Pylons and the Green movement

[pozorvlak]

[All opinions stated herein are my own: I do not speak for SGP or any other environmental organisation.]

The journalist George Monbiot (whose work I have long admired) has caused a lot of spluttering among my Green friends this morning with this article, in which he argues that the Green movement should throw its weight behind anti-pylon campaigns

Comments

I've long said Monbiot is an asshat

[anonymous]

1. Not so. I object to pylons, but not windfarms. Windfarms are pretty. Pylons are one of the worst things humans have imposed on the countryside

Re: I've long said Monbiot is an asshat

[danieldwilliam]

From memory, looking at the National Grid Transmission Charging DCLF model, the monetised cost of building and then maintaining a section of underground cable is about 20 times the cost of over head cables.

This would take the cost of Buely Denny from an estimate of £350m to £7bn.

For the cost of the wiring for a couple of wind farms we could (if we thought it prudent) put 1 or 2 1.6GW nukes in the Central Belt

[ext_447905]

I've rather lost patience with large chunks of the green movement, which seems to be of the opinion that All Progress Is Bad, and that wouldn't we all like to go back to subsistence farming?

More seriously, David MacKay makes it clear in "Without Hot Air" that the amount of energy required to run the UK without significant changes in everyone's lifestyle is so colossal that we cannot do it without either a) doing lots of nuclear b) importing colossal amounts of energy from overseas (say from solar panel farms in the Sahara Desert) or c) constructing so many wind farms, tidal barrages, power lines and so on that the landscape would be irrevocably altered.

Option d), of course, is that postulated in John Christopher's book "The Death of Grass" - the government drops nuclear bombs on all the major conurbations in order to reduce the population to one that the land can support. Can't see anyone arguing for that one.

[pozorvlak]

All Progress Is Bad, and that wouldn't we all like to go back to subsistence farming?I've yet to meet anyone like that, though that doesn't mean they don't exist. I've met lots who advocate (and practice) community-owned gardens and the like, but growing your own vegetables is hardly a return to universal subsistence farming. In general, I see quite a lot of enthusiasm for technology among Greens. But my experience may be atypical

[danieldwilliam]

If you haven’t already read it the Sustainable Development Commissions - Role of Nuclear in a Low Carbon Economy and the papers around the BERR nuclear white paper have lots of good references to stuff on the technology.

[ext_447905]

As you may have guessed, I was in a rather cynical mood last night...

More seriously, there's definitely a split between the "conservation" movement, which would like to preserve the countryside as it is / was / might have been in an idealised version of the past, and what might be called "progressive environmentalism" - the idea that technological progress should be harnessed in such a way as to minimise its negative environmental impact, and replace older, more harmful technologies. The Cambridge area attracts a lot of "conservationists", it seems to me.

I can't recommend a nuclear text as such, though I would recommend looking up the Pebble Bed reactor as a reactor design that is intrinsically resistant to coolant failures and has low proliferation issues.