You can see me speaking 24 minutes in here. Can’t work out how to embed this one. It was literally freezing and the very small crowd was understandable. I think four hour rallies outdoors in Scotland in midwinter are somewhat optimistic. I think we also need to face that the high excitement of the referendum campaign, where you could just put something out on Facebook and 10,000 people would show up, is behind us. What we have now is a period of hard graft towards the general election.
I think what I say in this short speech will give comfort to those in the SNP who blocked me as a candidate, because as usual I am joyfully off message. Shortly after me there is an amazing speech from Tommy Sheridan; his physical voice projection alone is astonishing! It was bouncing back off Salisbury Crags and Holyrood Palace.
This really is under 100 yards from where we live. That view of Salisbury Crags is what I see every time I look out the window. The balcony will be great once it gets a bit warmer.
The UK Nuclear Nightmare – An Awakening
by Jim McCluskey / February 6th, 2015
At last the Armageddon nightmare which is the existence of nuclear arsenals is exploding into the UK’s political consciousness. At last the magical word ‘deterrent’ which is supposed to automatically kill dissent is being examined and unmasked as the delusion by which the paranoid silence that still small voice, the voice which says it is a crime against humanity to prepare to incinerate a large part of the world’s population and risk triggering a global nuclear war.
/..
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/02/the-uk-nuclear-nightmare-an-awakening/
Jim McCluskey is the author of The Nuclear Threat.
~~
Keep going Clark. Information is valuable and valued.
Mary, thank you so much for your message. Sorry, I don’t really know what else to write at present. There just seem to be too many enemies, too much enmity at all levels from the international down to the personal, and it pollutes. I’d die to solve it if I believed that would help, but the whole Christian paradigm our society is descended from is based on a man who did that, and it clearly didn’t help or we wouldn’t have got to this crisis.
The problems of power and honesty themselves need to be addressed. I don’t think it’s just you and me facing our personal catastrophes; it seems to be all around us.
We need to learn to listen to our heads and our hearts; they inform us about different things. Our hearts can’t tell us the difference between U235 and U238, and our heads can’t tell us why we should love others as we love ourselves.
Clark, I’m sure you are familiar with the following, which are some of the most well known lines in English language poetry:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
From ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’ by Robert Herrick.
Herrick wrote that poem 400 years ago, and ramrkably he died at the age of 84. I say ‘remarkably’ because Herrick lived through a war with the French, the English Civil War and outbreaks of the Black Death.
The Black Death: I don’t have exact estimates to hand, except to say that it wiped out a considerable amount of the world’s population (at least 25% in Europe, I believe); but us lot, the human race, survived.
Carpe diem.
RobG, I’d really like to discuss nuclear pollution with you. I think we may well be able to help each other, like working on a jigsaw together. I have two suggestions which do not exclude each other. We could agree a time when neither of us would be busy, so we can exchange comments back and forth. If you prefer, we could proceed at your blog, though our efforts could be seen by more and attract comments from more people here.
Clark, I keep finding myself apologising to people on Craig’s blog (although most times I’m arguing with them). In this instance for missing your comment here.
Of course I would love to argue the toss about all things nuclear, and in particular Fukushima and the death of the Pacific Ocean.
Maybe Craig will let us do it here, where it will get a much bigger audience than on your blog or my blog?
RobG, Craig has only objected in the past if off-topic comments have diverted an ongoing on-topic discussion. Threads usually develop new topics by the end of the first page. Craig usually only reads the initial comments; until April last year he didn’t even know how to access later pages!
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/09/why-i-am-convinced-that-anna-ardin-is-a-liar/comment-page-10/#comment-454695
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/04/corruption-and-fear-in-the-uk/comment-page-1/#comment-454696
The mod(s) sometimes complain if there’s a specific topic on an open thread but people post about that same topic on a different thread. We should be fine here, over three hundred comments, second page and three newer threads. There isn’t an open thread about nuclear stuff.
I don’t have a blog, just some bits and pieces on ISP-supplied “web-space”. Squonk would probably welcome us, but we may as well continue here…
I’ll explain about my own interest in Nuclear tech…
I remember from my youth the discussions about UK nuclear power; the political argument between UK Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors (AGRs) and US Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs). The BBC news often seemed to say that the AGR design would be safer than PWRs. But I didn’t like the sound of either. It seemed that if the cooling were to fail the core could melt down and the reaction would become unstoppable. PWR sounded worse because any rupture in the cooling system would lose all the water as steam really quickly. The argument rumbled on for years until Thatcher chose PWRs. I lost interest.
After the 2011 tsunami and the Fukushima disaster Craig did a couple of posts about nuclear power; you can see some of my comments on those threads, though my opinions have changed since then:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/03/a-silly-way-to-boil-water/
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/04/nuclear-disaster-nothing-to-see-here-folks/
It was those discussions that awakened my interest. Someone said that thorium reactors were safe; I went searching and found that they didn’t know what they were talking about, but I found out about Kirk Sorenson and his quest to build Molten Salt Reactors. I’d never heard of this design and I found it quite fascinating. For a while I was convinced that MSRs could safely solve the energy problem, but the necessity of graphite moderator eventually put me off.
But it had got me interested, particularly (1) the possibility of a reactor that could get rid of the “spent” fuel ie. transuranic “waste”, and (2) the fascinating story of Alvin Weinberg, his career and how he came to be sacked; something like “Alvin, if you’re so concerned about reactor safety, perhaps you should leave nuclear power”!
So I started reading avidly about the Cold War and the race for nuclear technology. The US and USSR programmes to build nuclear powered aircraft. The formation of the UN Security Council and the development of the H bomb. The Windscale piles. Experimental reactors like SL/1. Chernobyl. Nuclear space flight, Project Orion and Ted Taylor, an incredibly talented fission bomb designer.
My present position is that nuclear technology is for use off Earth. I’d like to see a radio-telescope observatory built on the far side of the moon where it’d be shielded from all the electronic noise produced by humanity, which made me think about life away from the Sun and how no one should seriously try that without a decent nuclear reactor. But there’s a really big drawback; decent quantities of nuclear fuel should never be lifted through Earth’s atmosphere, it’s just too dangerous.
So I’m not anti-nuke, but I’m not pro-nuke either. I now know that Earth’s needs can best be supplied by solar energy. The books I’ve read include Wings of Death by Chris Busby, and I take it seriously. I’ve encountered some of the cover-ups, and I know there’s a very secretive, very powerful and indeed murderous pro-nuke lobby. But I’m in favour of space exploration, and that will require nuclear. I hope the asteroids have enough uranium 235.
First big question; WTF can be done about Fukushima? You’ve been following this; are there, so far as you know, still three ongoing meltdowns? I can’t think of any reason they’d have stopped.
Regarding depleted uranium, I’ve been looking through the FAQ provided by the Environmental Science Division division of the US Argonne National Laboratory:
http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/index.cfm
The US has about 700,000 tonnes of depleted uranium hexafluoride stored in 57,000 steel cylinders. On the following page, I assume “MT” means metric ton and not megatonne!
http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/mgmt/faq23.cfm
Fucking hell, look at this lot. Some “typical” uranium hexafluoride yards:
http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/storage/faq18.cfm
Two facilities to convert the UF6 to a more stable form were supposed to be completed around 2006; no further news at the Argonne FAQ. I’ll e-mail Argonne about their FAQ:
http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/storage/faq22.cfm
Nuclear power stations are supposed to be designed to withstand aircraft impacts and terrorist attack. Why bother when they’re leaving this lot lying around?
There are 4.3 million square feet of storage yard area. Considering the dimensions and capacity of the storage cylinders, this is consistent with about one-third of the area having being filled.
Not surprising that we’d want a way of finally disposing of this uranium waste, eh?
i’m still interested in Rob’s stats on cancer. I wonder what they’d show in the Middle East, everywhere we’ve been disposing of this entirely safe DU over the last few decades. Starting (IIRC) with our first unprovoked attack against the Iraqis, in 1991.
Glenn, I’m glad to see that someone has seen these comments.
UF6 has to be one of the worst ways to store depleted uranium. The radioactivity of DU is very low, but as RobG pointed out radioactive isotopes are orders of magnitude more dangerous inside the body than outside. Uranium is also highly poisonous chemically but again, only if ingested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UF6
Uranyl fluoride is highly soluble in water; what a great way of getting into organisms! One uranium atom per molecule, too; it literally couldn’t be more finely divided.
I wonder if other countries store their DU in this form. We need an international campaign to persuade governments to convert UF6 into more stable compounds.
There shouldn’t be much of a disposal problem. It’s not like “spent” fuel; you don’t need to space it out because it can’t go critical. Its radioactivity is low intensity alpha emission, so no shielding is required. So long as it’s converted to an insoluble form it could just be buried. But they apparently just haven’t bothered to do it. They’d even recover the fluorine which is saleable.
Clark, first off (RE nuclear power), since Fukushima both Cameron and Obama have announced the building of new nuclear power stations, and they’ve done this in the full knowledge of just how lethal and uneconomical this form of energy is, and in the full knowledge of just what a huge disaster Fukushima is (search for something like FIA NRA Fukushima – that’s the American Freedom of Information Act, and the American Nuclear Regulatory Authority, which shows, in official documents, that the American government knew quite well what horrors were unfolding at Fukushima, but they kept it from the public, and continue to do so to this day).
The new nuclear power station in the UK I believe is Hinckly C, in Somerset. Once again do a search on that. It’s being mostly funded by the Chinese and built/operated by the French, and it’s all been subsidised by an eye-watering amount by the UK tax payer; and of course, as always with nuclear power, no insurance company will touch it, so the tax payer will also pick-up the tab if there’s an ‘accident’ (which in this case would make half of the UK inhabitable).
So why do the US and UK waste huge sums of money, and take even huger risks with public health, on a white elephant like nuclear power? (and I haven’t even mentioned the nuclear waste, that no one knows what to do with)
I’ll get directly onto DU in a bit, but in the meantime, at Hanford (a nuke bomb factory in Washington state, in the western USA) there are hundreds of miles of ‘open’ pits filled with nuclear waste (I’ll repeat: ‘open pits’). These pits sit right on the banks of the Colombia River, which is a major North American watershed and has millions of people downstream. The huge number of cancers, genetic defects, etc, that have resulted from this are completely denied by the authorites, because of course all risks are judged by ‘external’ radiation dose, and not the fact that this crap is getting into the water supply and the food chain, and thus into people’s bodies.
THe US Government has already tacitly admitted that it will never be able to properly clean-up Hanford, because it would cost way more than the nation’s GDP
I only wish I was making this crap up, but alas…
@Glenn
11 Feb, 2015 – 1:22 am
Cancer rates in Iraq are through the roof, but you won’t hear that in the MSM. Like that nice Sophie whats-her-name (who always looks to me like she’s got a broom handle stuck up her arse), who announced on the BBC TV news a few days ago that a new report shows that 1 in 2 will get cancer, because of course we all live longer and it’s down to our lifestyle choices, just like those poor bastards in Iraq. That stat, 1 in 2, is way out of date. We got there a number of years back.
The real ‘tidal wave’ of cancer, as described in the 2014 WHO report, will start when Fukushima hits the five year mark.
That’s Sophie Raworth, aka The Head Girl as I call her. Especially emetic inducing when reporting on the royals. See she married an estate agent who works for the posh Savills.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Raworth
No the media never mention the increasing rates of thyroid cancer nor the presence of radioactive isotopes in the environment from nuclear weapons tests, ‘accidents’ at nuclear power stations, and from many other sources.
Best not to read this if normally you have trouble sleeping.
Fukushima Crisis Continues, Worse Than Reported from Start
by William Boardman / September 5th, 2014
And the radioactive waste from Fukushima goes to: Fukushima!
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/09/fukushima-crisis-continues-worse-than-reported-from-start/
Mary, wasn’t Sophie also a DG’s daughter?
And you’re probably aware of what’s going on in Japan at the moment. This short clip shows Rachel Clark, speaking at a conference in New York City in early 2014, called ‘Follow up on Fukushima Crisis’. Rachel talks about how the Japanese government is shipping radioactive material from Fukushima prefecture, and incinerating it in places all over Japan, thus severely spreading the contamination…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?jhBrYFp6s00
(in case I’ve screwed-up the extract link, the full piece can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FKnSv6U2N8 )
I could go on and on with the horrors that are now occuring in Japan. One reason you don’t hear about it is because of the secrecy law passed by the Japanese Diet in December 2013…
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/12/31/258655342/japans-state-secrets-law-hailed-by-u-s-denounced-by-japanese
… and notice how the US Government championed this secrecy law.
Japan has been in total lock down for more than a year now. No news comes out whatsoever, apart from carefully controlled propaganda, which the corporate controlled western media propagates.
Feck, this is so annoying: here’s the correct short link about radioactive waste being incinerated all over Japan…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBrYFp6s00
I’m so annoyed with my computer problems that I need some calming music…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN6pJ6Mrjyg
RobG, I’ve got more computers than I know what to do with. What sort of machine would you like and how could I get it to you? Can you put an OS on it yourself?
Rob, this whole subject of radioactive pollution has become highly polarised. My strong impression is that we have “nothing to see here, move along please” from the establishment, but we’ve also got some severe exaggeration coming from some of the anti-nuclear campaign…
…To take a single point as a start, at 5:05 pm you wrote “at Hanford (a nuke bomb factory in Washington state, in the western USA) there are hundreds of miles of ‘open’ pits filled with nuclear waste”.
Now I don’t wish to downplay the severity of this, but there’s only about fifty miles of river adjacent to the Hanford site. There are a lot of open pits which have leaked, leading to hundreds of square miles of contaminated ground. But that’s a lot less than your claim.
I repeat; I’m not trying to play down the severity. Rather, I’m… Sorry, I’ve been interrupted…
Clark, that’s really very kind of you (and I mean that), but don’t worry, I’ll be able to get my up-to-date Apple Mac working again sometime soon.
But since you’re a computer person, you might not mind me saying that the machine I’m typing this on is a Compaq Armada 7400, which well over a decade ago was a top range machine. A ten gig hard drive, can you imagine?! I give up on the memory, but I think it’s something like half a gig ram, which back then was amazing stuff, as you know.
Actually, I’ve found it quite an interesting experience using such an old machine, with regard to modern technology. It still copes with complicated audio and graphics editing; but when it comes to video, forget it. Likewise with web pages these days, which are a bit of a nightmare unless you have gigs of Ram; and modern browsers don’t even allow you to turn off all the whizz bangs, because the page no longer works without them.
So, still staying entirely off the subject of this thread, I think all contemporary web designers should be forced to work with an old Armada 7400, then they might start designing real web pages that work. The analogy might be the 1980s, when high production music videos started taking precedent over the music itself.
*end of rant*
Clarh, to get back on subject, and to address your last post, I don’t see this as polorisation, but more the fact that the general public are not only told diddly squat about all things nuclear, they are also deliberately lied to about it.
For example, throughout the Fukushima crisis I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that the constant meme from the western media was that it’s not as bad as Chernobyl.
Chernobyl No.4 was a small reactor compared to any of those at Fukushima, and the Chernobyl reactor suffered a partial meltdown; this compared to three full-size commercial reators at Fukushima (each containg about 100 tons of fuel rods) which have gone into complete meltdown. Further, Fukushima No.3 was using MOX fuel (which is totally illegal under Japanese law, by the way), and it all went sky high, including at least four spent fuel pools, which never seem to come into the discussion.
You, me, everyone reading this is breathing in and eating all this crap now. Within weeks it had got round all of the northern hemisphere, via the jet stream, and it’s continued on for almost four years now (the emissions have never stopped).
There is humour in all this though, such as Tokyo being awarded the 2020 Olympics well into the Fukushima disaster.
You-couldn’t-make-it-up…
Rob, yes, as I see it the down-playing by the nuke lobby and the up-playing by the anti-nuke lobby are flip sides of a coin. Personally, I hold the pro-nuke lobby as more responsible for this problem, but I expect that from their side it looks the other way around.
But we need to prioritise. Financial collapse can occur to any country with very little warning, and then the (already inadequate) patch-up measures might become unaffordable. We need to campaign and lobby governments to get the worst and most pressing problems addressed first, and if every problem is exaggerated then poor decisions are likely to be made.
DU in UF6 form is an example. If people are overstating its radioactivity there could be objections to converting it to solid form and burying it. people might object to transporting it even as a solid. People might lobby against it being buried “in case it goes critical after it becomes inaccessible”, which it can’t.
It is of course tempting to respond to propaganda with counter-propaganda, but this makes it more difficult to get things done right.
It seems we were actually lucky with Chernobyl. Yes, it melted down, but then it went prompt-critical and blew what was left of the core apart, terminating the nuclear reaction. Anything good coming of a prompt-criticality seems counter-intuitive, but it prevented an ongoing reaction such as those presumably continuing at Fukushima.
Ironically, the (inadequately) improved stability of the Fukushima reactors has resulted in a worse disaster.
Do you think the melted Fukushima cores are still reacting, and how can they be stopped?
Computers: can your Amarda play a pre-downloaded video OK; MPEG format for instance? Particularly, if the video resolution is equal to or smaller than the screen resolution so it doesn’t have to be resized? If so, the next test is to see if it will play OK with resizing.
The reason I’m on about this is the confounded Adobe Flash player. It’s such a troublesome piece of software. I do without it most of the time; I haven’t even installed it in my current setup. 90% or more vids on YouTube don’t require it these days. I don’t use it for BBC iPlayer, either.
Yes, developers use whiz-bang powerful machines. They produce web content that is overly demanding. This suits the industry by forcing people to buy new hardware.
Blocking Javascript helps a lot. I use NoScript.
Rob, I had heard of the MOX (Mixed Oxide Fuel to the uninitiated – contains plutonium) and the spent fuel at Fukushima. The latter was in a reactor room roof space for fuck’s sake, the ideal place to blast it into the atmosphere, which is exactly what happened – simply crazy. I don’t know to what extent the mass media reported this, but in any case they went almost entirely quiet about it years ago – mustn’t scare the horses, eh?