something serious for a change

[baratron]

I'm a woolly left-wing liberal, who is carfree by choice and recycles everything. But news that Greenpeace have been protesting against proposed new nuclear power plants just seems wrong to me. What, exactly, are they proposing as the alternative? Lovely though it would be for us all to reduce our use of petrol and electricity and for people to start walking and cycling everywhere, I can't see it happening.

In an ideal world, wind turbines would be shiny and wonderful and provide vast amounts of power. But in practice, they are noisy, and a large number of them are needed to produce a small amount of electricity. Many of the most suitable sites for them in the UK are areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as hill and mountain tops, and/or interfere with wildlife, such as offshore locations. Also, they are subject to the weather. Yes, it is often windy, but not always.

I don't know what the answer is. Ideally we'd use a large range of different non-polluting renewable sources. But replacing the entire country's fossil fuel stations with wind turbines isn't going to work. Nuclear power could be a short to medium-term solution to ease the transition between fossil fuels and renewable power.

What do you think?

[Poll #623017]

I'm not very impressed with Greenpeace for saying that nuclear power stations are a terrorist target. I can't really explain why this bothers me, except that I think that Fear of terrorism is the way the terrorists win. Let's take people's current Fear of Terrorism and combine it with their existing Fear of Radiation and use those emotions to win the argument, rather than science, logic and rational debate. *sigh*

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Eeek, you're up early. With a well-reasoned set of points, too. Damn you morning people!

I'm not dismissive of the terrorist threat. It's more that I think it's irresponsible of Greenpeace to go around putting those kind of ideas into people's heads - the fact they're almost making it the central point of their argument. I would like to be able to dismiss the idea of nuclear power with scientific principles (including "the half-life of this is n billion years, do we REALLY want to do that to the world?") rather than some nebulous fear ("$bad_people will blow it up").

I'm sure that a great deal of modern politics is based on emotion rather than logic, and that the various politicians employ spin to make their ideas appeal emotionally. Like ID cards "preventing terrorism". But I can't help but find that uncomfortable. I'd like decisions on the future of the country to be made with a clear head.

[djm4]

Yes, but the argument that ID cards will prevent terrorist attacks is almost entirely specious and based on no evidence whatsoever.

The argument that nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants are terrorist targets is based on credible intelligence. It is not in any way new, or specific to Greenpeace, either; to take a relatively recent example, Al Qaeda claims that it considered it for the 9/11 attacks, although probably one of the reasons that they didn't is that flying an aircraft into a nuclear power plant wouldn't cause a release of radioactive material unless they were incredibly lucky. The science behind what could happen if 'bad people could blow it up' (although personally I suspect 'blow it up' is a far less likely scenario than stealing some quantity of material from a reprocessing plant and introducing it into the local water supply) is perfectly good science, very much available as a weapon to people who want to attack nuclear power with it.

The fact that some (most?) people don't think rationally about terrorist threats shouldn't stop us trying to do so.

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

I don't think that nuclear power is the best answer - apart from the low probability/high risk stuff (both terrorism, and just fuck-up Chernobyl/3 Mile Island scenarios) its just too expensive to be my first (or even 2nd or 3rd choice) choice. When the government has actually put all the money that might sensible be spent on better/cheaper/quicker alternatives (such as wind power - where, btw, I disagree with your assessment, tidal, geothermal, cogeneration and most of all conservation) then I'd be prepared to resort to nuclear if we are still not getting there.

George Monbiot, who thinking i do respect, did write an article yesterday [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1653215,00.html] arguing that we needed everything, including nuclear, if we were to make a reasonable impact on our carbon emissions - I'm afraid I'm not really up to checking his calculations - but unfortunately the govt. seems more concerned about dealing with 'real politics', such as the threat that electors might have to turn down their central heating thius winter than the real issue of global warming.