Lasers and Icinerator from Dun Laoghaire
As spectator sports go, watching yachts race is really hard for me to muster a lot of excitement for - to be honest I'd much rather be out there on the water competing than peering through a telephoto lens at some distant specks! I guess I feel that way about most sports though - I'd rather be competing than watching - so perhaps that's just me. Other people seem able to take a vicarious interest in how well "their" team is doing.
The girls championship fleet was huge, with over 70 boats contesting the start line, making it probably the most challenging part of the race. I think it was a long disappointing week for her, to have come all the way around the world for some fickle winds, strong currents, many recalls & two whole days of cancelled racing. She did have some reasonably good races earlier in the week, but today's were definitely in the doldrums.
I was pointing my long lens towards Poolbeg so often that I started wondering what the new building is that is being built there, so I researched it a little. It seems it is a new incinerator being built (at a cost of €600 million) to turn Dublin's trash into 58MW of electricity. For scale, that's about what can be generated on average by a wind farm of 20 modern wind turbines.
This incinerator has been a long-time coming, surmounting many protests and much red-tape in order to get final approval. Now that I know about it I'm really not convinced it's (a) a great idea, or (b) the right place to be building it, or (c) the right business model for a public utility. I guess there are things that it will do which do need to be done. Incinerating rubbish seems intuitively to be one of the worst possible treatments, but then I also think about how much of it would not biodegrade, and how proper incineration will ensure those parts do make it back into the environment, as well as destroying poisons, etc, in the process. Time will tell, I guess.
[1] Dun Laoghaire is pronounced "dun leery" if you ever want to not brand yourself immediately as a foreigner on arrival in the area!