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OT: Moorabal/Lal Lal wind farm 28-Jul-2009 At 1:18:06 PM evanbb

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On 28/07/2009 Wendy wrote:
>After exhausting the books I carried on my walk, I borrowed a copy of
>James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia.

Wow, I had a feeling Lovelock was a bit batty. Not so, he's completely barking by the sound of it.

His concern about wind is almost rooted in fact. It's basic thermodynamics; if you get energy from somewhere (electricity) it must come from somewhere else. So if a turbine generates electricity the wind must slow down. As a % of total wind energy though I reckon it's delta-FA*.

Fusion isn't as far off as you think, but it's pretty hard to do. I've spoken to some Smart People about it and they are definitely getting closer. You want pies in skies? This is the stuff. But, unlike CCS, if they crack fusion, all our problems go away in the blink of an eye. You can 'burn' ANYTHING in it and generate virtually unlimited, clean energy. And better yet, unlike fission which can run away, maintaining a fusion reaction is so hard that if it gets out of whack it just stops. No, it's definitely not close to being cost effective or anything like that, and they're probably 100 years off commercial demonstration, but by Gods, if it goes, we'll never worry about energy again.

I wonder about nuke waste. The radioactive atoms came out of the ground initially; why not disperse them back to where they came from? I suspect the reason is that the reactor creates new, worse products, but I've never seen a good explanation.

*the Delta-FA thing is a quote from an excessively nerdy maths lecturer at uni. He'd do a long proof, a couple of boards long and somewhere in there he'd drop a deltaFA=0. Someone would always say WTF? "It's delta FA, change in f--- All. Change in f--- all is still f--- all, so it's zero!"