BackPacker

Summary says it all really. I could not find an English news source yet.

NOS Nieuws - Activist landt op terrein kerncentrale

The 1-mile Prohibited area around French nuclear plants has always seemed silly to me. If you wanted to fly into a nuclear plant, the 30-60 seconds warning that this area would give the French authorities would not be sufficient. But a lot of pilots have had the proverbial cup of tea without biscuits with the French authorities for busting it.

What's more, the enforcement seems to be purely based on radar/transponder readout. In a paraglider, or possibly even in a plastic fantastic microlight, with the transponder turned off, you would be virtually invisible.

So I wonder what this is going to do for those prohibited areas. In order for them to be even moderately effective, you'd have to increase them to 5 or even 10 nm. That would give you, arguably, a marginal response time to any threat. But that would make navigating France all the more problematic.

riverrock83

or add a SAM site on them to enforce the zone... Would probably need a person with a radio to decide whether to press the button or not to differentiate between mistakes and terrorists...

Not sure how you can enforce it in any way other than by using radar? A man with binoculars?

Unusual Attitude

SAM = Surface to Activist Missile?

Ultranomad

Not entirely true. Being a radar maintenance engineer by military training, I can assure you that a paraglider is perfectly visible on a radar, and anything with metal parts in it, even if these parts are only a few centimetres in size, is visible still better. The question is whether a given blip is assessed as a potential threat (discrimination methods may vary) and whether a timely response to this perceived threat is effected. In fact, fooling even fairly sophisticated means of defence may not be too difficult - fortunately, people with enough intelligence to orchestrate it properly hardly ever become terrorists (although, from my own experience, people in charge of such defence are usually not terribly bright, either). The modern nuclear industry, however, doesn't really take such risks lightly, and places a great deal of emphasis on physical protection - so that, for example, a backpackful of TNT may simply be insufficient to breach the containment.

Genghis the Engineer

Probably insoluble, but don't you love the attitude of people who are protesting against the cleanest and most non-polluting form of power generation, which has no significat greenhouse gas emissions "to save the planet".

G

NorthSouth

you missed out the wink
NS

Genghis the Engineer

Okay, cleanest and non-polluting, that actually generates enough power to be useful to anybody.

G

Pace

So we end up with all the visually polluting windfarms which destroy our lovely hills and countryside while their advocates make a fortune??

Restriction zones are political and a waste of time other than keeping law abiding citizans away.

I can remember flying in a Citation 5 Ultra in an airway which touched the 20 mile restriction zone put around London in the days following 9/11.
We were climbing through 20,000 feet and had kit which could literally put us into the front door of Parliament.

Had we been of such intent it would have taken us from turning 3 minutes max to get there.

For public consumption only springs to mind

Pace

soay

Nuclear power will only be the solution when its by-products, some of which are lethal for much longer than the time between ice ages, can be disposed of securely. Of course, if it's proposed as the solution to global warming, it's got to be globally applicable, which means some nasty regimes would be entitled to deploy it.

lasseb

Soay, I don't think you actually know anything about nuclear power with that statement. The lethal time range for the isotopes currently used is in the range 50-100 years. (unless you consume them)

The solution for nuclear power (i.e. dig stuff up, use it, then put it back underground again) is a hell of a lot better than what we currently are doing with the majority of power plants, where the lethal pollution is just lead out in free air causing all sorts of cancer cases.
Windfarms - unfortunately - can never produce the amount of power that we require.. not even close. We are talking less than a percent currently in the western world. Globally it is unmeasurable.

After 9/11 there was a lot of debate about what would happen if a plane where to make a direct hit to a nuclear power plant. The conclusion was that nothing would happen (to the plant.. not the plane ). I seriously doubt that a paraglider - even stuffed with TNT - can do any harm to a power plant. Except on people.

Pace

Soay

We all know that a Volcano chucks more Carbon into the atmosphere than we do.
Global warming occurs through out history caused by Sun Hot spots and only a minute fraction man made
But the politicians know its a big acceptable tax revenue and job creation source as simple as that.
But probably the biggest con of the century.

Pace

mad_jock

I was lucky enough to see a Royal Marine boarding of a Green Peace ship in the clyde one fine day while scuba diving.

Very impressive it was too, right up until the point they all got back on there ribs with armfuls of t-shirts.

They then came off went 500m up the loch turned round and an extremely huge red headed scotsman yelled "fark off tree huggers, your not coming any nearer"

Also on a more serious note one of them went up the out pipe of an installation and inflated a blocking bag and very nearly started our own Chernobyl when the cooling shut down. But luckily the safety trips did thier job and the kettle shut down with only a few fuel rods damaged beyond being able to extract them.

Genghis the Engineer

If you're interested, I know a number of climate scientists who would be glad to teach you how to fly Pace.

US Geological Survey figures are that the annual CO2 output of volcanos globally is about 200 million tonnes, whilst human activity runs at around 24 billion tonnes.

Much more variable, but forest fire CO2 emissions are actually around 2-3 times volcanic emissions.

Besides...



G

Pace

Genghis

I am sure you are aware that many scientists do not agree if you have such figures I am sure you also have details of temperature changes caused by explosions on the Sun and the radiation which comes from that?
Glacier core samples show regular global warming before cars or pollution ever existed.
While I do not question that "some" Global warming is caused by us the majority is not.

Do you have a breakdown of the distribution of what parts of the world the 200 billion tons come from?
How many $Billions are being spent on protecting the rain forests and developing genetically modified plants and trees to live in rain short desert areas?
These are just inflamatory figures which dont show the real picture.
But then things like that cost money while Government seem more intent on artificial job creation and Tax revenues to fill their coffers while leaving the real polluters of the world free to do what they want.
How much of the revenue for so called Global warming actually goes to rectifying the problem rather than balancing government books?

Pace

Unusual Attitude

Isn’t there a 15 year old girl who has for years produced more accurate predictions on climate change than the top global warming, sorry, climate change scientists?

As Pace said she monitors sunspots and solar wind and at the time everyone else was telling us that we were all doomed due to global warming she was stating that the climate would again become cooler and wetter. We now no longer hear the term "Global Warming" (Since it didn’t happen) which has been dropped in favour of "Climate Change".

Now excuse me if I've got this a bit wrong but a few million years ago wasn’t the whole of the UK under several billion tonnes of Ice, then in the 16th Century we had vineyards as far north as Newcastle, if that’s not climate change I don’t know what is!
Oh yes and then we have the fact that the axial tilt of the Earth is not steady and has in fact varied between 22-25 deg which has a massive effect on the climate, bugger all man kind can do about that.....!!!

peterh337

Does anybody have a reference (with a translation if possible) of the French law stating the penalties for busting these?

I have seen forum claims of e.g. 10k euros and/or aircraft confiscation.

soay

Really?

"Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 17 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years."

Source.

Pace

Soay

If you are such an expert on the subject of Nuclear waste which I am not do you know what weight and mass waste is?
Could there ever be a time when it could be sent into space? Ie we get rid of our waste by shuttle outside the planet?

Pace

soay

I don't want to get into an argument about who knows what, but while the Internet is a wonderful tool for providing access to knowledge, it is just as easy to use it to propagate misinformation, such as that you repeated in your earlier reply to Ghengis.

Do rockets ever fail to launch their cargoes into space?

The500man

What happened in Fukushima was a good recent demonstration of why nuclear power is not the solution. It having no significant greenhouse gas emissions doesn't mean it is clean or safe.

Wouldn't that cost a fortune?