Blimey! Where to start on a thread like this?
Where to start with addressing a climate emergency!
Some things we can do straight away:
* Take robust action to get better-insulated homes
* Electrify transport - including cars, because they can be charged overnight when there is spare grid capacity.
* Improve public transport, and penalise modes with a heavier carbon footprint
once the alternative is in place I've done the first, and taken other measures to reduce my power usage, and agree with the third, including the order in which carrot and stick are applied.
With the second, I would also love for all transport to be electric. But will there still be spare grid capacity at night with 22 million electric cars plugged in, plus every mobile phone, tablet, laptop, anything else with a rechargeable battery? Somehow, I feel we will find that off-peak moves to the middle of the day rather than the night.
The next steps are where it gets tricky: if only we'd gone all-nuclear, like the French did, then we'd have no concerns - other than finding the infinite amount of money needed to look after deadly poison forever. Solar and wind energy are of limited use without high-capacity grid storage, but does that mean we shouldn't install any until we've got that sorted out?
Working backwards, I agree that we should do whatever we can to sort things out pending a solution. Solar seems to work fairly well, with the serious drawback of not working at night, but every watt produced by the sun is one less needed from coal or gas. Despite that limitation, there are still plenty of publicly owned rooftops which could be the next step, rather than coating the rest of the countryside with them.
Offshore wind too can help, but again needs to be in the right place. Onshore wind much less so. You can't put wind turbines in cities because lots of people would complain about the noise, the effect on the TV signal and the bits dropping off occasionally, and in any case, there isn't much wind in cities. So they get stuck next to formerly quaint villages in the countryside, with the locals called NIMBYs if they object. They take up a lot of land for what they produce, which is unpredictable. Storage is something of a myth. Even if there was sufficient batteries, we would be storing renewable energy for the sake of it while burning more gas. A bit like putting £100 a month into a savings account at 1% while adding £100 to your credit card bill at 20%, but in carbon terms rather than cash.
Wind turbines are a sign of our problems rather than a solution. The big issue with renewables is the way government incentivises companies. Any money offered is immediately snapped up, with lobbying for more before any work on the current round has even started. Government thinks something is a good idea because a select committee has heard evidence and thinks it's a good idea, this applying even when members of said select committee or family members have interests in the particular technology under discussion. The bigest example of incentive driving perverse behaviour was probably biomass replacing coal in power stations - all very well when using waste wood or plant material, but much less green when it involves shipping kiln-dried pellets of wood from trees specially felled, from Canada and the US. Even the government eventually saw that as bad.
Which leaves nuclear. It doesn't have to be uranium in the reactor. Britain was once at the forefront of research into using thorium as the fuel instead. But we needed plutonium for bombs, and you can't get that from thorium, so our first generation of reactors ran on refined uranium. It decays, and all the bits that fall off hit other bits that fall off until you get a chain reaction, at which time it becomes self-sustaining and generates a lot of heat. Trouble is that left to its own devices, it would run away with itself and melt down, so it has to be moderated. Graphite rods are often used, but if something goes wrong, we are back to the melting scenario.
Thorium is one before uranium in the periodic table, and is a lot more abundant. As a fuel, it doesn't need refinement like uranium. It is less radioactive, and if you put a lot of it in one place, not much will happen. In a reactor, it needs a seed - a small portion of uranium or plutonium, which could come from nuclear waste piles. Then it starts to react like uranium, with some of it actually becoming uranium temporarily. But take the seed element out, and it stops reacting. It can be used as a molten salt - a compound of thorium with something to start it reacting becomes so hot that it melts, and can then be pumped through heat exchangers to proving steam for turbines. But if it overheats, it melts a plug, drains into a pan, and cools down again. In the process, the thorium is consumed, leaving far less radioactive waste, and of a far lower half-life. The current leaders in research are China, India, and Norway. Some reading
here.
A curious fact. Nuclear is seen as dangerous, wind as cuddly. Yet nobody has died in a nuclear accident in Britain in the past decade - probably much longer - but 3 people died in wind power accidents in the same period. It's still a lot safer than coal globally though.
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