Fracking coming to a National Park near you.

[Workingman]

Unfortunately we need the gas to buy us time to get other energy production technologies on stream.

In many respects the progress with the efficiency of some renewables has been astonishing, even windmills, but they are unlikely to be the whole answer. In other areas, tidal, geothermal and small scale hydro, we have been either lazy or simply written them off without putting any worthwhile research into them. What we have been left with is nuclear.

Deep down everybody knows it. Even some old-school environmentalists have changed their minds, and that is important and interesting. The problem with nuclear is not technical it is psychological. Many of those who are against it are stuck in the CND and Cold War days with the nuclear Armageddon clock on 59h 59m 59s. If those arguments don't work they can always fall back on Three Mile Island, Chenobyl and Fukushima. A lot of this misguided thinking is in the minds of some powerful people who are clever enough to drag the sheeple along with them.

Interesting news came out the other day about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The German team produced a helium plasma at 100mºC for 1/10 of a second - millions of times longer than previously achieved. A small, but huge step. The media coverage lasted about as long as the event because there was a Star Wars premier, a rocket launch or something else coming up.

[Suff]

Yep, tidal power, we’re seriously lacking in coastline for that aren’t we…. Geothermal? We haven’t really even looked at our resources for that, only carried out a few tests at 40,000 feet which is way too deep for what we are trying to do. As for weirs and river power…. That is almost totally private and virtually no braincells working on that one. They are all stuck in huge dam mode and environmental damage assessment.

So, yes, we are stuck with gas right now. It’s about the cleanest fuel we have (barring mass harvesting of methane clathrates), until we get something else on line.

I’m not objecting to Nuclear on the basis of risk, to be honest, I’m objecting to it on the basis that the technology is impossibly rudimental for what they are trying to do and the promised 3rd/4th and 5th generation reactors are just that, promises. Every decade they move another decade further away. With 2nd generation reactors we don’t have enough fuel to squander on hugely inefficient reactors.

Perhaps, with the issue of global warming, ever rising sea levels and ever increasing power and destructiveness of storms, we should learn from Fukushima though. Before embarking on bargain basement budget nuclear reactors. The AGR was not cheap but it has been exceptionally safe.

So, in the end, what do we have left? Gas will give us transition energy security until we can move to clean energy. Sadly that does not help the situation today. Out of control warming, decade on decade shift in the ecosystems and decade on decade devastation to the environment close to the Equator.

I was revising the pricing of power based on the sources today. It’s all in the Hinckley point wiki page. Current wholesale market price per MWatt is around £50. Yet the strike price for Nuclear, Wind, Hydro, Solar and others ranges from £80 to £150 per MWatt. Consumers pay £80 - £90 per MWatt so that shows how out of whack it is.

Who wants to pay 2 – 3 times their current energy bill because our politicians are unable to do the right thing. No, in the end they will use gas to keep the overall price down and that gas will come from fracking. Which will, in turn, come from the future of our descendents…