h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello

Personally, when it comes to power, I think we should be concentrating on less efficient, but cleaner and less dangerous sources, such as wind, wave or sun. The idea that what we are creating will stay unsafe for the next 2,500 years makes me feel very uneasy.

Someone, possibly from The Body Shop, was on the streets of Edinburgh yesterday, collecting signatures for a petition, asking the government to invest more in cleaner forms of power. I have a feeling that there's some sort of conference or meeting coming up - but I don't know where. Might be worth looking into.

cool, thats really good im going to find out all aboutit thank you.

The half ife of Plutonium 239 is about 24,000 years so if you have 100 grams to start with, you will still have 50 grams after 24,000 years and 25 grams after another 24,000 years. Plutonium 239 is the product of nuclear fission.

Alji

How dangerous is Plutonium-239? I know that not all radiation is dangerous - IIRC, Alpha radiation has a very short range, and can be stopped by air particles, Beta can be stopped by something as thin as paper, but Gamma is the real bugger. Discrete packets of energy, with little or no mass, as I recall. Is this the type of radiation we're talking about?

Plutonium 238 has a half life of 88 years so an equal amount of 238 would be more toxic than 239 because of the greater number of decays per year. There are 15 isotopes of plutonium from 232 to 246 with various half lives.

Alji

Plutonium produces neutrons, which are even worse (and gammas, which are actually high-energy photons). It's not enormously dangerous - it won't kill you in 5 minutes, but years of exposure will probably give you cancer. The risk is certainly high enough to make safe disposal essential. There was an article I saw somewhere the other day reporting that a study had found that nuclear tests have killed/will kill about 11000 people in the US alone.

Having said that, the only credible large-scale alternative to nuclear fission at the moment is fossil fuels, which are a lot worse.

Credible only because the bofins say so! Not enough work has been done to find alternative power sources because the money has not been porvided for the research.

Alji

The main problem we have in this country with alternativce sources is though we are sitting on a huge ammount of wind and wave energy is that we don't have the infrastructure to bring it on line it's all up there in the north west where no one lives so there is no major power grids up there and no one wants to fork out for the infrastructure even though in the long run it would bring in more money. Though having said that did see something in my enigeering magazine about the possibility of a link between scotland and ireland to possible make use of some of this.

wave and tidal could be deployed on artificial islands (like those they use for oil platforms) off the coast of skeggness. you could then deploy wind generators mounted on top of these islands.

These artificial islands would need to be little more than elementary pontoons.

skegness is in lincolnshire, and while it doesn't really have decent road and rail links, I can assure you that it is connected to the national grid.

so there goes your connection problem.

also, once you have electric, you can easily generate methane, so no problem, just stuff that down a pipeline and call it natural gas.

and it would all be renewable, using existing technology.