Did you see the report that boilers sales are to stop 2025

[Adam W.]

Just my uninformed observation.

New Zealand and Greenland are suffering extreme glacial retreat and Antarctica has recently created, in a year, two of the largest icebergs ever recorded.

Tinkering around the edges with a boiler here and a new battery there is not going to do much, as we still have to mine the materials and use fossil fuels to create the new products which are supposed to save us.

My advice, buy a house on a hill.

 

[Jacob]

J...d use fossil fuels to create the new products which are supposed to save us.

My advice, buy a house on a hill.

Or check out a few caves. One cheering detail is that we won't be entering a new stone age as there will be millions of tons of scrap metal lying about.
Freehand sharpeners will inherit the earth!

 

[Cooper]

There are clearly some well-informed people posting on this thread.

May I ask a question? (And this is a genuine question - I'm not trying to set anybody up or take the mick. I genuinely don't know what the answer to my question is.)

Let's suppose we push ahead with the UK's current environmental agenda; we all but eliminate use of IC engines, we replace gas heating boilers with other forms of heat, we find other ways to power aircraft and ships that by using oil-derived fuels, and we decarbonise the UK economy by 2050.

What happens to the climate?

An even more ignorant reply! I suspect that as we are repeatedly told, we are (or were) the 6th largest economy in the world. I presume that means we also consume a lot and therefore our impact or reduction of it will be significant.
Thinking that our individual contributions can't make a difference is a bit like the chap who throws his fag packet out of the window of his car as its only one bit of card but if we all did it we would disappear under piles of rubbish. As the Tesco ad puts it "Every little helps"
You can see I spent 40years as a D&T teacher!!

 

[sirocosm]

You don't immediately die from exposure to radiation though.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates between 4,000 and 27,000 people died as a result of the disaster, where as Greenpeach places the figure much higher at between 93,000 and 200,000.

Then you have the problem of how you dispose of Nuclear waste without it impacting on the environment.

It takes a lot of radiation to kill you, and it is very difficult to determine if an exposure has "pushed you over the edge" so to speak, and you get cancer, so I am not sure if these numbers can really be known with any certainty.

Greenpeace is an absolute disgrace for their anti-nuclear stance, they are more interested in environmental PR then the actual environment.

Far more people likely die from exposure to any one of the thousands of chemicals that are everywhere, in our food, all our products, even the construction materials that we use to build our houses. I worry about that funny smell when I cycle past the chemical plant on my way to work, and when I get stuck in traffic behind some stinky diesel. Many things that we think of as "safe" are like you said above, things that don't kill you right away, but rather add up over time.

There are thousands of toxic waste sites from various industrial processes, mines, chemical plants, factories, dumps, and forget half-life, some of them never break down, the so-called "forever chemicals". Slowly they are all leaching into the environment, mostly through groundwater. And like Chernobyl, it is very tough to prove they were the cause of one's cancer when it comes.

The media has managed to convince the public that radiation is some kind of super poison, when radiation is all around us, and always will be. The other point that seems to escape discussion is that radiation is super easy to detect, even at background levels. This means that if air or water in an area become polluted for some reason, we know it, and can do something about it. This is mostly not the case for all the other industrial nasties that we are exposed to.

To put things in perspective, the amount of radiation released into the environment from the atomic testing in the 50s and 60s is estimated to be between 100-1000 times that of Chernobyl.

Like I said previously the idea of "nuclear waste" is becoming outdated. Today's reactors can run on re-processed fuel from the previous generation, in other words they can burn nuclear waste. Only a few percent of the possible energy is extracted from the fuel, so it is not really "waste" per se.

 

[Fergie 307]

Surely the ultimate answer is for us to master fusion. I am sure we could crack the problem of how to build a fusion reactor if it was given sufficient priority, and funding, by governments. I think it was Brian Cox who observed that we spent more on mobile phone ringtones than on research into nuclear fusion. Tragic when this could potentially solve our energy needs by effectively creating our own mini suns in the form of fusion reactors.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

An even more ignorant reply! I suspect that as we are repeatedly told, we are (or were) the 6th largest economy in the world. I presume that means we also consume a lot and therefore our impact or reduction of it will be significant.
Thinking that our individual contributions can't make a difference is a bit like the chap who throws his fag packet out of the window of his car as its only one bit of card but if we all did it we would disappear under piles of rubbish. As the Tesco ad puts it "Every little helps"
You can see I spent 40years as a D&T teacher!!

OK - everybody 'does their little bit', and the UK decarbonises by 2050 (or something close to it).

What happens to the climate?

 

[Cheshirechappie]

An effect so small we wouldn't be able to measure it. The economic damage however would be catastrophic.

As I have said before, check out Bjorn Lomberg.

It may only be your opinion, but at least you gave me a straight answer to my question!

I agree about Bjorn Lomberg. He does seem to be one of the more thoughtful, informed and pragmatic contributors to the climate debate.

 

[sirocosm]

Surely the ultimate answer is for us to master fusion. I am sure we could crack the problem of how to build a fusion reactor if it was given sufficient priority, and funding, by governments. I think it was Brian Cox who observed that we spent more on mobile phone ringtones than on research into nuclear fusion. Tragic when this could potentially solve our energy needs by effectively creating our own mini suns in the form of fusion reactors.

Agreed, but if something is to happen in the here and now, then fission is our only choice, and when we transition from fission to fusion later, the infrastructure would already be there. Can you imagine what our electrical grid would look like now if we had transitioned to nuclear power 30 years ago?

France built most of their reactor fleet in less than 15 years, and there is no reason, other than politics, that we couldn't do the same with small modular reactors in 10 years. But 10 years from now we'll still be whinging that reactors take too long to build.

 

[Rorschach]

It may only be your opinion, but at least you gave me a straight answer to my question!

I agree about Bjorn Lomberg. He does seem to be one of the more thoughtful, informed and pragmatic contributors to the climate debate.

And that's why he is often ignored, as usual, his stance is reasoned and sensible, which doesn't fit the narrative and get headlines for the MSM.

 

[John Brown]

OK - everybody 'does their little bit', and the UK decarbonises by 2050 (or something close to it).

What happens to the climate?

Maybe the answer is that nobody is certain what happens.
However, there is massive concensus about what happens if we don't.

 

[Spectric]

Fun fact, more people are killed by wind turbines every year, than are killed in the nuclear industry. Your argument is like airplanes. Sure if one crashes, which they still do, then hundreds of people die. And yet it is a statistical reality that you are safer traveling in a plane than almost any other mode of transport. The same is true for power generation. All are more costly than nuclear in terms of human life.

Thats the whole point, the balance of how bad is the potential hazzard and what would happen if it occured, so if it is really bad then you have to reduce the risk of it actually happening to a low probability by implementing suitable safety systems irrelevant of how much they cost. Hence why wind turbines may kill more people during an average period of time than the nuclear industry. Now think of how many have died as the result of nuclear incidents and wind turbines are now very low risk, they may kill a few on a steady basis but high hazzards like nuclear kill an awfull lot every now and again.

As bad as it was, there were few deaths from Chernobyl

That should read as a direct result from the incident, if you have watched the documentary where actual people from the time were interviewed then this was only the starting point and deaths are continuing along with many other medical issues, and when you realise that there were more than 500,000 involved in the initial cleanup which by the way probably saved the northern hemisphere, then you can see why the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency estimate that the number of premature deaths associated with the disaster is approximately 4,000, and the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates between 4,000 and 27,000 people died, but Greenpeach puts this figure much higher at between 93,000 and 200,000. The human cost globaly is the real concern, in 1995 the World Health Organization linked nearly 700 cases of thyroid cancer among children and adolescents to the Chernobyl disaster.

Don't think we escaped either, almost 9,000 British farms were affected by restrictions brought in on the movement and sale of sheep and parts of Cumbria, Scotland and Northern Ireland were impacted, with North Wales hardest hit, here sheep were still failing radioactive tests 10 years after the accident in 1996 and the restrictions on sheep in the UK were only lifted in 2012, 26 years after the meltdown.

This disaster should have an official commemoration day because people need to be reminded of just how close we came to the end, as incidents go it was worse than Cuba because we had lost control.

 

[Spectric]

My advice, buy a house on a hill.

A house on a hill today but a house on an island in the future!

 

[Jacob]

And that's why he is often ignored, as usual, his stance is reasoned and sensible, which doesn't fit the narrative and get headlines for the MSM.

He tends to be ignored because he is not a climate scientist, nor a scientist of any sort, unless you include "political science".
His stance "doesn't fit the narrative" because he is ignoring the science and the best/most informed opinion.

 

[Cheshirechappie]

Maybe the answer is that nobody is certain what happens.
However, there is massive concensus about what happens if we don't.

I would be inclined to agree with your first sentence. The second - emphatically not. There is considerable debate about that, amongst scientists studying matters pertaining to climate, and amongst concerned commentators. That's why having a sound, evidence-based answer to the question of what effect on the climate the proposed mitigation measures will have is so important.

Why would we beggar ourselves if there is no benefit? Why would we beggar ourselves if the benefit is uncertain and unquantifiable, as you suggest in your first sentence?

 

[sirocosm]

The human cost globaly is the real concern, in 1995 the World Health Organization linked nearly 700 cases of thyroid cancer among children and adolescents to the Chernobyl disaster.

Sure, and they link how many cancers to sausage and salami? used to be they told us butter was bad, and that margarine was healthier.

They take some study based on very thin evidence and large pile of assumptions, and then treat it as fact.

The reporting about nuclear disasters in the power sector is almost universally overblown.

 

[Rorschach]

Maybe the answer is that nobody is certain what happens.
However, there is massive concensus about what happens if we don't.

Really? I don't think so.

 

[Rorschach]

He tends to be ignored because he is not a climate scientist, nor a scientist of any sort, unless you include "political science".
His stance "doesn't fit the narrative" because he is ignoring the science and the best/most informed opinion.

It's ok, anyone can be anything they like now.

 

[Jacob]

.....

The reporting about nuclear disasters in the power sector is almost universally overblown.

You should watch the film "Chernobyl" which is a realistic reconstruction. It emphasises what an absolute disaster this could have been to the whole of Europe if the wind had been different, and to the whole of the Mediterranean if radiation had entered the river.
No reason to think this wasn't true.

 

[D_W]

Maybe the answer is that nobody is certain what happens.
However, there is massive concensus about what happens if we don't.

It's a little bit warmer and sea levels rise a foot by 2100?

 

[sirocosm]

You should watch the film "Chernobyl" which is a realistic reconstruction. It emphasises what an absolute disaster this could have been to the whole of Europe if the wind had been different, and to the whole of the Mediterranean if radiation had entered the river.
No reason to think this wasn't true.

It is hard to imagine a worse outcome then an out of control core exposed to the atmosphere in a large reactor, and basically all they did was dump sand on it. That reactor should not have been operating in the first place, it was a very dangerous design, it had no plan in case of an incident, and it didn't even have a containment building.

I remind you that the movies are entertainment, and panic sells.