[Wind Farms]

Thanks fellas. Re-reading my first post, it comes across rather stridently, for which I apologise. There's likely to be an environmental cost to energy generation however it's generated and wherever the generation facilities are located.

There may be some locations off-shore where environmental considerations are less pressing and therefore there could potentially be some capacity, similarly some on-shore sites are as sensitive as off-shore one, so the only realistic option is a balance of on-and off-shore sites. That said - if you take an environmentally precautionary approach to siting, off-shore turbines will cost more to build, need more maintenance which will be more expensive to carry out on a job-by-job basis, will require replacement more often. They're viable only because they're proposed on a scale which would never be considered acceptable on land.

I guess it's a trade off to which (the argumentative sod said disappointingly ) there probably isn't a straightforward answer.

[Wind Farms]

As someone who is presently working on a number of off-shore windfarm projects from an environmental point-of-view, it's complete fallacy to suggest that it's less environmentally damaging to place them off-shore.

As HC and a few others have said - costs of Offshore sites in terms of construction and operation are hugely greater than terrestrial sites, therefore an economy of scale comes into play - it only becomes economically viable to have turbines in blocks of 40 or 50 at a time (I'm dealing with one case with over 100 turbines of a scale twice as large as on-shore turbines). The costs of protected on-shore cabling is great too so developers like to place these blocks close together. This has implications for effectiveness. The environment is more hostile and the lifespan of the turbines shorter, therefore they require more maintenance and earlier replacement andding to cost and environmental damage. There are noise impacts on cetaceans and seals, they can significantly affect bird migration and can impact upon bird mortality and are often placed in or adjacent to internationally important bird wintering sites. They are usually located in fairly shallow water, these often support important benthic habitats, including commercial fishing grounds.

There is certainly an element of out-of-sight, out-of-mind about shoving them in the sea, but it isn't an environmentally friendly option, unless the only realistic concern about the environment is what it looks like.

I'm not having the north pennines spoilt with wind farms - after all, it is an area of 'outstanding national beauty' and has a unique wild setting.

So does the Solway Firth and The Wash, but no-one seems to have a problem in trashing them.

[Tuesday 29th August 2006]

Showery here in Grantham on and off all day, presently a thunderstorm.

[Something Very Fishy.............]

Nuclear power plants are extremely safe these days – they were also pretty safe 20yrs ago, despite what happened in Chernobyl. Take France as an example – something like 50% of the power is supplied by nuclear power plants. As of yet, there haven’t been any disasters – nor is there any reason to suggest there ever will be.

There's the past history of a range of accidents at nuclear power plants and re-processing facilities, not just in France, but across the world.

The monitoring of the safety performance of these sites is only really available from the US where legislation exists that forces disclosure of accidents. The US has had a range of partial meltdown events, unforseen discharge events and fires, not just at Three Mile Island, but at Savannah River, Hanford, Detroit, Erwin, Long Island, Santa Susanna, Athens, Dover and Menlo Park, and this list isn't definative. Even the WNC only identifies immediate deaths as a result of these accidents, because no-one knows how widely contaminated the areas around some of these plants were - The sodium reactor meltdown at Santa Susanna is credited with releasing over 1300 curies of Iodine 131 and 15 grammes of Plutonium, all within 50 km of Los Angeles.

Nuclear might be the only realistic short-term answer, and the health impacts of nuclear power may be smaller than coal-power (in terms of asthma, for example), but we need to be honest about the risks and past history of nuclear power generation safety.

[Something Very Fishy.............]

Re the Chernobyl programme; when I watched it my view was that I did not for one moment believe the figures for attributable deaths. Years after Hiroshima people are still dying; Chernobyl will be no different, and given the huge numbers of soldiers and civilians sent in to fight the fire the number of deaths given (was it 17 or something), when compared to the accounts of radiation burns and skin literally falling of people's faces and limbs, totally laughable.

I found the figures extraordinary - kudos to those who were stating it for keeping a straight face. In the whole debate there has been hardly any discussion on the safety of nuclear power - I suppose in order to have this debate, you need to have the facts, and they're rarely made available.

[Something Very Fishy.............]

The supposed link between nuclear power and weapons is simply playing on emotion and is one of the best reasons why the whole issue should be looked at by a scientific panel who can best objectively reach some conclusion.

Why then does the IAEA term all states with nuclear power generation capabilities (with the exception of one or two countries with reactors incapable of producing sufficient HEU or plutonium) as latent nuclear weapons states? Why did Swedish physicist Hannes Alven, a Nobel Prize laureate call 'the peaceful atom and the military atom' siamese twins'?

Civil nuclear programmes are intrinsically linked to military programmes. That doesn't mean that all countries who have a civil programme choose to engage in military research (though most do) or that they intend to create nuclear weapons (most probably don't), but the vast majority could do so with a change of policy which is, at the outside, an election away. Civil nuclear programmes are therefore by nature contributory to proliferation, whether the nation states involved chose to create and deploy nuclear weapons or not. That's not emotive, it's a dispassionate assessment of the process of acquiring sufficient equipment, raw materials and personnel skills to run a civillian nuclear programme. It's also reflected in evidence gathered by the IAEA during NNPT compliance checks.

That's not to say the risk isn't worth taking, but dismissing the risk as emotive doesn't stop it from existing.

If we're going to have a genuine, open and realistic debate on our future energy requirements, then we need all the cards on the table, and we need to be open and honest about the risks, impacts and benefits of all methods of power delivery, including realistic assessments of what energy conservation could deliver.

The original subject of the thread, the programme on the impact of Chernobyl, was an interesting watch, though it was very careful to use the term 'attributable' deaths - very careful wording, for a reason I suspect. Similarly, the Chernobyl radiation issue is complicated by the general rise in background radiation as a result of open-air weapons tests, reactor meltdown tests, reactor disposal and poor-quality storage and re-processing facilities largely, though not exclusively in the former Soviet Union.

I also wish, when the safety of nuclear reactors are discussed, that we get a bit more on the real safety record. Everyone knows about Chernobyl, and a fair number remember Three Mile Island in 1979. In the UK we are aware of a fire and then beach discharge at Windscale, then Sellafied in 1957 and 1983. There are, of course many others.

[Snow Wintry/precipitation Reports 16th-18th March 06]

Recent moderate snow shower in grantham has left a covering on everything except the main roads.

[Snow/wintry Precipitation Reports 3rd March 2006]

Light snow falling here - has been for approx 45 minutes - very fine but a light covering on cars, pavements.

[Sunday 26th February 2006]

bitter wind chill (though temp is presently hovering between 3 and 4 degrees c - frequent showers of rain and hail in the last hour, sunny in between.

[Snow/wintry Precipitation Reports, February 23rd 2006]

Light snow in Grantham and parts of Lincolnshire south and west of Sleaford. Very light and settling on cars but not on roads.