Power lines

Peveragno, Italy (Nov 5, 2007)

Back from my trip in Europe, I spent the last 10 days writing proposals to NASA: the lifeline to get observing time on their telescopes in Space, and the grant money necessary to work on them. As usually I worked until the very last minute (last proposal submitted electronically 3 minutes before the deadline). As this year the requests for the telescope time were about 5x as much as the available time, and the competition will be fierce. Nothing new there...

Given these premises all I could do since I am back was to move, during the weekend, all my new italian photos from the laptop to the file server where I keep them. Too tired to try to process them... But I still wanted to post something before Thanksgiving so here it is an image I took and processed while still there. These cables bring electricity from either one of the large hydroelectric plants in the Alps, or from the French grid (where it is most likely produced by some nuclear plant). Fifteen years ago, after the Chernobyl disaster, Italy held a referendum to close the four Nuclear plants in the country and renounce to nuclear energy. That decision of course increased even more the dependence of Italy from fossil fuels, and the import of electricity from other countries. The irony is that a lot of the imported electric power comes from France, where 75% of the total electric energy is produced... by nuclear reactors.