I am a thirty something married gay boy living in Sydney, almost on top of the gay scene but not in it!
Why Sometimes blue?, because I love blue, but also I am sometimes blue :)
A Question on a Wednesday Morning...
There seems to be a growing environmental movement worldwide with poses a contradictory or 'inconvenient' theory.
To address global warming which is potentially the downfall of the planet we must embrace Nuclear power.
I am a walking contradiction when it comes to the environment, in many ways I feel that a lot of the work has to be done by business and government, but at the same token I do believe the old mantra think global act local.
But Nuclear power just plain scares me. The problem I have with it is that one small minor accident can render thousands of square kilometres uninhabitable. And accidents do happen, it's just a fact of life.
Anyway are we just burying our head in the sand by not embracing Nuclear power now while we still have time to build plants? Cause they take ten years at least to build not including quite often the years and years of public consultation.
Australia of course is rich in uranium deposits, in fact we have one of the world's largest natural deposits yet all we do with it is dig it out of the ground and send it overseas.
Oil is running out, Coal is running out, Bio Fuels take food away from people Solar is expensive and dirty to create and not overly practical with current technology.
So what else is there?
Wind?
Sea?
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4 Comments:
Any approach where we ignore options based soley on our feelings rather than rational debate is burying our heads.
Yes, Nuclear energy carries risks. But France has shown that it can be a part of an energy portfolio and technology has improved for recycling much of the waste.
Let's not ignore the issues with coal. There are numerous examples of accidents (usually fires) at power generation sites, and then there is the issue of the flue gas: U.S. coal fueled power plants account for 67 percent of all emissions of sulfur dioxide in the US. Emissions from power plants also combine with other pollutants to form ozone, a principle component of smog, which can cause a number of respiratory ailments.
Reading further on this, checkout the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant#Environmental_impacts
I didn't even think ractioactive contamination was an issue for COAL-burning power plant.
Many 'normal' things are radioactive... milk, beer etc are radioactive, and coal can be too....
It will be interestingto see what does become of this debate really...
Considering you live within a relatively small distance of Australia's only nuclear facility (Lucas Heights) I would have thought you'd have gotten over your fear of meltdown by now. :)
Wind power isn't bad, although some people say it can make rare bird species extinct. Albany has a wind farm with about 6 or 10 turbines, and that provides something like 30% of their electricity. Esperance has had a wind farm for a very long time, and more recently they built one just north of Perth, supposedly to offset the power consumed by the new desalination plant.
You'd think solar power would be a good idea in a country as empty and sunny as ours, but apparently the main problem is the energy lost in transmission from wherever in the middle of nowhere you put the power station.
Tidal power is a good idea, but would be a huge engineering project, would be environmentally destructive and would only be suitable where they get giant tides.
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