China and India and emissions targets

[Rainbow Moonlight]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... ion=justin

Seems good to me. Looks like something greens would welcome. Am I wrong?

[LeftofCentre]

Any such committment would end up reducing their consumption of our thermal coal (though not necessarily our metalugical coal).

However, if they do in fact intend to replace that with nuclear, Australia would still be in a position to benefit since we have around 40% of the worlds known uranium deposits.

I've never been a fan of things nuclear (hangover from the cold war days) but the new reactors are supposedly much safer than the old ones and cannot suffer a Chernobyl-style core meltdown and explode. Supposedly anyway. If this is the case then we may end up doing ok out of this.

[JWFrogen]

India is just making a lot of nice Bollywood noises and China is not agreeing to overall cuts but simply cuts in relation to their GNP which will grow.

[Jovial Monk]

Integral Fast Breeder reactors are safe, and being breeders generate more fuel as they burn fuel. One very promising fuel is thorium (plenty of that about, incl here, and that is even safer: it has to be continually pumped to keep going so it won't be able to explode.

Unfortunately, no IFB exists yet.

If everything said about that type of reactor is true I would be happy for Aust. to build them. The fly ash from coal is radioctive, so swapping from coal to thorium would REDUCE overall radioactive emissions. Won't stop the Greens screaming and NIMBYism raging tho, at least until the first one is built.

[Jovial Monk]

http://www.business-standard.com/india/ ... ch/372959/

Investment in Indian windfarms surging.

Meanwhile here the fucking Greens block windfarm after windfarm--they are more concerned these days with growing their vote than environmental matters.

Backstairs Passage has wind blowing like 364 days a year so SA could get a huge fraction of its electricity from there. But it wouldn't look pretty-picture postcard so it won't happen!

[JWFrogen]

Yes all the yellow and brown people are doing so well, even though they are the greatest growing carbon emitters.

Science must hold hands with PC, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[Jovial Monk]

Ummmmm, it is a Danish company investing in the windfarm. . .

[JWFrogen]

Ummmmm, it is a Danish company investing in the windfarm. . .

My grandmother was Danish, they are so morose death will not even dance with them.

[Jovial Monk]

Hmmmm the "baseload power" is being shown for the myth it is.

http://www.cana.net.au/documents/Diesen ... y_FS16.pdf
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea ... lity-51767

and for a bit more background..
http://www.environment.gov.au/settlemen ... dstudy.pdf

While one wind turbine might be intermittent, a windfarm is less so, and all the windfarms in an area, a state say, are even less. All this is without storage.

[Jovial Monk]

This is an abstract that further reinforces the above 2 links:

Wind is the world’s fastest growing electric energy source. Because it is intermittent, though, wind is not
used to supply baseload electric power today. Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is
a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency. As
more farms are interconnected in an array, wind speed correlation among sites decreases and so does the
probability that all sites experience the same wind regime at the same time. The array consequently behaves
more and more similarly to a single farm with steady wind speed and thus steady deliverable wind power.
In this study, benefits of interconnecting wind farms were evaluated for 19 sites, located in the midwestern
United States, with annual average wind speeds at 80 m above ground, the hub height of modern wind
turbines, greater than 6.9 m s 1 (class 3 or greater). It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum
of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power. Equally significant, interconnecting multiple wind farms to a common point and then connecting
that point to a far-away city can allow the long-distance portion of transmission capacity to be reduced, for
example, by 20% with only a 1.6% loss of energy. Although most parameters, such as intermittency,
improved less than linearly as the number of interconnected sites increased, no saturation of the benefits
was found. Thus, the benefits of interconnection continue to increase with more and more interconnected
sites.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf

I think the myth of baseload power can be dismissed as just that, a myth.

And wind is cheaper than nuclear, go figure!