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

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

I think all of the risks and benefits of various power generation and use strategies need to be looked at clearly, including waste products. I've seen little reporting that does this.

I think nuclear power has a low chance of anything major going wrong, but if it did go wrong the consequences would be awful. I think this risk is important both as a real threat and as a psychological stress.

The cover-ups, lies and sheer incompetence of nuclear power generators around the world over the last few decades makes me distrust them.

I don't think we should build any plants unless we have good ways to get rid of the waste. The timescales involved make it difficult to hold anyone responsible for it (we still have pollution in some areas from comparatively recently - Roman times) and I think that is dangerous.

Overall, my opinion is against nuclear power for similar reasons as New Scientist came out against it a few years ago: It might be possible to use it reasonable safely but I don't trust the companies involved and think the cost of doing it properly would be prohibitive.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

p.s. Little known Grant fact: One of my university applications was to Manchester to study Nuclear Engineering - together with quite a few others interested in alternative power.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Do you have a reference? I'd love to read that article.

Actually, I need to buy a subscription to the online version of New Scientist anyway. I'd never get round to reading the paper version, and it just wastes resources to buy it and have it sitting round the house.