Tuesday 22 March 2011

Oo-er...

According to this week's Fun Online Poll, a quarter of people (including me) are more favourably (or less unfavourably) inclined towards nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, for reasons which Electro-Kevin articulated thusly:

I'm more positive about nuclear power than ever. The Fukushima plant should be a ringing endorsement to everyone. Hit by a scale 9 earthquake, a 20 foot Tsunami, various explosions and still contained. It doesn't get worse than that and ours will never be subjected to anything like the stresses... short of a nuclear attack by which time it won't matter anyway.

Lo and behold, from George Moonbat's article in today's Guardian:

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.


I thought that people like Moonbat are our political compass - whatever they say is probably wrong and we just say the opposite? Bit of a moral dilemma here: do I now pretend that I supported nuclear power all along, or decide that I am actually less favourably inclined? Hmmm.

7 comments:

Old BE said...

That is quite worrying. I now think that perhaps we should go back to subsistence farming. But doesn't Monbiot agree with that too?

View from the Solent said...

Luke 15:7 (King James, of course)

Mark Wadsworth said...

BE, I'm not going back to subsistence farming, if other people want to do so, then good luck to them. That's not a collective decision like nuclear power.

VFTS, indeed.

Deniro said...

Talk of dose is innapropriate. The main danger from the disaster is from radioactive particles. So yes you should ignore Moonbat he is wrong.

Anonymous said...

I say go nuclear.
I think the chances of freezing to death are probably much higher than exposure to a nuclear accident.
When you look at the historical fugures even including to poorly run Chernobyl reactor.
It's just over 4000.
It is estimated by age concern that about 30,000 people die in the UK each year as a direct result of being too poor to adequetly heat their homes.

Robin Smith said...

Yes well you struggle with this because you dont do morals. Otherwise this is a very easy question to answer: observe facts, speak the truth. Always.

Monbiot calls a lot of people liars. Yet he also is a liar. Ignore him. He was definitely very very very anti nuclear when I was a climate change fanatic supporting nuclear power 5 years ago. Now he is saying he was never for or against it. A liar and a coward.

Observe facts, speak the truth. This is a very simple equation.

neil craig said...

Ah but Moonbat still says, after mentioning that he has finally noticed that the radiation at Three Mile Island couldn't hurt a fly, that he still hates the "liars" of the nuclear industry who told him exactly that 30 years ago.

So he stilllike eco-fascist liars, of whom he is one, and hates those who tell the truth, so he is still wrong.