The Energy Crisis

[Messiah Khan]

That would be an option. I was more thinking of the design of street lighting. If you look at a lot of them, they are designed to spread the light quite a bit, resulting in a lot of wasted light. This also affects light polution(Which is a sad issue on its own.. I want to see the stars again ) If they designed street ligting with shorter poles and more focuses beams, they could save a fair bit of energy i recon.

[Zirax]

Originally Posted by Messiah Khan

That would be an option. I was more thinking of the design of street lighting. If you look at a lot of them, they are designed to spread the light quite a bit, resulting in a lot of wasted light. This also affects light polution(Which is a sad issue on its own.. I want to see the stars again ) If they designed street ligting with shorter poles and more focuses beams, they could save a fair bit of energy i recon.

Problem is if they had shorter poles you know what will happen. Just thinking about the design again. Having seen some that were vandalised with the internal switch exposed, the one I saw worked like this:-
Switch either was 'on' or used the light sensor. I wonder if they have them hooked up centrally or something?

This could be the reason for their decision to turn them all off.... ie its easier to cut the power to the lights in a street than rewiring them all.

[Feek]

The light thing is interesting, before sensors were nailed on the top of lamp posts they used to be controlled by a time switch accessible through a plate in the bottom of the post.

They were never kept working reliably though. I clearly remember a lamp post near where I used to live in Harlow that was lit during the day and off at night. It was like that for as many years as I can remember.

[killerkebab]

I'm all for nuclear myself, and not just because France is a nuclear powerhouse (Over 80% of total electric production is nuclear if I remember right)

I've been reading up on the ITER they're building down in Cadarache and I'm hopeful the nuclear consortium can get it working before it is too late.

One thing I don't know about though, is how it works. The way I understand it, ITER will support 500MW of energy for 500 seconds... so what happens after 500 seconds? Do we just switch the machine back on?

Also saw something which I found slightly disturbing: According to wikipedia, ITER will represent the third most expensive scientific venture ever, falling behind the Manhattan Project and the Internation Space Station, and will cost €10bn, or something along the region of £7bn. Fair enough.

Then I thought about it some more, and it struck me. £7bn for the third most expensive scientific venture of all time... or £25bn for a new nuclear weapon. Oh dear

[Messiah Khan]

I agree its depressing the amount of money spent on increasing the efficiency of killing each other. The TOKAMAK ITER by the way is only a experimental fusion reactor. It isn't designed to produce a sustainable fusion reaction, only to be able to run short tests to enable future energy producing reactors. In fact I think the experimental one actually uses more energy than it produces, but it will hopefully carve the way forward for cheap, clean eneergy production. But as I said in my last post, don't hold your breath as its likely to be near the end of the century before we see them on a large scale. I'll leave you all with a pic of one of the current experimental TOKAMAK machines, as it looks so cool IMO ;