Wind Mill Blade Could Cut Your Head Off! And Pigs Can Fly!

Still on the nuclear power issue. The Sunday Telegraph has an article on "Nuclear families". Its about people living close to nuclear plants. I quoted it entirely unedited. "The main problem is the orange glow in the sky at night, because they floodlight the building like a Christmas tree" says Sheila. "But in the day you wouldn't know it was there. We're not worried about the contamination. There is fisherman nearby who catches sea bass in the nearby estuary and sells them to top restaurants in London. We also eat fish and our own home grown vegetables. Hinckley Point asked us to keep a food diary. For a week we had to put a portion of each meal into a jar, which was sent off to be analysed. It came out 100% pure. " Still in Mrs Flint's medicine box there is one omnious reminder of the possibility that one day something could go wrong, even now, when Hinckley Point is in the early stages of decommissioning. "Every year we are sent a fresh pack of potassium iodate tablets, designed to inhibit the uptake of radioactive iodine in the event of a nuclear leak" says Sheila. We also get a leaflet and a free calendar. If anything ever went wrong, the first thing we would know about it is that the siren would go off."

So what have you learned from this so far?
What I learnt is that nuclear power is even costlier than I thought. There is the security issue which means the plant is lit up like a "Christmas tree" (if you read my previous entry, you know what I think on wasting energy like that). There is yearly medicine to supply to the homes and a free calendar? Oh yeah! I am moving next to Hinckley Point right now so I can get my mitts on one of those! But the most amazing thing in this article is how similar this scenario is to the movie Erin Brockowich. The plant had convinced the neighbourhood of safety so much that they had a hard time accepting the truth.
So anyway, I have changed my mind, I am not moving! The free calendar isn't worth it afterall. And I shall never eat fish in London again!

Wind Farms do not require their spending money on medication and testing the neighbourhood, not even free calendars. Neither are they the source of materials, used for weapons of mass-destruction. And it's impossible to get sick from them... Nearly as the Telegraph article brought up an interesting argument.
It's about property prices in the vicinity. Sheila talks again, this time about house prices. "When we moved here, we had a choice between this house and the house at Holford, several miles further away," says Sheila. Both were the same price. But now we've had to drop our price, that house is on the market for 100,000 more than ours." Strangely, though, the nuclear power station isn't the trouble, she says. We nearly sold the property earlier on, but the buyer pulled out when he heard that there were plans to put up a wind farm next door to the power station. Fortunately the plans have been shelved for now. They were frightened the blades would come off and puncture the reactor."

Oh Come on'! The blade of a wind generator could puncture a nuclear reactor? Is this the best they can come up with, in argument against wind farms? (apart from the alleged spoiling of vistas but then again, which is more of an eyesore, a bunch of thick, concrete chimneys and industrial buildings puffing smoke and glow orange or a line of slender, beautifully designed wind mills) I'm gonna stop shaking my head before it falls off.