Shocking how we let such a terrorist organisation exist in our midst...
It would be find it they just protested and lobbied, but some direct action could be classed as terrorism.
The UK's advertising watchdog has upheld a complaint against advertising by hippy collective Greenpeace, which solicited money to help in such things as breaking into power stations and defacing property. The ad in question explicitly stated that gifts to Greenpeace would be used for "direct action" efforts such as painting …
"The Japanese have a few unemployed nuclear engineers I hear. They thought they had a job for life too..."
And they should have. 40+ years without serious incident, using designs from the Sixties, commisioned in the Seventies and keeping a highly developed nation happily ticking over all that time. Then they get hit by a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami and massively damaged infrastucture leading to an inability to lead power to the stations. And there was STILL minimal harm from radiation or pollution from the plants! The reaction about Fukishima is almost entirely manufactured by the media that finds scary stories sell more papers / get more hits. They should be ashamed of themselves for the fear-mongering. Nuclear power is one of our best hopes for avoiding an environmental collapse one day.
If they are really bothered about cutting pollution (as opposed to just enjoying their direct action and the lifestyle that comes with it, which I suspect is the case) then they should be working more like some of the cancer charities and taking the money to fund research into alternatives.
As it goes, I don't believe they are drawing attention to a worthy issue or applying political pressure. They're just making it easier for environmentalists to be dismissed as nutcases and actually harming their cause.
Ya do know that Greenpeace actually run training courses on how to conduct 'direct action' activities. Not to be compared with terrorist training camps of course, but they are funny and enjoyable. Not that those people have 'real' jobs or anything.
As a poster says, the lifestyle is somewhat relaxed... I object to funding it though and direct action is frequently about breaking the law, lets call it what it is.
I used to be completely baffled by the complete lack of rational thought of green peace.
Then one day I realized that most of them are kids or simply people who never grew up enough to hold a responsible position in society. Now their stupidity makes sense.
Give me a dozen random 40 to 50 year old people who have an honest job ( politicians and lawyers need not apply ) and the energy situation would be solved.
> Give me a dozen random 40 to 50 year old people who have an honest job (politicians and lawyers need not apply)
Police people? Journalists? http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/27/sun-culture-illegal-payments-leveson
Marketing er, people?
And, you would include those people that plan and (g)estimate IT projects?
I am so happy not to be in that range!
Sure nuclear plants are super productive NOW, but it took 40+ years to make that possible and only with massive government funding, one world war and one cold war.
Even though the long term problems with nuclear have been identified El Reg keeps harping on NO MORE RESEARCH and nuking the hippies.
At no point during nuclear power production has it been done without taxpayer dollars. Why not acknowledge that there might be options. Why not explore them?
Everything these anti-research Reg articles promote was paid for by the authors parents & grandparents. If research and trial/error create such awful results why do the Editors/Authors love it so much?
The problem with many forms of renewables is even *in theory* they cannot provide much in the way of energy. (The one major omission here is solar, worldwide at least, but there are political problems with coating the sahara desert with solar cells.)
Nuclear power, on the other hand, was obviously powerful enough, and the problem was harnessing it.
To be fair... all forms of energy production, be it nuclear, wind, hydro dams, you name it - everything except the most basic coal fired plant - has required government funding, including wars. I don't know for sure, but I'm betting that anyone on the national grid, supplying power, has had several government handouts at least.
And the only replacement offered by the anti-coal/anti-nuke crowd is fully renewable energy - if there is any technology that's had more government investment than nuclear, it's wind and solar energy.
But more to the point - where do you see "no more research"? I thought it was a bit more like "stop being idiots, a windmill can't replace a coal power station, cut your hair, get a job, etc., etc."
I don't think Lewis wants research on renewables to stop. Personally, I'd just want *deployment* of renewables to stop, because at the current level of development it just doesn't make sense; it's a waste of money. They need to be much, *much* better before they can actually be usefully employed; at the moment, their place is in the lab.
Also, it doesn't make sense that the greenies are against nuclear power. Nuclear power is way cleaner than fossils; the greenies ought to support nuclear power as a stepping stone to renewables. By railing against it while no alternative exists yet, they are forcing us to stick with the worst possible technology. We could actually fix the carbon problem, if only the environmentalists would let us!
In a lab test all kinds of things work. When it scales in the real world it might not work at all. You simply don't know until you try. Look at the billions spent developing huge fisson facilities that didn't work or exploded. The world learned SO much from the incident in Ukraine. That was a failure as were many of the original field experiments in fission.
Many renewables will fail too (most current tech probably will, I recognize that) but that doesn't mean stop trials at scale. El Reg says we don't even need to try. Go fission and we all get free electric, no problems and FREE MONEY & DONKEYS..
I'm just saying that El Reg oversells their POV just as hard and just as ludicrious as WWF or Greenpeace. Maybe they should stick to tech where they do a much better job of reporting...
"Sure nuclear plants are super productive NOW, but it took 40+ years to make that possible and only with massive government funding, one world war and one cold war."
You've answered your own question (albeit by trying to slip in the fallacious idea that nuclear power forty years ago wasn't profitable then. Hint: Fukishima was commissioned in the 1960's and has been providing Japan with electricity all this time until the earthquake and tsunami). Basically, if we've put 40 years of development into nuclear, we should be reaping the rewards of that. You seem to be using it as a reason to say (in effect), 'it took us forty years to get where we wanted, that's not good enough. Let's try getting here from somewhere else.'
You posit a false dichotomy when you say it is either nuclear power or research. Cheap power will lead to more money sloshing around for research than expensive power. And even if you're not a strong believer in AGW (I am not), the fact that fossil fuels are more polluting, rising in cost, finite and sourced primarily from nasty regimes in the Miidle East who exploit our dependence, it still makes more sense to get that cheap power from Nuclear than from fossil fuels until we can get the orbital solar stations going...
The construction of Fukushima was taxpayer-funded, as are effectively all nuclear power plants ever built anywhere. Yes, even the Americans.
Part of the justification of such funding has always been that research and experience would allow *future* plants to be built cheaper. For at least the first 30-35 years of commercial nuclear generation, that completely failed to happen - despite repeated promises that the designs would improve, each one cost more to build than its predecessor. It wasn't until the mid-80s that they started even to claim they'd got their arse into gear commercially. However, between TMI and Chernobyl, by this time they were PR poison, so that claim was never actually tested - because designs had to be remodelled *again* in the light of those disasters.
It's not clear to me why the same reasoning shouldn't apply to renewables now.
Square miles of land, worldwide, rendered uninhabitable or unusable by renewable power? Zero. Casualties arising from renewable power? Okay, some idiot falls off a roof while installing his solar panels - there are a few, but let me know when it begins to approach one Chernobyl. Requirement for expensive monitoring equipment, regulatory oversight or highly trained maintenance staff? None, slight and slim, respectively.
Sorry, Lewis, I get what you're saying, but by any reasonable measure solar, wind, wave and tidal power are vastly safer than nuclear.
"The construction of Fukushima was taxpayer-funded, as are effectively all nuclear power plants ever built anywhere."
All nuclear power plants ever built anywhere are taxpayer-funded? That isn't even true in the UK! Our government is willing to underwrite nuclear power stations we have built recently, but not to pay for them. If you're against taxes going to power, I assume you are even more against wind power (massively subsidied) and oil (backed by tax-funded military force and regime support in significant part). Nuclear power is *profitable*.
Just for wind power in the UK alone, the HSE said its figures showed three fatal accidents between 2007/08 and 2009/10 and a total of 53 major or dangerous incidents in the same time frame.
Wind turbines are inherently dangerous to work on or near - it's a lot of exposed work-at-height, in windy conditions.
There are over 100 deaths known to have been directly caused by wind turbines (most in the USA)
On top of that, they render large areas of the countryside or seabed uninhabitable and unusable because they often throw large pieces of ice long distances, and occasionally throw large bits of themselves as well.
Thus you cannot live or work near them, and to generate any sensible amount of electricity you need a lot of them over extremely large areas.
Sorry, but by doing any research you'd find that wind turbines are not safe.
> Square miles of land, worldwide, rendered uninhabitable or unusable by renewable
> power?
Quite a lot, I would think - have you seen the size of solar collector power stations?
This one: http://tinyurl.com/yw8jbd claims to be the first, and is from 2005 so I'd imagine they are bigger by now, and has 624 120 square metre mirrors.
Plus, you flood valleys when you build dams for hydro-electric power.
> Casualties arising from renewable power?
Loads of birds get clouted by wind turbine blades.
Incidentally, a total of 70 people have been killed directly by nuclear power station incidents - http://tinyurl.com/yunmz7. 112 people were killed building the Hoover Dam alone - http://tinyurl.com/2dudhca
> Requirement for expensive monitoring equipment, regulatory oversight or highly
> trained maintenance staff? None, slight and slim, respectively.
I'd rather hope solar collectors have trained staff and monitoring kit - they work at temperatures high enough to melt salt.
Save the environment...
Jump on board our Green Peace boat burning gallons of diesel while we circle this oil rig in the middle of the sea for a few months.
Or how about....
Chain yourself to this power station so we have to call in hundreds of bailiffs, security staff and police plus loads of vehicles.
Idiots.
As for shutting things down, if they break in carry on. If they hurt themselves one less idiot to worry about, personally I'd like to get a paintball gun and paint them the next time they go scaling something. Direct action against them would soon stop them, if you want to donate to our cause your £80 will pay for pellet guns, bb guns and paintball guns with associated ammunition to be fired at Green Peace protesters, bolt cuts for removing chains and handcuffs, rusty hacksaws for removing those limbs where we cant remove the chains.
Seriously why do you not do that?
These people, wrong though they might be in almost every way, care enough to have a go; I think you are right that 'direct action' against them would be a suitable response if you disagree strongly with their activities.
If there was strong public (both in the sense of in the open for everyone to see, and coming from individuals not the state / business) disapproval they might find it harder to recruit, harder to gain funding and harder to justify their actions to themselves.
Hmm, who's the retard if you bother to READ the article you'll see they have only used for the last year. Prior to that they used what ever they could get their hands on and in some cases those boats have been a right mess such as the one they used to circle Brent Spa back in the days, that had more rust than the rig.
Hell; I'd count myself a hippy (albeit one whose formative years were spent under the influence of techno and MDMA rather than acid-rock and hash), and I've taken part in direct action from before the days of Twyford and Newbury, against sulphur and cfc-emitters, whalers, land-mine producers, idiotic road 'planning', transgenic crop releases and other less-than-ideal aspects of a modern world which, on the whole, I still largely manage to enjoy. Strangely, I have also been able to hold down an IT career, pay a mortgage and bring up a family.
If it helps, try to think of direct action as being like unplugging the PHBs ethernet until he admits the company needs a backup router; it's frequently a misguided or even downright duplicitous tactic, but it can also be a useful tool to concentrate easily distracted minds on certain longer term issues which otherwise go ignored.
(And for the record, faced with the possibility of climate change and the certainty of fossil-fuel scarcity, IMHO we need nuclear AND renewabubbles until we make the leap to something better. We'd just better build lots, now, and fast, because I'd quite like my SAN to keep spinning.)
A/C because I KNOW they're watching ; )
Yep and not all Green Peace protesters are hippies, most of them are lazy lay about's who survive on benefits and donations or are so rich they don't need to work anyway.
The recent 'activist camp' by us against a coal mine was a right mess not to mention cost over £200k to clear up after, litter, human waste, and an eyesore (ironic that's all the stuff they campaign against), really pi**es me off that they can just hang around there for months on end campaigning against a project which will bring much needed jobs to our area because they don't work.
If Greenpeace are openly admitting they have plans for 'direct action' (vandalism) and are asking for funds to support this (Inciting others to aid and abet criminal activity?) then surely the correct organisation to report them to is the police.
Any reg hacks fancy getting a comment on the issue from plod?
and despots with a greenpeace activist on a university campus, and it was quite stimulating until I let slip that I was actually an ex-serviceman, at which point I became the "point man" for abuse directed at any and all military sins (even tho I wasn't born when the My Lai massacre happened).
Personally, I would like to see abusing citizens due to their membership of the military classed as a hate crime, to give them the same level of protection as those who deliver the abuse.
Sure, because Lewis is about to be arrested for inciting hatred against hippies.
"Abusing people" for any reason whatsoever shouldn't be a crime. If I choose to go up to a black one-legged lesbian single mother and start haranguing her to go back where she came from, the correct response is for me to be beaten up by passers-by, have the video posted on YouTube and become a global pariah. Not to be arrested.
OzBob,
I quite agree, as a former Royal of ten years service now working in NHS IT, I'm quite amazed at some of the hostility I have recieved when people find out I used to be a Marine. You'd swear it was my job description to rape and pillage at every opportunity. Oh how I wish it was..... ;-)
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So I give them £80 so they can vandalize property? What the hell is the point of that?
I can easily support an eco charity which is working in some constructive way, e.g. promoting energy efficient businesses, or prosecuting polluters, or planting large amounts of trees, or lobbying government to strengthen legislation etc. But if it's to fund a bunch of "direct action" campaigns (i.e. attention whoring) then I'd rather keep my money in my pocket.
In order to enhance your enjoyment, here's a handy set of definitions:
'Hippy' = Anyone who disagrees with L&A
'Extremist' = Anyone who disagrees with L&A a lot
In order to maximise enjoyment, stop bothering to read sloppy, lazy, one-sidd, provocative,reporting-lite and go read something that someone's put some actual effort into. You never know, it might even bear out what they say.
Although I'd not hold my breath.
Here's my prediction: if we do ever get cheap clean safe energy from fusion it will be massively opposed by the "green" lobby as encouraging use of excess energy.
And *if* human intervention is having a significant contribution to climate change then there might be an argument, because *if* the power were really cheap enough for all nations to be using it by thepower station load, then since generating really gigantic amounts of power from what will probably be called fossil deuterium molecules (or whichever molecule) will produce gigantic amounts of heat.
Tha chances of the greenies sums adding up will approach zero of course, but that rarely stops 'em!
Don't hold your breath. I went to visit ITER (the site of the internationally funded and experimental facility being built just NE of Aix-en-Provence) at the end of March and based on the presentation have concluded it's not going to happen. Not because it couldn't but because of the way it's run. Building the fusion apparatus (they don't like being called a 'reactor') and related facilities was started in 2007 and is due to be completed in 2014. However, the first time any fusion is due to take place is not until 2020 after which there will be 20 years of experiments. Yes, 20 years. Ending in 2040. At that time the facility will be dismantled.
There are 600 people on site at the moment. Every single one of them a civil servant. This is a government-does-science project. But not in an adventurous, risk-taking, exploratory way that may deliver something but a ponderous way that is highly likely to squander billions.
Necessarily the project needs to start with civil engineering and this requires the plodding mentality at which civil services around the world excel.
But the reason I'm dubious about this approach is that there are real problem maintaining and controlling plasmas at the temperatures involved. Plodding through 26 years of experiments may solve the problem of this type of device (TOKAMAK) but its more likely that the problem will be solved some bright young thing with a new idea. However new ideas are famously ground down by civil service organizations and what bright kids are going to want to work in such an oppressive environment. Especially when they know their idea is unlikely to see the light of day in their working lifetime.
But it does provide employment for some french people for the foreseeable future.
The problem with nuclear fission is the waste produced and its storage. This accounts for the vast majority of the costs and risks of using nuclear and in the UK, at least, is currently paid for through government subsidy. The current UK cost for nuclear waste is estimated at £48bn. It is the waste production and management that Greenpeace are against when considering nuclear. Should fusion become viable, much of the waste problem goes away and it really does become a clean renewable.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-126360/High-cost-nuclear-waste.html
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>> The problem with nuclear fission is the waste produced and its storage.
Correction, the problem with "currently used" nuclear fission.
And why do we only use low grade reactors that make lots of long lived waste ? Why do we insist on dealing with it now rather than leaving it for 100 years when it will be much easier and less costly to handle ?
The answer to both is politics - and in particular the "oh no it's nucular and must be bad" response from certain quarters. We've had the technology to built "better" reactors for many decades - better as in produce more energy from less fuel and have less bad wastes at the end. But there's only one word that gets people frothed up more than nuclear - and that's plutonium. Hence it's been impossible to build the better reactors because all those hippeis would be even more woulnd up and teh red top readers would blindly follow them in ignorance.
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Now why did this article have to be spoilt by a blatant plug for the worst form of energy known to mankind ?
Nuclear power stations. Not to be confused with green and ecologically friendly places.
How many centuries will it be until the already existing nuclear sites are able to be used again ?
And how many billions will it cost us tax payers to remediate those sites after just a few years in production ? Noting those few years making profits for private multi national corporations.
If you're going to do down Greenpeace, fair enough. But don't use a false chestnut to do it.
By the growing population of Planet Earth. Our lives will become more and more buried in concrete, mass produced slime (food) and totally devoid of much that is "natural".
Which weirdo's really want to live with LOTS and LOTS of other people? (A "small" crowded space can be arranged for them).
30 million would be more than enough for the UK. We're at about 61M and climbing. Less people means less problems. And don't start on about "we need more young people to look after all the old people" - bullshit. Where does that little pyramid scheme end? We need older people working longer and better use of technology.
And I'm not advocating murder - or the complete removal of the right to have children. Just policies that make it far more difficult to have too many children.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/anonymous_32.png
What's the problem? Do you really think it makes sense to keep on upping the population? Give me one single reason why that's a clever and sensible thing to do? I'm not - as I said - advocating killing people - just for us to stop treating the earth it like it can go on forever.
Meanwhile - you enjoy your concrete cities, endless traffic, crowded beaches, denuded forests, growing deserts, polluted seas.