A few points, just for good measure
Volts and Amps:
Switching power supplies as used in most electronic equipment to date will indeed react to voltage drops by drawing more current, thereby maintaining constant power. However, the SMPS's in most consumer equipment will start flaking out when voltage drops more than 10% below nominal. Some SMPS's are however capable of operating anywhere between 100-250Vac (sometimes even 90-260Vac), these are mostly found in pro gear.
Heaters will indeed consume notably less power as the voltage drops, but most heaters tend to be governed by thermostats so they will just spend more time being switched on, and in the (medium)long term there'll be no difference in energy consumption.
Incandescent ligth bulbs and motor driven appliances are the few things I can think of that will effectively use less power in brownout conditions.
Uranium scarcity and thorium reactors:
Uranium is indeed getting somewhat scarse though the figures quoted (about 40 years of supply @ status quo, 70 years if we include military inventory) are the most pessimistic I've seen so far. A few other sources I came across (print publications so alas no url) went for 100 years @ status quo, and maybe twice that if uranium reserves that are currently considered uneconomical to mine are brought into the bargain.
Also note that nuclear reactors have few emissions, but uranium mining causes severe pollution.
Thorium can be used as fuel in breeder reactors, as can uranium. But breeder reactors are a tad more dodgy to operate than conventional reactors. The few known practical breeders use liquid sodium as a coolant, which:
* becomes very radioactive (Na-24)
* is extremely chemically reactive and will cause severe explosions if it comes in contact with water.
Apply Murphy's law to the above, and then tell me if you'd want such a reactor anywhere near where you live.
The most promising new reactor design from a safety point of view is the pebble bed reactor, which has its fuel encapsulated in graphite/ceramic spheres that are just about indestructible, in other words there's very little risk of irradiated fuel and fission products (aka radioactive waste) getting into the environment where it can do damage.
Regrettably, this also means that fuel recycling is not viable.
Radioactive waste:
Disposing of radioactive waste by shooting it towards the sun with rockets is 1950's sci-fi, except there's a lot of fi(ction) and very little sci(ence) involved. The largest current vehicles have payload capacities in the low tens of tons, there are tens of thousands of tons of higly radioactive waste to be disposed of, and operational safety would require the waste to be packed in shielded containers which weigh something like ten times the amount of waste they contain. Which means that all the rockets launched since the 50's would not have been sufficient to deal with even a small part of the nuclear waste that has been produced till now.
Fusion:
For the past 30 years, science pundits have been telling us that we'll have viable fusion reactors in less than thirty years. Don't hold your breath. Also, contary to popular belief, fusion reactors *will* have radioactive waste problems. The fusion process does not produce fission products ,of course - but it does produce truckloads of very fast neutrons which will "activate" (= render highly radioactive) the materials that the reactor is made of, and damage them in the process. Parts of the hypothetical fission reactor will have to be periodically replaced, these parts will be extremely radioactive and will need to be disposed of safely.
Building a fusion reactor has been likened to "putting the sun in a box", but "we still don't know how to make the box". I'd like to remind y'all that we already have a fusion reactor, which is sitting at a safe distance, has a MTBC (Mean time between catastrophe) of about 10*10^9 years which leaves us still about 5*10^9 years of stable operation, is totally maintaince free and supplies the earth with more energy each hour than all industrialized countries consume in one year.
Wind:
The U.K. has a lot of potential for viable wind energy, but it is currently among the european countries with the lowest installed base in wind power. While it is true that wind does not blow all of the time, it does most of the time and the possible contribution of wind should not be dismissed as an ecotard hobbyhorse. Wind energy has come of age, it is one of the cleanest sources and now economically viable.
Also please do not confuse (most of) the anti-wind-turbine crowd with "ecologist" or "conservationists". A sizeable part of this crowd is made up of nimby's who gratefully accepted the Exxon Kool-Aid. As for yours truly, I cringe at the thought of strip mining for coal - which comes down to blowing off entire hilltops - but I would not have any problems with looking at an array of windmills perched on those same hilltops.
For those who managed to get to this point, thanks for sitting this one out. However, the above arguments barely scratch the surface of a very complex set of problems humanity is currently facing. I'd just like to remind y'all that all such complex problems do indeed have simple solutions, and these solutions have one thing in common: They're invariably wrong.
My excuses for any typo's and spelling errors: this post has become an article proper and as such should have been proof-read, but I don't have a proof-reader handy.
Alien, just because that's what I feel like at the moment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
