It is wintertime in Amsterdam. They skipped fall this year, just like they skip spring as well… welcome to the new globally warmed world.
Part of it being wintertime means it gets dark pretty fast in this upper part of continental Europa. Which of course means, more time with the lights on.. and that is where my subject of today came to mind: energy.
It powers your lamp. Or that fan on the powerbook that is now getting very loud cause Ive probably left it on all day. Electricity is obviously vital; so what do you know about where you electricity comes from? By all means, if you know, write it in the comments.
I’m going to take a guess about mine here in the Netherlands. I believe it is nuclear. Nuclear and perhaps parially windpower, since the city is basically surrounded by those beautiful white one-legged animals. Much of central Europe is actually nuclear powered, a side effect of having destroyed themselves in WWI and II, plus the investment dollars from the US of A that were likely earmarked for those big Montgomery Burns style cooling towers.
Of course it provides alot of power to alot of people, all over the world. And I was just reading how the UN’s nuclear agency is going to go on a PR mission to promote building more nuclear plants. Sounds lovely in their words. Clean, efficient, safe, powerful sources of energy.
But I can’t help but think of the waste. The umm.. nuclear waste. The waste they still don’t know what to do with or how to get rid of it. In fact, they know they can’t get rid of it. In Nevada they built a giant radiation dump under a mountain called Yucca, where they believe they can hide all the nuclear waste and they won’t wake up one day to find their groundwater glows in the dark and they’ve got lots of previously unheard of cancers. In France I think I saw a report about a similar idea for disposal center where they’ll just pile it up in neat little piles for about 1,000 years when it won’t be as deadly.
It is not that I don’t like having power for my fridge or to charge my batteries, i recognize the necessity. But the choice of nuclear, and the continued investment in making more plants, that I cannot understand. For a world that still has not resolved IF there is even a way to handle the hazardous waste that comes from making this energy, it seems rather short sighted to push ahead with making more.
My suggestion, besides not investing in more nuclear, is to seek other sources. I’m not a scientist, I just play one on the blogosphere; but I know we have a never ending list of intellegent and innovative minds that could surely find another solution. Hell, maybe every city should surround itself in pretty wind generators. Or let them persue something more powerful… but please… let it be sustainable and beneficial to future generations, not some crazy burst of energy that leaves a deadly mess which cannot be cleaned.
This plan gets the support of the conservative Prime Minister, of course. And it certainly rings true with the rhetoric of his neighbor to the south. But the way pro-nuclear lobbyists and the big companies behind them refer to this as a nuclear “renaissance” is disturbing. Be it in Canada, Berlin, Japan, or Brazil… the world still has not figured out how to store radioactive waste in a safe way. Better yet, we don’t even know IF that can be done at all. In Nevada they want to put it under a mountain. In Europe they seem to pass it back and forth by rail between Germany and France. In Japan… what do the Japanese do with their waste?