A successful wind farm close to the Lake District national park is one of the sites recently approved by the Government for a new generation of nuclear power plants.
From the Guardian:
One of the oldest and most efficient wind farms in Britain is to be dismantled and replaced by a nuclear power station under plans drawn up by the German-owned power group RWE.
The site at Kirksanton in Cumbria – home to the Haverigg turbines – has just been approved by the government for potential atomic newbuild in a move that has infuriated the wind power industry.
Colin Palmer, founder of the Windcluster company, which owns part of the Haverigg wind farm, said he was horrified that such a plan could be considered at a time when Britain risks missing its green energy targets and after reassurance from ministers that nuclear and renewables were not incompatible.
In a masterful understatement which belies the local anger and bewilderment at the lack of early consultation, Matthew Clayton of Triodos Renewables, the company which owns three turbines on the site said:
“It’s staggering that they [ministers] don’t exclude areas that are already productive sites for renewable technologies as part of the initial screening process. It just isn’t very joined up. They’re stamping out prime wind sites with arguably a much less sustainable technology.”
Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said recently:
“A new generation of nuclear power stations will be a colossal mistake, regardless of where they are built. They are hugely expensive, dangerous and will take too long to build.
“There is a real danger that the government is becoming too close to the big energy companies. The best answer to Britain’s needs is a massive expansion of renewable energy. If billions of pounds are wasted on new nuclear sites, the money simply won’t be available to do this.”
Sign the petition against nuclear power at http://ourcampaign.org.uk/no2nuclear and encourage people you know to do the same.
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15 Comments
Thank goodness for that,
This country will be running out of power in the next 10 years even if we build more power stations at twice the rate we are currently. Wind power is a tiny amateur only addition to the UK’s power needs and is ok for DIY projects and rural homesteads.
Renewable energy is an oxymoron ! If you mean generated from raw materials that don’t run out then nuclear is obviously your best option. Presumably wind isn’t as viable as so called global warming would require there to be far less wind or else we would have global cooling!
Wave technology might work as according to the alarmist anti nature warmers we are all going to be under 7 feet of sea sometime very soon
This presumably means that the coal or gas-fired power required to back-up the intermittent performance of this wind farm will also no longer be required. Good result for planet earth and the taxpayer surely?
I would love to sign the petitiion, but I’m afraid I can’t, on account of how I don’t really agree with it. I don’t see how the next generation of power generation can be anything other than at least partially nuclear, if we are serious about climate change.
However, I quite agree that this proposal is ludicrous. In no way should renewables lose out to nuclear, and this seems a particularly obviously avoidable case of such a thing happening.
Go to Rye. Park at the bottom of the hill, walk up through the town, on past the church, and stand at the parapet by the castle. What do you see? The great expanse of Romney Marsh punctuated only by occasional church towers and a myriad of willows? Yes. And also a clutch of hideous great wind-turbines despoiling this unique landscape. By contrast, the distant hump of Dungeness Nuclear Power Station is a benign presence on the horizon.
Green hairshirters will tell us that beautiful landscapes benefit people, and people don’t matter, only “the planet”. Well, if there are still Lib Dems who wish to be associated with the Puritan Losers Party (aka the “Greens”), please count me out.
Nuclear power may not be pretty, but I cannot see a realistic alternative.
Actually (though I’m happy enough with some nuclear in the mix) I think the aesthetics are a matter of opinion. I think wind turbines are beautiful, and would happily have one in my back yard, if I could afford a back yard.
I’m with Alix. The wind turbines I’ve seen are beautiful: they add to, rather than take away from, the scene. That said, I’m sure it would be possible to find a really ugly one that I wouldn’t like!
Another vote for wind turbines being, on the whole, actually rather beautiful. They have a certain majestic quality to them, and are far preferrable to, say, pylons, which people like Sesenco never seem to find the energy to decry with quite so much vehemence as wind turbines. See also George Monbiot’s point that so many CPRE groups seem a lot more bothered about wind turbines than, say, open cast coal mining.
I think the aesthetics of wind turbines are all in the mind, probably. That’s the only reasonable explanation for the extraordinary correlation between one’s stance on them and one’s aesthetic judgement of them.
Oh, and Sesenco:
“Green hairshirters will tell us that beautiful landscapes benefit people, and people don’t matter, only “the planet”.”
Rot. It is precisely because so many people stand to suffer an awful lot as a result of climate change that “Green hairshirters” say what they do (if they are anything like myself, anyway).
Dumbest comment I’ve read on the web all day
“he was horrified that such a plan could be considered at a time when Britain risks missing its green energy targets”
Ok so assuming Green means no Green house gases then
Surely the only way we can meet them is by using nuclear?
Alternatively we could
SCRAP the CAP
CAP as in “The common agricultural policy” whereby
rich, white, green welly wearing, middle Englanders
are subsidized by us tax payers
to do nothing
they could be growing bio-fuels
but the CAP means rich white green welly wearing farmers get to actually get paid to do nothing
they get paid with our money actually
makes you think we come so far since the days that our forefathers worked as a servants for rich land owners
I do believe it was Thomas Paine who said something to the effect that actually
The landowners owe us money for making money from our land
SCRAP the CAP
and lets get some efficient usage of the land that
1) lowers food prices
2) Helps the environment by producing very profitable bio-fuels
3) F@cks over rich white people
The only way we can save the environment is by taking the land off the rich upper class people
(Its not taking cus as soon as we cut the subsidies they lose control of it)
and giving it to privately owned enterprises that can deliver to us food and GREEN fuel at a reasonable price
For anyone who wants to raed a reasonable assement of how we can run a green economy
please read this book
http://www.withouthotair.com/
download a PDF for free here
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.ht
Crazy! We need energy use reduction and renewables not unsustainable nuclear power.
(more wind turbine votes at planning today … had to leave early so didn’t vote but we are approving more than we refuse)
“We need energy use reduction”
Not really
thats the last thing we need
we need to encourage growth in energy consumption in the third world
when Africans have plasma screen TV’s and Internet access fossil fuels won’t be sufficient to supply to world’s energy needs and hence
alt-energy will be cost afordable
Cheney’s UK spokesman on the 9/11 Truth Movement, Mr George Monbiot, is talking claptrap, as usual.
Perhaps Monbiot is too young to remember the 1970s, when the CPRE led a highly publicised campaign to stop open-cast coal mining in the Vale of Belvoir. (Yes, he was too young; he was still at Stowe, fees paid by his rich father.)
Incidentally, the first Green Party activist I ever met (it was called the “Ecology Party” in those days) told me his party was strongly in favour of digging up Leicestershire for coal. “We’re not pretty pretty environmentalists,” he told me. (The man came from an elite family and was subsequently done for possessing indecent images of children – sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)
The guy who says that I have never objected to electricity pylons reminds me of apologists for the Soviet Union who never failed to accuse those who criticised the human rights record of that country of not excoriating South Africa, Chile, etc, with the same vehemence. Didn’t matter if it was true or false, they always said it.
Actually, I have objected to electricity pylons, but it is a bit of a waste of breath to do so, because they are built by statutory undertakers who don’t require planning permission. The other day I was on Cleeve Hill in Gloucestershire and I was appalled to see a line of pylons that were almost as high as the hill.
The gentleman who lays into the CAP has a point. Believe it or not, one of the few good things the Labour government has done is use some of the subsidy to pay farmers to replant hedges. Does that make Gordon Brown a “pretty pretty environmentalist”? I hope so.
Sesenco: I didn’t say anything about you, I just said people like you (by which I meant people who express opinions akin to those you expressed in your comment). I obviously know little about your own positions, beyond what you wrote, so I was addressing a generality.
As for CPRE, the guy Monbiot interviewed on the subject seemed to be too young, too. If they campaigned on it in the 70s, good for them. Doesn’t mean they aren’t being one-track-minded now, though.
We need a whole bunch of stuff in the mix for the future, including energy efficiency (it’s a no brainer when it’s cost effective), wind (we’ve got the best wind resource in the world) and nuclear (even though we had the most amateur nuclear programme in the world, with no two nukes alike).
But, we need to be aware of the scale. A nuke is likely to give at least 7,959,000 MWh per year [1]. The wind turbines yielded 6,381 MWh in their best year[2]. That’s a thousand time less. Given that wind and nuclear are about equal in terms of CO2 emissions per MWh, it would be daft to reject this site solely because of the turbines. But, if another equally good site is available, it would be better to leave the turbines in place.
[1] Sizewell B’s poorest performance – 1999 http://snurl.com/gz9p5 [www_iaea_org]
[2] also, coincidentally, 1999 http://www.baywind.co.uk/baywind_windfarm.asp?ID=WDF6&catID=3
“Presumably wind isn’t as viable as so called global warming would require there to be far less wind or else we would have global cooling!”
Not true. Wind can be warm wind or cold wind, but that’s not important. What’s important is the frequency and strength of the wind. Wind, being movement of air particles, is just simply kinetic energy, and it is this movement of air that can be used to drive turbines.
And actually under global warming, hurricanes should become more frequent and stronger, so global warming increases the wind we get.
Wind may seem cold to you, but it carries a lot of energy (though not as much as nuclear: Simon Hughes is wrong to rule it out, and I think the poll on this site agrees with me).