Energy Probe

When Lawrence Solomon invited me to join his blogging I thought it might be amusing and interesting. However, the appearance of Ian Plimer's book “Heaven and Earth” opens a really useful subject of discussion.

I sent the following letter to the National Post. It has not been published.

“The Editor, National Post. 2009 Aug 2nd.

For over a century, people in the advanced world, now over a billion, have pressed that switch on the wall and the light has come on. Most people regard this as natural - like the light coming in when the blinds are opened.But it is not.

I can find no definition of "green energy" anywhere, but then, expressions used in toothpaste commercials do not necessarily get into the dictionary. Let us see what we can do to clarify things a bit.

Lawrence Solomon and Amory Lovins may delay future developments by a few years, but they cannot escape the fact that 1 kilogram of uranium yields roughly 50,000 kiloWatt.hours of electrical energy in present-day thermal reactors or 3 million kiloWatt.hours in fast breeder reactors. Both technologies are fully established, though the breeder is in abeyance at present because thermal is cheaper and uranium is abundantly available at low price.

In the torrent of gossip and nonsense that besets the climate change issue, sea level is one of the issues that has "gone off the rails", so it will presumably be of some value for it to be put in perspective. Nautical charts show sea level as "HWOST" - high water, ordinary spring tides. The "O" is a give-away; in most coastal areas, tides are almost never ordinary. In England, Holland and Belgium in 1953, there was a real catastrophe - not the scaremonger kind.