Energy Companies buy RAF AD Radars

[ORAC]

I wonder if they'll have sponsorship logos on them.... :ugh::ugh:

Military radar deal paves way for more wind farms across Britain (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/8726922/Military-radar-deal-paves-way-for-more-wind-farms-across-Britain.html)

[green granite]

British countryside RIP :{:{

[Squirrel 41]

Agree, S_M. There's certainly no other chance of the UK Mil getting its hands on some modern transportable radars anytime soon.

S41

[jamesdevice]

the Pakistanis got these in 2008

are we playing catch up again?

for interest this is Lockheed Martin's advertising flyer for it http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/8408.pdf

[ORAC]

Agree, S_M. There's certainly no other chance of the UK Mil getting its hands on some modern transportable radars anytime soon. The RAF bought the T92 back in the late 1980s.

The T92 was the RAF designation for the GE-592, which begat the FPS-117, which begat the TPS-77.

It's low enough tech they sell it to Pakistan - and commercial energy generation companies.......

Modern, it's not........

[Jabba_TG12]

Modern - as in cutting edge technology - it might not be, but so far as the sensors being integrated into ACCS and compared to the current inventory, acquiring the TPS-77 and having the sheer chutzpah to get the racketeers of the energy industry to pay for it is not a bad bit of business.

It has rightly been observed that there would have only been one other way we would have got hold of such technology and that would have been the day that Satan took delivery of his first pair of ice skates. :ugh:

Lets just hope that joe public doesnt catch on to the fact that both the "renewable" energy industry and the acquisition of these radars may have involved quite a number of er... players, shall we say telling slightly less than the whole truth. ;)

Amazing what you can get away with these days. :rolleyes:

[SirToppamHat]

On the face of it, OK from an MOD funding perspective, but in terms of the whole government, the only reason these wind farms are 'cost effective' is because of Government subsidies. The logical extension of this is that the tax payer is paying for these radars just as much as they would have been if MOD had bought them (though possibly without the cost of DE&S Procurement!).

Oh and whilst it's fine from an ASACS perspective, I can't imagine they're terribly possible from the Low Flying vantage point. Do these wind farms affect AI radars?

STH

[green granite]

The tragedy is that wind farms are so inefficient you will need to cover virtually the whole of the UK with them before we generate a sensible level of power.

Research, carried out by Stuart Young Consulting, analysed electricity generated from UK wind farms between November 2008 to December 2010, and found that wind generation was below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time. Certainly not worth the ruination of the environment and the heavy subsidy they need to exist at all.

[aviate1138]

The stupidest thing is that wind farms need switchable fossil fuel backup power for when the wind is too strong or too weak. Plus we the taxpayers are covering the substantial lead in payments to the owners who supply the National Grid with very small amounts of power and surprise, surprise, when we need the power most [winter cold or summer heat it is usually when a high is sitting over the UK and wind is almost non existent!

The madness that is Green Garbage Grants!

We are Carbon based life forms and CO2 is neither a poison or pollutant. Nor does it cause Climate Disruption/Change/Global Warming which is a myth anyway.

[Molemot]

What I have never been able to understand is why, when the wind DOES blow, a lot of these wind turbine things still have their blades feathered and are generating no power. One would think that they would all be churning out their rated output in these conditions, and the fossil fuel stuff would be turned down. I'll bet it takes so long to get conventional power stations online that they turn off the wind farms instead! The sooner we give up on these illogical "renewable" energy systems and build some more proven nuclear generating stations, the safer we shall be from all the lights going out....

[aviate1138]

We should her heavily investing in Thorium Nuclear Power generation


Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html)

[NorthSouth]

Jabba_TG12:Lets just hope that joe public doesnt catch on to the fact that both the "renewable" energy industry and the acquisition of these radars may have involved quite a number of er... players, shall we say telling slightly less than the whole truth.

Amazing what you can get away with these days. Very perceptive. But if you can deploy the "national security" card to prevent people finding out the facts, you can continue to hold all the cards. And of course, contrary to all those now predicting that a couple of TPS-77s will allow the concreting of the countryside, this deal will allow MoD to insist that no wind farm anywhere within coverage of a radar which isn't a TPS-77 will ever be acceptable. Seemples! No more wind farms!

NS

[jamesdevice]

no great surprise that China leads the way in that technology. Thorium is a by-product of rare-earth metal extraction (mainly used in electronics) from monazite sands - and China has something like 97% of the world rare earth production, even though it has less than 50% of mineral resources (from mainly non-Monazite ores).
You may be aware that China plays games with the rare earth market: they hold back stocks and limit availability as a deliberate industrial warfare strategy, placing competitors at a major disadvantage.
The problem is that anyone extracting thorium would also need to extract and sell the rare earths to make production economically viable - but with China being able to dictate the terms of that market, no-one is going to take the risk.
Rare earth (and thorium) production is an environmental nightmare with massive quantities of highly acidic sludge being produced, that cannot easily be safely disposed of. Anyone remember the "red tide" that killed part of the Danube last year? That was a tiny fraction of the effluent from a rare earth extraction plant.

[jamesdevice]

"this deal will allow MoD to insist that no wind farm anywhere within coverage of a radar which isn't a TPS-77 will ever be acceptable."
But it may also explain why a small number of long established radar sites seem to have vanished over the last year......unless it was the local pikeys

[Willard Whyte]

jd, thankfully India and The USA are thought to have the lion share of the world's thorium.

Well, according to wikipedia anyway...

Thorium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserves)

It'll be nice to have a resource war where islam isn't a factor.

[jamesdevice]

this has possibly more accurate resource data on thorium
Thorium in Australia (http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/2007-08/08rp11.htm) which suggests Australia, USA, Turkey, India, Venezuela
as the prime countries. However the problem is going to be the interlinking of the two markets: extracting thorium without extracting the rare earths doesn't make commercial sense - at present. And the Chinese totally control the rare earths market.
Given the environmental issues, Australia and the USA may simply be too expensive due to the effluent volumes