A “Lib Dem” minister just told Sky News he was approving new nuclear power stations to promote green jobs. If anybody ever votes for these lying bastards again I shall be disconsolate.
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Hello my name is Shams. I am eight years old and live in Iraq. I am blind. My family were victim of car bomb in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq
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Her mother was killed in the attack. My life is still sad because our families are both Sunni and Shia. They must hate each other and I have no Shia friends. I am told the Americans divided our society.
.
Why can’t people just love each other? Please.
Life might not be good (mine certainly doesn’t seem to be), but it is glorious. What were the chances of you being born and gifted with a mind that is self aware? It’s a terrible waste of that mind’s potential to dwell on how the world doesn’t conform with our preferred arrangement. If you are free from the horrors of war, crime and disease, life can be good .. if you try.
Monty Python’s Universe Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYSXBsGOVuc
Jemand,
” If you are free from the horrors of war, crime and disease,”
And just how many on this delicate planet really are though?
You also forgot poverty and loneliness-amongst other blights-in your list.
I know that this will be unpopular with some people, but I think that activists should get their facts right. If we make erroneous claims, it leaves us open to being discredited, looking stupid and losing important arguments. Such error has already disadvantaged the campaign against nuclear power.
Cryptonym, radioactive stuff is not going to wipe out all life on Earth. The whole planet, all the way to the core, is radioactive. Whenever fossil fuel is extracted, radioactive material is brought to the surface, where it is burnt and released into the atmosphere. Much soil contains radioactive thorium. Granite releases radioactive radon gas. Radioactivity is natural on this planet. Life has continually evolved and diversified in the presence of radioactivity, as shown by the fact that life has evolved cellular DNA repair which protects against radiation damage.
Before you start thinking that I’m lobbying for the nuclear industry, Nevermind can confirm that I’m reading his copy of Chris Busby’s Wings of Death, the iconic anti-nuclear book. So far, I find Busby’s “Second Event Theory” reasonably convincing (though Busby’s style is disjointed and confusing). But even if Busby is 100% right, radioactivity from human sources has maybe doubled or tripled certain cancer rates that are way below 0.1% of the population in any case. Any increase in cancer is bad, but really, human-produced radioactivity was never anything like a mass-extinction event, even when H-bombs were being tested every few weeks.
Cryptonym, I suggest that you learn a bit about nuclear physics, shine some light to banish irrational* fears. Then start criticising from a position of strength, and there’s plenty to criticise; stockpiles of “spent” nuclear fuel for a start.
*”Irrational” is not an insult; its meaning is “not in proportion”, i.e. the fear is out of proportion to the threat.
From what I can tell, there is so much misinformation written about nuclear its untrue. The word alone is enough to instil fear in much of the population. But such fear, it seems to me, is largely unfounded.
The impacts of climate change represent arguably the greatest challenges faced by mankind since the emergence of industrial capitalism over a century and a half ago.
So we need to add to the mix, in my view, radical alternatives in an attempt to counter this threat. The nuclear option ought to be a very big part of that radical alternative. George Monbiot has written some brilliant articles on this subject.
Good to have you back in your inimitable groove Clark.
:.)
Hey Jemand, I learned that song off by heart years ago. It’s good to sing it occasionally, but it’s also a brilliant memory aid, as all the figures are roughly correct. “We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point, we go round every two hundred million years…”
OT,
Craig,
Saw this article, comments are also worth a read.
http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/03/cyprus-versus-the-eustapo-a-mischievious-idea/
Jives said – “And just how many on this delicate planet really are though? You also forgot poverty and loneliness-amongst other blights-in your list.”
. . .
The horrors of war, crime and disease are nothing more than what other animals face in their own jungles. Every being will face a lonley, often horrific, death. Why should human animals be any different?
If you dwell on what you have not got instead of what you do, then you will never find happiness nor contentedness. The consumerist society is based on perpetual discontent with one’s life. We are told that we are ugly, fat, bored, old-fashioned, ignorant, poor, lonely, … etc. All of which is the opening sales pitch to sell us makeup, dieting books, gadgets, hobby education, financial products, dating services .. You see how it matches up?
So much unhappiness is caused by internal conflict where unfulfilled expectations produce disappointment which leads to frustration, anger, low self-esteem and all of the other stuff that keeps therapists and psychiatrists driving BMWs. The consumerist society exploits this weakness and so do politicians and social agitators.
I think if you can see, touch and hear yourself count every one of five digits on each of four limbs, then you might have enough material being to start the journey to happiness/contentedness. Life wasn’t meant to be easy, and if it were, you’d be unhappy for it.
Hi Clark
Yes, it’s a great song. It puts our trivial worries into perspective. And as a memory aid, good idea. Although I would prefer to learn the following, less edifying, speech by Dr Evil delivered in a therapy session with his son Scott.
Dr Evil, speaking to a group therapy session –
Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
Daniel, I loathe the current power reactors. They’re ridiculously expensive. If they spring a leak, the coolant water flashes to steam and the core starts to melt down. In normal use, you put your fuel rods in, start the reaction and the rods immediately begin to decay. They crack, warp, and the nuclear reaction causes contaminants to form within their solid structure. So a year or three later, you have to pull them out again. What proportion of the nuclear energy do you think has been extracted by then? About 1.5%. The rest is our 100,000 year “disposal” problem.
Back in the late ’60s the US built this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_Salt_Reactor_Experiment
It’s the second of only two Molten Salt Reactors ever built. It’s the most versatile fission reactor ever designed. They ran it on U233, U235 and plutonium. It was an unusually stable, predictable, controlable reactor. With so little prototyping it’s difficult to say, but simulations suggest that MSRs can burn 98% of the fuel you put in, and they can burn spent fuel. My back of an envelope calculation suggests that we’ve enough nuclear fuel for all the worlds electricity for a thousand years, in the form of plutonium no one knows how to get rid of, “spent” fuel from nuclear power stations, and depleted uranium. All three of these are essentially waste; no mining required.
Unlike typical reactors which run best at constant power output, MSRs self-regulate to load by thermal expansion of the fuel. And it looks much safer; if it gets too hot it shuts itself down with no active control involved. Really; no computers, electrical power or human intervention required.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was terminated in the early ’70s; a political rather than a technical decision. Its proponent, Alvin Weinberg, also designed the PWR, the design used in typical power stations, but he said that PWRs weren’t safe enough for civilian use and MSRs should be used instead. Shortly thereafter, Weinberg was sacked with the words “Alvin, if you’re so concerned about reactor safety, maybe you should leave nuclear power”.
Recently, people have been getting interested in the MSR design, and I see that the following link was posted earlier in this thread:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/14/nuclear_reactor_salt/
He lied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb
Written Answers to Questions
Tuesday 11 January 2005
DEFENCE
Firebombs/Napalm
Harry Cohen: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence whether Mark 77 firebombs have been used by Coalition forces (a) in Iraq and (b) in or near areas in Iraq where civilians lived; whether this weapon is equivalent to napalm; whether (i) the UK and (ii) the US has signed the UN convention banning the use of napalm against civilian targets; and if he will make a statement. [207246]
Mr. Ingram: The United States have confirmed to us that they have not used Mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time. No other Coalition member has Mark 77 firebombs in their inventory.
The United Kingdom is bound under Protocol III to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) not to use incendiary weapons (which would include napalm) against military targets located within concentrations of civilians.
US policy in relation to international conventions is a matter for the US Government, but all of our allies are aware of their obligations under international humanitarian law.
.
13 June 2005
Letter from the same Adam Ingram notifying that the US used 30 of these bombs in March and April 2003.
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/foto/documento_ministero.jpg
Where is the liar/warmonger now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Ingram_(Labour_politician)
In 2010, the Daily Telegraph reported:
Adam Ingram, the former Armed Forces minister, and Richard Caborn, the former trade minister, met a fake lobbying company to discuss work they could do after they stand down as MPs at the general election, it has emerged.
Mr Ingram, the MP for East Kilbride, is understood to have cited work he does for a defence firm in Libya as evidence of his experience in the field of business. He already makes up to £170,000 a year from consultancy work and non-executive directorships while also drawing his MP’s salary of £63,291.
One of his five outside jobs includes providing consultancy services to Argus Libya UK LLP, a firm that explores commercial opportunities in Colonel Gaddafi’s country. Mr Ingram also makes up to £55,000 advising Electronic Data Services Ltd, a Ministry of Defence contractor; about £50,000 from SignPoint Secure Ltd, and up to £25,000 from Argus Scotland Ltd.
Vile. Another one to rot in his own hell.
We ain’t got barrels of money but boy, have we got piles of nuclear waste!
24 February 2013
UK’s plutonium stockpile dilemma
By Rob Broomby
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21505271
Our legacy to the future generations.
Here is a candidate solution to JimmyGiro’s multifacetted problems of power, pinkos and employment. Clark might even approve the model.
Toshiba’s MSR –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
Bill Gates seems to like it –
http://www.fastcompany.com/1594671/bill-gates-goes-nuclear-toshibas-4s-reactor
Hopefully Bill’s involvement won’t result in a Blue Cloud of Death.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green): There are much faster, cheaper and more affordable ways to tackle climate change than nuclear, but my question to the Secretary of State is about the only two nuclear power stations under construction in Europe today. They are billions of pounds over budget and delayed by an ever increasing number of years. Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark are all rejecting new nuclear. Even France is aiming to reduce its reliance by 25%. What do all those countries know that we do not? Why is the Secretary of State locking UK consumers into artificially high energy prices for years to come—to the benefit of the French Government, not the UK taxpayer?
Mr Davey: The hon. Lady has pushed her views for some time, and I have respect for them, but tackling climate change means that we need every form of low-carbon generation possible. The risk and the challenge are so great that it is wrong for people who are worried about climate change to turn their back on the issue. She points to other countries, but around the world many countries are looking again at new nuclear. She is right that the two new nuclear power stations that are being built are over budget and out of their original time schedule. That is why we are being extremely careful in our approach to those negotiations and to the new nuclear programme, learning the lessons of the past and from other countries so that we do not repeat those mistakes.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm130319/debtext/130319-0002.htm#13031966001868
Hinkley Point 19 March 2013
Jives:-
This is what I was referring to:-
http://www.cnduk.org/information/briefings/global-abolition-briefings/item/482-cnd-briefing-iran
Scroll down to the last section, CND’s Position, read the third paragraph and then compare that with CND’s position regarding the UK’s civil nuclear programme.
Uranium is just another mineral:- there is only so much of it down there and when it’s gone, it’s gone. By that time we will have accumulated a mountain of radio-active waste which will be obscenely toxic for millennia (over geological time, actually) and we will find ourselves in roughly the same position that we are in now with regard to energy supply.
Ultimately there will be no alternative to waving goodbye to our wasteful lifestyle. The question is, do we do it now, gradually, using whatever hydrocarbon resources we have left to effect as painless a transition as possible, or do we do it abruptly at the point of a post-nuclear future by which time we will have buggered the planet.
Politicians – of any party, by the way – have to get elected. At that point they run into the hypocrisy of the rest of us as well as their own. We all want to go to heaven, but none of us want to die.
Did you know that today is International Happiness Day? No irony. I expect the people in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere under the heel of the USUKIsNATO jackboots are really happy today. Obama arrives in Israel on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war to plan more war against Syria and Iran at the Zionists’ bidding.
PS Did you hear the German finance minister saying to the Cypriots ‘Your banks may never open again’! Coming to us and other European countries in the not too distant future??
Late on Tuesday, Mr Schaeuble said that he “regretted” the vote.
“The ECB (European Central Bank) has made it clear that without a reform programme for Cyprus the aid can’t continue. Someone has to explain this to the Cypriots and I think there’s a danger that they won’t be able to open the banks again at all,“ he said.
”Two big Cypriot banks are insolvent if there are no emergency funds from the European Central Bank,” Mr Schauble added.
Norman Nicholson is one of my favourite poets. He summed the nuclear industry up after the Windscale ‘accident’.
The toadstool towers infest the shore,
Stink-horns that propagate and spore
Wherever the wind blows,
Scafell looks down from the bracken band
And sees Hell in a grain of sand
And feels the canker itch between his toes.
This is a land where dirt is clean,
And poison pasture, quick and green,
And storm sky, bright and bare;
Where sewers flow with milk, and meat
Is carved up for the fire to eat,
And children suffocate in God’s fresh air.
From A Local Habitation
Windscale was renamed Sellafield in the hope that people would forget. This is why people like Tristan annoy me. The Sellafield area has one of the highest rates of childhood leukemia in the country. All other areas around nuclear plants have similar medical anomalies. When disasters occur, as with Chernobyl and Fukushima, the populace quickly forgets.
What is most disturbing about the latest proposed nuclear power plant is that it is going, if it goes ahead, be in the hands of the private sector, whose main motivation is profit. The private sector can’t even find and fix leaks in the various boards’ water systems, and has no incentive to try. The private sector knows that it can keep reaping the profits until something goes badly wrong. Then the public sector can pick up the bill. And if a few thousand people have their lives disrupted what do they care?
A sutainable energy supply is essential for human survival – even insulation for houses can only be made by using energy. To cope with global warming we need to stop burning carbon whether from coal, oil or gas.
The best book on the subject is ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’ by David MacKay. The book presents an unbiased assessment of what is possible and what is impossible. Before ruling out nuclear energy please read it.
Nuclear is expensive, so should we not look at every other option first? Because the legacy already left in highly active waste, by the sound of our elected speed daters, will only grow in size.
What of the precautionary principle when benign latent energy is coming out of every pore of this island, whether its the wave lift, wind, sea currents.
Who has ever asked why no progress had been made with these alternative energy sources? why they have come to nothing?
Well the 1950’s innovative car firm called Borgward gives us a hint. Then the first manufacturer who used zink to coat its chassis, with the foresight to put grease nipples on moving parts, some 69 of them, to increase the cars longevity, they went bust.
Why? because the other large manufacturers in Germany went to the banks and threatened to pull their business out if they provided any further development loans to this manufacturer.
So if the fossil fuel merchants and nuclear bullies have acted in such competitive manner as to undermine the emerging technologies, what chance that we will ever see their full potential?
BTW I would not regard Chris Busby’s work as a bible, but he points to low level radiation as being as dangerous to our cell structure as high radiation, whether this is correct I can’t say, not my field of expertise.
Let us not forget Mordechai
18 years in prison, some of those in a windowless cell in solitary confinement, and and still trapped 8 years after ‘release’.
http://www.vanunu.com/
and in several parts
Dimona Nuclear Power Plant Part 1 (The Hidden Israeli Truth) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAhfefKQ_3w
It’s the starry-eyed nuclear advocates who’re being over-emotional, almost immediately terms such as irrational and hysterical were hurled around with abandon at anyone looking at the nuclear issue, without the rose-tint lenses and who’ve been resistant to endless ‘atoms for peace’ professional PR advocacy directed at the public for decades. Global warming cannot be arrested by what we do hereafter, the damage is done, 200-300 years of near zero carbon emissions -an impossibility, would be required before any improvement could begin, too little, too late. Human life on this planet so far has just been the instant of crossing the finishing line at the end of a geological marathon. Human life in some form in many parts of the world could survive the extreme climate effects expected, but will not, cannot survive any further addition to our cumulative radioactive dose. This little island is tiny and shrinking, there is just no possibility of survival here if existing nuclear facilities, waste pools and more are not shutdown and made safe while we still have the resources, skills and ability to start the clean up. Failure to make safe now,the burgeoning legacy we’ve had dumped literally on us by past short-term escapism of the nuclear nightmare – an example being Sellafield, no mere plant, the site covers 74 square miles of forever uninhabitable once beautiful and pure Cumbrian and Lake District coast – and hundreds more sites are indeed disaster areas, but also crime scenes, the crime is the genocide of Britain and the British people, by past and present corrupt politicians, seeking easy answers, personal gain and vainglorious fleeting militaristic power.
Think only of yourselves, is the pro-nuclear mantra.
Cryptonym, “irrational” means “out of proportion”. These, from you, are way out of proportion:
If you don’t want to be referred to as irrational, don’t publish things that are way out of proportion.
@Habba
““Is he bidding to be the new LD leader and are his loyalties to this country or to Israel, or both, one asks?”
What a curious second question. What (and what mindset) could be behind it, one asks?”
In my experience this is usually code for suggesting that someone is Jewish or has Jewish relatives.
These, from John Goss and Nevermind, are good comments:
Yes, the principle of operation of fake free markets: privatise the profits, and displace costs onto the public. Public subsidy of nuclear power includes provision of security, management of nuclear “waste”, insurance, and undertaking the responsibility of cleaning up after disasters such as Fukushima.
Yes, funding for development of renewable energy generation should have started decades earlier, in which case we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are. But “nuclear bullies” also act against sectors within the nuclear industry itself; just look at what happened to Weinberg (my comment at 3:12 am).
A large proportion of the public have been opposing nuclear power for decades, and I don’t blame them. Nuclear power was tightly bound to plutonium productions for weapons (less so now that there’s such a huge stock of unwanted plutonium), shrouded in the same secrecy, immersed in the same security, and the public have been subject to draconian government abuses of the process of obtaining planning permission. The public were right to object:
http://www.monbiot.com/2012/10/09/the-heart-of-the-matter/
Public opposition increases the cost of nuclear power stations. The nuclear industry is probably delighted about this. Power station planning and construction repeatedly go way over budget, so the companies, including their legal departments, end up getting much of that extra money. Failing to build most of the proposed nuclear power stations has probably proven far more profitable than actually building them and selling electricity.
What if Molten Salt Reactor development had received similar funding to solid uranium / water cooled reactor designs, as a strictly civilian application with proper transparent accountability? If MSRs had been built and tested, and lived up to Weinberg’s expectations of efficiency, simplicity and safety, the public would now have a genuine choice between various ways of running a nuclear power industry.
Cryptonym, 10:21 am:
I disagree that there is “just no possibility of survival here”; you grossly exaggerate the dangers from nuclear contamination, and life is far more robust than you seem to think.
However, I entirely agree that climate change puts human civilisation at risk, and best efforts should be made as soon as possible to clean up existing nuclear sites, as you say, “while we still have the resources, skills and ability”.
But one big thing is missing from our abilities; we have no way of destroying the “waste” that comes from “spent” nuclear fuel. Burying it seems utterly irresponsible, because if it doesn’t prove safe and the toxins start getting back into the environment, the source has been placed beyond our reach.
It has become our moral duty to destroy the nuclear “waste” that has already been produced, and the only method known at present is to put it in a reactor and let it cook until it really has yielded up all its energy rather than just 1.5% of it. Molten salt reactors seem to be capable of this task, but since no one has built one for nearly half a century, no one really knows.
Mary, thanks for your link:
2http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21505271
The article suggests turning plutonium into Mixed OXide (MOX) fuel rods, to be used in solid-fuelled reactors. This approach suffers from a “law of diminishing returns”. The MOX rods suffer from the same problem as rods from freshly enriched uranium, that only a small proportion of the energy can be extracted. Then the rods must be withdrawn from the reactor and sent for reprocessing. I don’t know how much of the U238 in those rods will have been converted into yet more plutonium while the rods were in the reactor, but it seems inevitable that there will be quite a lot.
The problem with doing nuclear reactions using solid fuel is that the reaction products are formed already trapped in the solid structure. They have to be removed because they degrade the nuclear reaction, so to remove them, the rods must be withdrawn and the fuel reprocessed. Reprocessing involves converting the fuel into fluoride salts, but fluoride salts, when melted, are exactly what you need to fuel (you guessed it) a molten salt reactor.
This is why I think that liquid fuel is a much better approach. Why bother repeatedly converting between solid uranium oxide fuel and uranium fluoride for reprocessing, when melted uranium fluoride is the fuel for a safer, more efficient type of reactor than those currently in use? I may be over-cynical here, but it seems like the nuclear industry is behaving like a dishonest taxi driver, taking ignorant tourists by routes three times as long as necessary on quiet nights just to increase the fare.
Resident Dissident. No I do not think Davey is Jewish and nor was I suggesting it nor care. Stop your slurs. The Friends of Israel have split loyalties and allegiance.
btw Have you looked at that film about Dimona made in 2003 by Olenka Frankiel? Brilliant investigative journalism. See the chilling and cold eyed Peres dismissing her like trash when she asks some penetrating questions. Hear that neutron bombs and other weapons are/were made at Dimona. Hear about the cover up of accidents at Dimona and the dumping of waste and the lack of concern for those who worked there who were sick. They are probably dead by now. Open your eyes and ears to see and hear.
I should not worry about the Nuclear power stations ,they are redundant and will not see the light of day.
The new energy revolution has been under way for some time now,it is being crowd funded and is open source.
LENR is the way to go, it runs on Nichol powder and Hydrogen .It means people can have stand alone energy systems
which will be independent from the monopoly of the energy companies ,and will in the end cease to exist.
Here is a example of one such crowd funded LENR research .http://www.quantumheat.org/