G8 irony?
Am I alone in being slightly tickled yet simultaneously hacked off by the stuff on 'food wastage' that our beloved leader was spouting forth yesterday at the G8 summit? I think it was the bit on the 10 o'clock news that said the delegates ended the day with an 8 course banquet that had me spluttering on my wine with indignation...

I wonder how many plates were completely cleaned at that banquet? And how much food was actually chucked out? I think we should be told...
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:15, 19 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

I'm pissed off
with being told to limit food consumption, whilst MPs vote to retain their money-spunking rights at John Lewis.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:17, Reply)

It's time
To burn these fuckers out of office.
( Cawl, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:20, Reply)

Ah yes, MPs
I'm pleased that they have voted themselves a below inflation payrise, in line with the general policy of the public sector...

*Not at all bitter that he hasn't had a payrise in two years*
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:20, Reply)

And why bother
with the G8 summit at all? Why not just do it by teleconferencing, or e-mail and save all the travelling, security issues and catering bills?

Because they're politicians, and they're in it for personal gain, of course.

Personally, I hate wasting food. I feel hellish if I ever leave food on my plate and have to chuck it away. It happens only very rarely, if I'm ill or something.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:23, Reply)

My flatmate
is terrible for wasting food. He's an ex-Marine, so is still in the mindset that he has to do an insane amount of exercise every day. To maintain his strength, he eats a correspondingly huge amount of food (example: large bowl of pasta, jar of pesto, two huge lamb chops for supper last night). Then, to stop him getting fat, he does more exercise. It's a weird food/running vicious circle.

Anyway, he buggers off to East Street Market every weekend (SE London, Walworth Rd), and comes back with masses of food because it's cheap, and seems like a good bargain. Except even he can't eat his way through half a bin liner full of mushrooms, so they go off, get chucked out, and he's wasted his money.

He's also a sucker for "3 for 2" deals at the supermarket, so our kitchen is crammed with tins of beans, boxes of cereal and loads of biscuits. He doesn't even eat biscuits. Argh.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:29, Reply)

I hate this needless waste of public money
I heard the other day (possibly from Clarkson) that for the cost of the 7000 (or something) wind turbines they want to build to provide fuck all of our energy needs they could build 37 nuclear power stations.

even if this isn't true, it's well known that with current costs and efficiencies solar and wind power are completely impractical and a waste of money.

hydro, tidal, geothermal and nuclear ftw!
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:29, Reply)

@Vipros
Re the nuclear power plants. I don't know if that figure's correct, although it seems a bit unlikely. But even if it is, you then have to factor in the cost of running and subsequently decommissioning, the nuclear plant. To decommission a wind turbine, all you do is remove some bolts and take it to bits.

That said, I am in favour of nuclear power. It's safe (yes it is, honestly), and can provide a huge amount of reliable power compared with renewable sources. Of course, the uranium has to come from somewhere, and as demand increases, so will prices, and eventually the supply will run out.

There's no easy solution. Solar power would be near perfect, but it would require enormous investment because of the equipment costs and requirement for large area coverage. Also, you can't guarantee sunshine; in fact you can only guarantee that a solar power plant will not work at all for at least half of the time. But this could be overcome if we developed suitable energy storage, or constructed a worldwide power grid.

Tidal power is the one guaranteed renewable source, but it's fraught with problems - silting, blocking estuaries to sea traffic and fish, etc - so it's unlikely to be used much in the short term.

And nuclear fusion, which would actually be the best long term solution, is still a long term solution. They haven't even started to build ITER yet, so it's unlikely we'll see commercial fusion plants in the next 30 or 40 years.

And they said that 50 years ago...
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:40, Reply)

I also deplore food wastage
And feel very guilty if something in the fridge I was going to freeze and then forgot about ends up being chucked. Same with leaving anything, although in that there is a benefit of having a dog (not that we give her scraps very often because of the BARF diet that she's on).

Politicians. Bunch of arse biscuits, the lot of 'em.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Tue 8 Jul 2008, 12:40, Reply)

@k2k6
I agree that the figure is probably way out, but it started my argument nicely ;-)

I'm all for nuclear as well, for the reasons you state, cleanliness and consistant output

I work very much in the industry involved with tidal power and while there is an argument against things like a Severn barrage, there isn't much to stop smaller scale tidal generation from happening.

My thoughts on the whole thing are actually (now I've had a chance to think) we either need to go big with nuclear, or go very small with little geothermal or hydro plants serving communities.
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 13:31, Reply)

^
I'd personally go for the smaller community ones.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 13:33, Reply)

Geothermal power
would be a great solution, were we able to tap into it. We're sitting on a huge fission reactor under the earth's crust, which has kept it warm for billions of years, However, save for places like Iceland where the magma reaches the surface, it's beyond our current technology to drill deep enough to access this heat source. And these locations are also inherently geologically unstable.

There is another so-called geothermal technology, which isn't really geothermal at all. It uses a heat pump (essentially a refrigerator) to transfer heat from pipes buried in your garden to radiators in your house. The amount of usable heat produced by this method is typically 2 or 3 times greater than the energy required to drive the system, as most of the energy comes from the heat in the ground. But close to the surface, this is actually derived from solar heating, rather than true geothermal energy from below.

It's still a very efficient way to heat your house though. If you had a biggish stream running through your property, you could dam it and use the stored energy to turn a turbine, which in turn would drive the heat pump.

I would love to do this one day!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 13:41, Reply)

@ancrenne
Cool. Didn't know about that. And it's true geothermal too.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:05, Reply)

that southampton thing
is pretty interesting. didn't know they were doing that sort of thing
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:15, Reply)

Re: Solar Power
Now I've not done any calculations but I suspect that large-scale solar power would also have its own associated problems.

I imagine covering every surface in solar panels of whatever type it's possible to use (black radiators/the real semi-conductor deal etc.), we'd be effectively changing the albedo of the planet which can't be a great idea.

*should so some sums but can't be arsed*
(Shippy likes linebreaks and doesn't care what you think, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:28, Reply)

Shippy
A month or two back, I was at a lecture given by an eminent scientist on this very subject. His answer to this question was that the area required to be covered was actually surprisingly small in the grand scheme of things.

In fact covering an area the equivalent of a fraction of 1% of Britain's surface would provide enough energy for the whole planet's needs.

That's still a hell of a lot of solar panels though.

As far as changing the albedo is concerned, yes, it will make a small difference, but because of the area fraction concerned, it's effectively a negligible one.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:32, Reply)

Yup
The sums I wanted to do were heavily dependent on the average efficiency and cost of solar panels, so yeah.

Nice to know it's a small area though.

It's sad that global co-operation has the potential to solve so many problems but we're too busy poking our mates with pointy sticks to do it.
(Shippy likes linebreaks and doesn't care what you think, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:35, Reply)

^this
we'll never explore the cosmos while poking each other with sticks either...
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:41, Reply)

Heat pumps
We use them here in Virginia, but what we use are the kind that work on air rather than the buried coil type. Very efficient in temperatures above freezing, but not good when it gets much colder than that.

The buried coil type is a large initial investment, but is extremely efficient- especially if the water table is only a few feet down.

I'd really like to see ocean currents tapped for power rather than tides- we have them well mapped out, and could put something similar to a large wind turbine a couple hundred feet below the surface and it would never bother anyone. Just run the power cables back to the shore. Yet is this being investigated?

*crickets*

Yeah.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:34, Reply)