Last updated on March 1, 2013
Yes it is true; the use of wind power is a constant reminder and an insult to all the millions of people that suffered and died in the world wars. And the reason for this is steel.
Steel was used to kill, maim and terrorize countless millions of people from 1914 to 1919 and 1939 to 1945. It was used in rifles, in tanks, in artillery shells and hand grenades. All of it culminating with the steel birds Enola Gay and Bockscar dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Steel and war are forever linked because you simply cannot wage war without steel.
The connection between war and wind power is steel. Practically every wind turbine in the world uses steel. Steel is everywhere in them: in the tower that holds up the turbine; in the gearbox; in the bolts that hold it together, just to mention a few examples. This of course means that wind power always connected with the use of weaponry and war.
Wind power is an insulting tribute to the memory of those who died in the world wars. Turning away from wind power and, in turn, weapons and war should be a true lasting legacy and memorial of those victims.
What?! Wait…
No folks, we haven’t gone completely off our rockers just yet. The arguments above are (of course) pure nonsense. Using steel for killing and using steel for producing electricity are completely unrelated. The start of this article is just to show you through irony how utterly stupid such an argument is.
Still, this is exactly the kind of argument Greenpeace calls upon in their effort to try to abolish nuclear power. The boldface sentence above is copied nearly verbatim from a Greenpeace blog article posted on August 6, 2009, the 64’th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. You can read the post here.
We could count endless examples like this:
We could go on and eventually dismantle our entire way of living because of the atrocities mankind has committed in the past. But everyone knows it is absolutely silly to argue like this. It is not the origin or some vague, irrelevant common denominators that decide whether something is intolerable. It is the present intent and use that decides. So how does Greenpeace make the connection between the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and nuclear power in the year 2009 and onwards?
The entire Greenpeace article hinges on the following sentence: “Nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand – always have, always will.” The critical thinker asks: “Do they now? Why? What would nuclear power and atomic bombs have in common?”.
The answers are, in order: “no”, “no reason at all”, “nothing”. The peaceful use of nuclear fission to generate electricity for millions of people has nothing in common with using fission for war and mass destruction. Nuclear power is about as similar to nuclear weapons as is cutting bread with a knife compared to stabbing someone else in the heart with the very same blade. The connection just isn’t there.
Looking at the bottom of the Greenpeace blog entry there are three links. All three of them relate to the bombing of Hiroshima or the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. None of them even mention nuclear power. So where is the link that Greepeace say is “always” there?
It’s not. It’s missing. There is no link. This is guilt by association. The Greenpeace blog entry associating nuclear power with the atomic bombings is trying to exploit the deaths and suffering of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to gain points for a completely unrelated issue of opinion. Did Greenpeace take time to ask the over 200 000 still living hibakusha, “explosion-affected people” if it was alright to abuse their plight for a completely unrelated cause? We dare claim that Greenpeace didn’t do that. They just chose to shamelessly exploit these victims despite having neither permission, nor cause for it. As if getting two atomic bombs dropped on them wasn’t enough already, not only are the hibakusha, their relatives and children being discriminated against; now they also have to suffer Greenpeace swinging them around by the ankles as a bat in the debate on nuclear power.
And in the midst of this, Greenpeace speaks of “insulting” them. The irony is just staggering.
If Greenpeace cannot argue their standpoint against nuclear power without resorting to this kind of nonsense, it’s time to look close at their other arguments as well. Something tells me we’ll find a lot more holes in their reasoning…
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Surely the common factor here is Humans and their motivations.
Steel doesn’t make a decision to be used in a tool of death or a tool of life. Same counts for nuclear materials.
Humans choose how to use these things, humans are the issue here because we’re willing to use them to exterminate life or to enhance it.
So what to do? Culling the herd that is human society seems a bit drastic to prevent such decisions.
Couldn’t agree more Stotty. We are facing a huge problem in that air pollution is killing millions of people every year. A (part of the) solution to that is replacing polluting sources of power with nuclear power instead. Saying that we should not do that because of a war that took place 65 years ago, is just stupid. Especially concidering that pollution has, by now, killed more people than the world wars put together…
/Michael
studies by MIT back me up on this one so here goes. by 2030 we must cut our emissions by 50% or we will as a ecosystem perish. if 600 billion dollars was invested atm, nuclear reactors will only reduce these emissions by 12%, in contrast to the 55% cut by investing that money into true clean energy such as wind or solar power. the war was a grim reminder that yes, reactors DO produce plutonium, the main part of the modern nuclear bomb. (the first being uranium, betcha didn’t know that eh?;) ) the theory however was that if terrorists infiltrate these poorly defensed facilities, nuclear fallout can wipe out large amounts of people and poison land and water for many thousands of years, and large scale assault can wipe out most of the civilians in a single day. and i have never heard this “Especially concidering that pollution has, by now, killed more people than the world wars put together” before. in the name of great justice, source?
Feel free to link to said study. I am very curious to see what study claims wind and solar is 4 times cheaper per kilowatthour.
The plutonium you get from light-water reactor is useless in a bomb since it’s an isotope mix and not clean plutonium 239. You get cheaper, cleaner weaponsgrade plutonium by building a dirt cheap, very simple graphite channel reactor. Just like thy did when they created the first bombs far before we had civilian nuclear power.
Source for the damages pollution is causing… that would be for instance searchig for “Asian brown cloud”, “The Great Smog”, and “External costs for pollution”. ExternE is an EU project for this. Google for that and “deaths”.
/Michael
And what could be less poluting than wind power?
Whats the fuel? Air … wow … thats free and clean
Whats the waste? um … Air! … thats exactly the same as what was used.
Downsides:
Wind Farms are big … well … lets face it … powerstations are big AND ugly and just walking around my home village I can see three or four in the distance.
They make noise … well modern designs make less noise and they tend not to be built in populated areas … so problem solved.
Wind isn’t always there … well … not much we can do there.
What could be less polluting than wind power?
Answer: nuclear power and hydro power.
You don’t build wind turbines from a stiff afternoon breeze. As mentioned above: you use steel for that. Steel, copper, neodymium and other metals are used. Metals that need energy and coal to be refined. You use concerete for the foundation. You use trucks and cranes to transport and erect them. All of this leaves a footprint. And concidering how little energy you get from one wind turbine, and how extraordinarily much energy you get from uranium, they actually compete in the same division when it comes to footprint.
Seen in a life-cycle, where you sum together all the environmental impact, and divide that by the amount of enery that is gained, hydropower and nuclear are the cleanest of them all. Next thereafter comes wind power, in the same division, but clearly more polluting than nuclear and hydro.
This kind of analysis is call a Life-Cycle Analysis. Here is an example from Swedish power company Vattenfall: link. The interresting part starts at page 22
That was a very interesting read, Michael. Thanks for the link!
Greenpeace (among others, I presume) often clame that nuclear power is less viable than the methods of energy transformations that they advocate (solar, wind, hydro) from an economic angle. Do you have anything to say against that? Perhaps a little link? 🙂
Greenpeace linked to a scientific paper that apparently concluded that nuclear power is filthy and expensive. I downloaded it and saw a large Greenpeace on the front page. Given their affinity to publish false data and to twist and bend the truth I find it hard to believe any investigation ordered or performed by Greenpeace.
Cheers!
Greenpeace (among others, I presume) often clame that nuclear power is less viable than the methods of energy transformations that they advocate (solar, wind, hydro) from an economic angle. Do you have anything to say against that? Perhaps a little link?
I have, but it is in Swedish. Elforsk AB is a swedish institute whose “overall aim is to coordinate the industry’s joint research and development. Operations are organized in five programme areas – Hydropower, Electricity and Heat Production, Transmission and Distribution, Electricity End-Use, and Strategies and Systems”. They published a reseach article outlining cost per kWh, both including and excluding external costs/rebates such as green taxes, government subsidies and so forth. The results were like this:
Without taxes, subsidies, etc. (10 SEK ~ 1 EUR)
Hydro power: 0.25 SEK/kWh
Nuclear power: 0.27 SEK/kWh
Gas CHP (150 MW): 0.38 SEK/kWh
Coal: 0.44 SEK/kWh
Wind power (land, 40 MW): 0.47 SEK/kWh
Wind power (land, 4.25 MW): 0.54 SEK/kWh
Wind power (sea, 150 MW): 0.73 SEK/kWh
Wind power (sea, 750 MW): 0.82 SEK/kWh
Greenpeace’s favorite cherry to pick is the finnish reactor Olkilouto 3. The project has been plagued by problems. However, this is but one out of 44 different reactors being built in the world. Greenpeace and other nuclear power opponents try to paint OL3 as being typical for all the world’s nuclear power. This is simply not true. OL3 is a pilot plant; the first of Areva’s EPR design, which means teething problems are likely to happen. It is also being constructed after a major hiatus in building nuclear reactors which means we are again bulding competence and experience in Europe. Of the other 43 reactors being built in the world, the majority in southeast Asia, most are on time and on budget.
Fact remains: nuclear power does not need subsidies to compete. Windpower on the other hand cannot stand on its own.
And of course you are right in that work commissioned by ardent nuclear popponents is quite likely to have a bit of spin to it. 😀
/Michael
Oops, forgot the link itself: Vindkraft tar in på Kärnkraft – Ny Teknik 21 feb, 2009
/Michael
i can’t really speak for greenpeace, but i for one, frankly don’t care. The core of your argument is that this one reactor cannot be compared to others after it, but they all emit dangerous levels of radiation, produce radioactive waste and do not have the impact on emissions we are desperately needing in the 21st century. nuclear power is the the most powerful source of energy (aside from fusion which we have yet to master) but the facilities needed to harness its energy are to bulky and costly to have the impact that green alternatives offer.
/point
Concidering that wind and solar and solar are even bulkier (you need approximately 5000 large wind turbines just to get a yearly average the same as one modern reactor), nuclear still wins out.
they all emit dangerous levels of radiation
No they don’t. That’s a bogus argument.
produce radioactive waste
True… incredibly small amounts of waste compared to for instance coal, and nature has already shown us what to do with it. The Swedish KBS-3 method goes to authority review and approval in approximately 1 year. After that you lose that argument.
[nuclear power] do not have the impact on emissions we are desperately needing in the 21st century.
The numbers don’t agree with you. If the World Wildlife Foundation numbers are to be believed, the amount of carbon dioxide per kilowatthour in a few select countries are:
Germany: 495 g/kWh
UK: 572 g/kWh
USA: 625 g/kWh
China: 771 g/kWh
This you can compare to nuclear nations:
France: 86 g/kWh
Sweden: 47 g/kWh
And you can hardly accuse the WWF for being pro-nuclear since they tried to hide these numbers by replacing the emission-numbers for nuclear with those of gas, and only when reading the footnotes did you see the true numbers.
With this in hand saying that nuclear has “no impact”, I say: hogwash.
/Michael
“All of it culminating with the steel birds Enola Gay and Bockscar dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
A little nitpick here…Those planes were basically made of aluminum.
Yeah, I know. It was very deliberate. It’s an example of something that just sounds cool in an argument. It pads out and decorates the argument… like verbal make-up. And as long as people don’t have the knowledge or take the time to analyze what is being said, things like that slip by unnoticed.
And this is exactly what nuclear power opponents often use when they form their arguments. They stuff things like this into their arguments… things that sound good but that are in fact faulty or irrelevant padding. When you listen to their arguments you have to watch for it, strip it away and get to the core statements.
/Michael
which is?
It usually boils down to “Ok, so the emission numbers are lower, reliability is way higher and safety much better than pretty much anything else… but we still don’t want it, just because. So there!”.
/Michael
Nu fick jag mer att läsa. Men inte mer att lära. Fick du? Troligen inte.
P.s Vind och sol samt vatten finns över stora delar av världen. Uran och stål…? Intelligens?
So, I got some more bedtimereading, that’s true Michael. But did we ever learn? I think you ar the example that we did not. We fought (and killed millions) over resources. Lets learn from our misstakes. For once.
Water, wind and sun are resources found through out the world. Unlike oil, steel or uranium.
Learn. Or don´t.
Academic.
My ass.
Tänkte väl det. (I thought so).
Snacka går ju. (Bull shit).
4:e lördagsnatten på raken som du inte har något bättre för dig än trolling på NPYP.
Nej Micke, du kommer inte att bli bannad för det, hur mcyket du än hoppas.
/Micke
Tycker det är kul att du skriver “inte något bättre för dig”…
Sant. Freudian?
Tomtar och troll, de förvirrade, de vansinnesdrivande om för stor uppmärksamhet dem ägnas, de städs onödiga, hava sin plan, den osammanhängande, för blogginvasion låtit gå i verkställig, till stor skada för sina egna tillika andras psyken. “Varde svammel.” sade de, trollen i samkväm med tomtarna, högtidligen, och svammel, å bloggens kommentarfält, vart det. Den starka kraftens utvinnare hava förespråkare, de intelligenta, som äga argument med stort faktainnehåll i kontrast till trollen, de slemma, vars argument, de storligen desorienterade, helt sakna något innehåll, sådant som eftersträvas, av värde. Trollens anstormningar, de kroniska, bestå närapå till fullo uteslutande av synnerligen evinnerliga personangrepp, sådana som tages till då de innehållshavande argumentens antal decimerat har blivit.
Vid verkställigheten av trollens plan ådagalades att deras, tomtarna och trollen, argument, de praktiskt taget obefintliga, helt saknade substans.
Ett synnerligen okonventionellt sätt att uttrycka sig på… men visst ges medhåll till ovanstående: när argumenten tryter, då är det ad hominem som gäller. 🙂
/Micke
[…] are so strongly opposed to it that they resort to rather extreme measures. For example, Greenpeace consider any use of nuclear power to be an affront to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasa…, which seems a bit of a […]
[…] all… we don’t exactly lack examples of “emotionalizing” in the nuclear issue from […]
Nu förstår jag var Michael fått uttrycket troll ifrån. Tack, Asplund. Du låter verkligen som en person som har alla indianer i kanoten. Jobbar du också inom industrin eller är du bara ytterligare en akademiker i raden?
Jupp, Michael. Femte lördagkvällen då jag inte har något bättre för mig än att läsa kring saker som intresserar mig och som jag gjort inlägg kring.
Troll säger ni. Tomtar säger jag.
Men snälla Micke… är din vokabulär så dålig? Vad hände med de journalistiska kunskaperna, du som är så duktig på att leta fram fakta?
Internet-troll har inget med Tomtar & Troll att göra. Troll kommer från engelskans “trolling”, det vill säga att ro drag. På nätet är “trolling” just det… att ro drag med dumheter och hoppas på att någon biter. Troll… det är sådana som ägnar sig åt trolling.
Antar att du inte känner till Dunning-Kruger heller då…
Och?
Un bon mot ne prouve rien. Eller hur var det nu du citerade…
Och?
Vilket Skulle Bevisas 😀
/Micke
Exakt. Un bon mot ne prouve rien.
Det är lugnt Micke… fortsätt bara så… ovetande om hur du snärjer in dig själv. Hade du varit ens en tiondel av den journalist du påstår dig vara hade du för länge sedan fattat hur jag driver med dig. 😀
/Micke
Det är jag som driver med dig. Tomte.
ah, c’est bon quand il y a des francaphones sur l’internet! et especialement quand ils supportent une cause honorable.
We was quoting me from an earlier post where I reminded him of Voltair’s words: “Un bon mot ne preuve rien” – “A witty saying proves nothing”.
/Michael
P.s För övrigt var det Asplund som skrev om troll och tomtar. Hur får du in tomtar i din argumentaion?
D.s
Troll säger ni. Tomtar säger jag.
Signerat: Mikael Hildingsson, 22 Augusti, 2009, 23:08:09
“Tomtar och troll, de förvirrade, de vansinnesdrivande…”[…]
Skrivet August 18, 2009 at 15:08:29 av Asplund.
Före mig således och något jag besvarade.
Hi
Yes Nuclear Power is simply good for mankind, but isn´t good for, worlds syndicate
“profit poker-rulet communism”
Yorick
What do you mean?
/Michael
[…] Policy Alternatives and the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses joins the World Wildlife Foundation and Greenpeace among those that are getting so utterly desperate in their attempts to oppose nuclear power […]
i see plenty of pro nuclear comments, but not one against. are you screening comments based on if they support you ideologies? if so then this article is purely one-sided and has no real weight or true analysis on the current topic.
/pwn
No, the only comments that get screened are spam. Anyone is welcome to discuss.
/Michael
m’kay
As you may have noticed your comment passed right through this time without moderation. This is because of the WordPress spam-filter: it blocks anyone that hasn’t had two comments approved before. After that though, all your comments slip right through unless you trigger the spam search parameters explicitly.
We’re not afraid of dissenting opinions here. In fact: we welcome it. Nothing gets more boring than talking to people that agree with you all the time. It’s like a creepy form of opinion-incest. Only by talking to those that disagree with you can you put your opinion to the test and get a measure of what it’s worth. If you know what you are talking about, your opinion will stand up to the test. If you don’t however… then is a good time to take a think about your opinion and if it’s right to hold on to it just for old time’s sake.
/Michael
may not be spam, but i troll all the same
Well… trolling is OK to a certain degree I suppose because 1) if a sound reply cannot be given even to trolling, then the arguments are crap and 2) it’s hurts the troller worse than the trollee. 😉
/Michael
ok, so how many new reactor do you think will have to built to make USA a “nuclear nation”? can we attain this goal before 2030, and only with funding appropriate with USA’s interest in the project? And btw kootoos to you for the KBS-3 find, if only yukka worked as well politically wise…
I’m not saying we should go only with nuclear. We can’t afford to say no to any clean kilowatt-hour. We need a mix of clean energy. Nuclear is one of those.
Yeah I agree that Yucca Mountain is a bit of a mess-up. It seems technically pretty sound, even though I don’t really like the idea of storing things in an oxidizing environment (KBS-3 will be implemented in a reducing environment). But the biggest problem seems to be that they tried to shove yet another nuclear facility down the throat of Nevada… hoping they wouldn’t mind. They did…
/Michael
Nevada wont be hopping aboard the nuclear train anytime soon, and its nice to see that you have a better understanding of the time factor in this debate then some.
Thank you. 🙂
And believe me, the short-sightedness is one of the things that bugs me the most in this debate.
To exemplify: here in Sweden our nuclear plants, currently 3 plants with 10 reactors, were built in the late 70’s and early 80’s. They currenly supply just shy of 50% of our yearly average consumption of electricity. But the anti-nukes are saying: “We dont’ need to build any new reactors… because we currently have a production surplus”. And that to me is about as stupid as saying “No, of course I didn’t bring gas-money for our 3000 mile road-trip… look at the gague, the tank is full!”. The lack of foresight is just astrounding.
Looking even further than that, some people are saying we much abolish nuclear power because uranium and other fissionables are exhaustable. Well I agree that the fuel is indeed exhaustable… but why do we bother? Heck, if the anti-nukes were the least bit clever, they’d ask for an increase in nuclear power so we run out faster!
The thing is it’s not inherently bad to exhaust a resource provided it’s not critical for future generations. So if nuclear power buys us 100 years of clean energy, heck, I’m all for it! It’s not as if I’m saving the uranium for my grandchildren anyway. And during those 100 years, it’d be pretty piss-poor performance of mankind to not come up with anything at all to replace it. We have no less that four different research trails into fusion; energy storage techniques may revitalize things such as solar and wind adn solve that damned intermittancy problem; and smart-grids can help smooth out our consumption peaks and reduce stress from intermittent sources further.
The main problem in the debate is that most people argue from current conditions and as if any decision we make now will be final and ever-lasting. And that’s just plain silly. We need to look and not just assume the future is static.
[…] Satire: We must abolish wind power Aug 09, 2009 by kirkfsorensen0 CommentNPYP: We must abolish wind power because of World War I and II. Yes it is true; the use of wind power is a constant reminder and an insult to all the millions of […]
[…] Satire: We must abolish wind power Aug 09, 2009 by Kirk Sorensen0 CommentNPYP: We must abolish wind power because of World War I and II. Yes it is true; the use of wind power is a constant reminder and an insult to all the millions of […]