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

Comments

[hattifattener]

Yeah, I'm another one of those pro-nuke(-power) lefty greeny liberally types. The US environmental organizations' anti-nuke-power stance has never made much sense to me, except as an unreasoned side effect of the anti-nuke-weapon and anti-technology stances. Nuke power certainly has a close association with the military-industrial.

Waste processing is a significant problem with nuke plants, but I think it's more significant than it has to be. In the US, the plan was to reprocess most of the waste (the technology was pretty well planned out), but since the late '70s, that's been effectively banned due to a fear that some of the plutonium that would be separated from the waste could be stolen and used by terrorists. So instead the waste piles up at what were supposed to be short-term storage sites.

[baratron]

I know where you're coming from. I've never really decided what I think about Greenpeace, ever since I heard about the Rainbow Warrior as a child. I do have an opinion on PETA, though - I am a vegan who cannot stand PETA's militance. The "highlight" for me was when they ran a campaign about the evils of the dairy industry to encourage teenage girls to stop drinking cow milk.

Now, I believe that the dairy industry is not kind to cows, and that cow milk is not the most ideal for humans to drink. However, running a campaign aimed at young kids who probably have a pretty unhealthy diet is not on in my book. Milk might be the only source of protein, calcium & B-vitamins that a faddy teenager who thinks she's overweight despite being a size 6 gets. And how many parents will be willing to swap cheap cow milk for expensive, weird-tasting soy milk? Do PETA expect the kids to pay for it themselves

[tropism]

Actually, one of the biggest problems with solar energy is simply that you only get it during the day. You've got to store it somehow if you want to use it at night, and this generally involves batteries. Because of the limited life of batteries, this can be a losing proposition. Of course, there are alternate ways of storing energy, but these generally require somewhat radical solutions and large tracts of land. (For example, you could use excess power to pump water uphill into a large basin. At night, you run the water back downhill, through turbines, in order to generate power.) Windpower also has this same problem

[djm4]

I think it's an entirely justified fear. I man not see eye-to-eye with Greenpeace on everything, but I honestly thought I'd slipped into some sort of alternate reality when I heard that we were even considering restarting the nuclear power programme

[baratron]

Eeek, you're up early. With a well-reasoned set of points, too. Damn you morning people!

I'm not dismissive of the terrorist threat. It's more that I think it's irresponsible of Greenpeace to go around putting those kind of ideas into people's heads - the fact they're almost making it the central point of their argument. I would like to be able to dismiss the idea of nuclear power with scientific principles (including "the half-life of this is n billion years, do we REALLY want to do that to the world?") rather than some nebulous fear ("$bad_people will blow it up").

I'm sure that a great deal of modern politics is based on emotion rather than logic, and that the various politicians employ spin to make their ideas appeal emotionally. Like ID cards "preventing terrorism". But I can't help but find that uncomfortable. I'd like decisions on the future of the country to be made with a clear head.

[djm4]

Yes, but the argument that ID cards will prevent terrorist attacks is almost entirely specious and based on no evidence whatsoever

[a_musing_amazon]

I don't think that nuclear power is the best answer - apart from the low probability/high risk stuff (both terrorism, and just fuck-up Chernobyl/3 Mile Island scenarios) its just too expensive to be my first (or even 2nd or 3rd choice) choice. When the government has actually put all the money that might sensible be spent on better/cheaper/quicker alternatives (such as wind power - where, btw, I disagree with your assessment, tidal, geothermal, cogeneration and most of all conservation) then I'd be prepared to resort to nuclear if we are still not getting there

[hiddenpaw]

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

[_nicolai_]

Greenpeace are usually stupid and usually miss the point, and complain about what's trendy, not what's important. I don't see them complaining much about, say, Russian nuclear waste handling which is truly horrific. And the Brent Spar they were complaining so much about? Was home to endangered cold-water corals, amongst other things.
As for nuclear power, suggestions of what's going to provide the baseline electricity load for the UK are welcome: it's got to be reliable.
I think pebble-bed reactors are the way to go. We can license the tech from the South Africans.

[nmg]

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