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

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

How do you protect your UHF power satellites from a fragmentation cascade?

[evilref.livejournal.com]

How do you protect your UHF power satellites from a fragmentation cascade?

My first reaction would be "you don't", since they are so cheap and so temporary anyway that if you lose a few, you bung a few more up. I'm assuming that a modular design would mean that panels could be lost and the system continue operation: the bit that does power conversion for the downlink would be tiny (and so statistically unlikely to be hit) compared to the area of the panels.

But if you know the asteroid is coming (and we really ought to have some sort of asteroid radar net, yes?) then you could improve their odds of surviving a lot by orientation. In other words, you could turn the panels to line up with the orbital path of the debris, to lower the chance of being hit. You dodge.


Here is some more detailed breakdown of a cost analysis by the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science:-

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/a_common_cost_target_of_space_transportation_for_space_tourism_and_space_energy_development.shtml

As you can see, the cost of them is mainly launch cost - and is much, much lower than the cost of nuclear power stations.