...on dumping the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the planetary atmosphere.
The wind isn't blowing anywhere in the UK right now. The Germans have a word for this situation - Dunkelflaute - and I have quantitatively, downloading CAISO *.csv files, a couple of weeks worth data on California's Dunkelflaute event in the weeks before the equinox. As I wind down my tenure here, I may post it.
Over a period of weeks, two small buildings in California, the beautiful Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on a twelve acre footprint surrounded by 700 acres of virgin Chaparral, was routinely and consistently producing more energy than over a thousand square miles of desert and mountain wind industrial parks.
Predictably, because we live in age of the celebration of ignorance, it is the Diablo Canyon plant that will shut and not the vast distributed trash laced across California.
If the Independent Scots wish to destroy their aquatic ecosystems, jacking up microplastics and other shit in them, to provide tidal energy - after half a century of wild cheering all over the world, it remains a completely useless and worthless and trivial form of energy - that will be their business. It won't be "green." Just as is the case with wind power, destroying wilderness, including aquatic wilderness, to make industrial parks to provide diffuse and unreliable energy will be a crime against the future.
Hydro is slightly less obnoxious than wind, tidal, and solar, but it always amuses me that the Sierra club was founded by John Muir to prevent the destruction of wilderness - in this case the Hetch Hetchy valley, a battle he lost - to construct a dam. The current membership, who diligently drive their electric SUV's to the mall to buy their Sierra Club Calendars - have never seen an offshore landscape that they don't want to tear apart with diesel barges hauling carbon dioxide intensive concrete, to convert into an industrial park that will be landfill (or sea fill) in 25 years, nor have they ever seen a mountain top that has been torn pieces for service roads to industrial parks for wind turbines of which they don't approve. Probably these modern oblivious bourgeois types, unlike their founder, will never see a dam they don't like. Maybe like David Brower, they can trade the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon, I don't know.
However, returning to California, even dams are unreliable sources of energy, because after all they depend on weather, weather that is being destabilized by climate change because cheering for so called "renewable energy" has failed miserably to address climate change.
If Independent Scotland built a few reactors along the coast, either in our out of the EU or Britain, they could dispense with all this worthless garbage and have completely carbon dioxide free electricity. If they build high temperature reactors to do what Calder Hall was designed to do, albeit in a time of primitive materials science, and make fuels, they can be totally independent for all forms of energy to do this.
Some countries in the EU are climate disasters, in particular Germany, and don't get it at all. They have decided that "nuclear energy is too dangerous," the obvious corollary being that "climate change is not too dangerous."
The EU, like everyone else on the planet, should ask which killed more people this year, nuclear energy or climate change?
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