The above Depatment of Energy and Climate Change graphic (hat-tip: Will Heaven in the Telegraph) was removed from the Gov.uk website earlier this week. It's not hard to see why. Quite apart from relative costs, it suggests that wind farms destroy over five hundred times as much countryside as nuclear power stations to produce the same amount of energy. That's not the kind of thing the eco-loon Lib-Dem energy secretary Ed Davey (or his jailbird Lib-Dem predecessor) want us to know.
Wind farms and nuclear power plants are both pretty ugly things, but if I had to choose on aesthetic grounds, I'd probably pick power plants. They tend to possess a minatory beauty, and they look like they're actually for something purposeful, important and BIG - you can imagine something this massive and weird churning out energy like nobody's business. I get an odd thrill from seeing them in the distance: they remind me of old black and white British movies featuring windswept countryside, bemused squaddies, theremins, crude special effects (usually some radioactive monster emitting a noise like a chip-pan) and an American scientist to sort out the mess (which he may or may not have created in the first place). Here's an excellent example from 1956:
I was really disappointed when we were on hioliday in Sussex in 2002 to find that Sizewell B was closed to members of the public (no doubt because of 9/11). I'd love to have seen inside. Driving around it was fun, but I just wish I'd had some creepy sound effects to play on the stereo.
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| ooo-WEEE-ooo! |
Remember - it wasn't nuclear power that created the Chernobyl disaster: it was socialism.
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