28/04/06 x2
I just took the following screenshot on Amazon.com:
No, I'm not going to explain why I ended up at that page...
28/04/06
To quote my workmate "You've stirred up a hornets nest, Tony!". Here are the replies to my metro letter:
Wow, cool, were do I begin on ripping apart these letters?! OK, the first one by Sam says "To suggest that nuclear power is cheap is either wilfully ignorant or just daft". Wow, someone really put their foot in it, BBC Nov 05 or Uranium Info Center April 06 or NuclearTourist Jan 30th 06 put the CURRENT costs as the same or hard to quantify. Costs of cleanup and storage are taken into account. But I say, fu<k the cost, even if nuclear WAS more expensive than other cheap as dirt power production, are you seriously suggesting that burning fossil fuel is better for the planet? Someone sure is ignorant and looking at the wrong sites... I just don't think it's me. As far as other forms of electricity are concerned, biomass is too much in it's infancy to provide significant power in the near term (and on large enough scale you'll have to look out for large scale habitat destruction to farm enough biomass) although it should be done were possible due to helping the environment by reducing greenhouse gasses, wind is pathetically unreliable (and costly) to the degree that you need to build 3 times the generation you actually need just to try and make sure you have semi reliable production, solar has made leaps and bounds (holographic solar collectors anyone?!) and will continue to do so but current costs financially and environmentally in production of panels sucks, again, better forms of solar cell production on mass scale can't get here fast enough. I'm not saying give up on these or other forms of power production, far from it, more investment should be made, more money should be put in, but they aren't available to produce large amounts of power NOW. We need more power NOW, especially in developing countries.
On to the next letter by Thomas, at least the message (well, one of them) is getting through "on this point he is right - nuclear power is much safer than it was" he says, yay, a breakthrough in understanding. He then says how wrong I am to suggest that nuclear is clean because of the vast opencast mines (BTW, they have to be open cast because of radiation concentration killing miners) that uranium comes from... Um, excuse me, I had no idea coal walked out of mines on its own and opencast mines are dug downtown for viewing pleasure. I have no idea what he's going on about with energy out to energy in ratios as there is no comparison to anything else, but if energy out is clean, then great.
There are good and bad points about any form of power production, having a variety of different sources is good too as you don't depend on one technology. The point is, people in general need to re-assess their long held beliefs about ANYTHING (not just power production). Open your mind, educate yourself using current facts, REVISE your understanding regularly, approach solutions with a balanced and educated mind.
27/04/06
I read the following letter in Metro yesterday about Chernobyl and Nuclear Energy (I included the letters below it, because I thought they were interesting):
Nothing infuriates me more than ignorance being spread and I just had to reply to that letter, plus, replying to uneducated ramblings gives me a certain feeling of satisfaction even though it's easier than taking candy from a baby (hey, baby's kick and scream!). Anyway, I flipped straight to the letters section of the Metro today and low and behold, what did I see!
I'll be signing autographs later... Fortunately the Metro editors "edited" the more objectionable content out of my letter (such as calling "Andrew Kelly" ignorant). The original text I sent in can be read here if you really wanna see it.
By the way, I actually know an Andrew Kelly personally, Andrew, I'm assuming you're not living in Somerset at the moment?!!! ;-)
Update: It has been, very rightly, said to me "what makes you an expert on Nuclear Energy, Tony?!", well, I work in the power forecasting industry and work daily with experts in the field so I hear all the inside stories. I also read a fair amount of scientific articles daily (not just on nuclear or other forms of energy production).
I don't discount other "green" ways of producing power either (wave power, solar hydrogen, etc) in fact I would prefer them to nuclear (wind power sucks, however) but unfortunately they are in their infancy and aren't able to be deployed fast enough.
I also recommend reading articles from wired, Patrick Moore, some Wikipedia articles or Google Nuclear Reactor Safety and read the latest articles that don't use Chernobyl as the basis for their argument.
19/04/06
