Why Dont You Blog?

Buildings don’t get much more attractive than traditional windmills. More or less anyone will agree on that. It even comes as a bit of a shock to remember that windmills were industrial structures, not landscape beautification projects.

So, what is it about modern wind turbines that sends some people into a rage? In the Times, Charles Bremner claimed that the French countryside was becoming ugly because of the spread of wind turbines.

Windpower blights “la belle France”

His argument is basically that France doesn’t need the “ugly” windturbines because it has loads of nuclear power. What? Has he ever seen a nuclear power station?

The UK’s only remotely attractive one, as a building, was Trawfyndd – of which the architecture bit of the Guardian showed a flattering photograph a couple of months ago. The photo doesn’t come with the online story but here’s an extract from the text.

The tradition continued into the early nuclear age with the appointment of Basil Spence, architect of Coventry cathedral, to design Trawsfynydd in Wales. Like Scott, Spence went down the route of unabashed monumentality to reflect the awesome technology at work within. Never mind that his 20-storey monoliths in the middle of Snowdonia stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs. At the time of Trawsfynydd’s construction, in 1959, this treatment was entirely appropriate: symbolically, nuclear power was one of the few things that told Britain it was still Great. That triumphalism would soon fade, as the implications of the Windscale fire in 1957 became apparent, and environmental and peace movements started to campaign against nuclear.
One need only look at the industrial-looking nuclear eyesores built in the 1970s and 80s, such as Hartlepool or Dungeness, to see the change. Having furnished Britain with some of the ugliest buildings ever seen, British Energy took a renewed concern in the appearance of Sizewell B in the 90s.

Note, “Ugliest buikdings ever seen.”

You can see a selection of postcard views of nuclear carbon-friendly power plants on an odd site that google found, and you’d have to admit that, despite the stunning landscapes they are set in, the kindest description of them would be “darkly foreboding.”

OK, the concepts of beauty and ugliness are relative and individual. Let’s assume that those elegant wind turbine blades are uglier as huge concrete slab monolithic powerplants in the eyes of some beholders.

Pretend that a miraculous new way of generating energy (from fusion or electrolytic transformation or any star-trekky energy source you can imagine) has been discovered. So, the working life of a wind turbine is over. What happens to it? You just take it down. I think that’s it. (You might cause some localised pollution by dropping it in landfill. Pretty small beer compared to what we dump every day, but still, I’m trying to be fair.)

Not quite as easy to take down all the carbon-neutral new nuclear power plants is it? You need a decade or more for decommissioning. You’d still have to protect it to within an inch of its life (from accidents and terrorists) for that time. Then you’d just have to store and guard the materials for, oh I don’t know, a few thousand years.

Or, let’s assume that the star-trek energy breakthrough doesn’t happen. The turbines just spin around, collecting energy that – as far as I can tell, on recent form – is increasing, if anything. They break and can get replaced. The land, sea and air around them are as clean, or otherwise, as they would be in the absence of a turbine.

There is no reason, except aesthetics, for not siting them in the centre of big cities. If they break, they just break. They don’t go critical.

A really unlucky person might find that a broken one landed on their head. This doesn’t quite compare with Chernobyl.

(There’s a REALLY ugly power generator picture – of the post-explosion Chernobyl plant - on the Wikipedia page. I didn’t pasted it here because I’m baffled by the fair use clause.)

Imagining for one minute that you share the aesthetic sensibilities of Charles Bremner and the couple of French aristocrats he reported, it’s still a very small price to pay.

If you are looking for a holiday to the south of France anytime soon, can I suggest you stop by Clairac for at least a visit. It is a gorgeous little town – you can see some shots of it on Flickr.

In keeping with the world’s recent life-imitating-art forays (see previous posts- Wallace and Grommit and 1984) the latest imaginary universe to get dragged into reality is Quake.

The Register has a piece with the title USAF flying deathbot power-grab rebuffed. This links to an earlier Register post that claimed:

Everyone knows about the current rise of the aerial killer robot. These machines are now in operation across the US military, and have already reaped a deadly harvest in Southwest Asia.
But the big deathbot battle isn’t, in fact, in Iraq or Afghanistan; it’s between the various branches of the US armed services, regarding who will be in charge of all the new flying slaughter machines and spy-eyes.

(Who really cares which branch of the US forces controls the deathbots? )

I’m not “everyone” to the Register then, because this was news to me. These Quake-esque machines are all called suitably sci-fi names: “Predator”, “Reaper”, “Sky Warrior”. The language just oozes harmless sci-fi gaming:- dramatic uber-manly words with minimal connection to reality.

It must be much easier to deal death and destruction if you never actually get to see your enemy face to face. There’s a lot less chance of getting mentally messed up for life if you are dropping bombs rather than bayonetting someone who you have to look in the eye. (Obviously, being on the recieving end is just as unpleasant in either case but at least one gives you the chance of fighting back.)

How much more detached would you be from the consequences if you just press the Start button on a deathbot and let it go off to do its own natural thing. Even easier if the whole experience is just like playing an computer game.

Saying that modern warfare is becoming like a PC game is a cliche point, repeated ad nauseam in workplaces all over the UK a few months ago, when the TV stations released video footage of a “friendly fire” event (friendly fire always sounds so chummy and innocuous, itself). This looked for all the world like a recorded “video” from a Quake 3 tournament.

This depersonalising war doesn’t make it any less deadly. In fact the numbers of dead and injured people involved in modern wars defy the imagination. Not that anyone seems to count numbers as representing human beings, once they get beyond about half a dozen. Hundreds of thousands of people don’t mean anything to us because we can’t actually see the bodies. The notoriously bloody medieval conflicts probably wouldn’t even merit a mention on the main News if we matched the numbers today.

The Guardian today reported that the head of the UN Nuclear agency was warning of the dangers of war with Iran, following a disturbing “Brace yourself for war” comment from the French foreign minister.

“There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons.”

I’ll take that 700,000 as an accurate count of deaths, just because I have no way of testing it. I certainly can’t form a mental picture of that number of people, alive or dead. A small city’s worth of people? A couple of really big football crowds, to adapt the traditional “football pitch” measure of area? (which is always wasted on me because I can’t really picture a football pitch area, either.)

The whole point about death in a computer game is that it is just a minor irritant. At worst, you respawn somewhere without your best conceptual “weapons” and have to dodge the opposition players camping there, who are waiting to kill you again.

Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s “war” itself that keeps respawning. Once a human player loses an eye or a leg or their life, that’s it, they are out of the game for good.