'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

Re: If your name's not down, you're not coming in... [sorry, but the mistakes were driving me nuts]

This is why I like the concept of buried self contained nuclear generation systems, I believe most concepts are breeder based.

You build a 20-500MW reactor, bury it deep underground (ooh what about all those disused coal mines ;) ) and feed cables to the grid.

When it needs decommissioning, you turn it off, done. No clean up, no overheads. At least that is the theory.

If there is a problem, it's well away from people and while there is obviously a financial loss, it will be nothing like the clean up costs being experienced at say Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Don't include me in that !

>> But shirley, as the people of Cumbria have just decided, the disposal of the nuclear left overs is a major problem, its fine saying we need a number of new nuclear plants to meet energy requirements for the next 50 years, but after that, where does the crap go?

Actually it wasn't "the people of Cumbria", it was the County Council. I didn't ask them to vote that way, in fact I'm for the repository (sort off, read on). Quite frankly, listening to the locals on the news last night, I found myself what scheme they'd been looking at because they seemed to be objecting to a lot of stuff that's not being proposed.

All this crap about "it'll ruin the landscape in the Lake District" is complete and utter tosh. Complete rubbish put forward by pressure groups who (being polite) seem intent on not understanding anything lest it interfere with their fear of it. Not all are like that, but some are (I've met some of them), and some eco people are not capable of having a rational discussion with anyone who doesn't 101% support their position (and I have to wonder even then).

The actual effect would be something akin to a large factory site, on the West Coast, outside the Lake District, and not actually visible from most of it. I can't see traffic being any worse than it is now - Sellafield creates a fair bit of traffic as a lot of people work there.

And one thing a lot of these "it'll ruin trade" people fail to realise is just how much the local economy gets from Nuclear. I suspect losing it would hurt trade a lot more.

Now, I'll come to why I'm only "sort of" for the repository. If that's what we're going to do with "the material" then I see no problem with the repository - for one thing I think the design should allow it to be removed later when we decide we can use it. However, the issue is with what we call waste - ie a large quantity of what would, in better times, be described as fuel. The technology exists to turn this so called waste into fuel, and run it through a different type of reactor - both releasing energy (it's not creating it, just releasing it) and reducing the quantity, drastically reducing the quantity. I believe it also reduces the "nastiness" as well. So we could take a lot of this waste, use it as fuel, and up with a much smaller quantity of less problematic waste.

Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear lobby have stymied that as well - if just saying "nuclear" is enough to get a lot of people into a lather, mentioning "plutonium" will well froth things up. The fact that the plutonium produced is itself fuel for further use is by the by - it's verboten by the anti-nuclear brigade and so far the politicians seem unable to see the long term view.

And before i leave that bit, the anti-nuclear lobby are also responsible for creating some of the waste in the first place. Take a Magnox station and turn it off - for a while it's "quite hot" and highly active. Now, what the majority seem unable to grasp (unwilling I suspect) is that if something is highly active then it has a short decay time, if it has a long decay time then that means it isn't that active. AIUI, the plan was to shut down a station, cool it for a few months while the worst of the highly active stuff burns out, defuel it, and then leave it - take away all the support stuff (cooling systems, machinery houses etc, and just leave the core and containment. Wrap that in concrete, post a few guards to protect it from graffiti (about the biggest risk it faces), and leave it for 100 years - so something about the size of a large house. After a century, the most active materials will have decayed and it can be dismantled by people walking in and picking up the graphite blocks from the core. Littel by way of a disposal problem.

Instead, by insisting on "get rid of it **NOW**" it has to be handled while active, thus actually creating a problem (at great expense) where there was none before.

>> "...one nuclear power station provides as much power as 3,200 industrial wind turbines, without the environmental damage..."

>> Mind you, the ex-residents of Pripyat and Fukushima Prefecture may have a different opinion...

Actually, I believe a lot of people from the Chernobyl area were really happy - they got evacuated from run down slums and housed in brand new houses. The old towns aren't deserted because they are dangerous, they are deserted because they were run down slums that no-one wants to move back to.

And for both places you mention, if you imposed the same exposure limits over here, then large parts of the UK would be evacuated because of the background radiation. And don't get me started on the amount of uranium spread around by burning coal because we didn't build new nuclear power stations to replace the coal fired ones.

NB - before anyone accuses me of being a nuclear industry shill ... I don't work in the industry (though I would object to doing so). Also, there is no element of NIMBY here - as the crow flies I have an active nuclear power station now far away in one direction, and Sellafield not far away in the other (and also the nuclear submarines aren't that far away either when they are under construction - no I don't work there either).