Are wind farms an eyesore or do they blow you away?

badger you say “I believe that most if not all politicians are self serving and not altruistic”. I also think that there are very few technically or scientifically qualified members among them. On top of this, they are informed and advised by partizan researchers who are dependent on grants for their continued activity. However, there might be some hope in the recent formation of an All Party Parliamentary Committee on Thorium. Tim Yeo is a member but wouldn’t it be nice if the energy minister was one also. They list the Weinberg Foundation as their source of references.

The Chair of the Weinberg Foundationis is Lady Worthington (labour). They have a wonderful collection of references to LFTR and molten salt cooled reactors (MSR). Alvin Weinberg was a Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was an inventor of the existing pressurised water reactors (PWRs) but didnt like the safety aspects – so he invented and built a thorium reactor that uses a liquid fuel. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to build a bomb from a thorium reactor’s by-products – so Nixon and his cohorts sacked him and scrapped his MSR.

Jazz, you stated that “Wind Farms have a range of known negative impacts,”. Here’s another one a Met man told me the other day. Downwind the turbulent air stirs the boundary layer above the soil. This effect reduces the thermal isolation of the soil and its energy loss. The change is small but the natural environment is changed. It is reported that eventually there is a discernable change in the downwind flora and fauna.

I sympathise with your situation and I don’t want to depress you but in 1841, Charles MacKay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds repeated a quote that “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” This is as true now as it was then. (Sorry if I’m sounding a bit Boris-like).

Sorry Finsbury but I was among those working on fusion research in the late 50’s. Zeta produced some neutrons and the media descended. Someone said “Nuclear Power would be so cheap it would not be worth metering!” and that was it. The next year I was among those that showed that those neutrons did not have a thermonuclear origin! Nevertheless, someday it will be true – and I believe that thorium reactors will come pretty near to the fusion promise – but that is just a feeling and not a fact.

I am sure that we will have break-even fusion demonstrated from either magnetic confinement (ITER) or inertial confinement (laser shock) within the next 10 years, but which ever one wins will lead to enormous reactors when only a few of them will supply the whole country. I think that the small modular thorium reactor will be the result of market demand over the next 50 years but it will need a prototype to be demonstrated first – and the US has shot itself in the foot when it comes to thoriun resources. That is why China and India are likely to get there first. India is sitting on mountains of thorium.

By the way, it is rumoured that the current level of introduction of uranium fuelled reactors will result in uranium shortages in 100 years time whereas thorium, it has been claimed, could last for over 80,000 years. That should give us enough time to solve the compact fusion reactor problem!

I think you’ll find that a plebiscite would result in abandoning wind farms and possibly even green energy. It’s our our politicians who’ve got their heads up their jacksies and are ruining our country, not the proletariat.