March 2012
20 posts
4 tags
The State Of Fusing The Atom
Nuclear fusion has long been an interest of mine, not least because of the potential it has to provide practically unlimited energy cleanly, quickly and efficiently, using what I see as the peak of both humanities scientific endeavours, and a beautiful use of physics and technology. To mimic the Sun and harness it’s power down here on little planet Earth is an incredible prospect, and one...
6 tags
Big News - E.On And RWE Bail Out Of UK Nuclear Due...
Both German energy giants E.On and RWE today stated that they were pulling out of a two-reactor build on the Isle of Anglesey due to financial problems in working up the necessary cash and support from the German government for plans to go ahead. The original program, named Horizon, was a joint venture between the two and was estimated to cost £15 billion in all, providing roughly 6,000MW of...
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Obama And The EPA Deal Coal A Killer Blow
The American president and his environmental agency EPA have taken bold steps to reducing the nation’s reliance on coal-fired power plants by introducing new rules which, if upheld, will practically half the allowable emissions from these industries from the next generation of builds onwards. The cap would limit associated carbon emissions at just 1,000lbs per MW/hour, and with the average...
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Mini-Nuke Reactors Could Be The Industry's Saving...
Despite the big blow the nuclear industry has taken in recent months, with many developed nations (forgive the A-level terminology) giving the idea up in favour of a safer and cleaner future, it won’t be a nice, easy transition considering the sizeable gaps in energy production needed to be plugged. There’s the big issue surrounding baseload and how to replace the chunky proportion...
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Sustainability In Gaming - Good Or Bad?
There’s been a growing trend in gaming recently to include some of our real world issues on climate change and sustainability, including parameters such as environmental pollution, carbon emissions and green construction, in their structure. This is increasingly common in the world-building and city construction games such the famously addictive SimCity, Cities XL or Anno 2070, the above...
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Taking Solar Into The Next Dimension - Solar3D
http://ecoswitch.com/tags/solar-panels/
I know that many of my last few blog posts have been the subject of solar, singing its praises and banging on about how we’re witnessing the start of something pretty big, but I wanted to draw attention to a little company which has the potential to completely reinvent to industry once again, and bring about massive efficiency increases. That company...
4 tags
Solar Deserves Our Attention, And Money, For Many...
www.solarselections.co.uk/blog
Judging from recent events and articles I’ve been seeing skip their way around the internet, there appears to be a recurring theme on the subject of solar feed-in-tariffs (FiT) and their destined lifetime in the modern economy. Many governments and analysts seem to think that, given just a few more years of subsidies and kind cash incentives from their...
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Looks Like Solar (and Wind) Finally Grew Up
www.which.co.uk/energy
To me it feels like not long ago when solar energy and it’s associated technology was a stick in the mud, a solution that would never really have the power or money to get very far in the big wide world of fossil fuels and hydroelectric dominance.
When I was in school studying about the climate and energy, and considering this was just 4 or 5 years ago, it seemed...
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Germany Is Spending How Much On Renewables?!
www.spiegel.de/international/germany
Bloomberg announced recently that industrial and renewable powerhouse Germany is planning on spending a whopping $263 billion (£167 billion), or 8% of their 2011 GDP, on an audacious energy transition involving low-carbon solutions and paving a way towards a greener future. The report did not state specific timescales or proposed plan implementation, but set...
Has Climate Fatigue Set In Throughout Our Youth?
http://health.doctissimo.com/womens-health
Given the modern day media and its sometimes questionable coverage of climate change and our overall environmental woes, I find it somewhat bittersweet to see that in a 2012 study of 882 US residents carried out by the Brookings Institution, 62% are solid believers of the climate science and the fact that humans are rapidly speeding up Earth’s...
Google Says Goodbye To Green Program, But With...
We all know that Google are giants of the tech and internet industry, with their fingers in so many various pies that it becomes hard to keep count. Namely, their furores into the mobile phone craze with Android, and the subsequently vicious and protracted legal battles with Apple has cemented their status as big-game players who are ready to take on possibly the most important and successful...
Nuclear Becoming Less Viable By The Day
I’ve always been someone who has kept a keen eye on the nuclear industry, as a person who sees the system as a powerful and important intermediary energy source to aid in the transition from fossil to renewable. It provides relatively clean electricity at much less comparable damage to the environment than that of coal or gas and is a fantastic depiction of what science can achieve with the...
Screw Geoengineering, What About Bioengineering To...
So here’s our problem; anthropogenic emissions are changing our climate, as we should hopefully all know and trust, and we’re accomplishing that much faster than good old nature has been used to, hence all the fuss over it. One of the most grand, and unfortunately controversial solutions forwarded by many lobbies is that of geoengineering - the artificial changing of our climate,...
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One Small Step For Solar
Solar installations by proportion across the world. www.greentechmedia.com
Some good news from SunTech and for the solar industry as a whole; it appears that the world record for PV efficiency has reached a pretty important milestone, and surpassed it. As of today, the company achieved an impressive 20.3% efficiency with its Pluto technology PV panels, taking the crown for highest rating ever....
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*Update* Should Nuclear Be Let In The Renewable... →
So it seems that the Guardian’s earlier article regarding the UK’s stance on renewable targets and it’s apparent attempts at pushing nuclear into the renewable club are misguided, if a letter from the Secretary of State is to be fully trusted, in which the whole situation laid out in the popular newspaper today was disregarded completely.
According to the letter, the UK is...
Should Nuclear Be Let In The Renewable Club?
Carrying on from my last post on the subject of nuclear energy, renewables and the state of public feelings after Fukushima, I felt that a follow-up post was necessary after reading of a potentially leaked document (seen by the Guardian), which purports to the UK government investing in a strange new direction for green energy production; the rebranding of the nuclear industry.
This document, and...
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Is Fission Falling out Of Favour?
This coming Sunday represents an important date in the nuclear industry, and human history, as a year would have passed since the Tohoku earthquake and ensuing Fukushima Reactor disaster plagued Japan and the wider world. Since then, the power of fission has rapidly fallen out favour, and multiple economically-strong nations have opted to drop construction altogether and shut off nuclear, Germany...
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We Could All Do With A Bit More Sun
I’ve decided to go straight into the second blog of my life with an image I saw floating around twitter a few days back, which struck me as something well worth a further look into (got to love Read It Later).
Ecomagination - http://twitpic.com/8r3njw
The above image is a simple map demonstrating how much land surface would be required to power the entire globe purely through the wonder of...
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Time To Take A New Angle On 'Business As Usual'
Well I finally did it, I’ve actually worked up the effort, and (some very limited) photoshopping skills and kicked off a blog, on what is one of my only strong passions in life - a clean, sustainable future for us humans, in which we can not only begin enjoying life without ruining our next-gen prospects or this planet, but progress down a path which is an ever-growing necessity, and surely...
