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Originally Posted by freefeet  And North Sea oil rigs! Those things take some of the worse punishment of any man made structures on the planet. It seems fairly obvious that if we can make an oil rig to withstand the environment of the North Sea we can make a wind turbine tower to last more than 20 years. |
Bearing in mind what I said about high tension cables earlier in the thread...did you know that oil rig plumes cause incredibly high casualties among migrating birds in bad weather...then again, lighthouses are not innocent either. I am not being cyinical here, it just goes to show how complicated these issues are.
Ted - I am not aware the RSPB has ignored the nuclear debate but I think we ought to have some cynicism about Tony Blair's comments of a few years a go. This has certain parallels with the debate about a new 'London' airport because basically, the real desire is to expand Gatwick but a legal block prevents this and I suspect given that BAA have announced the sale of the airport, the legal block will not be lifted when it expires next year. A few years ago there was a proposal to build a new airport at Cliffe...before that it was Maplin Sands...now Boris Johnson has proposed another airport in the middle of the Thames Estuary. This smacks of 'give us what we want and no one gets hurt' (to quote U2 in Vertigo) or put another way, give in on opposing expansion of current airports or the wildlife area gets it. To my mind, Tony Blair was voicing a lack of patience with the way too many wind farms were being opposed and trotted out nuclear power because he knew it was the one the public has least trust in. At the time, the RSPB stated that they did not think nuclear power was the way forward, which neither supports nor condemns it. As far as I can tell, the RSPB's policy on sustainable energy fully allows them to review situations should the information reveal something of more importance to the overal debate...maybe we should all take a little bit from that and keep our minds open even if that is not normal human nature. At the end of the day, there are few short of the industrialists who think we are not facing a lot of problems even if we disagree on the finer detail