Did you see the pictures of the towering inferno as a Victorian wind turbine went up in flames? What a spectacular show, almost as dramatic as the terrifying 1970s movie. And what an eloquent symbol of the future of the so-called renewables industry if and when we find the courage to switch to nuclear energy.
A wind turbine in the southwest of Victoria has been destroyed by fire overnight, with a giant blade crashing into the ground.
Firefighters were called to the Portland wind farm around 8pm last night, finding the top of the tower in flames.
More details tonight at 6pm. #9News pic.twitter.com/zE4cV8Dvr3
— 9News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) June 29, 2024
It was also a reminder of the huge difficulties we can already foresee in 20 years or so when these sinister windmills have reached the end of their working life – if you can call it that, they’re strictly part-time – and the country is littered with great heaps of obsolete rusting junk that will cost billions of dollars to remove, if in fact it can be removed. (This, I understand, will be at the expense of the farmers and other landowners who have so foolhardily allowed these ugly constructions to blight their land.) At least, once the intermittently revolving blades are stopped for good, ornithologists will be pleased, with no more massacred birds.
Going nuclear, as – at last –cautiously proposed by the federal opposition, will be a long and dirty fight. The ‘green energy’ tycoons who are enriching themselves out of taxpayers’ and consumers’ subsidies to wind and solar energy are not going to see their investments fade away – go with the wind, you might say – without doing everything they can to protect their golden geese from nuclear competition. Nor will the ‘global boiling’ ideologues for whom the quest for ‘Net Zero’ gives their stunted lives meaning. Nor will the occult forces of Marxism who dreamed up the whole ‘climate crisis’ as a means of handicapping the West economically – if you don’t believe that ask yourself why they never tell China to stop pumping coal-fired pollution into the atmosphere?
One thing they will play up are the dangers, mainly alleged, of nuclear reactors. We’ll hear a lot about Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island – the ABC will dredge up reels of archival film for one of its mendacious editions of Four Corners– but we won’t be told that the first was a jerry-built reactor, unsafe by any standards, the second caused by an earthquake and tsunami, by neither of which phenomena is anywhere in Australia seriously threatened, and the third the result of employees panicking when a valve broke down. And of course, neither the ABC nor any of the other organs of the Left that largely constitute our news media has ever said anything about the dangers of wind farms, so graphically illustrated in Victoria last week. What if down below, in addition to sheep, there had been one of those guided tours slyly organised by wind-farm operators to ingratiate themselves with local ratepayers who might otherwise object to these grotesque manifestations of ‘clean energy’ blighting their landscape?
Indeed, the aesthetic element of wind power seems to be ignored in communities where ‘planners’ regulate everything else down to the colour you can paint your front door. It’s as though wind farms are regarded as just part of the rural scene. There are more than 300 such farms in Australia and ‘Net Zero’ zealots want to build more. If they get their way it will be almost impossible anywhere to avoid seeing these gaunt towers bristling on the skyline, great rows of them like prehistoric monsters stalking over many a once idyllic country panorama.
The fight to keep nuclear power generation out of Australia will put previous political rows such as the ‘Voice’ into the shade. Misinformation and disinformation will be at fever pitch with tales of risk and disaster, radiation and meltdowns. Our esteemed arbitress of truth, the ‘e-Safety Commissioner’, imported from America presumably to distance federal
Governments from the unpopularity they knew she would incur, will be working overtime – or recruiting platoons of extra staff at public expense – to censor pro-nuclear voices online, who will be routinely described as ‘far right’, ‘fascist’, etc. Indeed, the campaign to discredit nuclear is already getting louder. ‘Economic insanity,’ says that paragon of responsible financial management, the Albanese government. ‘Too expensive,’ says the green-drenched CSIRO. The ABC has conveniently discovered that ‘several’ of the Coalition’s proposed reactor sites are on geological ‘fault lines’, though on one site there has been a conventional power station for decades that’s somehow remained intact.
The Left is utterly unhinged about nuclear energy. This goes back to the days when the grandparents of the kind of people who are now screaming about Palestine or tearing down statues of ‘colonialists’ threw themselves with zeal into campaigns for nuclear disarmament and ‘peace’ movements that turned out to be bankrolled by the Soviet Union and staged by its useful idiots in the West. Since then the very mention of the word is enough to send a Leftist into paroxysms of superstitious horror – look at the fuss New Zealand’s Leftist government made some years ago refusing port facilities to American nuclear submarines (they’d welcome them back soon enough if China was moving south).
Add to this the ever-rolling juggernaut of climate protest and its vested interest in sending us back to the era of sailing ships while siphoning off money from ingenuous or deceitful governments and there is not much motivation among our ruling elite, in Australia anyway, to go nuclear. But it will happen, unless we are prepared for a new dark age of kerosene lamps and cold showers for the sake of ‘saving the planet’. Voters will become fed up with the unreliability of the power supply as more fossil-fuel-based generators are decommissioned and the nuclear option will become increasingly attractive. And as nuclear energy continues to be safely employed overseas, so will opposition to it here be seen as increasingly irrational.
