Articles
Stay at home to save planet
The Earth is bountiful in providing all our needs. Thinking man has polluted air, earth and water. We need an industrial restoration of the ecosystem.
Removing plastics and other pollutants from oceans and rivers along with mining landfills would yield recyclable material. Making biofuel from algae would reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. Chemicals used in food production needs innovation as present system pollutes.
Can the offshore, fishing, chemical, engineering, construction and agricultural industries get together to sort it?
The human species has achieved much but it came with dominance, intolerance, prejudice and poverty.
The pandemic will result in many deaths but what we have done to the planet will cause extinction due to global warming unless we act now!
Instead of jetting here and there we should holiday at home with loved ones and enjoy the passion of wildlife and travel documentary makers.
John McIntosh
Build small modular reactors
I hear discussions in the media about new plans for nuclear power.
Could I ask the IMechE and all readers to petition the Prime Minister regarding the possible new nuclear power station at Sizewell C.
I am a keen supporter of nuclear as an essential part of the energy mix. However, the delays and technical difficulties of Hinkley Point C have shown that copying that model by EDF for a new plant at Sizewell C would be a slow, expensive and risky mistake.
May I suggest that the government looks again at the much more safe and sensible solution of small modular reactors, a version of which has been made by Rolls-Royce for many years and is fitted to nuclear submarines. This technology is much quicker to come into production, much easier to finance, much more secure against technical failure or terrorism, and can be produced in a central factory and transported as required to be installed, in multiple sets, at the various existing nuclear stations around the country.
Once we have demonstrated the success of this model, it gives us a tremendous potential to export the systems to other countries who are currently using high-carbon generation methods. That is good for jobs and good for the environment.
Hugh Mattos, Cornwall
Wasteful clouds overhead
Since about 2011 I have felt I was the only one concerned about the internet cloud and its use to store “trivial” files, each with their ongoing gentle but indefinite leaking of CO2. Anything that a large number of people may need to access seems justifiable but it has been found that typical smartphone users have each uploaded thousands of files that may never ever be accessed even by those who uploaded them.
At last, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme on 16 November exposed the huge overuse and subsequent energy cost that results. Individuals were checking their stored files and finding many thousands of photographs and many hundreds of videos stored for later potential recovery that will probably never happen. It is alarming to contemplate just how much data is being stored indefinitely on behalf of deceased users. Ireland is having to expand its generating capacity to power all the new servers at its tech hub. China was shown building a server farm covering the same area as a small real farm!
There is a lot I do not know about server farms but I am left wondering if planning permission ought to require the automatic deletion of any files or open access/commercial software that has not been accessed for a year.
Denis W Oglesby
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.