TopGun

All public museums are free to get entrance these days. So anyone wanting a titanic/bargate/reginald mitchell museum is going to have to have a good plan to put to the govt to get funding. Maybe Marcus Liebherr might help as part of a plan to integrate the club into the community!!

TBF Mike, TDD normally signs off a post with a "tax payer" comment. Clearly the Navy spend their "tax payer" money efficiently and no other body does. I'd put TDD up for Chancellor.

You could dig a whacking great hole anywhere and stuff it full of high level radioactive waste and cover it up. Theoretically you could build the hole in Hampshire, not just Wales or Scotland. The NIMBY issue is probably a fair one in this case though, no matter where it might be.

The sea is a no-no for environmental and political reasons. The USSR dumped four subs in their bit of the Arctic Sea and it makes Chernobyl look pleasant. A big deep hole would be fine (well, best option) but we don't have space in the UK to do that without it being near a community.

I agree with nuke build, because of the circumstances. Nuke is actually far more expensive to build short term (than CCGTs for example) and also long term to set aside money for depositing the waste safely but we have few options because of the shambolic energy policy that should have adopted more renewables years ago. The government is still debating what to do with the radioactive waste that we have stored in canisters as a short/medium term measure at Sellafield. TDD will also back me up when I say that we also have 13 defunct nuke subs sitting in Devon and Scotland quietly rotting away as no answer has been found for the disposal of the core reactors yet. Short of blasting nuke waste into space or quietly dumping it in the sea (as the USSR did) you need to build an effing big hole in the ground, as the US has done in the middle of nowhere.

Rafa has to be in trouble now though.

+1. He'd angle for a job for Wise no doubt too. No thank you. Those are bad memories past.

Personally I think Mark Hughes is a good manager to look after overpaid brats. I'm sure he takes no sh#t and I'm not sure who would prove to be a better manager at City. If true, it's a bit like getting rid of Paul Hart at Pompey. What more do the directors expect?

Unlike nuclear?

If you read the Copenhagen text you will realise that China is ready to do its bit. The problem with China is that people have this idea they open a coal-fired power station every two weeks, as gets reported in the media here. China is opening new coal power stations in some parts of the country but it is also a leading player in renewable power and CCS. It is also the world's leading producer and installer of solar PV panels. Ultimately the US has a carbon footprint that is 10x higher per person than China has. And the UK is also 5x higher than China per person. China just has lots of people and the often ignorant media here distorts the issue. Which leads to unknowingly ignorant views expressed widely as well.

Don't buy it from Amazon as they are not charted.

Ex-Wales and Lions RU winger and legend Gareth Thomas has stated he is gay. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/welsh/8421956.stm Quite a tough decision for him and, as he states, he can't be an anomaly. I imagine there must be hundreds of professional footballers who are gay on a 10% rule. But I can only think of Justin Fashanu and he topped himself.

I had a dream that Saints will end up fourth. So I'll be placing my bet there.

It might be better if the Swedish government jumped in for a few years to get the company going again so it remains a quality brand. With some financial assurance I think Saab can be a viable alternative in the upper end executive car market as 19C says.

Quite sad news really. Saab has always found it difficult to compete with BMW and Mercedes but generally have produced decent cars. I think they made a big mistake by selling up to GM a decade back personally as GM bosses in the US would have never understood Saab's niche market. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8421007.stm

There's a road that goes from Skipton to Kettlewell in Yorkshire that is a road kill fest. Rabbits, hedgehogs and pheasants aplenty as well the odd fox. I've always thought it might be a good source of revenue for amateur pet food manufacturers that could sell some form of tripe at a local market. I imagine Spudgun's discovery of a porn stash was dumped by some bloke concerned that his parents or girlfriend might find the material in his cupboard!

Interesting Ribbo.

It seems obvious that they will pay a rubbish price to anyone stupid enough to sell to them because they have to pay for all those adverts on TV and radio.

The average for turbines in the UK is 25%. You need an average wind speed of about 7 metres /second to achieve that. Turbines generally work up to 12 metres/second when they will shut down. To say that wind is questionable is farcical as the UK has the best wind speeds in Europe and wind has proved itself more than adequately elsewhere in Europe as a viable form of commercial energy.

A biomass power station is a renewable energy power station.

CCS will never work without a state incentive - which is vaguely occurring. Arguably, the UK should have been the leader of wind energy but never did it (mainly because we had coal reserves and countries like Spain don't). We might manage it with CCS but there has to be more commitment. Like wind, CCS should be a winner with the storage available to the UK under the North Sea in exhausted gas fields and natural aquifers. It will probably be done by foreign companies though.

Yes. In 1984 average UK energy consumption was at about 35GW at any time in the middle of a week day. Now it is about 46GW. Loads goes on peripheries like moving advertising boards etc.

If you want to get overawed by more fire, steam and power than you have ever seen, book a visit at Drax - they do them once a month or so. Seriously eye-opening!

Frightening!

Coal is cheap as chips if you buy from Aus or Poland. Can't do that any more here at a competitive cost here because of the geology. The recent boon in opencast mining is of course scraping the surface. It scars the landscape anyway but only produces a tiny amount of coal required for the remaining coal power stations. Drax usually generates 7% of all the UK's electricity - to do that each day it consumes 30,000 tonnes of coal.