Itâs strange that when it comes to proposals they are usually made on protected areas. And coincidentally enough construction and money is usually involved
Thereâs usually a good reason why conservation charitys say no to certain proposals Exspeacially if the proposal is on a protected area
Meanwhile Starmer wants to allow more house-building on the Green Belt. The attacks on our environment and wildlife are unrelenting.
There seems to be a fascination for these massive, environmentally-disastrous projects (remember Borisâs vanity plans for an airport on the Thames estuary and the England-Ireland bridge? Or, for that matter, Trumpieâs famous wall-that-wasnât?) Like building on brown-field sites (or redeveloping city centres), small is definitely not beautiful for these people.
In London there seems to be quite a lot of building on brownfields although at present this also involves knocking down normal houses and building blocks of flats in their place.
You only need read the âadvantagesâ to see what this is all about:
âelectricity for 600,000 homes and businesses in the regionâ - not actually very many considering the cost and environmental impact
âcreate the potential for cruise-ship tourismâ - cruise ships are notoriously polluting - see Cruise ship pollution in Europe - Wikipedia
âa new road that links Lincolnshire to Norfolk in 20 minutesâ - would certainly save fuel over the existing route but has anyone asked how many actually make that journey?
"opportunities for marinas⊠" = money
"âŠconstruction of desirable waterside developmentsâ = more money
And unless the relevant water authorities stopped discharging sewage into the Welland, Nene and Great Ouse, it would make resulting lake pretty foul after a while.
Incidentally - anyone know why the Thames Barrier isnât used to generate electricity?
So âFollow the Moneyâ seems an apt comment.
They will not use the Thames barrier due to wear and tear on the hydraulic rams as it opens and shuts to let shipping through.
Shipping traffic it the main reason for putting off tidal power.
The other down side is at high tide and low tide when the direction of flow changes. You would need a storage lagoon to fill the gaps while the tides are changing.
The engineers have been looking at fully immersed turbines placed in ocean currents as an alternative to tidal power.
For example, in the Pentland Sound, south of Orkney.
I could not remember the location but that sounds right.
Remember the boast about the Calder Hall reactor - âelectricity too cheap to measureââŠ
That was when the electricity was a by-product of ammo for the cold war.
The first reactors (Hanford B in the USA, Windscale 1 and 2, and the incredible Soviet bodge-ups) had no electrical generating gear. That came later: the problem was that operating for power generation or plutonium production required different management, apparently.