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

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, we're likely to see ropey Westinghouse PWRs instead of anything more efficient. We already have the AGRs, which are about the most efficient commercial reactors IIRC (and with none of those embarrassing containment breaches when your primary coolant changes phase from liquid to gas), but they're the Concordes of the reactor world; engineering masterpieces, but you wouldn't want to foot the bill. I don't know enough about pebble beds, but they seem like a sensible design.

I've also got a bit of a soft spot for the Dounreay Fast Reactor due to its use of sodium/potassium alloy (NaK) as the primary coolant - less corrosive than hot water or steam, and excellent thermal properties (good enough to convect and conduct away much of the heat generated by the pile in the event of circulation stopping).

(and don't get me started on the white elephant that is fusion research - even if it demonstrates break-even and a sustained reaction, it's not going to be as effective for generating power as current fission technologies, and it may well have *more* of an issue with readioactive waste)