by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party and EMP recently made this statement which shows that all those that considered him not to be grounded in the real world were true and correct.
Mr Farage, like so many other politicians are either in the pockets of the nuclear (and other) power industry or, otherwise, live in a parallel universe and not on Earth. Maybe it is both even.
I must say though that I do agree with Mr. Farage as regard to the large wind farms... They probably are not something that we really need, to some degree. We need wind power and solar power but on the scale of every roof a power station. Nuclear, however, is not an option and can never be unless we manage to perfect fusion.
Nuclear power, in the same way as nuclear weapons, is something that none of us can afford and it is not (just) a matter of cost but a matter of the fallout of any accident, whether civilian or military.
The accidents that have happened in the nuclear industry should have taught us and Chernobyl should really have done so. While the accident at Chernobyl was, more or less, man-made the fact is that when something goes wrong in such places it rarely can be contained.
Wind and solar, together with hydro, should be able to provide us with enough power if we but do it right. Every roof of every building, whether home, stately home, office or factory, must become an electricity generating facility and we must change the way we use electricity and especially the voltage and current that we use. If we do this and do it right, I am sure, we can make it work and we can keep the lights on and the computers and everything running too. And all of that without the need for nuclear power or the dirty coal, the oil or gas.
In addition to that we must make use of the gas that is freely available and for which the first power stations were, in fact, built, namely methane, aka sewer gas.
The obstacle does seem to be, at every instance, the fact that the politicians the world over, with bar a few exceptions, seems to be in the pockets of the big companies that want to keep the business as usual model of power generation by means of coal, oil and gas and nuclear.
The claim that nuclear is non-CO2 producing is also rather misleading for there is an environmental footprint attached to nuclear that is way bigger than that of any other means of energy production. So why are the powers that be trying to bamboozle the people as regards to nuclear? My guess is because of the 'fringe benefits', for them, of nuclear power, in the form of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
© 2010
