Renewables cannot cover our entire consumption. Also, they are costly, inefficient, and if you want a turbine in your back yard, go on ahead. As regards solar energy, it is not reliable, especially in Ireland

Why can’t it cover our entire consumption? Projections show it can and will power the world at ease

Are you prepared to pay increased prices for renewable energy?

And by the way once I can afford my home it will have its own personal wind turbine combined with solar panels so I pay less than 200 euro a year on bills. I’ll also be helping the environment stay clean and breathable. I know many irish people who have achieved energy independence and they are financially free.

The 6 billion spent each year on importing fuel would allow us to go full renewables by 2050. So yes I would happily pay increased prices for the next 35 years if it meant my grandchildren had a sustainable, breathable future.

Kevin. are they financially free.? what was the cost of installing all that equipment. ? how long will it last before it needs replacing. Battery’s, solar panels, turbines. Even with solar panels you have to have them for around 15 years before you break even and that’s with lots of sunlight. The government needs to step in here and allow for over generation to be sold back to the grid to help offset these cost. otherwise in the long run your savings will be quickly eroded.

How many passengers did it carry and will it be able to bring in cherries from chile for the supermarkets in the future .

it carried one person and had a huge wing span. it also flew very slowly.

Thats 100% powered by solar energy without storing any of it so I wouldn’t be so quick to criticise new technology thats ultimately here to solve the problems weve created. Jet fuel is a massive producer of carbon and phasing that out is surely a good thing.

In regards to the financial freedom the equipment pays for itself in 10 years, warranty for 25 years and yes amazing grants are available. Its better I get 2000 euro from my government to fund my energy independence than it is to send 6 billion euro each year to Saudi Arabia isnt it?

Fact of the matter is green energy is better than any fossil fuel weve ever seen and it finally gives power to the individual rather than large multinationals.

Haha solar energy is not reliable and the chemical in them generally run out after 10 years or so and then after that it’s totally new technology so everything news to be replaced at another massive expense, it’s getting better but no where near worth putting your money into. (For now anyway). And wind turbines are massively inefficient aswell.

Here’s a 100% community owned wind farm example in Tipperary. Less than 200 euro a year bills and they even sell energy back to the grid seen as the wind turbines are as massively efficient. – http://tea.ie/projects/templederry-community-wind-farm/

@Eric. I didn’t say that renewable energy should replace fossil fuels. I said we should invest in renewables and gradually move over time to a fully renewable system. Seriously like. By 2025 we will have landed people on Mars, I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to have a more diverse system for producing our energy needs by then

It can solve some of them which is better than nothing, I mean for instance in Bristol they now have a bus that is powered by methane from human waste and food waste.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/20/uks-first-poo-bus-hits-the-road

Kevin Please tell us about the amazing grants.
For solar? For wind generated power?
When I looked into installing a small domestic hydro unit last year, the information I got was all grants and tariffs for micro generation will cease at the end of this year.
There is no encouragement for the individual to sell back into the grid.
I would agree with you that more power would go to individuals rather than multinationals if our government provided the conditions to make that happen.
The reality is the exact opposite is the case.
The government has created an energy bubble, where giant multinational utility companies such as Element Power ( headed by Tim Cowhig, former FG head of elections, running mate of Simon Coveney) have managed to literally write the NREAP ( national renewable energy action plan ) whereby wind developers get guaranteed subsidies for 15 years (refitt), extremely generous capacity payments, 4 billion from the taxpayer for Eirgrid to Build grid 25, which will litter the country with pylons, power lines, substations, super stations, ac / dc converter stations, nodes , super nodes….hell…we even pay wind developers for when they don’t actually produce electricity!! We paid giant wind utility companies 140million last year in ” curtailment fees “….
Are you going to be paid by the taxpayer for when the wind either doesn’t blow hard enough, or blows too hard????
Any attempt to move from fossil fuels to renewables has been hijacked by an extremely well funded, and well connected wind industry.
Since an intermittent generator such as wind is incapable of producing reliable dispatchable power, it is completely incapable of displacing fossil fuel generation in any meaningful way, and is thus not having any great success in reducing our co2 emissions.
It is, however….driving the cost of our electricity up ( 3rd highest in EU), and making fat cat speculator investor wind developers richer and richer…
You might find this blog piece interesting
http://the-law-is-my-oyster.com/2015/03/15/the-business-plan-of-the-wind-industry/

1st off I want to say the government isn’t doing half the job when it comes to grants and incentives for Green tech. They spend more time widening the two tier society we currently reside in today.

Heres where you find whatever grants they currently have: http://www.seai.ie/

Renewable sources of energy cannot compete with fossil fuels on price parity. Even with the massive subsidies. But all of that aside, wind and solar don’t get away from the core problem of having to excavate massive amounts of rare materials to power an ever growing society.

There simply is no way that we could switch to renewable sources as they are today. There is simply not enough tellurium, neodymium and other REEs in economic quantities in the Earth’s crust to sustain it. There is no such thing as clean energy. It’s all obtained during horrificly dirty and polluting extraction techniques.

Ireland has the best value wind energy in the world, don’t let the ranting of Dave Fingleton confuse you. We pay less than half what the UK does for it’s wind energy on average.

Yes, we do offer some security to wind developers through fairly simple contracts because it massively reduces costs. Complex contracts introduce risk and massively increase borrowing costs. Wind energy has tiny operational costs and massive upfront capital costs. The cost of borrowing is the defining factor when looking at the cost wind energy. If you can borrow at 4% compared to 8% the difference over the life of the contract is massive.

So yes windfarms make a profit and to a extent it is de-risked for those who invest. But they don’t make a huge profit. They build the place and earn a small return and we get good value wind energy.

Compare Ireland to the UK and we look so so so much better than them.

Renewable sources of energy are catching up and in some cases surpassing the cost effectiveness of fossil fuels, fossil fuels have always been heavily subsidised its just not obvious because the subsidies go to large multinationals rather than average joes, our bills certainly aren’t subsidised.

Even with the massive subsidies we are still having to excavate massive amounts of raw materials a million times bigger than rare earth elements which are used for green tech and other modern applications.

Rare earth elements are not running out yet fossil fuels are, green tech can work without earth elements but it requires more gears and moving parts. There is no such thing as clean energy but there is such a thing as the dirtiest energy and thats fossil fuels.

China’s wind energy now produces more energy than all the nuclear power stations in america combined, to say we cannot switch is false as the switch is already well established and happening.

Kevin, just no. Green energy doesn’t even approach the low price of MW/h that you get with oil. You’re forgetting that solar energy for example is massively subsidised and oil energy is massively taxed and oil is still much cheaper. It’s not even close.

You don’t think we’re running out of REEs? I’m a Geologist and I’ve spent a lot of time studying REE deposits and the economics of REE. The Chinese demand alone is already outstripping the global supply. It’s become a strategic resource with export bans and countries are trying to stockpile them. I’m not trying to be sensationalist, I don’t think you’ll have a literal resource war. But REEs are so valuable and so incredibly difficult to extract cost effectively that your green eutopia is not only completely cost ineffective, it’s literally impossible. REE concentrations as far as we can tell are incredibly rare geological events and there haven’t been any significant finds in decades. Nearly the entire supply comes from one mine in China.

That’s not to mention the fact that the average wind turbine consumes more energy to create than it will ever produce in its lifetime. None of this is to say that green energy can’t eventually work and become economic. I would still encourage lots of research. But only an idiot thinks that there’s nothing but political will between the world of today and the world powered by green energy. It’s just impossible with current day technology and economics.

At last, someone with facts rather than propaganda and dreams.

Hate to tell you this but Lincoln, in the UK, has been running a fleet of Biomethane-powered buses since 2013. Operated by Stagecoach. Bristol’s claim to fame is not Biomethane powered buses but merely the source of the gas. Human excrement as opposed to waste and cowshit.

There’s no utopia, just the next step on our human journey. There is no steps left with fossil fuels

I agree. Fossil fuels have no future. But wind and solar as we know it have no present or future.

Sorry Verge that you confuse facts with ranting but it’s not untypical of those like yourself who are quick with diversionary and often inane information about wind energy so as to deflect from the hard truths about the absolute folly of further investment in Industrial wind farms in this country. ” Ireland has the best value wind energy in the world”?? This is completely irrelevant. Those people that can’t afford their electricity bills don’t care that England has more expensive wind generated electricity. England has cheaper electricity ( what the customer pays) than us. I notice you didn’t dispute any of the factual information I have shared. Just as well Sean J Troy has also seen through the industry spin and is posting good factual information. One of the most prominent environmentalists in the world, Joe Lovelock, didn’t hold back when he declared the wind industry as ” a scam”…Here’s the reality of just how “green” and “clean” wind energy is..http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html

Kevin while your annual bill maybe 200 a year, your repayments on the hardware required will be more than other peoples electricity bill

Kevin while your annual bill maybe 200 a year, your repayments on the hardware required will be more than other peoples electricity bill

Denis, the plane is still flying, it’s going to take several months to fly.

Not a penny in subsidy is available for anaerobic digestors in Ireland. I saw the CBA of a planned AD in Carlow that was seeking planning. German plant. Irish investors and landowner. Pig slurry, waste fruit and veg, milk slops, and maize / silage / grass if there’s a shortfall, to produce methane. Gas turbines produce electricity, the byproduct is heat. This heat will be used to grow market garden produce in the poly tunnels situated adjacent to the plant. what comes out of the digestor is a pasteurised solid material that is an excellent fertiliser. Win, win, win. A plant that produces reliable, dispatchable power with positive environmental, social and economic side effects. The essence of sustainable development. This doesn’t get a chance because all the focus of NREAP was to shovel money at the wind industry…to build monster industrial wind turbines which are unreliable, don’t provide dispatchable power, need constant back up with reliable generators and have seriously negative economic, environmental and social side effects…As Enda has said..” great little country to do business in”…especially if you’re buddies with those holding the purse strings!!

Dave our farms are to small for AD and our animals graze outdoors so collecting their shit isn’t practical. More fuel would be required to transport the waste and collect it than is generated.

300 a year to pay back over 15 years which equals a 500 euro a year bill, fact is thats cheap. Then from 15 years onwards its 300 a year including maintenance and repair.

Its been costed and im getting it done.

So your buying s a system for 4,500 what are you getting? PV? Wind ?
How many kwh is it rated for? If it’s wind, what kind of wind survey was done? If it’s solar what is the annual w/m2 where your putting it? If it’s solar is your house occupied during the day? Most electricity is used after work hours when it’s dark ?

Mostly, Cattle and sheep graze outdoors for 7-8 months of the year. There are some bigger farms that intensively produce beef and they are over slats most of the year. Pig farming is intensive and they are kept in large numbers indoors together. I have seen farmers being paid to draw pig slurry more than 10 miles from one big pork producer near where I live in Laois. I understand the transport issue. I would think if the right size AD was located in the right place it would work. I saw the CBA for the one in Carlow and the figures seemed to add up for it. I’m merely suggesting it could contribute to our generation, not suggesting it can produce anything like the required 4000MW.

Kevin you’re talking nonsense.

Kevin,

I consider myself to be environmental conscious. I try to be green and all that. But, the problem with what your saying is it’s completely false.

Renewable energy has a place as part of our portfolio of energy supplies, albeit a small place with its current level of technology and efficiencies. The reality is that a heavily reliant green energy community and economy couldn’t function in a modern way. The sustained output doesn’t even come close to meeting our demands, ask any electrical or power distribution engineer.

I do believe that if the current level of investment is maintained an actual viable alternative to fossil fuels will be found in the next 20 to 50 years, but if it’s green (wind, tidal or solar) it will be radically different to what’s available today.

Instead of spouting such nonsense lets look at the results: Renewable energy has saved Ireland more than €1bn in fossil fuel imports, cut CO2 emissions by 12m tonnes, and does not raise electricity prices, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) reported. That savings is from Ireland getting 8% of its power from green sources. – http://www.siliconrepublic.com/clean-tech/item/35838-renewable-energy-has-saved

Kevin , sounds like you might have been telling porkies about your home energy.

The Seai are a vested interest group. Simple fact is that wind is not dispatchable and results in cycling of existing plants thus causing increased O&M costs and higher emissions.
The East West interconnector has reduced energy costs by 9% and is dispatchable so is much better than renewables.

We need to ditch wind and look at proper dispatchable renewables

That’s not true Dave, the Feed in tariff for AD digestion in Ireland is almost twice that of wind. Your research and effort needs to use facts not assumptions.

Kevin, I suggest being careful with SEAI figures. Those headline figures don’t take into account spinning reserve which halve them, or the massive and expensive grid infrastructure required to collect, ditribute and balance all the intermittent wind generated power. Facts are..20 years of investment in wind energy, more than 10 billion spent, miserable 2.3% reduction in co2, miserable 2.9% reduction in imported fuel. Industy spin must be separated from fact. SEAI are headed by Brendan Halligan (he’s actually just retired ), he has 500,000 shares in mainstream, a giant utility wind developer. He’d hardly be presenting spin as fact now would he?? Listen enough to Brian motherway and Ken Mattews..They say exactly the same thing…where does one start and the other end??

Rory, I stand corrected on AD Tariff. I was talking to a man from that industry and I took him at his word. If I’m wrong on that, my mistake. What i’ve said about SEAI is bang on the money though.

John, there is a green solution available today. It’s cheap, works 27/7, lasts 50+ years when built, guaranteed high and reliable output per plant and tried and tested. It’s called Nuclear Power. It powers 75% of France.

Oops, 24/7

William, nuclear power is probably the best current energy source. The problem is that it’s incredibly expensive to build and maintain reactors and this is reflected in energy prices. You would also create huge demand for REEs used in control rods such as samarium. It’s probably possible to satisfy global demand, but it would be ludicrously expensive.

Another downside is that it still doesn’t fix the biggest emission source in Ireland which is transport. Electric cars don’t work, they are impractical and they aren’t exactly clean to build. You’d need to simultaneously boost energy prices to astronomical new levels and also somehow get the hydrogen fuel system and infrastructure going, which would also be incredibly expensive. I’m in favour of both of these measures. But you would still irreversibly destroy our current standard of living. You’d also cripple developing economies and ensure that it’ll always be for too expensive for a third world country to modernise.

Sean, “The problem is that it’s incredibly expensive”, is obviously wrong. France with 75% NP has the lowest electricity prices in Europe. Money is heap top borrow, especially for a NP. Once it’s built it’s very cheap to run. Ireland only needs maybe 4 reactors or 16 of the new smaller ones coming on line.

I have a hybrid car. They do work. For many families the current range limit of around 100Km on an all electric car is perfectly OK. My wife never does more than about 160Km per WEEK. With an electric car you have effectively NO fuel bill, it’s that cheap.

William , the UK recently had to take most their reactors offline which resulted in an energy crisis. We can’t rely on large power stations as we would need to build redundant capacity

Electricity in France is indeed, very cheap. The problem though is that although roughly 75% of electricity is provided by nuclear, less than 40% of total energy is provided by nuclear. France still imports enormous amounts of fossil fuels. It also regularly suffers from brown outs during the winter. You’re also forgetting that if everyone started to build plants, the raw materials required to build them would soar. So you have to factor in massive increases in capital expenditure if nuclear was expanded in a big way.

The other problem is that the plants are state owned, so of course the energy is cheap. Ireland is nowhere near in a position to borrow the billions needed to construct a plant. So, they’d have to privatise it. Which has been a disaster in the UK. I think it’s the Hinkley point plant? It’s already being subsidised against European law and the company building it is demanding a price floor that’s nearly twice what the UK is already paying per MWh. It’s not economic in the slightest.

I’m delighted that you’re capable of commuting and doing your daily business within one charge. Most people can’t. You’re also forgetting the astonishingly filthy process required to extract the Nickel and Lead that the battery cells are made out of. Again, if we all went hybrid the prices would shoot through the roof which would make it less economical. Neodymium and Dysprosium are just two REEs required during hybrid engine construction that are already in short supply.

Brian, I spend a lot of time in the UK. I’m not aware of any “energy crises” caused by taking NP plants offline. The UK has VERY little spare capacity. Warnings are printed regularly about not having enough electricity. But that’s successive governments faults and not a technical issue. NP plants are incredible reliable.

Your other claims are similar to what someone said in 1900 in NY. They said that if the increase in the population continued then because of the number of horse drawn vehicles, the streets would be under 3 ft of horse shit within a few years. The Nuclear Industry isn’t aware of ANY shortage of anything.

The Nuclear Industry is very small. It doesn’t consume a lot of REEs compared to the consumer electronics market. Uranium is fairly cheap. But once you scale up production, the costs will go through the roof. The global demand on REEs is astronomical. We need to REDUCE our dependence on them, not increase it. Reducing our consumption of oil by increasing our consumption of something even rarer is idiotic. You can’t solve this crisis by kicking the ball down the road. We need radical new thinking, not business as usual.

Nuclear is consistently more expensive at the plug than coal and gas. You can’t escape this fact. See the link below. There are many others if you want to Google it for yourself. I’m not one of those tinfoil hatters who think that nuclear is dangerous or evil. I’m just being a realist, it cannot come close to satisfying global energy demands. And even if it could, it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than current sources of energy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Nuke,_coal,_gas_generating_costs.png/500px-Nuke,_coal,_gas_generating_costs.png

William the nuclear plants were taking offline as they found an Issue with similar plants. A 4% buffer is a crisis.
http://m.bbc.com/news/business-29058644

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/11193899/Lack-of-wind-or-nuclear-problems-could-wipe-out-UKs-spare-power-capacity.html

Sean, if NP is more expensive why has France the lowest cost of electricity and Germany using coal one of the highest? The cost of burning Oil & Coal doesn’t take into account the cost of global warming or the hundreds of thousands of deaths the WHO said is caused by the particles of dust thrown into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. If they were taken into account NP is far cheaper. Ask the people of Vanuatu what the cost of Climate Change is.

Brian, that Telegraph article is about the general lack of spare capacity in the UK and it’s reliance on wind which is unreliable. NP is only about 20% of the UK production so it can hardly be blamed. Did you not read this, “But fires at the Ferrybridge and Ironbridge coal-fired plants in the early summer, and the announcement that a gas-fired plant at Barking, in East London, is to close means that a further 1.2GW of power is also in doubt.”?

There isn’t enough capacity because the UK government has chickened out and delayed making decisions on their energy future. That’s the fact of the matter.

France is an anomaly in terms of nuclear power. Every study on the planet suggests that nuclear is massively more expensive. France is a weird one because it’s so heavily subsidised. It’s owned by the state whereas most countries with nuclear power do not actually own the plants.

If it was simply the case that a publicly owned nuclear infrastructure was cheap, I’d agree with you. But France is a very wealthy and powerful country. There are only a handful of countries who could potentially shoulder the cost of building loads of power plants. Ireland is not one of them.

In terms of fossil fuels, I completely agree with you. It’s filthy and it’s killing a lot of people in subtle ways. But governments don’t care about that and neither does the industry. But to go back to your shining example, France is the largest oil importer in Europe. Like I said earlier, France is the largest consumer of nuclear energy in the world by market percentage and even it cannot satisfy more than 40% of total energy requirements. You cannot build an entire energy infrastructure on nuclear with current or even developing technologies. The raw materials just aren’t there. And neither is the political will to force people to pay three or four times more for their energy and transportation costs.

Sean, you’re just making stuff up. I’ve lived in France, it’s a POOR country.

The following are the figures from the UK. Do they show NP is “nuclear is massively more expensive”? I’ve a link so you can look at other countries. AND those costs do not include the costs associated with burning fossil fuels of Climate Change or the hundreds of thousands of deaths from soot.

UK energy costs for different generation technologies in pounds per megawatt hour (2010)
Technology Cost range (£/MWh)[citation needed]
Natural gas turbine, no CO2 capture 55 – 110
Natural gas turbines with CO2 capture 60 – 130
Biomass 60 – 120
New nuclear 80 – 105 (92.50 guaranteed from 2023[36][37])
Onshore wind 80 – 110
Coal with CO2 capture 100 – 155
Solar farms 125 – 180
Offshore wind 150 – 210
Tidal power 155 – 390

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Take those figures with a pinch of salt. It’s the clean up costs for nuclear that’s expensive. These costs are often omitted from such figures

I’m making stuff up? You just said the sixth largest economy in the world is a poor country. It’s the fourth wealthiest country in the world by household wealth. If you’re seriously claiming that it’s a poor country, I’m out. I can’t argue with that level of stupidity.

France isn’t poor. It’s just a hugely socialist state.

I’ll rephrase, the French are poor. There’s almost no middle class. Have you seen the size of an average apartment? An average car? The French haven’t a tosser. As Brian said it’s a very socialist state. The state might be wealthy, the French aren’t. That’s why property is so cheap in most of France and why it’s such a cheap place to holiday, apart from the Côte d’Azur of course.

Brian, you can’t ignore the figures because they don’t suit your argument. The figures from all countries listed show NP to be far cheap than the other useless renewables except for Hydro (and that has lots of problems including dam bursts which have killed hundreds of thousands). The clean up costs of a new build NP plant are irrelevant from an accounting pov because it’s not for 50+ years. By then we’ll have robots doing it anyway.

Sean PS. France is the 26th wealthiest country in the world GDP per capita. Ireland is 15th.

They are not poor. Nearly EVERYBODY in France is middle class, that’s why there’s no clear distinction. It is fourth in the world in household wealth. Not state wealth. France is the fourth richest country in the world in terms of money in the average punter’s bank account.

The French are poor because they don’t have big cars or big houses? That’s an awful argument. The Japanese are exactly the same. Are they poor? Big cars and a big house are a sign of vanity, not of wealth. The Americans could equally look at us with our tiny cars compared to their hummers and claim that we must be poor.
Robots will be cleaning up nuclear waste. I forgot that robots are completely free of charge. The cost is trying to store large amounts of waste. A problem that only gets more expensive if you have more reactors.

You completely ignored my graph of citations that showed nuclear is more expensive than coal or gas. So I’m going to ignore your copy and paste from Wikipedia.

GDP per capita is less important than total wealth when you’re talking about massive capex projects. Lichtenstein is fabulously wealthy in terms of GDP per capita. It could never, ever afford a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power requires scale.

GDP is less important because it doesn’t suit your argument? France’s GDP is on par with Italy’s. Of course we can afford NP. We can afford to pay back far more than it would take to build reactors to bankers. Any capital project that makes economic sense can be funded. If we had a partnership with the French and built say 4 small reactors and also had a connection with the UK we could probably drop coal, turf and oil completely and reduce gas to a small amount. We could then export energy to the UK. The UK will need extra energy so it’s a win win situation. We then meet our CO2 targets for 50 years.

PS Your shitty graph from thin air actually shows NP to be only slightly more expensive than coal. No one says coal is dearer than almost anything but it’s FILTHY, kllls people, destroys the environment and causes trillions of dollars in costs associated with Climate Change.

You exaggerated, even your own graph shows that.

I’ll explain it a bit.

A country with a large GDP is much more capable of paying for a nuclear reactor than a country with a large GDP per capita.

Liechtenstein has a GDP per capita of nearly twice that of France, but its total economy is about €4 billion . A reactor is estimated to cost roughly $10 billion. $10 billion is a tiny fraction of €2 trillion but it’s about twice €4 billion. Meaning that France could probably earmark a reactor whereas Liechtenstein would have to commit 100% of its resources for two straight years to pay for a reactor. That’s why it’s impossible for a small country.

In terms of partnerships? That’s a slightly better idea. But then you’ll have loads of other problems that come with international infrastructure projects.

And no, we wouldn’t be able to wipe out turf, oil and coal. Again, France is the largest oil importer in Europe. It’s satisfying less than 40% of its total energy requirements with nuclear.

My “shitty graph” had citations. You just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I was being hypothetical when I said three or four times. I was talking about a situation in which nuclear became the norm. You’re presumably familiar with supply and demand. If we switched to nuclear tomorrow, the price of samarium, Uranium and other elements would go through the roof and so would electricity prices. The price of oil and gas would go through the floor because nobody is using it. There is no scenario in which nuclear would be cheaper.

Sean, you clearly have a penchant for exaggeration. Liechtenstein doesn’t need NP, unless it bought a second hand reactor from an old submarine. It’s got 40,000 of a population. Using that as an example is absurd. France, off the top of my head, has about 20 reactor sites, we have a 10th of the population so we need 2-4 reactors to supply approximately 75% of our power from NP.

Your comments regarding “supply & demand” are rubbish. If more Uranium was needed, they’d just mine more.

You started saying “Every study on the planet suggests that nuclear is massively more expensive” and not alone have I shown that’s it’s a gross exaggeration but so have you.

China is embarking on a massive drive to build reactors. All that will happen is the Uranium mining industry will react. They have plenty of warning. All the other materials are also in abundance and can be replaced with other materials. The human race has been adapting for millennia. We even sorted out the 3ft of horse shit on the streets of NY problem. You would have been in there claiming it was going to be 20ft of horse shit. I bet you you claimed Peak Oil was going to be a problem 10 years ago. Now it’s $60 a barrel or about 50c a litre. If it wasn’t for tax the price of petrol would be irrelevant.

Okay, there’s no point arguing anymore. You’re trying to dictate mineral economics and Geological resources to a Geologist. You are just so wrong on so many accounts. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Anyway, I’ll finish up by saying I agree with you that fossil fuels need to be removed from our economy and that nuclear is a part of that solution. But the entire solution is impossible with present day technology, we’ll have to see what happens.

Happy Paddy’s Day!

Sean, I’m off to the pub. I hope they don’t run out of Guinness.

PS Did you as a geologist believe in Peak Oil?

Well there’s two parts to that. First of all, you’re using the past tense. And second of all, you’re making it out to be a belief. It’s a loaded question.

I accept the fact that peak oil is inevitable. Peak oil merely refers to the point in human history at which oil extraction is at an all time high, that’s all. Most industry professionals predict we’ll reach peak oil in the mid 2020s or possibly 2030s. It’s difficult to predict because there are always unforseen circumstances. Nobody really thinks we’ve already hit the peak. That’s just media sensationalism. The price of oil is only indirectly coupled with productivity. That’s an important distinction. Oil prices are very low right now because OPEC are waging economic war on the Northern American companies who make unconventional play systems their bread and butter. It’s got very little to do with real world extraction

Yes it DOES sound ridiculous

This is all fairy talk.

Wind energy provides non dispatchable non synchronous generation so NO you cant power even ONE single house with a wind turbine. This is not an anti-wind stance, this is a simple statement of FACT.

It is about time those who have no power generation knowledge stop talking claptrap.

Please go and power your home with a wind turbine if you love them that much and then get back to us before you start talking Alice in Wonderland PLEASE.

“Ireland has the best value wind energy in the world, don’t let the ranting of Dave Fingleton confuse you.”

Yes of course and on St Patricks Day today we have a grand sum total of MWs from Wind of :

19 MW !!!!!!!!!!!!!! from over 2000MW of wind capacity LOL LOL !!!!

Is there anyone else who really believes this baloney ?

Wind energy drives up the price of electricity – it is now accepted by everyone including the Energy Regulator

http://irishenergyblog.blogspot.ie/2015/03/response-to-irish-times-article-by.html

Product should read production.

It doesn’t matter cause the reality is that increases in gas/petrol are immediate, whereas decreases are slow in being passed on

B####@*

The world now has the highest reserves ever of oil

I sincerely hope we’re not relying on cold fusion to save us

I’m saying it’s an incredibly exciting development Cornelius and maybe one day we’ll all be using fusion to power our world. Granted it won’t be for a while but once they can figure out how to get more energy out than you need to put in, the advancements will come thick and fast to the betterment of the whole world.

I think the idea behind it, is they use radio waves. when concentrated and targeted on salt water it makes the salt water flammable They reckon they will also be able to produce aviation fuel from it. they currently don’t have any ships or planes running off salt water and will probably be another decade before any real life application. There aim is to generate fuel while out at sea so they don’t have to keep breaking form to refuel. But to generate fuel they will still need a power source. probably from nuclear reactors.
You cannot create energy out of thin air. energy is never destroyed just converted into something else. To make this fuel might cost them more than what they get out. but if they don’t have to return to shore to refuel then it will benefit them no matter what the cost .

Presume you meant their aircraft carriers – which is correct, rather than their aircraft – which would be daft.