Nuclear Power

Today I found some links on different blogs to this book, where Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist, journalist and former nuke protester "changed her mind" and is now supporting nuclear power over the alternatives.

History taught us that it takes either courage or a large sum of money to admit you were wrong. In this case "altering" your view would infact be a shortcut to being a succesfull novelist, as it's proven yet again that there is no such thing as "bad" publicity. I for one am ordering this because it re-interested me in the subject.

I'm not saying that she "sold out", but the fact that we can make more energy from nuclear resources, than we can make from burning *all* the fossil fuels on earth does imply great economic forces that have everything to gain by enhancing the public opinion towards nuclear energy. As always, you have to *think* before forming your *own* opinion. So I'll give you a bit of my view to start thinking about:

A small 7 billion people on this planet are in need of increasing amounts of power, and there is 2 ways to provide it to them:

1) Burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels (oil/gas/coal) to satisfy the massive demand, and in the process take a quick route to global disaster, probably irreversibly altering this planet's ability to support most of the current species of life, thanks to the massive release of carbon dioxide (and methane).

2) Take the nuclear route and embrace the fact that we have an alternative solution, a realistic and cost effective way of generating more power than we could ever need while halving our greenhouse gas emmissions! A nice side-effect is the political issue where we minimise our economic dependancies on oilsupplying countries in the middle east.

You don't have to be a atomsplitting genius to figure out I'm pro-nuclear.

I think, therefor I *know* !

Whenever I was asked a question that I didn't know the answer to, I'd respond:"My friend Google knows!" And Google never let me down, it was always there, it always responded (swiftly I might add) with pages full of search results! I think I was one of the early adopters, switching from Yahoo and Alta Vista to Google as my favorite search engine.

As the years went by, the internet grew and so did the instruments for obtaining information. Wikipedia started, search engines evolved. Mankind even evolved into the digital era, where electronic information is at least equal to vintage sources like the televised news or the daily journal. I've been calling paper "pre-ascii" since the late 90's I think.

I valued the internet over vintage sources since it's almost impossible to censor and accessible to many. It only takes 1 guard with a cellphone to witness the execution of Sadam Hussein. Imagen a similar video of the JFK-shooter posted on youtube. The evolving and maturing the internet felt like a big step forward for mankind! It would make world a better place!

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." — Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), July 2004

Now let me take you to the cold and factual "present"

Google is not my friend anymore. It's primary objective changed from providing me with the information I requested while funding itself with adds to providing me with the best possible adds wrapped in some decent search results, while optimising the profiling of myself and selling any information gathered... no make that harvested. (read the google privacy policy and get my point)

The idealistic selfproclaimed "sum of all human knowledge", a.k.a. wikipedia, has a secret innercrowd of editors who use wikipedia as their E-peen and decide how the sum of all human knowledge should be interpreted and what is or isn't relevant to add to this sum.

If power and money corrupt the objectivity and validity of information more than ever, than there is NO reason to believe anything you read on the world wide web. Thus information is even less reliable than it was before. And there is no turning back, the digital era is here to stay and even dominates vintage sources of information

On the other hand, there is no use in going back to the pre-ascii age, since information was just as subjective. There have always been innercircles, determining the "best" version of history for humanity or for themselves. The Council of Nicea already decided for you what books the holy bible should and shouldn't include somewhere around 400 A.D.

So here's some wise words ;-) Although in present time you have more information available to you than you ever had before you don't KNOW anything unless you actually gave it some thought yourself, and the general opinion equals the absolute truth no matter what you know.