"Java Jive" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 22 Aug 2013 14:44:09 +0100, "Tim+"
wrote:

Whatever they might have said, pylons are a *necessary* evil. There's
not
an economic alernative if you want affordable electricity in your home.

They bury the cables in the towns and cities, why not in the
countryside?

Which just goes to show that two blights *do* make a wrong.

:-)

I'm no fan of pylons but I accept their necesssity. I *like* reliable
affordable electricity.

So do I. I'm just pointing out that to criticise wind turbines for
being a blight on the landscape but not to complain about the much
larger number of pylons is nothing more or less than bias, pure and
simple.

Without subsidies, windfarms wouldn't exist and
they do not provide secure or affordable power.

Without subsidies, and being an offshoot of the nuclear arms race,
nuclear power certainly would never have come about. Without
subsidies, no new nuclear power stations are likely to be built in
this country, see the projected costs given in my reply to Tony.

As we *don't* need them,
it's perfectly reasonable to rail against windmills but not agains pylons
(which we do need).

But it's only your opinion that we don't need wind turbines and do
need pylons, and, although it's an opinion widely shared within this
group, it's perhaps not as widely shared elsewhere, and even if it is,
it's still only an opinion.

All I'm trying to point out that this complaint about wind turbines
being a blight on the landscape is one of several common examples of
bias both within this ng and the wider media when discussing such
issues.

It seems that when discussing power generation, the mortar boards are
cast aside and replaced by the pointed hats and druidic robes. Here
are some more examples that spring to mind:

Pejorative terms like NIMBY are applied to those who are anti nuclear
power or shale gas, but not to those who are anti wind turbines.

Wind turbines are widely criticised for being heavily subsidised, but
it is equally widely ignored that the nuclear generating industry has
gobbled up more than half of the world subsidies to the power
generating industry to date (note: when I last checked this link
thoroughly and extended Table 1 as below, there appeared to be
summation errors in it, nevertheless the overall point stood and still
stands that fission has gobbled up half the total R&D subsidies known
to IEA, equalling all the other areas, including fusion, added
together):

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf68.html

Table 1 (extended with summation errors corrected, and this will wrap
of course - you'll have c'n'p into Notepad or equivalent and replace
any spurious newlines by tabs)
Year 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 Total
Percent
Consvn 333 955 725 510 1240 1497 1075 6335 9.74%
Fossils 587 2564 1510 1793 1050 612 1007 9123 14.02%
Renews 208 1914 843 563 809 773 1113 6223 9.56%
Fission 4808 6794 6575 4199 3616 3406 3168 32566
50.04%
Fusion 597 1221 1470 1055 1120 893 715 7071 10.87%
Other 893 1160 787 916 3756 5.77%
Total 7426 14608 11910 9036 7835 7181 7078 65074
100.00%

Another point about subsidies that is widely overlooked is that
generations indefinitely (for all practical purposes) into the future
will have to bear the cost of managing, storing, and guarding (against
potential terrorist attack) nuclear waste, but, unlike us creating the
waste now, will have zero benefit from so doing. In effect it is
being demanded of the future, without being given any say in the
matter, that it should subsidise the present. This too is never
mentioned when subsidies to wind generation are criticised.


You are excatly correct.
Most of the people here are too thick to see it.