Who’s going to pay for a greener, global future?
Looks like an interesting lead into the UNFCCC Warsaw negotiations.
Monthly Archives: November 2013
More on precaution: mobile phone masts
Some of the MOOC discussion about the precautionary principle touched on mobile phone masts. One of my colleagues at the School of Geography in Leeds, Frances Drake, has published a couple of papers on the topic and has just uploaded them to open access sites so they are available to read. You can find the papers by searching for the titles. They are:
Drake F., Mobile Phone Masts: Protesting the Scientific Evidence, Public Understanding of Science 15, 387-410, 2006.
Drake F.: Protesting Mobile Phone Masts: Risk, Neo-liberalism and Governmentality. Science, Technology and Human Values, 36 (4), 522 – 548, 2011.
Reply from Guy Watson
As a follow up to a question in the MOOC on the Precautionary Principle video about what happened after Guy Watson’s 1998 case against the GMO trials, here is a reply from him:
‘We harvested the crop and sold it as organic and subsequently continued to farm as part of our normal rotation. We didn’t test but I would guess any contamination was minimal. That was never the point for me really.’
I agree with Guy – the point is the principle.
Investing in renewable energy
The energy sector is a good investment. It is an important component of both economic growth and household consumption. Investment in energy infrastructure will provide term guaranteed returns, and because of energy’s central role in a nation’s economy, the sector attracts government subsidies for both industrial and household energy use.
So why not invest in renewable energy and disinvest in non-renewables?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bdfbf812-16e0-11e3-9ec2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2jkgBDDy1
http://www.quaker.org.uk/news/quakers-disinvest-fossil-fuels
Thorium Nuclear Reactors
Now that the first trial of the ‘When Worlds Collide’ MOOC is complete, I’ll try and keep this blog up dated with thoughts and information. I’ll also be going back through the many thousands of discussion comments in the MOOC, and I plan to compile an ebook we can use for the ‘alpha’ launch of the course in March.
I’ll use the blog to post parts of the ebook for comment and reflection. I’ll also be using the blog as an aide memoir and will be posting links to research articles, unless you are in a University it’s likely that you won’t be able to access the full texts of the articles, but you should be able to see the abstracts.
Civil nuclear power is clearly an area where science could potentially be of great benefit to society, particularly with an energy crisis and global climate chaos looming. In the past, development of nuclear power plant designs was heavily influenced by the need to provide weapons grade material, as shown by this article on technological lock in of light water reactors:
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700037153
[Edit, DOI link doesn’t seem to work, not sure why, try this one:
or use Scholar Google to search for ‘Nuclear Reactor Technological Lock In’
However, there are alternatives, such as the thorium reactors being developed in India:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029549306000690#
I’d be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts on firstly, the technical aspects of thorium reactors vs the current technology used in commercial civil nuclear reactors, and secondly, if thorium reactors are safer, why we aren’t adopting them. Is reactor design still geared to producing material for weapons? Or is this now past?
jon Lovett 