$1.2-2 billion dollar windfarm stirs opposition in New Zealand.

[NNadir]

The people who will decide whether the Project Hayes wind farm can proceed are operating in a policy vacuum, it was claimed yesterday.

Meanwhile, opponents of the wind farm say they are not dispirited about the Government’s decision to back the project, and they still want the project abandoned.

Minister for the Environment and Dunedin South MP David Benson-Pope said on Monday a “whole of government“ submission was being worked on, which would indicate government support for the project.

Meridian Energy is planning a ple making these decisions should be as fully informed as possible, both at a regional and national level.

The problem was the Government did not have any energy policy to guide the decisionmakers.

http://www.odt.co.nz/article.php?refid=2006,11,22,3,00300,38a11eb214c8061149d02fd249ebc0df§=4

Shocked Dunedin councillors were forced yesterday to come to terms with the wideranging effects Meridian Energy’s Project Hayes wind farm could have on the city. A council committee has moved to oppose the wind farm, after discovering it could have “significant” adverse effects on Dunedin, even though the development will be built outside the city boundaries and the council has limited power to affect it. Some councillors were angry they had only recently heard details of the effects. These include Meridian’s expectations of a total of 76,900 vehicle movements, and the possibility of trucks weighing up to 125 tonnes and as long as 60m, rumbling down Riccarton Rd in Mosgiel, Mountfort St in Outram, and the Old Dunstan Rd. The wind farm was also expected to have adverse effects on the character and amenity of rural-zoned land, significant outstanding landscape, and fire safety, a report by council resource consent manager Alan Worthington said

http://www.windaction.org/news/6323

NIMBY, NIMBY everywhere.

New Zealand, as I understand it, faces some hard energy decisions in the future. Maybe we'll hear from a New Zealander on the subject. ;-)

[Vorta]

1. Don't burn coal , it gets my hair dirty.

Don't do nuclear, we'll glow in the dark
Don't do hydro, some rare leech might become extinct.
Don't do oil, it supports oppression.
Don't do wind, pigeons are people too.
Don't do wave, you'll mess up my view.

Let's do some technology that doesn't really work yet, maybe never will, but is really clean because it doesn't work.

Oh yeah- don't smoke cigarettes and don't hog the joint.

[NNadir]

2. I really like that locution.

Let's do some technology that doesn't really work yet, maybe never will, but is really clean because it doesn't work.

This explains why those sources of energy that provide the least energy get the most attention, here and elsewhere.

[BeFree]

4. Here comes the sun

This explains why those sources of energy that provide the least energy get the most attention, here and elsewhere.

Yeah, the sun is of no consequence, so we'll just ignore it. LOL

[NNadir]

5. Again, if you know how to interpret data, and you don't, you will understand

that solar electricity is next to useless. It is 50 years old and still has not managed to provide 0.1% of the world's energy. I'm sorry you find that cause for giggling, but this is hardly surprising.

It doesn't surprise me that you are totally confused about what I am saying and are misinterpreting it in a silly way.

All of the LOL bullshit will not do one thing to prevent global climate change. The sun has been shining 4 billion years continuously and still the problem of climate change has come to pass. Maybe you don't get it, but the rest of the planet does.

Here is how the planet is working to address climate change while you giggle:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.htm

[BeFree]

6. Oh yeah

That' kind of attitude is gonna win you a world of friends.

The only reason solar isn't big is that the facists haven't figured out a way to tax it. If solar had the same amount of government support nukes have had we'd all be wired directly to the sun by now.

You can go stick the nuclear waste you'd create, up your you know what. In fact, that is an experiment you could do just to prove how *safe* it is. You wouldn't last a week. Try me.

[NNadir]

7. I am singularly uninterested in your friendship.

I am also not interested in your theories and pretenses about government support.

My game, irrespective of what you think, is to slow climate change. Such a focus precludes forming friendships with people who are advocating doing nothing about climate change other than to recite mindless (and frankly now ancient) platitudes about solar energy.

If you tally the amount of money spent on solar research in the last 50 years and divide it into the amount of energy it has produced, and compare that with nuclear the numbers are pretty telling.

But then again you would have to know how to manipulate numbers to make the exercise useful, and, again, you don't know anything about numbers. I would do the exercise here but it would be a complete waste of time since your view of energy is inherently religious and does not in any way depend on facts or data.

Solar R&D is going on around the world and has been for some time. For all of the money invested, it has produced very little. Many billions of dollars have been spent on it in the United States, in Japan, in Germany and elsewhere, using both public and private money, and still solar PV energy has yet to produce a single exajoule in a given year. World energy demand, meanwhile is 470 exajoules. This is a serious matter and is not appropriate for childish thinking.

One of the ways to be politically popular is to advocate for solar power. Thus solar power has been funded far beyond the level at which it has returned. This has been true for decades. This does not necessarily mean we should cut off solar research, but only that we should be skeptical of claims that it is realistic to assume that it will be a panacea in the short term. The fact that it is effectively now, after many decades of exploration, a useless tool for addressing climate change must have something to do with the fact that investment in it is still mostly an investment in wishful thinking, the type of wishful thinking that will be fatal to humanity if it is transmuted into an appeal to do nothing.

Almost all of the energy actually produced thus far by solar PV has probably gone into powering up solar promotion websites.

Nuclear energy gives a far greater return. Nuclear energy provides about 30 exajoules of primary energy, and is currently growing at a very rapid pace on an exajoule scale.

There is nothing I can do about your fetish for so called "nuclear waste." Since nobody important on the planet is taking your fetish seriously however, your fetish's importance is null and of no practical consequence. You can whine all you wish, spend hours on the greenpeace and ratical website, but you cannot stop nuclear energy. Humanity as a whole has recognized the critical importance of nuclear energy in addressing climate change.

The fact is that you are not now and never have been able to produce a single person who has been injured by the storage of so called "nuclear waste," even as you assert, in an abuse of language, that it is "dangerous." Your assertions about "danger" are therefore purely absurd and arbitrary. You know zero about the subject. Muttering a crude suggestion about how I should "shove it" does not detract from these facts in any way. It is very clear that you arbitrarily do not extend your fetish about the products of nuclear fission to the products of fossil fuels. This is a profound moral problem, but I am not your mommy or your daddy and I have no responsibility whatsoever for your level of moral development.

Your continuing moral indifference aside, fossil fuels kill, every day, in vast numbers in normal operations. Nuclear power normally doesn't kill, except in the rare case of spectacular failure - limited more or less to a single event, Chernobyl. It follows that Chernobyl sets a limit on the potential for loss of life for nuclear energy, since nearly its entire inventory of fission products and fuel was released to the environment and because its effects have been characterized. It is thus easily shown that one Chernobyl a year would still be orders of magnitude smaller than loss of life from fossil fuels. However there is not one Chernobyl a year. In fact there has only been one Chernobyl event in the 50 years of nuclear operations and we now know how to avoid repeating that event. It follows that nuclear power saves lives. This is a fact. I'm sure you don't like facts, and its clear that you would rather substitute fantasy for facts but tough shit. Facts are what they are. The world is not going to be inspired to continue to kill because you don't get it. On the contrary, the world is building or planning or pondering over 200 new nuclear reactors. With these facts in mind, I am not likely to be inspired to seek your friendship or your respect. I am wholly uninterested in your opinion, since your opinion speaks for itself.

[BeFree]

8. Well, ther's another difference

I do care about other people and how they feel after I interact with them. You, tho, are a challenge. But what you are essentially proposing is foolishness. You propose that the lifestyles that we have developed should continue to grow even more wasteful, being that even more polluting power is produced.

You sit there and claim that nuke waste is not dangerous. Incredible. Simply mind blowing that you can't accept the danger involved in nuke wastes. I don't have to prove nuke wastes have killed anybody, the simple matter that nuke wastes have to be handled by robots and must somehow be buried is proof enough.

I don't know what your gig is but your ramblings here have reached a point that I just couldn't allow you to misinform anyone else. What you are preaching is idiocy. It reminds me of some preachers I have had the displeasure to listen too. You are so far out in your ramblings that you bring shame upon the whole situation.

The facts are that airplane flights are the main cause of high atmosphere pollution, and transportation is the main contributor to co2. Electricity production is a factor and there are ways to limit it, but frankly, if you don't see that a reduction in the wasteful lifestyles of modern peoples is the only way out of environmental destruction, then you are the PROBLEM.

[NNadir]

9. Of course you claim that you don't have to show "danger."

You want to say that nuclear waste is dangerous based on your faith that it is so. Most rational people actually attach the word "danger" to instances of injury. Therefore I am merely pointing out that you are abusing language and appealing to an arbitrary non-standard definition of the word "danger." If I look in the dictionary, I will not see the worda "handled by robots," as a definition of "danger."

Sorry kid, I don't do faith based thinking. If I thought that faith based thinking was worthwhile - and clearly I don't - I would be a Republican.

Again, since the world gets it even if you don't, more than 200 nuclear reactors are on the drawing boards. You cannot "disallow" me to "misinform" anybody. You seriously over-estimate your capabilities, much as you over-estimate the risk of spent nuclear fuel. Your arguments stand or fail on their own merits, and frankly, they have no merit. There are many hundreds of thousands of highly educated people who work with nuclear energy and the facts of the case have been the subject of many millions of scientific publications, all of which are a mystery to you. These are people who have studied in significant detail physical processes such as multi-group neutron diffusion, materials science, like the corrosion properties of zirconium alloys, chemistry, like the oxidation potential of pertechnate in a vadose zone and many high level subjects. Given the primitive and unsophisticated level of objections like yours, the world has rejected your claims in a resounding way.

Actually the need for me to address nuclear ignorance has ameliorated greatly in the last few years. Nuclear opposition has been morally and intellectually discredited, as it should be. I've been at this for many decades, and I can tell you that for a long time it felt as if I were locked in some kind of irrational alternate universe populated by dogmatists devoted to fatal mysticism. More and more though, although the emergency presses against us in a profound way - and I do worry that it is too late - people are echoing the arguments I have made for many years. For a long time I worried that events like the paen to ignorance at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant would be repeated frequently. Now more than 50 countries have nuclear power programs and many new reactors are being built, are on order or are being designed and proposed. Countries as far apart as Nigeria and Vietnam and Argentina are all getting into the act. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, with nuclear capacity now under discussion to rival the output of the extremely dangerous fuel coal. I feel vindicated and I feel greatly relieved. I feel now, in contrast to what I often felt in the past, that it was not a waste of time to expend the effort I spent asserting the truth. At one time, I would have had to worry about the damage to humanity that people like you do, but no longer. I finally have the luxury now of finding you to be merely amusing. Your set has finally, after doing much damage, been rendered harmless.

[Porcupine]

10. We're gonna convert the Solar System to Human Flesh!!!

because we don't have to conserve NOTHING!!! We'll just keep on reproducing at exponetial rates forever. Nuke power will be there to help us couse anything that you slap up against a pile becomes radioactive too. ('cepting Helium, I'm not stupid) There'll always be power.

Plutonium IS forever.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Nimbys are pretty universal, sadly...

... But they are in the minority, so hopefully there will the usual shouting and finger wagging, before it goes ahead anyway.

I'm intrigued by the idea of it being a fire risk, though: Maybe the turbines spin so fast they spontaneously combust. It can get pretty windy down there.

[Nihil]

11. True

> I'm intrigued by the idea of it being a fire risk, though: Maybe the
> turbines spin so fast they spontaneously combust.

No silly, it's bound to be dangerous with all of those fans blowing
the air into the flames ...

:P