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

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

Nuckear has it's problems but at the moment it dose seem to be the best opption. Focil fuels are causeing too much damage. I can't say nuclear is totaly clean/safe, background radiation does go up and if you have enough powerstations over enough time it could build up a problem like focil fuels, but there is no evidence of that at the moment where as the damage of focil fuels has reached critical levels.

The only workable renewable source to be stable and constant (Not including biofuels) is wave power (wind sometimes fails to happen and the supply at solar power is at it's worst when we need it most). The effect of wave based genorators on sea based wild life. Give sea bararges tend to form long lines it could be a serious danger to migratory fish. maintanence would be difficult and it would not be popular with shipping. That said there's alot of sea out there so alot of space for bararges. I wonder if enough wave power bararges would alter costal errotion or destroy the ecological balance of mud flats (Vital areas for many birds).

The other thing that anoys me is people saying the carbon costs of building a nuclear power station would be worse than what you would save from useing it, but I wonder if they have taken on to account the carbon cost of building a convetional station of transporting the coal or gas. The maths seems to make little sense.