kwlf wrote:
I would also caution against second-guessing anybody’s reasons for being vegetarian or vegan. I have a friend who decided to become vegetarian as a toddler, because she hated animals so much that the idea of eating them disgusted her!
Completely right – also in the other points you make in your post. I would – however – still “second guess”, that the motivation you quote is a rather rare one.
I absolutely do not judge people for what they eat – everyone should be absolutely free to choose whatever they like (as long as they do not torture their kids or even dogs into vegan food). What I don’t like about some vegetarians and most vegans I know is the fact that they want to tell me what I have to eat. Many of them, unfortunately, do that based on a feeling of superiority that is mainly driven by lack of thinking.
One of the best signs of this being quite mainstream in the vegan scene is the current hype about fake meat: Who would have thought 20 years ago – when the vast majority of vegetarians were from the environmentalist scene – that industrially/chemically produced food would be regarded as a “healthy diet” again?
Why has no vegan ever been on the Mars so far? Because there is nobody she could tell that she is vegan ;-)
Yes, I think my friend is probably nearly unique. When I was younger, most vegetarians were girls who didn’t like the idea of killing animals to eat. I think that environmentalist vegetarianism is relatively new. India is the most vegetarian country, so I suppose globally most vegetarians are probably vegetarian for religious reasons.
Personally I have my doubts about whether vegan diets are healthy. Are there undiscovered animal-derived vitamins, for example? I suspect the first Martians will eat a lot of insects.
kwlf wrote:
Personally I have my doubts about whether vegan diets are healthy. Are there undiscovered animal-derived vitamins, for example? I suspect the first Martians will eat a lot of insects.
Same feelings here. Humans are omnivores by nature. Certainly, western populations consume too much meat, but not consuming any meat is not what our bodies were made for either.
There’s always the choice of dairy products, though there are lots of animal welfare issues in the dairy trade, not least the question of what happens to the male calves. Most of them, anyway.
The hormones in meat and dairy are great for cancer growth, but we did all this in the healthy eating thread 
Most people, even those with cancer, and those who know this, say they are too emotionally attached to the stuff.
Malibuflyer wrote:
What I don’t like about some vegetarians and most vegans I know is the fact that they want to tell me what I have to eat. Many of them, unfortunately, do that based on a feeling of superiority that is mainly driven by lack of thinking.
It’s a very common trait in today’s world, in relation to any number of issues.
There seem to be 3 quite similar transformer/inverter structures in the area. So your picture might only show 1/3 of the overall power.
I went back to the site yesterday. You are right – there are three of those transformers. But on a closer look they aren’t 1MW. They are more like 0.5MW, so 1.5MW for the whole farm. Then there is a brick building which may have a bigger transformer inside which does the final 33kV output, but that isn’t relevant. The final cable used for the grid connection is 25mm2 which across 3 phases could be 10MW.
It makes me laugh they got planning for a “10MW” farm “which will power 3000 homes” And anybody who has ever played with solar panels will know that a little cloud over the sun reduces the output by at least 90%.
I am also delighted that brexit has not had a big impact on cross-border subsidy farming The current owner is not the first one in just a few years.
Peter wrote:
It makes me laugh they got planning for a “10MW” farm “which will power 3000 homes” And anybody who has ever played with solar panels will know that a little cloud over the sun reduces the output by at least 90%.
Isn’t that the same for all power plants? Hinkley Point C will only be able to provide 3.200MW of power for a very limited time – will probably never do it at all and in lifetime average will be clearly below even 50% of its nominal 3.200MW power output…
I think the actual duty cycle of a solar farm is at least an order of magnitude different to that of a “normal” power station, especially a nuclear one. For a start, you have absolutely zero during the night Then you have 5-10% under any overcast. In the UK it just gets silly. I have constructed solar chargers for things like electric fences and on average, from say 30×60cm, you get about 50mA. That is only slightly more than the internal leakage of a car battery.
The problem is @Peter the populace don’t want Nuclear Power Stations. In the 1950’s it was very popular, cheap electricity for life. The fast reactor could make it even cheaper because that would use, effectively what is a waste product of the nuclear cycle. It was clean technology.
What’s not to like.
Then it started to go wrong the production of nuclear energy got linked (wrongly) to the nuclear bomb. But the antis point was proved at 3 Mile Island. The China Syndrome was born as was the notion that a nuclear power station could blow up like a bomb, which had nothing to do with reality. Then there was Chernobyl. The media attention, some pretty poor and fantastical reporting led to more and more of the public being turned against nuclear power. And the final nail “what do we do with all this waste that has a half life of thousands of years?” The price of nuclear electricity must reflect the safe storage of all that waste for its half life, it must include an allowance for safely dismantling and storing the power stations at the end of their useful life.
But perhaps even more costly than all this, or even than the technology to build the power station is the cost, in most democratic countries, of teams of barristers to deal with the inevitable public inquiries which roll on for years.
If you add this all up and divide it by the cost per unit of the electricity it can produce over its lifetime, nuclear power is no longer so much cheaper than other sources of electricity.
Some, shall we say countries not known for their democratic credentials can however mitigate all many of these costs overriding the will and fears of the people whilst at the same time producing as a by product, the ingredients to threaten and destroy the world including themselves if they should so wish.
On top of all this, countries, like the UK, with its privatised electricity generation set up, must persuade others to put up the huge sums of money to build a nuclear power station. To do that, they must make financial guarantees to those investors, eg that the price of electricity cannot be allowed to fall below a certain amount per unit before the investors have got their money back, plus a substantial profit. And who are these investors who can afford to plough billions of dollars into such long term investments? Well the Chinese Government for one. For the Chinese Government, it is a win, win, win, win situation. It can develop and export the technology, it can copy/steal the technology it does not have, it can have cheap electricity at home whilst getting a guaranteed income from overseas. It can reduce its CO2 footprint to International standards so the whole world sees it as more environmentally friendly than the USA. It can produce materials which can easily be turned into arms to take the world by force or threat if necessary and if the offer of export of nuclear fails, they also produce a large proportion of the solar panels on the market today.
Meanwhile the UK Goverment, in the face of such a possible threat has to increase it defence spend on nuclear war heads just in case the Chinese or one of its allies might threaten.
It’s a strange world isn’t it?
