High-profile climate change campaigner goes nuclear

"Perhaps this is the point in history where mainstream environmentalism - in the form of some kind of more regulated business as usual - splits off from radical ecology, which sees no alternative to a complete overthrow of the dominant culture of hatred, oppression and destruction. It may be hard to imagine such a revolution happening but it's even harder to accept that without such a fundamental shift in our cultural values any kind of meaningful relationship with the rest of life on earth can ever occur."

You probably see this as a betrayal because you aren't (yet) willign to face the realities of the choices before us. You probably don't believe that the environmental crisis is "real", imagine that is is just some artifact of social injustice and that ALL we need is the revolution and all will be hunky dory.

STOP! --- I am NOT on the side favoring nuclear, but at least I understand WHY perfectly rational people might decide that there is no alternative --- in the sense that the other alternatives are worse.

In one word -- POPULATION. Now I am not going to argue this with you because what you believe isn't rleavant to the discussion -- we are tying to understand why some other otherwise rational person is deciding "no choice but nuclear" and for that you need to ask what does THIS person believe about the population question. Now there have been a number of "estimates" made by the "numbers" people (people who believe in the reality of numbers instead of mantras like "if we share fairly, there will certainly be enough to go around"). I have seen estimates for population on sustainable basis (when the fossil resources, fossil fuel and fossil water are gone). Some range as low as 500 million and some as high as 2 billion but I haven't seen any convincing estimate as high as six billion. Do you have ANY conception of what it would mean for our population to reduce from 6 billion down to 1-2 billion within a hundred years? The kind of social dislocation a rate of reduction that rapid would represent. Remember, this would be like the rate of decline during the 14th Century plague pandemic except continued for 100 years instead of just 50.

Well some of us are going to say "so be it" while others of us are going to decide "unacceptable -- maybe with nuclear power we can stave this off, buy more time for a slower crash." Still others of us are going to continue to have faith in miracles, that if shared fairly, a few loaves and fishes will feed the multitude. May even continue to have this faith even though the oceans are being emptied of fish and there's no more water left in the aquafers to irrgate the grain crop.

let me see if i understand this correctly...

in order for the earth to stay a sustainable resource,

for the system we live in now to stay the same,
[who wants that? not me!]
there 'needs' to be a human cull??????????


that sounds suspiciously like: Eugenics ....Genocide....

The CARTEL that owns your right
to get access to 'their' resource supply industry

[how did they come to own the rights to these resources from OUR planet?]


its a cartel that serves us a false freedom...

one that many humans willingly partake in
within a false indoctrinated 'perception managed'
'consensus'...beleiving their slavery as work

to acheive progressive modernity: continuous Upgrade culture
betterment sold as 19th century enlightenment

the monopolised dirty
discraceful con of 'free market neo-liberalism'

CONSUMER SLAVERY by any other name

and these robber barons with their 'global 2000' and the ' Club of Rome'

convince the common low down humans slaves that it is us
'greedy people' who are the cause of all the worlds problems....
[slightly catholic guilt trip, would'nt you say?]

After investing so much time and money on
indoctrinating the masses into beleiving the GOD [consumerism]
they then tell you, you are the naughty child who needs reeling in...


Blairs stupid stunts on his nuclear table [sellafields recent 'leak']

expect power cuts and psyops this summer

under the rouse of the 'cheap energy' schtick
they intend to convince the public that
our power grid is in need of desperate repair...

but the real reason :
they are gearing the UK for another round of Nuclear weapons


The senate in the US are already preparing
a new breed of NUKES

this time they will be space based



The cartel say the system is too expensive to change...

If things are so bad then it begs the question...

why are these nutballs letting the planet go down the tubes?


Question:
what do you think a human will breathe in 300 years?
Oxygen?

or the very gasses and pollutants that are being
GEO-MANAGED AND EXPERIMENTED WITH RIGHT NOW...


as William Burroughs once said:
'The earth is going to be a space station'

it is going to be a planet system
within which EVERY resource a human will need to
survive will be labelled, managed, tailored and sold as
a product

a global consumer society based on slavery to their system

[yes it's 'them' again!]
same as it ever was

What an utter cop-out - Mark considers energy efficiency and energy saving measures, but basically concludes that they are too hard and that people won't bother. So, the alternative? Setting up ultra-dangerous stores of nuclear waste, vulnerable to terrorism and human error, which will be around for the next million years!

MIght I suggest that jumping out of the frying pan into the fire is in no way a 'solution' and that giving up on energy saving and a technological shift to renewables shows political cowardice of the worst kind.

So disappointed.

Matt

The move to nuclear power is the logical one for the world. I lived in France for some years and saw how the Frech have benefited from their all nuclear policy of the 1970's. Cheap electricity, no accidents, no fossil fuel burning.

Of course a change in the world's energy use would be nice but to be honest it aint going to happen.

Eat plutonium selfish bourgois mutherfuckas. You make me sick pathetic greedy worms.

The more people say we aint gonna change the world and we just have to 'go with the flow', the more folks say all we can do is tinker with the system to stop it blowing apart, the less likely real change is actually ever going to happen.

Still, you can be sure those taking such a position will take refuge in their cosy, middle class, white Western lifestyles, while the working classes, the poor of the global South and of course us Muslims and other people the Empire wants exterminated will continue to be force fed the excremental fall out of such unsustainable lifestyle 'choices'.

Is Lemming an appropriate metaphore here? Perhaps chicken would be better.

Nuclear power is both un-sustainable and dangerous. It has been "made to work" in this country by enourmous governmental hand-outs, which effectively propped up an industry which cannot support itself.

On top of that, the potential dangers of fallout, spent nuclear rods and other by-products, and terrorist attacks, nuclear fuel is not a viable option.

Off-shore windfarms could provide 25% of our energy needs. This, combined with a widespread policy of energy reduction, is the way forward. Photo-voltic solar cells are becoming cheaper and cheaper by the day.

We need to cut our energy usage; turn off TVs instead of using standby; use energy-saving light bulbs; insulate better to cut down heating costs; make all new homes carbon neutral; offer grants to families to upgrade to energy efficient washers and other household appliances.

Oh, and by the way: the leak at Sellafield went undetected for 9 months, according to todays Independent:

 http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=642358

I can understand why yet another climate advocate has turned nuclear.

I remember just five years ago, everyone was incredably pro-alternative. Many (including me) still are.

However, as we started trying to build wind farms, more and more sheeple objected to them on "aesthetic grounds". Even our former friends at the RSPB turned away in disgust. With such widespread opposition, there is little we can do.

If, however, we offer people the choice between a few windfarms in their back yards and a great big nuclear powerstation time-bomb, I think I know which they'll pick.

However, I don't wish to see a return to nuclear. I, personally, don't see why we couldn't generate the bulk of our energy at a local level. This would virtually eliminate the need for gigaWatt powerstations, and also the energy lost through power transmission could be put to good use. Combine this with energy efficiency, and there is literally no problem.

However, it requires a small effort on the public's part, so no politician will ever suggest it...

I am going to stick my neck out on this one.... I asked Sir John Houghton [1] at a conference earlier this year [2] about such things. He had a very inspiring idea in his answer to me: decommission the nuclear warheads and use the existing fissile material for power, to give us some breathing space before renewables catch up. As far as I can see, this will involve building some more new nuclear power plants; and we will need a firm political commitment that no new fissile material will be mined (otherwise it becomes a cop-out for the survival of the nuclear industry rather than breathing space for the development of renewables). The former is unsavoury and the latter is tricky, but that is the nature of the questions we face today [3] (or is it?). The bonus here is that whoever does this might just be fulfilling their obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty [4].

[1]  http://jri.org.uk/brief/christianchallenge.htm
[2]  http://sageoxford.org.uk/ccupdate.htm
[3]  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1476077,00.html
[4]  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/oxford/2005/05/311366.html

population is not the problem, our patterns of consumption are.
= Excuse A for not addressing how we all (& each) live.

nuclear even without hearing about leaks in France, still leaves a toxic legacy we don't know what to do with for so many generations. It cannot be a solution.
= Excuse B for not changing anything.

people won't change their energy use so we have to use top-down 'less-bad' bullshit nuclear, in line with Blair's plans.
= Excuse C for giving up changing things, after years of trying and not seeing signs of hope, just the impending climate chaos and destruction.

The gains to be made from using nuclear power are minimal. If we were to derive all of our electricity from nuclear and still use oil for transport (relying on oil for over half our energy needs) our uranium supply would peak in 6 years and we would still be in the same position.

Reducing our energy conmsumption simply needs to happen. Within a matter of 20 years, oil and uranium could easily be in short supply, leaving us only coal and renewables. If we don't cut down our energy use then, we will quickly return to the smoggy days of 19th century London. Using less energy will be painful but not as bad as a drastic population reduction (and we will suddenly feel more cameraderie with the Africans again...)

Paul.

I'm not sure where you are getting your ideas from - ("Within a matter of 20 years, oil and uranium could easily be in short supply"). The current oil reserves for known fields are currently around 200 to 230 years assuming the current growth in consumption. The majority of energy analysts know that further fields in the Arctic regions will easily extend that by a further 80 to 100 years.

The situation with Uranium is very different, for all practical purposes the world's supply of Uranium for power generation use will last at least another 1000 years and probably well beyond then.

For those looking to get some accurate information on the energy reserves of the planet I suggest the CPAST Foundation, CPAST stands for Corporation for Public Access to Science and Technology. They are nonprofit corporation based in St. Louis, Missouri USA and provide a non industry, government or NGO overview.

Friends, thanks for correcting me.

Energy efficiency could make up a large part of the gap, but it's a long shot. People want the latest energy-hungry techno-gadget more than they want insulated lofts, while almost the entire political class holds economic growth as an article of faith. And don't even mention energy reduction to India and China. Hydrogen would be great if only we could find some way to generate it without using fossil fuels. Oh, and it's difficult to store and no use at all for aeroplanes.

I'm not suggesting that nuclear is a panacea. It can reduce carbon emissions only as part of a combined dash for renewables and energy efficiency, buying us time while truly clean energy systems are developed. True, renewed nuclear power could lead to Chernobyl-style accidents or terrorist attacks and will leave a legacy of toxic waste for millennia. But have you considered what five or six degrees of global warming would do to the planet? Something far worse, I assure you.

And just in case we also find ourselves running out of uranium, here's another idea. Why not burn up all the nuclear warheads currently stockpiled in the US and UK (and Israel)? That would deal nicely with the WMD problem while keep- ing us all in carbon-free energy for a few decades. If you ask me, anything is preferable to planetary climatic meltdown combined with a 1930s-style collapse into political darkness. Even nuclear power.

 http://www.marklynas.org

Nuclear won't 'buy us time'... and Mark knows this. The lead in time to design and build these new power stations is 10-20 years. The cuts we need must happen NOW. These can be achieved through massive investment of renewables, and (controversial!) behavioural change. The biggest cuts could come right now from the transport sector (currently 25% of all UK emissions, and the fastest growing source): making aviation pay the true environmental cost and not subsidising it any longer, incentivising people to chose low carbon vehicles, investing the £15 billion road building budget into public transport etc.... The changes can be made right now, but not if people like Mark roll over, give up, try and persuade everyone else to give up, and accept the filthy dirty cop out that is nuclear...

See Capitulation to the Nuclear Lobby is the Politics of Despair at  http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1491418,00.html

I wrote that if we converted to Uranium power we would soon run out and it wouldn't buy us much time, especially compared to how much poisonous waste we would create in those few years. I've found the reference I needed to give you all to read.

It's  http://www.oprit.rug.nl/deenen/

It's a very simply put together site but the information is pukka.

This article is from 'The Scotsman', Mon 30 May 2005


SERIOUS UK NUCLEAR LEAK 'WENT UNNOTICED FOR NINE MONTHS'

(by MICHAEL BLACKLEY)


TENS of thousands of litres of highly radioactive liquid has been leaking unnoticed at the UK's nuclear reprocessing plant for nine months, it was revealed yesterday.

The leak is being described as the worst nuclear accident in Britain for 13 years and could threaten the future of the Thorp plant, at Sellafield in Cumbria, where the leak was discovered on 19 April.

The International Atomic Energy Authority has admitted that it would classify the accident as "serious".

It was only discovered that liquid was leaking last month, but by that time 83,000 litres of radioactive fuel, enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool, had already been accidentally discharged.

British Nuclear Group, which runs the plant, said workers had failed to respond to indicators that would have warned since last August that there was a leak. The company has ordered an urgent review to check that there are not any other potential leaks, and is also warning against staff complacency.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, the government quango responsible for the reprocessing plant, said that it will need time to assess the findings before discussing the implications with the government and the company.

But if the decision is taken to close the plant, it is predicted that it would cost taxpayers billions of pounds.

The accident will be a major setback for the government, which was preparing to seek public support for a new generation of power stations to help meet climate-change targets.

The company says the leak was contained and thus was not a threat to public safety, but it could yet face criminal prosecution.

A spokesman for the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate told a Sunday newspaper: "I can confirm we will be seeking to find out what monitors were in place, whether they were working and, if so, why they were not acted on."

Four inspectors have been on site at Sellafield in Cumbria since the accident occurred, tasked with discovering why engineers failed to modify pipes leading to moveable tanks.

The investigation is likely to last many weeks before it is decided whether to take action against the British Nuclear Group.

It is clear that the leak will become a major political issue. David Willetts, the shadow trade secretary, said he would call on ministers to answer urgent questions on the matter when the House of Commons meets next week.

He said the incident would have a major detrimental effect on public confidence in the nuclear industry, and the case would need to be rationally considered.



This article:

 http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=589332005