Bruce

You are a kind guy nomad. Less kind people have suggested that maintenance is deliberately scheduled at times of possible crisis in order to create a shortfall in supply and send prices through the roof. Is this insane system still in place? I am reminded of how the Chinese used to pay their physicians only when they were well ... they were not as dumb as us if this is true.

Even if old K's figures are correct , that would still make nuclear the least worst option between nuclear and coal. ( I reckon Chernobyl was a disgrace, an under-maintained old station, and as for building any power station on a tsunami coast, well I thought better of the Japanese) Marty's point about running out of uranium does not apply to modern reactors, especially the hybrid fission/fusion ones. But if stored renewables can come in cheaper, well thats great news and a surprise to me.

If I had been listened to, the real power would have come from nuclear for the last 50 years and the planet would be in better shape than it is now. Millions are already sick and dying from climate change, maybe a thousand times more than in all the nuclear accidents put together. Try looking up the effect of heatwaves on the poor in cities in India, for just one example.

Thanks for the molten salt storage power station reference, I'm becoming persuaded that renewables with storage may become cheaper than nuclear after all. But what a shame if it is all too late, and the planet has been wrecked by greenies who effectively stopped nuclear in favor of coal for 50 years.

Yenn, I grew up in Alice Springs before air-conditioning was available for ordinary people, and yesterday at Gawler really was as hot as claimed. And my car has a fairly accurate " outside air temperature " readout and it said 51 degrees yesterday. It had been in the sun a bit, but even on the long drive home it said 47. Sorry but I have to cast doubt on your "missed maximum" theory, because there are old fashioned max/min thermometers, which push a pin up and then leave it stranded when the temp goes down. They sure used these in the 50's. I reckon they had them for about 100 years before that. But there is a great story told by Burt Rutan, ( yep he is a climate-change denier as well as being a gifted designer ) and that is how in the old Soviet Union, a Siberian settlement got more heating oil if it reported colder temperatures. What an incentive to fiddle the record huh.

Yes pmc, CO2 is a pollutant depending on the concentration. Try breathing 100% CO2 for awhile. It is not a pollutant at small levels in a greenhouse though. On a dry planet, the temperature rise from a given CO2 change is a simple calculation, one that you could have given to year 12 physics students in my day. The CO2 absorbs long-wave emitted radiation from the surface, thus changing the planet's albedo and hence the temperature. It is the effect of clouds which makes the calculation a hard one, but the supercomputers are getting better at it.

Yesterday, record high temperatures occurred all over South Australia. It was a great gliding day, with strong lift to 14,000 ft. I couldn't help but notice that the hundreds of wind-turbines on ridge-tops north of Adelaide were all still. Power outages were only prevented by the use of emergency diesel generators installed by the previous labor government. I wonder if those who would have us do nothing about CO2 insure their houses? As hihosland says, the consequences of being wrong if we do nothing are huge. With your house burning down, the risk is small but the consequences of being burned and uninsured are huge. Personally though I doubt that enough will ever be done, as it would take a big transfer of resources from our military to do enough. Fat chance of that, I reckon.

I would just love it for you to be right, pmc. On the opposite side of the argument is that professor who says the human race has ten years to go, because release of methane from melting premafrost has such a high feedback that it will do us all in. I sure hope he is wrong. On measurements, I would place more credence in the latest stuff compared to what we had before. As I write, the forecast for Adelaide is to equal or exceed the all-time record high temperature. I'm hoping to fly the glider .

Gosh pmc, you are not stupid or uneducated, and you are in some good company including guys like Rutan. But, looking at the first paper in your link, the data there is completely different from what I've been seeing. Take the Argo sea temperature system for example. 4,000 automatic sinking/rising senders reporting via satellite every day. You just have to google up " latest ocean temperature news" to get the Argo results and they are completely different from the paper in your link. Now add to that other evidence of coral bleaching and glacier retreat , both of which I have seen with my own eyes, and the case for the standard argument is even stronger in my mind. But like I said, why not have a bet ?

wow pmc, you join some good mates of mine in being a global warming skeptic. But I bet you won't agree to my deal. If the climate was not warming at all then you would win big on my deal. Bet you don't want to even hear it.

Tout le mond rire quand je parle francaise. Je suis tres terrible.

I like your spelling space. It has character and anyway the idea of only one correct way to spell was invented by a guy who just wanted people to buy his new-fangled dictionary. On banks: The funny thing about our banks is how they mainly started out as government owned and then got sold off. I remember liking Keating until he sold the Commonwealth bank.

If you see an Arab woman wearing a burqua, there are 2 possibilities: One, that she is practicing her heartfelt religion, and two, that she will get bashed and worse back home if she doesn't. How do you tell the difference?

Old K, I have tried to think of a bore-casing that will take the heat and pressure and not corrode out..PVC is way to soft at high temperatures. What a shame, all that energy there and no way to get at it. It is better than a nuclear power station in that it can be turned on and off quickly. It would be great if a solution, like applying a cathodic protection current, were to be found. I don't regret investing in them, the idea just had to be explored.

Nuclear power has moved on from the dark ages. They don't have to produce dangerous stuff anymore. Do some research on the latest stuff. But I agree Australia will not be the first country to do anything. As for greenies, it is accepted that they are not all scientifically ignorant, but their official policies sure are. Their policy on open door immigration makes no sense to me at all for several reasons. I reckon they are typical of the generation which takes food for granted to such an extent that they feel free to attack farmers at every opportunity. And I know a green-voting woman who is proud of her natural granite benchtop, and I don't have the meanness in me to tell her that granite makes a geiger-counter click.

How many amps were you drawing for that hour, old K? And how many volts is your LiFe booster pack? It sure did a good job for you. If it was a 12 volt booster pack, my guess is that it would be supplying 300 watts to run a fridge and a freezer, that is 300/12 amps or 25 amps. If it was a 24 volt booster, then 12.5 amps etc. This is assuming the inverter losses are included in the 300 watts. You wouldn't be wise to make a cup of tea with a kettle like mine ( 2000watts).

That would be nice old K. All we humans need is to solve global warming, resource depletion and overpopulation while we spend the resources needed on the military. We have maybe 10 years to do that. On the SA geothermal story... I lost money investing in the SA hot rocks, and what happened was that their stainless steel bore casings rusted out too quickly and this made the project non-viable. Under certain chemical circumstances, stainless steel can rust out just as fast as anything. What a shame huh... natural energy, always available, which could be turned on and off real fast and complement the wind and solar. A good investment huh. Actually, it is the radioactivity of granite rocks which is the true source of the energy, but the greenies would never know that.

If they don't have battery backup, then the supply system needs to cross them out as a power source and have standby power as backup, so the savings equal nothing.

Australia is way too stupid to innovate with nuclear power stations, but what will we do when the Chinese have lots of cheap and safe power stations but still have fewer carbon emissions? Will we all commit mass suicide or what? Conventional power stations using molten salt for coolant will be safe and are not far from starting. Then hybrid fission/fusion will be next. During this time, Australia will be caught in the dark ages of Chernobyl fears etc and burning coal while the world fries.

I agree with u space. When they were selling for 0$ I bought some (6) and now I reckon I could add 3 more without upgrading the wiring. My only problems are the price and whether the forces of evil will be looking at sat pics of my roof and thinking I've done something illegal.

Wine doesn't go bad, space, unless you let air on it or the cork goes bad. But it can be kept too long and not taste so good , depending on the wine. I suggest you try that Minchinbury from time to time. It is wrong to think that older is always better with wine.

As a subject of the same queen that the british have, I expected better treatment at Heathrow than to wait in a long queue with lots of other aliens while thousands of swarthy people from greece etc walked straight in. And I keep seeing plaintive letters from glider manufacturers based in Germany who say their fees from the bureaucracy have become so unsupportable that they just have to pass them on. They have to pay separate fees for about 5 different aspects of glider maintenance, and do this on gliders which were paid for 50 years ago. The EU bureacracy is what needs to be culled , as it does here. The only product of bureaucracy is poverty. I applaud the Brexit lot and I hope they become a haven of lesser bureaucracy.

you are right space, but that stuff is millions of years away. Old K and nomad are referring to stuff which is ten years or so away. There is a prof from the US who says that humanity will be extinct in ten years and I disagee with him, but we sure are in for some bad climate-change things.

I dont agree about extinction for humanity. We are just too good as animals at surviving. We can not only eat cockroaches, we can party on them. We can subsist in deserts or tundra. We can sweat and cool ourselves like few other animals can. Civilization is another matter and much more fragile.

I thought the failures on hot days were artificially induced so the spot price would go through the roof. Gosh its terrible to be such a cynic.