NAMA Ireland could be have a bright new future. Free of OIL. Free of debt. Free from war. Freedom is spelled NUCLEAR.

The Monstrous Green ideology that threatens our livelihoods and our sanity needs to be thrown over. Down with the Greens. Go NUCLEAR.

Yeah!

Why yes, they do - at keeping the local population in the dark, that is, as enormously benefitted (to give one example) Irish Fertiliser Industries.

I have sympathy for John Gibbons as it appears that he is suffering from another rush of blood to the head.

I’m sure the warm fuzzy feelings are returned. I personally have nothing but the highest regard for you, I must say.

Richard is also right about the crunch Britain is facing not only in electricity, but across all the infrastructure sectors. Short-term focused private equity financial engineering and rent-gouging has hollowed out balance sheets, utility sector restructuring has reduced the number of counter-parties able to enter into the long-term contracts required to support investment in long-lived, specific assets and regulation, using a weighted average cost of capital, is, by definition, guaranteeing returns less than the marginal cost of equity on new investment.

However, I would be more sanguine than Richard. Private equity is in retreat, infrastructure funds (with a longer term focus) are playing a greater role and the government is beginning to accept its responsibility to provide the necessary commitments to secure investment. Much more needs to be done, but there is an increasing focus on the investment challenge and, more importantly, on how this investment will be financed.

I wish I could say the same about Ireland.

Jim Hansen, the atmospheric physicist, is calling for a tenfold expansion of nuclear power worldwide to solve the climate problem, and he is duly parroted by John Gibbons. A single nuclear plant in Ireland would not perceptibly change the proliferation risk, but 4000 new ones (mostly outside Ireland) would.

This is a beat up by uranium investors. No nuclear unless Thorium is proven.

Pity really, as it would mean jobs for Donegal…

I’ve always hated the idea of being first mover. That’s why I work in an industry that uses 40 year old technology, I suppose. The point is, it’s rare that first mover wins. It is even rarer when you have to put all your eggs in one basket, as a small country does. In a large country, you get to average out your losses on doing it wrong the first time by the lessons you learn.

At the same time, the idea of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is deeply appealing (are they the same idea?)…

Are you sure that 15 years is the minimum lead time for a nuclear plant?

BrendanC: Moneypoint is plated at approx 900 MW, not 1700 as you seem to believe.

I appreciate your concern about proliferation. It’s an old one. But when you examine the history of nuclear power one thing becomes clear; those who want to use nuclear technology for weapons purposes will so so, those who don’t will not. There were lots of countries, such as Sweden for example, who considered the possibility of a nuclear weapons programme after the Second World War and then thought the better of it. Impeding or restricting the spread of nuclear power for energy generation purposes to so-called ‘good’ countries who will not initiate a clandestine weapons programme and who will agree to be bound by international safeguards regimes doesn’t work. If you want to get your hands on the technology or the raw materials to make a nuclear bomb, it’s really not much of a problem if a regime is sufficiently determined to do so. As someone else remarked, the real surprise of 20th century post-war history is that there were so few countries who developed a weapons programme.

I agree with you that there is a genuine risk of terrorists acquiring small amounts of material from broken down States (mostly ex-Soviet) for use as ‘dirty bombs’. But ‘dirty bombs’ are more like to induce psychological terror in a target population than cause physical devastation, as acknowledged in international literature.

The capacity of such terror groups to develop an effective WMD with a large-scale destructive potential is limited. As I understand it, if you want to build a nuclear bomb then you’re going to need some fairly hefty kit located in a large and easily identifiable manufacturing installation, plus an awful lot of money to ultimately acheive the desired result. It’s hardly good tactics, since there are cheaper devices to cause mayhem more readily available and less likely to lead to assuredly devastating consequences for both their cause and their country in due course.

A short-term view. Waste from current reactors remains radioactive for many thousands of years, so it’s entirely likely that our civilisation will fall and the descendents of these “qualified people” will be walking around in bearskins (!), before the waste is safe to be around.

http://www.thoriumenergy.com/
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

something that might start to get more coverage in time.

So nuclear has to be on the table as an option - Richard has a good point: if we are to replace Moneypoint in 2025, what are the alternatives to coal? I doubt greatly if alternative sources will be ready by then.

There is hope - for example, Panasonic have developed a battery that they claim can power a house for a week:

http://green.venturebeat.com/2009/12/24/panasonics-new-home-battery-could-store-a-weeks-worth-of-electricity/

That’s a Japanese house, so we might need 2 per week! However, the storage problem is one of the big issues with alternative sources. A blogger calculated that it would be about the size of a fridge, & development might make it even smaller - the size of a gas cylinder?

But if we need someting to take up the slack in the mid-years of the century, then nuclear may be the only option, even with the risk of terrorist construction of a nuclear weapon. James Lovelock came to that conclusion as well.

I am afraid we will have to continue farting at a few windmills for our energy needs.

Nuclear (fission) energy production has a somewhat low energy return for energy invested and the decommissioning energy costs are possibly in excess of what the plant itself might be capable of producing. Someone will have data on this issue.

B Peter

Saying that Moneypoint is our baseload station is incorrect. Moneypoint is only one of a number of stations which provides baseload. The market determines which units should provide base load. If a Moneypoint set or another set is too expensive it comes when the load is low (at night or during high wind). Units can even two shifts (off at night and on again in the morning).

“As for building a nuclear power plant here, apart from the timescale as you have correctly pointed out above, it’s politically impossible. What people tend to forget is that the provision making it illegal to construct a nuclear power plant in the Republic arose from a demand by the Green Party and the Labour Party at the Committee Stage of the Electricity Regulation Bill that an amendment be introduced to prohibit the importation of electricity generated from nuclear sources. The Minsiter for Energy, Mary O’Rourke, acknowledged that this was impossible under EU law, so the ban on nuclear generated electricity was put forward as a compromise.”

Did the Greens and Labour party explain how to distinguish electric currents generated by nuclear as distinct from coal power stations?

Impossible under EU law? Impossible under the laws of physics more like.

At first this nonsense seems funny, then it is scary. Current energy policy makes about as much sense.