At 08:43 AM 7/8/01, Jim Sharkey wrote:
>Jeroen wrote
>
> >>>>Not to mention when one of the blades breaks off in a high wind
> >>>>and goes flying through the air like an unguided guillotine . . .
> >>>
> >>>If people say they can build something as complex as a safe nuclear
> >>>reactor, surely those people must be capable of building relatively
> >>>simple things like safe windmills, with blades that don't break
> >>>off...
> >>
> >>One can only assume that Jeroen's sense of humor circuits were in
> >>the "Off" position when he wrote this. :-)
> >
> >Oh? Why?
>
>Well, it certainly seemed to me that the whole guillotine thing had tongue
>planted firmly in cheek. I mean, one just doesn't read copious stories of
>windmill-based decapitations. Somehow, the vision of people running
>panicked through the streets in a manner normally reserved for attacks by
>Godzilla over the dangers of windmills just cracks me up. Maybe it's just
>me...
(A) Yes, tongue was planted firmly in cheek when that was written.
(B) However, it wasn't Jeroen's tongue, viz:
(1) At 13:47 4-7-01 -0700, Darryl Shannon wrote:
>>First of all, France and Japan have
>>the biggest nuclear power programs of any countries. Do they have much
>>higher cancer rates than other countries?
(2) At 11:38 AM 7/5/01, Jeroen wrote:
>They (and many other countries' governments) certainly don't seem to have
>unlimited faith in the safety of their own nuclear reactors. The website
>of the International Nuclear Safety Center has a map of Europe that shows
>the locations of the various nuclear power plants. Notice that there are
>quite a lot of them built near national borders and near oceans.
>
>http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/europe.html
>
>(For better image quality, look at the .PDF file that is linked to at that
>page)
>
>There's only one reason I can think of to build nuclear power plants near
>the border: if something goes wrong, part of the problem won't be *your*
>problem. If nuclear plants are as safe as the nuclear energy advocates
>want us to believe, why aren't they built where most users of electricity
>are: near cities throughout the country? As Dan pointed out earlier,
>building power plants far from the people who will use the generated
>electricity leads to a lot of line loss.
>
>The same goes for building reactors near the ocean: if something goes
>wrong, at least part of the problem will drift out to sea (and who cares
>what damage it might do there, right?). That, and it makes it easy to dump
>the coolant. (No, you don't build them there so you can use the sea water
>as coolant -- it's too salt, the pipes would corrode).
>
>This practice of building near the border isn't something typical
>European, BTW. The link below leads to a map of the US, that shows the
>locations of the various nuclear power plants. Guess what: many of them
>are built near state borders.
>
>http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/north_america.html
>
>(For better image quality, look at the .PDF file that is linked to at that
>page)
>
>BTW, I also noticed a lot of nuclear power plants were built near rivers,
>no doubt because it makes it easy to get rid of coolant. Are there any
>recent studies on-line regarding the condition of those rivers? If you
>continuously dump lots of warm/hot water into a river that has a different
>temperature, you stand a good chance of doing damage to the river's ecosystem.
(3) At 16:43 5-7-01 -0500, Erik Reuter wrote:
>>I've noticed that many countries like to build their cities near oceans
>>and rivers. I guess they don't have much confidence in their cities.
(4) At 05:29 PM 7/5/01, Jeroen wrote:
>I've noticed that many people like to live together in cities with
>millions of other people, but I have yet to notice millions of people
>moving because they want to live close to a nuclear power plant.
(5) At 06:22 PM 7/5/01, Adam C. Lipscomb wrote:
>How many people want to live near any power generation station? I would
>rather live near a nuclear plant than a coal or oil burning plant, and I
>hear the noise from "wind farms" is simply godawful.
(6) At 03:10 AM 7/6/01, Ronn Blankenship wrote:
>Not to mention when one of the blades breaks off in a high wind and goes
>flying through the air like an unguided guillotine . . .
(7) At 05:19 AM 7/7/01, Jeroen wrote:
>If people say they can build something as complex as a safe nuclear
>reactor, surely those people must be capable of building relatively simple
>things like safe windmills, with blades that don't break off...
(8) At 07:59 AM 7/7/01, Ronn Blankenship wrote:
>I suspect that one difference between them is that the nuclear power
>plants are manned and monitored continuously (and hopefully Homer Simpson
>is _not_ representative of the typical employee), while windmill farms are
>generally built in rather remote locations.
>
>There is a windmill farm out near Laramie, Wyoming, that is visible off to
>the north from I-80. When I was out that way last May, the interstate
>between Cheyenne and Laramie was closed temporarily due to a snowstorm
>just as I got to Cheyenne, so I had to take a back road that allowed me to
>get a view of the windmills from the other side. I was rather surprised
>when I noticed how many of them were not turning and how many had one or
>more blades missing. I suspect that it is so difficult to do maintenance
>on them during the winter that they have to just let things break and then
>try to fix all of it during the summer. I did kinda wonder where the
>missing blades landed, though . . .
(9) At 07:09 AM 7/7/01, Jim Sharkey wrote:
>One can only assume that Jeroen's sense of humor circuits were in the "Off"
>position when he wrote this. :-)
(10) At 01:49 PM 7/7/01, Jeroen wrote:
>Oh? Why?
(11) At 08:43 AM 7/8/01, Jim Sharkey wrote:
>Well, it certainly seemed to me that the whole guillotine thing had tongue
>planted firmly in cheek. I mean, one just doesn't read copious stories of
>windmill-based decapitations. Somehow, the vision of people running
>panicked through the streets in a manner normally reserved for attacks by
>Godzilla over the dangers of windmills just cracks me up. Maybe it's just
>me...
HTH.
-- Ronn! :~)
----------------------------------
"Humor...it is a difficult concept."
--Lt. Saavik (Kirstie Alley) to Admiral Kirk (William Shatner)
in _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn_
