Campaign for Nuclear Energy.

Woebot

Well-known member
Saw this chilling TV programme on Saturday Night; "The End of The World As We Know It" The programme hit very hard after the Tsunamis.

The programme's centrepiece was an interview with James Lovelock, architect of the Gaia theory who believed that without nuclear power we will release so much CO2 into the atmosphere in the next ten years that global warming will become an irreversible process.

I think its amazing that a diehard Green like Lovelock will sanction something nuclear power. He's clearly under no illusion that civilisation will abandon "progress" in order to survive. On the other hand it seemed a little pathetic watching the director of Friends of The Earth still grappling with post-Marxist solutions to the problem.

I've always been in favour of nuclear power, and i was really shocked to learn that the UKs last Power Station is about to be closed down!!! How the hell did that happen. Surely we can can build better Power Sattions these days anyway?
 

johneffay

Well-known member
WOEBOT said:
I've always been in favour of nuclear power, and i was really shocked to learn that the UKs last Power Station is about to be closed down!!! How the hell did that happen. Surely we can can build better Power Sattions these days anyway?

They are uneconomic to run in competition with fossil fuel power stations. All that stuff about them being a cheap form of energy was just propaganda.

Are you not worried about the potential dangers of nuclear power? I know that there is no proven link between the clusters of leukaemia around various nuclear power stations and the stations themselves, but I still wouldn't want to buy a house next to one.
 
johneffay said:
They are uneconomic to run in competition with fossil fuel power stations. All that stuff about them being a cheap form of energy was just propaganda.

Are you not worried about the potential dangers of nuclear power? I know that there is no proven link between the clusters of leukaemia around various nuclear power stations and the stations themselves, but I still wouldn't want to buy a house next to one.

It would make sense to build nuclear power stations in caves. Decommisioning would be less daunting for future generations to deal with.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
Lovelock is a scientific pop star but he's a maverick -- by which I mean he delights in being a wind-up merchant. He's not really a "diehard green" in the broadly accepted sense. His position on nuclear power has been very pro for years, but also fairly confused and inconsistent in his argument. Don't forget that he's not exactly a professional scientist in the collegiate sense of the term -- he's independently wealthy from flogging exploration devices to oil companies, rather than being a climatologist or whatever. Nothing wrong with that, but he has utterly failed to address the issues Effay has pointed out. Which is that nuclear power is totally uneconomic. So much so that you won't find a decent stock market in the world that will invest in it -- unless you have two conditions, which have largely obtained until the last ten years in the UK:

1) you rigidly ignore the real costs of nuclear power, and the (Wot economists call) negative externalities -- i.e. clean up costs, long terms risks from waste, and most crushingly the almost incomprehensibly vast start-up costs. If you ignore all these costs, especially the start-up costs, you can make nuclear a bit cheaper than wind, wave etc. More on that in a minute.

2) you fully-value the positive externality of nuclear power, which is that it gives governments international clout by conferring the ability to make nuclear arms. This has of course been the core motivation behind nuclear power in Britain. The "cheap energy" issue is just PR fluff.

In contrast, wave and in particular wind have a pretty good chance of delivering -- especially when combined with a decent stab at energy efficiency and sustainability in transport and construction. The numbers really aren't that hard to make work and you don't have to knit your own car to do it. But the numbers have been distorted because wind and wave technologies haven't had the investment or deployment of nuclear or oil-based technologies, which means they're still relatively high on the energy yield to cost curve. But even without the massive subsidies which nuclear and oil have troughed in the last forty years, they're beginning to look attractive. I've got my eye on a wind-generator that will power a fair-sized house for 20 years that costs £1500, for example. (No, it's not quite on the market yet.)

The real problem is that wind and wave haven't really been tried, and certainly haven't been subsidised the way oil and nuclear have been. And as a result, false arguments in favour of nuclear power which are really economically invalid get trotted out. I'd love to believe in nuclear power, same as I'd like to believe in genetically modified food -- in fact I still think GM food will turn out OK, no thanks to Monsanto and its test-rigging -- but it just doesn't add up.

Anyway, I give Matt five minutes to bring in David Bellamy and wind power, and then another ten minutes for me to bring in Bernard Ingham...
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Following on from my blog entry on disasters, I have big problems with nuclear power because of the potential risks, in a society driven by profit rather than safety.

I'm no expert on wind/solar whatever power, but it does seem to me that the risks with that are infinitely lower.
 

Jesse D Serrins

Well-known member
I mean, there are a number of possibilities for alternative energy and I don't even see why one needs to be 'it.' It's bizarre that in this world so full of energy we're willing to accept oil as the ahistorical primary energy source. That's why we have imaginations. My friend is studying molecular biology and was explaining to me research that has been conducted regarding enzymes or bacteria which, when they consume certain grasses and such, issue gasses as biproducts which can serve as an energy source. Hopefully I'm doing a decent job of relating this, and if I remember right, the main problem in terms of really getting down to whether this is a viable option is, of course, funding. Ah, privatization.
 

jenks

thread death
Just read this review, on thinning ice, in the lrb - for a non-scientific person like me i found it really clear. interestingly he sees the idea of nuclear power as the solution which kinda undermines the other stuff.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
nuclear power yes please

when i was at oxford in the early eighties, a boy in my class -- the resident right-winger, wore a waistcoast -- sported a Nuclear Power: Yes Please badge -- i assumed it was just a wind-up, upset the greens and the lefties, didn't realise there were arguments in favor of n.p.

wasn't Thatcher really pro nuclear energy purely because they needed to reduce reliance on coal in order to weaken the Miner's Union, the most powerful and militant union in the country, brought down Heath etc etc?

presumably western powers will be thinking of nuclear energy as a way of reducing dependence on oil from the middle east

interesting to learn that there are actually Green arguments in favor of it, lesser of two evils etc. Depressing to think those are the choices though.
 

Rachel Verinder

Well-known member
when i was at oxford in the early eighties, a boy in my class -- the resident right-winger, wore a waistcoast -- sported a Nuclear Power: Yes Please badge -- i assumed it was just a wind-up, upset the greens and the lefties, didn't realise there were arguments in favor of n.p.

this wasn't niall ferguson by any chance was it?
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
niall f

no. i forget his name

when i read the History Man by Malcolm Bradbury recently i imagine this boy as the right-wing student that Howard the lefty professor mercilessly torments

how goes it Marcello then?
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
blissblogger said:
interesting to learn that there are actually Green arguments in favor of it, lesser of two evils etc. Depressing to think those are the choices though.

lovelock was interviewed on newsnight a few months ago, and from what i can remember he wasn't in favour of nuclear power from an ideological standpoint, but rather from a pragmatic one: he argued that as almost no money was being put into research on tidal/wind power, the only practical alternative to global warming and self-destruction was nuclear.

a touch defeatist, i thought.
 

Andrew

Member
while nuclear looks attrative at the moment its a bit like getting cash off your friendly local loan shark to pay off this months card card billl, everything will be great for a while and then there'll a knock at the door...

The end of cheap energy is a bit nearer than we think
 
Rachel Verinder said:
this wasn't niall ferguson by any chance was it?

I used to live in the flat above Niall Ferguson's tutors rooms in college and the cunt used to wake me up every morning by revving his TVR underneath my window as he pulled into the quad. I don't think it was nuclear powered though.

In return I treated him to three terms' worth of jungle, techno and whatever else i was listening to back then. To his credit, he never complained.
 
Nuclear energy is clearly the way forward. The dangers of radioactivity are overstated - didn't the Power of Nightmare weave that idea into its final synthesis last night, debunking the dangers of dirty bombs? It did.

If the engineers do a good job - and they seem to have done in every non-Soviet built nuclear reactor commissioned since the mid-70s - the only outputs are electricity, warmish water and a wee gust of radioactive gas every now and then. Compare that with the megatonnes of CO2, particulates and sulphur sent skywards by conventional power stations (plus all the proven hideousness of hydrocarbon politics).

And if the space programme was based on nuclear energy we'd be on Mars and mining asteroids for deuterium by now.
 
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Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
HMGovt said:
Nuclear energy is clearly the way forward. The dangers of radioactivity are overstated - didn't the Power of Nightmare weave that idea into its final synthesis last night, debunking the dangers of dirty bombs? It did.
The failure to make an economic case for nuclear is still an issue.

Nuclear is only around because it provides arms, period. The Green arguments can be dismissed pretty much out of hand. That's why none of the actual green organisations are in favour of nuclear.
 
2stepfan said:
The failure to make an economic case for nuclear is still an issue.

Nuclear is only around because it provides arms, period. The Green arguments can be dismissed pretty much out of hand. That's why none of the actual green organisations are in favour of nuclear.

Economics schmeconomics. The state can always make enough money if it wants. And what's economical about spending $87 billion upfront on the Waronterr, plus countless billions in the aftermath, just to secure oil. I don't think the economic models your argument depends on are very wide-ranging or flexible.

Besides, the Greens are just SO GAY, with their hand-knitted muesli and beard odour.
 
Nuclear power proven safe-ish again

Coolant Leak at Fermi II Plant

By Action News Team
Web produced by Jenny Clark
January 24, 2005

State and county safety officials were called to the Fermi II nuclear plant in Monroe early Monday evening to investigate a coolant leak situation.

Michigan, Wayne and Monroe County authorities responded to what they called a "situation" within the plant around 6:00 p.m.

Minutes later, DTE officials confirmed that there were indications that there had been a leak of reactor coolant into the containment area. There were no evacuations at the plant, and there were no signs of any release of radiation.

Stay tuned to Action News for more on this developing story as it becomes available.
 
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