Technorati is anagramming their name differently on every page you hit today, presumably in honour of April Fools. I´ve had:
HeartTonic
Tonierchat
ricoTta hen
inochaTter
When my eight year old played an April Fools joke on me this morning, I convinced him that when we put the clocks ahead an hour last week, the calendars went ahead a day and TOMORROW was “één April” as it´s known here in Amsterdam. That worked for about 30 seconds.
As the director of the Museum of Hoaxes (the headquarters pictured on the website is itself a hoax) Alex Boese says in a Reuters piece today, a good Hoax (like, ha,ha, “French nuclear success“) is really hard to pull off.
Don´t know about that. People actually built nuclear power plants in the 70s on the promise of energy that would be “too cheap to meter” and haven’t cottoned on to the fact that the entire industry is just a bunch of hilarious pranksters when they spin out their latest knee-slapper: Nuclear Power is a solution to climate change. They kill me.
technorati tags:technorati, april_fools
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1 Comment to 'April Fooled'
April 3, 2007
Let’s hope they don’t kill you!
Of course there really is no need for nuclear power in Europe because there is a simple mature technology available that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.
I refer to ‘concentrating solar power’ (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.
CSP works best in hot deserts and it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient ‘HVDC’ transmission lines. With transmission losses at about 3% per 1000 km, solar electricity may, for example, be transmitted from North Africa to London with only about 10% loss of power. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by the wind energy company Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe.
In the ‘TRANS-CSP’ report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. That report shows in great detail how Europe can meet all its needs for electricity, make deep cuts in CO2 emissions, and phase out nuclear power at the same time.
Further information about CSP may be found at http://www.trec-uk.org.uk and http://www.trecers.net . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at http://www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm .
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