So, I just went and slipped into something a little more comfortable. While I'm sure some of you would probably like that, it's not what I'm posting about just now.
As it happens, last Thursday's newspaper was sitting on my bedroom floor. On its front, there's a pretty picture, and a headline like "Howard Says Future Still Nuclear". (By way of pure optimism, I misread it as 'unclear' every time).
The pretty picture was of one of those solar tower power plants, with the rings of mirrors around it1. The picture was taken such that the rings of mirrors made spirally patterns in the picture, kind of like sunflower florets.
And then, suddenly, the agenda looked so much clearer.
A solar power plant is a bit like a sunflower - it turns to face the sun, it looks fairly pretty, it's difficult to hurt people with them, you can safely plant whole fields of them, and they mainly work by happily soaking up warmth and light.
So, of course, the power-wielding neoconservatives must crush. them. all.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, exhibits none of these features. It's messy, it's expensive and it's complicated. It takes a complicated system of checks and balances to make it reasonably 'safe', and even then the byproducts are dangerous to people, plants and animals for millions of years. It uses patently artificial means to achieve its aims. Additionally, terrorists can make nuclear plants a threat to the health, safety and well-being of the populace.
Read that list again. Can you see why nuclear power is so attractive to the right wing? It's like a dear friend, or a long-lost twin, or a clone from the evil mirror universe on the other side of our good mirror universe.
Needless to say, the newspaper's going in the recycle bin tomorrow. It's making me think in slightly stranger ways than usual.
As it happens, last Thursday's newspaper was sitting on my bedroom floor. On its front, there's a pretty picture, and a headline like "Howard Says Future Still Nuclear". (By way of pure optimism, I misread it as 'unclear' every time).
The pretty picture was of one of those solar tower power plants, with the rings of mirrors around it1. The picture was taken such that the rings of mirrors made spirally patterns in the picture, kind of like sunflower florets.
And then, suddenly, the agenda looked so much clearer.
A solar power plant is a bit like a sunflower - it turns to face the sun, it looks fairly pretty, it's difficult to hurt people with them, you can safely plant whole fields of them, and they mainly work by happily soaking up warmth and light.
So, of course, the power-wielding neoconservatives must crush. them. all.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, exhibits none of these features. It's messy, it's expensive and it's complicated. It takes a complicated system of checks and balances to make it reasonably 'safe', and even then the byproducts are dangerous to people, plants and animals for millions of years. It uses patently artificial means to achieve its aims. Additionally, terrorists can make nuclear plants a threat to the health, safety and well-being of the populace.
Read that list again. Can you see why nuclear power is so attractive to the right wing? It's like a dear friend, or a long-lost twin, or a clone from the evil mirror universe on the other side of our good mirror universe.
Needless to say, the newspaper's going in the recycle bin tomorrow. It's making me think in slightly stranger ways than usual.
- The mechanics of such a device are fairly simple - the mirrors track the sun's movement so they can reflect many oodles2 of sunlight onto the top of the tower, which makes heat, which in turn makes electricity. Other designs use a parabolic mirror that reflects oodles of sunlight onto some kind of heat exchange device, and turn that whole unit to steadily follow the sun across the sky. Rinse, repeat, duplicate, etc.
- Also, I'm nominating the oodle as the new SI unit of sunlight, being equal to the amount required to cause Heliogenic Vampire Combustion in an otherwise healthy creature of the night. Large solar arrays use hundreds of kilooodles - or even megaoodles - of sunlight, while a brighter future might involve the strategic deployment of vast gigaoodle solar arrays. To put the oodle in everyday perspective, one millioodle is approximately that amount of sunlight annoyingly reflected into your eyes by the face of an average wristwatch.
