March 16, 2009

Let’s not have an argument

Greenpeace piss me off. They’re as bad as a religion. Once a dogma is acquired, it is stuck to resolutely and evidence that contradicts that dogma is shouted down or ignored. These are the same luddites whose opposition to GM food would allow the world's poorest to starve because of evidence-free scaremongering.
No offence to Romania, but at least this shitty little campaign is restricted to that country.
What’s so bad about it?
How about saving the planet? The “radiation will mutate you” issue assumes that nuclear technology has remained stagnant for decades and, therefore, we daren’t use it.
There is a significant case to be made for reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuelled power stations and switching to nuclear energy. These ads effectively kill that argument without even presenting minor details such as, for example, the facts.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll give an amen to that, brutha. The anti-GM sentiment prevalent in this country is pretty embarrassing, shops use GM-free labels like a badge of pride. When it comes to things like that and nuclear power people are much more willing to listen to ill-informed, sensationalist scare stories than any evidence.

Bah, bloody people.

Anonymous said...

You probably picked this up from an ad blog or something but there is a short explanation for this (in which I am not defending Greenpeace by any means)

Romania currently has one nuclear reactor active which supplies about 10% of the energy

The second plant is to start working from this year onwards, with reactors 3 and 4 in need of funding till 2016 or so, so that's quite a long while

What Greenpeace don't like is that the reactors don't meet German/US standards or something, the story didn't interest me a lot - and their main argument is that they're built on the same framework as the ones from Chernobyl; we know what happened there BUT what the masses don't know about Chernobyl was that the disaster was a bad managerial decision.

All (naive imo) people need to take away from this advert and what they know of Chernobyl is nuclear energy is bad. If boom, then six digits and three heads.

I agree it is bad because I've visited the power plant myself while they were building the second reactor. I'm totally for it not because it would give Romania energetic independence but because we know what happens when Russia goes 'lolno' and cuts of gas. Relying on gas from Russia or anywhere else is a big problem for everyone so having an infrastructure for reducing the damage in case something like that happens again is probably my main argument for building the reactors.

SchizoFishNChimps said...

Thanks Andrea, that's a really good explanation. It does allow Greenpeace to become a conspiracy theorist's dream, what with the Cold War connections between anti-nuclear groups and the USSR.