Naturehero

I’m not very good at cooking, so the following maybe won’t apply to all circumstances. In recipes it’s common to see advice to heat your oven to, for example, 220 C (or 428 F) degrees. It isn’t really necessary to wait temperature to rise 220 C, you can put your cooking in before that. In some cases it could be difficult to know when to get the food out of oven, if you don’t follow exactly the recipe. But many times you can see when the food is ready. What is really important is to get temperature to where it should be, for example to 220 C, but it isn’t necessary to be there all the time (in my experience). So you put temperature up, and put your food there already, so it saves electricity used to heat oven.

This can be also done in a reverse, and it shouldn’t affect to your cooking in a any way. If pizza for example should be 10 minutes in 200 degrees C, oven can be turned off after 8 minutes. And we can combine these two ways to save environment and nature!

Natura 2000 is an EU-based project, which goal is to protect natures diversity in Europe. Each EU member state make their own list of areas which meet requirements of Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive. After then European Commission makes its decision what areas become Natura sites. At the end of December 2008 Natura 2000 included 17 % of terrestrial area of EU-27 countries. To me It came surprise  that 17 % of EU-27 countries terrestrial area is Natura 2000 area, that’s huge number! And it’s great!

EU-27 countries or EU-27 are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Source

I just noticed that Vattenfall offers 100 % nuclear power to everyone who wants it in Finland. Why anyone would want that?

Freely translated from vattenfall.fi:

Benefits of pure nuclear power -contract:

• 100 % nuclear power
• Electricity which you use, doesn’t produce carbon dioxide to atmosphere

(And then some marketing talk.)

Ok, it’s true that nuclear plants doesn’t produce carbon dioxide. But it’s also true that burning coal in coal plants doesn’t produce nuclear waste. Nuclear power isn’t nature friendly either, even though it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide.

So again, why anyone would want 100 % nuclear energy?

It must be the price you yell! Ok, let’s take a look.

Vattenfall offers 4 types (+ stock market priced) electricity, 100% wind power,100% water power,100% nuclear power and regular power. I used calculator on their site to get offer to holiday apartment, to small company and to regular houses. The results were the same, there were no difference between regular house, small company and holiday apartment electricity prices.

In the following table, in the description in each type of electricity contract, day/night means that day and night electricity have different prices and seasonal means that different seasons have different prices for electricity. Business days in the table means days Monday to Friday.

The prices:

We see that there’s no difference in price between nuclear power and water power.

So for the last time:

Why would anyone choose nuclear power?

It’s possible to make electricity with many ways such as burning coal, nuclear energy and wind energy. Using renewable and low-polluting alternatives in energy usage is nature friendly, as oil and many minerals will deplete within few decades and making power from them is toxic to the planet.

In many times it’s possible to choose where power to your house comes from. Good sources of energy are for example solar energy (solar panels), wind power (wind turbines) and water power (hydroelectricity).