Pylons are magnificent (but I love them, great iron giants striding across the landscape).
Obviously that’s a very personal view, but the cost of digging up vast tracts of land to bury high voltage cables (and cost to dig them up to find faults) would increase energy bills exponentially.
The new design pylons aren’t my cup of tea, but any pylon is a necessary evil. They’ll grow on me I’m sure.
I’m a big advocate of green energy, so turbines are, again, a beautiful thing (I live near many). Unfortunately, there is concern for bird life due to habitat loss, collisions & migration disruption if sited on migratory or near breeding sites. However, as the greatest threat to wild life is climate change, building more wind farms would be a vital piece in our nationwide energy strategy.
The real green winner would be nuclear, specifically smaller local reactors which can be made production-line style (fully capable by our current submarine contract Rolls Royce), unlike our ‘bespoke, made to measure, every one is different’ current stock, or larger, higher output reactors replacing our existing reactors at Hinckley Point, Sizewell etc. A possible solution would be thorium salt reactors where high level waste is burnt up as part of usual reactor operation, lowering the dangerous, high level waste that persists for hundreds, if not 10s of thousands of years (plutonium 239, I’m looking at you). Or the CANDU Canadian reactors that can be refuelled online saving downtime.
I’ll be honest, the government’s announcement to start building the C reactors last week took me by surprise (I wouldn’t wee on this lot if they were on fire normally, utter bastards).
Shame it’s 15 years later than they were meant to start breaking ground…
Would I live next to a reactor? Absolutely. We need to disengage the relationship between nuclear power = nuclear bombs. Yes, some of the current reactor fleet were designed to produce plutonium for our nuclear arsenal (Windscale and Calder Hall for example produced the first fissile material, now decommissioned at what is now Sellafield). With a thorium reactor, there is no thermonuclear bomb making stuff left at the end of the fuel’s lifetime - it’s been used to generate electricity!
Nuclear power good, nuclear bombs bad.
Chernobyl happened when I was 13. Parents not allowing us out in the rain when the cloud might be coming over. Panic on the TV. Reports of swathes of land contaminated & not eating English lamb because of strontium 90 & cobalt 60 contamination.
But Chernobyl happened due to political pressure - fear if the test wasn’t performed they’d lost their status in the Party - and a flaw in reactor design (the graphite tipped control rods). The exponential rise in power in a reactor of the same type had happened at Ignelina. Politics & not disseminating this information to other RBMK operators played a sizeable roll in the catastrophe at Chernobyl.
We don’t use RBMK reactors in the UK!
I’m a bit of a nuke nerd these days, but I come from a position of having radiophobia (like, can’t leave the house, all terrifying anxiety, proper panic attack level phobia) to, through a 20 year journey of learning, studying & now advocating for nuclear energy.
It’s a zero CO2 producing technology. There is CO2 produced in uranium mining & fuel manufacture (less so with thorium, monazite sands can be harvested from beaches - environmentally sensitively of course), but so too is mining for rare earth elements to build the technology inside wind turbines or solar panels.
Blimey, that was a bit epic, even for me.
TL;DR pylons & windmills = necessary evil, nuke power good, nuke bombs bad, thorium & CANDU reactors are the dog’s danglies.