PowerSwitch

an extract from http://southwest.greenparty.org.uk/greensword0605.pdf

Countering the Nuclear Proposal:

Cost of building (not running or decommissioning) a new nuclear power
plant is around ?1.5Bn. Generating capacity 750MW (some proposals are
up to 1GW). Running costs approx 200 full time jobs plus fuel costs.
Decommisioning costs incalculable (but VERY large)

Cost of individual domestic wind turbine, with inverter to produce 220V
approx ?10,000. Generating capacity approx 5kW. Running costs approx
4 manhours year maintenance with zero fuel cost. Life end costs
recoverable from scrap value.

So instead of building a new nuclear plant you could install 150,000
domestic wind turbines which would produce around 750MW and
provide distributed employment and economic activity as well as
having minimal decommissioning costs at the end of a similar working
lifespan.

New nuclear power plant building is simply economic madness, without
even considering the social or environmental impact or long term costs!

The idea of a small turbine on each roof is a good one and a lot of useful electricity could be generated. One problem might be planning permission as having a roof turbine is likely to screw up your neighbours TV picture.

Solar panels on roofs are also worth having.

Problem with both these electricity sources is their intermittent nature. You still need some kind of fallback generation / storage. I agree in general though, there's a lot of useful power you can generate from small scale low-tech sources at a fraction of the cost of nuclear - although we will need that too.

We just need to change our demand to become more intermittent tolerant.

clv101 wrote:We just need to change our demand to become more intermittent tolerant.

Totally agree - I read recently that some power customers in the States are being charged a lower rate per unit in exchange for allowing the supplier to have remote access to their air-conditioning!

On the the old forum I posed a question about the UK's peak load demand; how much could this be reduced if we accepted that the washing machine would take two hours to run its cycle or a full kettle take 10 minutes to boil?