Gonzo
Hang on.......You say it will cost £10bn to create this new airport, and yet you expect to get £40bn from the sale of LHR?
If the cost of the Thames barrier, island and the road and rail links are placed in their true bugetry pidgeonholes, then the cost of a terminal and a slightly larger island for the runways could easily be accomodated within £10bn.
London is going to need a new Thames barrier, in the next 10 years anyway, before it becomes the new Thailand, and sinks gracefully under the sea. And the new roads go without saying .... as they say in the People's Judaean Front.
Man7
Yes Heathrow is full and potentially loosing out to European airports but so much more could be done here in the UK before we start covering our small country with yet more South East centric concrete.
That's the whole advantage with a Thames airport - nearly nothing gets covered in concrete, except a silty estruary. And don't blame aviation for destroying the UK's open space and wildlife, blame the guys who allowed the UK to be invaded. Strange as it may have seemed to the brain-dead politicians, but all these new people wanted somewhere to live and somewhere to drive. Strange that...
Man7
Another big problem that an earlier poster touched on was "What will all these aircraft at this new airport use as fuel in the future ?"
An easy problem to solve, if we did not choose brain-dead idiots for politicians.
Aviation is one of the few energy users that cannot be easily changed - not until someone does something radical to battery design. So fuel should be hoarded for aviation use.
As to (nearly) everything else, the nation can go electric. Not with those renewable fantasies, promoted by Dave "where-did-my-roof-turbine-go-to" Cameron, and his Watermelon chums,
but by Thorium power. There is some 10,000 years of Thorium power, easily available - it is one of the commonest of the nuclear power sources, and inherently safe (the decay elements are short life, and you cannot turn it into a bomb).
Heating will be electric thermic pumps (a fridge backwards), which are clever designs that can deliver up to four times the input energy. Vehicles can also be electric - we are not there yet, with battery energy density, but getting there. Its a shame that, since this is the major technology gap mankind has, not one brain-dead politician has launched a major initiative to discover better energy stores.
Oh, and Thorium has no CO2 emissions, which may be a problem. CO2 is plant food, and the greatest determinor of crop yields, and so we may need CO2 generators to keep our populations fed. (Don't believe the warming cr*p that the Watermelons keep telling you about, that is simply a political gambit aimed at creating a One World Government. With the PDO turning negative and the Sunspot cycle in a funk, we are likely in for a cooling period of 30 years.)
Keep smiling - we may one day insist that politicians are picked from the brightest, and have actually done some real work before they are elected. But then one day pigs may fly and Lo-cos may put safety first......
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