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

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Energy from waste seems to be missing from the debate so far - but supplies lots of energy in Denmark and other countries.

The thing with nuclear is that it has to be run by humans. And humans are, well, human.
Conflux worked on a reactor one summer as a student (Torness?), which was enough to convince me against it.

The problem of nuclear waste clinches it, and then there's the question of how to get the energy to get the enriched nuclear material in the first place.

[tropism.livejournal.com]

Actually, there're some nifty, new nuclear reactors, primarily designed to supply several MW of power in remote areas, that can run for a decade or more with someone just around to watch them, and which cannot fail catastrophically.