Category Archives: Government

Britain, Climate Change, Energy, Government, Science

The UK’s energy dilemma

UK ENERGY NEEDS

Intro: Britain is facing a pressing problem in coping with its complex energy demands

DELAYS to the construction of the controversial Hinkley point raises a number of important questions on how the UK might meet its future energy needs. Pressingly, as the UK searches for options in how its future baseload power can be met without heavily polluting the environment, a solution in bridging the energy-gap will soon be required.

Britain is facing a pressing problem in coping with its complex energy demands. It needs to provide extra energy to meet rising demands for power in the future but at a reasonable cost – while also reducing carbon emissions by considerable levels in order to meet its climate change commitments. This will not be an easy combination to achieve. Hinkley Point, however, was considered by many experts to be a crucial determinant in reaching these goals.

Equipped with a massive 3.2bn watt capacity, Hinkley Point C has capacity in providing 7% of the nation’s electricity if completed. That would help to generate the power that would keep the nation working while renewable energy sources, mainly wind turbines, would provide the rest of the electricity needed by domestic households and firms. As one spokesperson from the Grantham Research Institute said: ‘You have to have some baseload source to provide power when it is utterly calm and renewables are not providing energy . . . Gas and coal plants – which can also supply that baseload – will no longer be viable in the future because of their carbon emissions (which cause global warming). You are then left with nuclear.’

This dilemma exposes a major drawback that affects renewable energy. Wind and solar plants are intermittent power supplies. They often provide power when it is not needed but fail to provide it when it is most needed. Until a method of storing energy on an industrial scale is developed, this drawback will continue to impede its deployment across the country. Research into ways to store energy on a large scale is now being pursued across the globe but may take decades. Other game-changing energy projects are also being worked on.

One of the most important of these future developments is fusion power (see annotation below).  This aims to recreate the process that provides the Sun with its energy. Nuclei of hydrogen atoms are fused together at colossal temperature inside huge reactors to create helium nuclei. The process also creates vast amounts of excess energy but with little pollution or radioactive contamination. Nonetheless, current devices – in particular, the international ITER fusion reactor, being built as a collaborative programme in France with British involvement – are years behind schedule and vastly over budget. Few experts believe fusion will get us out of our current energy problem.

Alternatively, we could continue to utilise carbon capture and storage (CCS), a process which uses fossil fuel plants which takes their carbon dioxide emissions, liquefies them and pumps them underground into porous rocks. Furthermore, Britain has huge, empty North Sea oil fields which many geologists and energy experts believe would be ideal for storing liquefied carbon dioxide. Several test projects were set up in recent years, with the government pledging to provide funding of up to £1bn. In November last year, though, it abruptly cancelled the programme, halting work on all major CCS projects. As devastating that announcement was to those engaged in development work, such technology is critical for the UK’s economic, industrial and climate policies.

Annotation:

Fusion.gif

A fusion reaction involves the combining (or fusing) of two or more atoms to make one single atom. Fusion reactions are the ones which power our stars. In a simple fusion reaction shown, two isotopes of hydrogen combine to form one atom of helium.

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Britain, Government, Politics, Sport

Team GB offers a golden lesson in how to beat the world

TEAM GB

RIo Medal Table

Rio Medal Table

OVER THE PAST FORTNIGHT in Rio at the Olympic Games, Team GB exceeded the highest hopes, spreading euphoria and joy even among many who thought they were uninterested in sport.

Across a huge range and spectrum of disciplines, Team GB athletes have shown what this country can achieve at its best. It amassed a hoard of gold medals to outstrip even China with its population of 1.4billion.

Yet, the performances we have all witnessed have given us much more than an excuse to fly the flag or by raising a toast to Britain’s highest ranking in the medal tables for 108 years. Team GB has offered a daily lesson in human virtue, gruelling effort and its rewards.

See: A collection of moments from the 2016 Rio Olympic Games – Olympic Rio Gallery 2016

Interviewed after their victories, these supremely dedicated athletes, for the most part modest and unassuming, have attributed their success above all to sacrifice, determination and an unrelenting work ethic.

In the words of the immortal Mo Farah, winner of four Olympic golds: ‘If you dream of something, have ambitions and are willing to work hard, then you can get your dreams.’

These are true role models for Britain’s young, too often captivated by dreams of the effortless, vacuous celebrity of the tawdry stars of reality TV.

If our athletes’ performance spurs them to emulate the commitment of the likes of Andy Murray on the tennis court, cyclist Laura Trott, boxer Nicola Adams, taekwondo’s Jade Jones and gymnast Max Whitlock, what rich rewards this country would reap. The showjumping gold won by 58-year-old Nick Skelton and older Britons, too, also offers a lesson about the importance of refusing to give up.

 

BUT isn’t there also a lesson for politicians in our athletes’ phenomenal success?

As one victor after another has been quick to acknowledge, Team GB owes at least a measure of its triumph to the ruthlessly effective way in which the British Olympic Association and UK Sport channelled state aid and lottery money into the disciplines most likely to yield the richest crop of medals.

Wasn’t the Olympic investment strategy – focusing on fields in which Britain is strong, the competition vulnerable and the rewards enormous – a perfect model for government priorities after Brexit?

The fact is that in commerce, as in sport, Britain has huge strengths – as even the most ardent of Remainers are beginning to admit.

Indeed, US banking giant JP Morgan has become the latest promoter of Project Fear to reverse its prediction that the FTSE-100 would plummet after a Brexit vote. Now it tells investors that British shares are the safest bet in Europe.

Certainly, there are tough negotiations ahead – and the sooner they start, the sooner the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the economy will lift.

But with the right focus, there is every hope that wonderful opportunities will open up when we’re free from Brussels interference to develop industries and services of our own choosing.

In Rio, our athletes have shown what huge rewards can be achieved through self-belief and hard work, backed up by clear-thinking administrators with their minds fixed on results.

The ministers in charge of negotiating Brexit should learn from them. Instead of fighting turf wars among themselves, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis need a clear strategy to help us take on the world and win.

Team GB has shown how it can be done. Now the politicians in Britain must get on with it.

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Europe, France, Government, Islamic State, Society, Terrorism

Europe and Islamist attacks

TERRORISM IN EUROPE

Intro: President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position

THE INSTINCTIVE RESPONSE on horrors such as those that have taken place in France and Germany in recent days is to look for a pattern, a narrative that might go some way to explain the inexplicable.

The brutal and bloody murder of an 86-year-old priest in Normandy invites such thinking, since it follows years of attacks on Christians in the Middle East: first by al-Qaeda and then by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Is radical Islam seeking a war with Christianity?

The very suggestion or notion of such a conflict between faiths would delight followers of ISIL, but it is hard to reconcile with that group’s dreadful persecution of fellow Muslims. ISIL has killed many more Muslims than it has Christians or Jews.

Or are the Islamists targeting Western liberal values more broadly, seeking to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate that once existed across the Middle East and parts of Southern Europe?

If so, that end has been poorly served by the enormity and mayhem in Normandy and Bavaria, lands that were never home to Muslims in the middle ages and which have only come to have Muslim residents as a result of those liberal Western values.

Seeking some kind of explanation for the evil that has been perpetrated is perfectly natural, but we should not impute too much calculation or design to those individuals who carry out such heinous crimes.

Whilst we may look for explanations the truth is there is no rationale or logic, nor any coherent argument in explaining away why Europe is suffering such appalling atrocities on its streets. These are the acts of inadequate and disturbed individuals with a nihilistic desire to destroy anything that challenges them and their ill-formed and warped idea of the world.

We must harden our defences against such acts, but we should be wary of the idea that those acts represent a clash of cultures – for that suggests some sort of parity between irrational extremist ideology on the one hand and a civilisation of shared traditions developed over thousands of years on the other.

President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position. Such a response, however, also risks validating the arguments of Marine Le Pen’s National Front (i.e. that the French establishment has failed to face up to the existential threat of terrorism).

Security and intelligence operations should be reviewed in the face of these latest attacks, particularly as the numerous intelligence agencies that operate in France are highly dysfunctional and disjointed. Great care must be taken not to dignify the attackers or their pathetic dreams of grandeur. They are murderers only deserving of contempt.

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