hedgehog

You do make a good point Les that most of the media coverage has been all one direction, but then the media love a story and in science they need drama and death rather than the boring and tedious stuff.

With the current cold winter (well about a 65% probability of the winter being in the coldest third) predicted and with some experts on solar cycles saying that we might see cooling very soon it will not be long until we get the "Gulf Stream is stopping so it is getting colder" story again. Again this is great news for the media but maybe not so good science. The truth is that research is just starting into the Gulf Stream and how it behaves and last year the first measurements were taken to lay down the foundations for setting a base line for its behaviour, as currently we don't even know what normal is for it. One of the scientists working on the survey ship suggested that they would not be seeing useful results from his research in his lifetime. I guess climate research is like forestry, your ancestors get to see your work.

The water vapour thing is easy to demonstrate. Just go outside on a clear January night and feel how cold it is, then compare with a cloudy evening. There is usually a significant difference in temperature, though the CO2 concentration is the same, due to the water vapour in the clouds trapping the heat.

The situation with aircraft is more complex but it is probably reasonable to say that because of the nature of the "clouds" caused by the con trails they tend to reflect more heat than they trap. They actually cause the earth to reflect the incoming energy from the sun. This is exactly how the "global dimming" theory started as measurements taken on the day all the flights in the US were grounded appeared to show that the surface temperatures were a fraction warmer than might have been expected when there were con trails across the sky.

OllyK

Sure, if you have weapons grade nuclear material - in terms of explosive potential I'd be more worried about Chaos. However using conventional explosives on depleted fule won't actually set it off, but it will spread highly radioactive crud over a reasonable area. The chances of a nuclear explosion from a power plant, even with terrorist intervention are pretty limited IMO.

_RIP_

lol

hades

Have you asked any of them? I've worked at quite a number of nuclear plants, including Sellafield, and I'd say from the many locals I've ever spoken to, a significant majority are well in favour of nuclear energy and the impact on the local economy than against it.

As for the waste issue, it's amazing what you can do with the figures. If you took, for example, a jar of brazillian coffee onto a power station, under the Radioactive Substances Act, you couldn't remove it and would have to bury it as low level active waste. You'll get more radiation in two weeks on a beech in Cornwall, a few hours in parts of Brazil, or a couple of trans-atlantic flights than you will spending months next to any power station in Britain.

hades

There's so much wrong with that first statement I can only assume you have little knowledge of physics. For starters if the waste had enough Uranium 235, plutonium etc left in it to explode, it wouldn't be waste, it would be fuel. And even if you had large lumps of enriched uranium (and note many of the UK reactors don't even use enriched uranium), there's somewhat more science involved in making a bomb than "put some nuclear things in a room together". I'll save you the 3 hours of lectures in my final year "applied nuclear physics" degree unit (which I am sure is barely skimming the surface of what you'd need to know) but suffice to say it's not a simple thing. Considering some of the people in the world who'd like to have nuke's, I'm quite pleased about that fact

Be a shame to flatten Scotland as well, the hills and mountains there are the one thing they have in their favour. . . .

gussy

iTrader: (2)

I will second what Hades says Being one of the peeps he is Talking about, how would you people down saff like it if they built say a wind farm good for the greens but it would have to be about the size of say leistershire at least and it still wouldnt have the same output as a small bitty nuclear plant.

boomer

Why worry about actual "waste", when the folks in charge of our wonderful nuclear plants can lose enough plutonium to make SEVEN nuclear bombs!!!

See the BBC for details.

mb

gussy

iTrader: (2)

Old news boomer( tomorrows fish and chip wrapper )

unclebuck

Good post! Curious about your username though....

hades

Also more than a little "spin". All the power stations in the UK run on Uranium 235. Whilst a small amount of Plutonium 239 - contained within the fuel rods - is an inevitable by-product of U238 absorbing a neutron, most of it will fission soon afterwards, the very small residual amounts would contained in the fuel rods.

If I were a betting man, I'd think that most of the "lost" plutonium was formed in a couple of reactors that were originally configured for plutonium production for military purposes, which was happening an awful lot more in the late 50s and early 60s, where quality controls etc were not close to today's standards. (But if I'm right, some or most of the details will probably be military secrets which I don't know and couldn't tell you if I did!)

These days, I believe the regulations state that it's a major event requiring regulator involvement if more than 1g of fissile material is lost.

hades

ub - the username came from university days many years ago, and I've just kind of taken it with me ever since. I have never actually guarded the gates of hell, or even the gates of Sellafield for that matter!