Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Sterling On Lovelock's Pro-Nuclear Stance
Robert Berger writes "Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, critic, blogger is also the creator of the Viridian Notes series of emails that comment on articles and websites about global warming. The current Viridian Note 00415: Doom is Nigh (scroll down past the inital links) has inserted his Sterling's pithy comments into Jame Lovelock's assertion that 'Nuclear power is the only green solution.'" (See also this earlier Slashdot post about Lovelock's nuclear apologia.)
Firstly, no, I didn't RTFA. The first few lines were enough to bore me. I'm gonna assume I know what the whole thing says, and here's my response.. (if I assumed incorrectly, boo bloody hoo).
.
We've seen it all before!
No doubt it's all true, or they think it's true. But seriously, how many times have we heard humans will be wiped out in the near future because of insert reason here>
Carbon realses from the amazon, global warming, asteroids, low oil supplies, nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, etc. etc. etc.
Please! We have survived for thousands of years already, people highly overestimate the malvolent potential of whatever. Even if we are going to die because of whatever; no doubt we will come up with some sort of device which will stop it from happening, and no doubt, scientists will start telling us all that that solution is now going to kill us all.
*Yawns*
no one is willing to switch their house over to solar energy
Where the fuck do you live? I live in the Seattle area, and in the wintertime we get all of 6 hours of daylight, most of it cloudy. Granted, solar panels still work when it's cloudy, but I understand not as efficiently (i.e. they don't generate as much as they would on a sunny day).
So show me your solar panel contraption that'll keep my house powered in the wintertime and finance the loan and I'll buy it. (Can't promise to buy it if nobody will finance the loan because I'm broke, but possibly with rebates from the power company I can make the loan affordable)
Solar power is a dead-end in northern climates unless you pipe it in from southern climates. Even then, there's a neighborhood in La Luz, NM that I used to live in where there are literally rows of houses each with solar panels on their rooftops.
I suspect you're just crying about how wonderful solar power is without completely examining the whole problem. Even if you provide workable solar power to every single home in the world, you still haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels. We have planes, trains, and automobiles that all require fossil fuels. Military use as well. How about rocketry? Do any of our rockets require fossil fuels? (I think "no" but I could be wrong) And nobody's going to buy a car that they have to spend eight hours recharging in order to drive another 100 miles.
The problem, as usual, is more serious and much more complicated. We don't just need to replace power plants. We need a completely new source of energy, period. While power plants are the top energy producer, they're not the only one. I'm all for working on one problem at a time, but there's enough of us out there that we can solve them all at once. ;) The main problem is getting the technology out there. We already have reliable wind power, water, and yes, even solar power. We already understand the dynamics of each method, and there're even more projects looking at other ways (combine wind + water, stick a wind turbine in the middle of ocean currents!). What we don't have is the requisite mass adoption.
I call troll on this whole article. Given the time it would take to power up with nukes, could we accomplish the same power up with renewable sources? I suspect the problems are mostly political at this point, but how much would it actually cost (total cycle costs for 50 years, that is, plus additional costs for decommissioning nuke plants) and how long would it actually take? Let's see a real comparison here, renewable sources that don't produce CO2 vs nuke plants. I'm all over nuke power, don't get me wrong, but I just don't see how it's going to be any more effective to setup a bunch of nuke plants at $XXX trillion dollars compares to setting up a bunch of "green" plants at $YYY trillion dollars.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Oil is not a fossil fuel
it's in my head