something serious for a change
Nov. 30th, 2005 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronI'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*
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*
no subject
Date: 2005-11-30 07:38 am (UTC)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.