Tuesday
Mar152011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Hastings notices energy gap
Mar 15, 2011 Energy Politicians Max Hastings, writing in the Mail, notices that we may have a bit of a problem with our energy supplies here in the UK.
To be sure, if Fukushima releases lethal radiation affecting thousands of people, it will become much harder politically for any government to push through a new nuclear programme. But, today, this still seems unlikely.
What could be a catastrophe for Britain, however, is the crisis that will fall upon us ten years hence unless this Government comes to its senses, and starts to plan for a credible energy future which must include nuclear power.
If it continues to duck the issues and leaves policy in the hands of Chris Huhne and his foolish green friends, start hoarding candles.
H/T Breath of Fresh Air
Reader Comments (127)
BBD
From local knowledge, we know that the nuclear industry is totally corrupt. We know that about Japan. We also know that AGW geeks are pathetic little creatures who talk about peer review and 97% of scientists etc. A geek is a geek in any colour of shirt. A geek loves authority, its life is based on it. Mummy, teacher then the telly.
Going to gym.
Mar 16, 2011 at 11:39 AM | E Smith
".............. The nuclear industry is highly secretive, partularly in Japan, ..............
It is not a secret, have a look at this:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html
They got the UK information correct, so the information for Japan is more than likely correct.
Mind how you go at the gym!
Brownedoff
"The World Nuclear Association is the international organization that promotes nuclear energy and supports the many companies that comprise the global nuclear industry. "
So, they actually counted the number of reactors correctly. This must the Absolute Truth.
I didn't go to the gym, I went to an aerobics class and jumped about like a girl. See how easy it is to be deceived ?
This is the wrong place to dismiss scepticism as conspiracy theory.
Robin
Bolt seems to have grasped the situation well. Meanwhile, the CAGW supporters are ghoulishly rubbing their hands with glee over a real-life catastrophe, thinking it will provide a clear field for their PV panels and windmills, with little thought about the unintended consequences. Plenty of time for remorse later, I guess, although of course they will blame everyone except themselves.
More from Andrew Bolt. This might interest a few...
More people die of fear of nuclear power than of the power itself.
James P
As far as I understand it, the majority of mainstream, corporate greens like George Monbiot are pro nuclear now. . They are the opinion makers. Even James Lovelock, another ultra conservartive green is pro nuclear.
This is a giant blow against global warming economics.
The EU's energy chief Guenther Oettinger has said that in the coming hours "there could be further catastrophic events, which could pose a threat to the lives of people on the island". He told the European Parliament the Fukushima nuclear site was "effectively out of control". "The cooling systems did not work, and as a result we are somewhere between a disaster and a major disaster."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698
It only takes one accident . As well as all the minor ones that are covered up. and the dodgy government reports that tell lies about the true situation and all the dodgy Labour politicians in the pockets of the nuclear industry. I am certainly not against it in principle, but the the involvement of the military distorted this industry from the beginning. Who can we trust to tell the truth ?
E Smith
See 11:53am above.
"See 11:53am above."
There isn't one for 11:53am. I am going out to play with one of my pals now. Won't be back till 8 or 9.
The Eu's energy chief, if correctly reported, should be sacked immediately, if not correctly reported then the BBC should be held to account and wholesale reform of the News division actioned.
E Smith
See 11:53am above. It will still be there when you get back from playing with your pals.
Lord Beaverbrook
Agreed on both counts.
The EU's energy chief is the boss. He has a phd. We should bow before him like an Olympic god. The boss is always right. He is our dear leader. He knows best. We should love and respect him deeply. He cannot tell a lie. He would die of shame.
E Smith
Thought you'd gone out to play.
Oettinger trained as a tax accountant.
See 11:53am above.
@ Natsman
"UKIP just MAY hold the answer..."
Farage always reminds me of one of those corrupt seedy characters that Inspector Foyle always catches with his fingers in the petty cash box.
Shame really, as we don't have any serious player with gravitas to lead the opposition against the EUSSR. Farage and his pygmies don't, I'm afraid, cut the mustard.
[Snip - manners]
All
Can commenters on this thread please moderate their tone.
Sorry, your Grace, I was tempted by the juxtaposition of events.
so far nobody died from radiation. If only fossil fuel or water were that safe, but for these the champagne left decided not to be too worried about. Note the champagne left will NEVER make any such errors as fukushima, because the champagen left is always in that high and dry corner decrying the injustices while living a posh life off other people's back, and doing exactly that: nothing.
there seems to be a lot going wrong at the nuke plants and , as was with the credit crunch, the root problem is all the imposed regulation over the years, which results in mega systems , with loads and loads of paperwork , procedures , tests certifications, candy travels, photo opportunities for the poops etc etc etc. There are however less and less people around who know how things work.
A bit similar to post Roman times and the aqueducts. The various Ghots in Europe decided, you know, that water ove bridges was just tooo cumbersome to maintain, and focussed on essenshul sevisses instead. Most of them ES being snakeoil with a drizzle of inconvenient truths.
Do they know Sony has robots that replace pets? Learn a f-ing automated pet how to piss in the spent fuels pools. ffs.
An interesting exchange.
My impression of the civil nuclear industry in the UK was that it came from, and was used to cover up, the costs of the nuclear weapons programmes. There was talk in the early 60s of how it would make electricity so cheap we would have under road heating and it wouldn't be worth having light switches. All part of the flannel.
There were cock ups and incidents which were smoothed over and the military origins made that easier. In the 70s, John Hill came on the telly as a nuclear expert and his frothing at the mouth tone didn't do much for me at least.
Windscale (or Sellafield as the name was changed to) was not a model installation. The clean up bill for the hole into which things were chucked in the North of Scotland is tens of billions.
There's a culture in the UK of doing things on the cheap, which you don't find in Germany, Japan or France.
So, to go along with E Smith, I do have that creepy feeling about the UK and nuclear power, however, faced with a choice between hopeless alternative energy schemes and having reliable, affordable mains electricity with all that brings, I'll go for the second option and live with the creepy feeling.
cosmic
The dirty deeds and political corruption of the industry are easy to see. It simply isn't true that it doesn't cause cancer clusters. The Germans found that it did and elected to decomission the lot in 2000. Another industry that wouldn't exist in its present scale without the need for nuclear weapons is hydro (believe it or not).
phinniethewoo
It is precisely the dodgy bastards of the champagne left that have approved the new generation of nuclear power in Britain. There's a whole lot of them here
Labour and the nuclear lobby
Anti-nuclear campaigners like to portray the government as being in the pocket of the nuclear industry. How else, they argue, do you explain the return to favour of an industry once written-off as dirty, dangerous and prohibitively expensive.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5149676.stm
I must say I LUV the idea that the credit crunch was caused by too much regulation. You should write a novel.
German abandonment of nuclear power
In 2000, the German government, consisting of the SPD and Alliance '90/The Greens officially announced its intention to phase out the use of nuclear power. Jürgen Trittin (from the German Greens) as the Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, reached an agreement with energy companies on the gradual shut down of the country's nineteen nuclear power plants and a cessation of civil usage of nuclear power by 2020.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
Higher cancer risk for children near nuclear power plants found in Germany
A new study on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection is the first study to show reliable results: the risk of children under 5 years of age to contract leukaemia increases the closer they live to a nuclear power plant. This is the result of an investigation of the German Childhood Cancer Registry (GCCR) in Mainz carried out on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. The investigation concludes that in the study period from 1980 to 2003, within a radius of 5 km around the reactors, 37 children contracted leukaemia. On the statistical average, 17 cases would have to be expected. About 20 cases can thus be attributed to the fact that they live within this radius.
http://www.insnet.org/ins_headlines.rxml?id=5571&photo=
E Smith,
"I must say I LUV the idea that the credit crunch was caused by too much regulation. You should write a novel."
It started with the Community Finance Act in the USA. Banks being leant on to give poor people home loans - kinda nice - or to put it another way, banks having their arms twisted to lend money to people who weren't remotely creditworthy to buy places that weren't security, with politicians making on it. Not so kinda nice. The debt was packaged up into incomprehensible bundles and there was a bogus form of insurance Credit Default Swaps to sweeten it.
Banks, and in fact the whole world, soon found that debt was good and it was, until the bubble burst. Wile E Coyote had run off the edge of the cliff and was running furiously and stayed aloft until he realised he was standing on air and kidding himself. Then he fell.
So, there's an element of over regulation or at least political interference in it, and there's an element of under regulation in it, like why were the normal rules for lending magically suspended and no one noticed.
It would make an interesting novel, but it's more or less a complicated modern variation on the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme and many others. CAGW is another one.
cosmic
Yes, that was a big part of the public scam and the Bush administration tried to stop it. However, they ignored the real disaster which was the derivative mountain ready to collapse whenever the banks were asked to value their mbs at market value. Lehman's was revealed as a giant Ponzi Scheme which had been abandoned by the wise guys who created it. A company which had traded profitably for 150 years suddenly had 150 billion dollars of debt and 400 billion dollars of debt insurance. At was an insurance job too.
***
Bush can share the blame for financial crisis
The (Bush) administration did push hard on Capitol Hill to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, only to find itself stymied by Congress. But the administration's intense focus on fending off what it foresaw as a looming housing crisis did not extend to the proliferation of fiendishly complex mortgage-backed securities, said Harvey Rosen, an economist who served on Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, briefly as its chairman.
"Maybe there should have been," Rosen said, "but we were focused more on the fact that if these entities just held plain-vanilla mortgage-backed securities, it was still a disaster in the making."
Beyond its deregulatory bent, some economists argue that the administration's fiscal and tax policies made the United States more dependent on foreign capital, which fueled the bubble in housing prices.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-prexy.4.16321064.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
Bungling, cover-ups define Japanese nuclear power
TOKYO (AP) — Behind Japan's escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses.
Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all.
In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died.
"Everything is a secret," said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan who now lives in California. "There's not enough transparency in the industry."
Sugaoka worked at the same utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant where workers are racing against time to prevent a full meltdown following Friday's 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami.
In 1989 Sugaoka received an order that horrified him: edit out footage showing cracks in plant steam pipes in video being submitted to regulators. Sugaoka alerted his superiors in the Tokyo Electric Power Co., but nothing happened. He decided to go public in 2000. Three Tepco executives lost their jobs.
The legacy of scandals and cover-ups over Japan's half-century reliance on nuclear power has strained its credibility with the public. That mistrust has been renewed this past week with the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. No evidence has emerged of officials hiding information in this catastrophe. But the vagueness and scarcity of details offered by the government and Tepco — and news that seems to grow worse each day — are fueling public anger and frustration.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iU29-CtBza8xA01r9IzPwksyP1WQ?docId=9e518d4998224fd8b705cc3fe9903eb6
E Smith
It has taken you 24 hours to produce a couple of (questionable) bits of 'evidence' to support your assault on the nuclear industry.
Yet, for all you efforts, you have not answered my original questions, which I posed to prove the point that nuclear is the safest baseload power generating technology we have. Compare and contrast deaths in the fossil fuel industry, if you doubt me.
To refresh you mind, the two questions you dodged were:
- How many reactors are operational worldwide?
- How many nuclear accidents have there been in the last 40 years?
The German leukemia cluster study you reference is problematic:
- Causation is not shown: no increase in radiation was found proximal to the reactors
- None of the reactors in the study had any accidental release of radioactive material
- No demographic comparison was made with populations of industrial towns without nuclear plant (alternative causation from non-nuclear pollutants is not examined or constrained in the analysis)
- Other studies using the same data from the German Childhood Cancer Registry did not find the claimed correlation between childhood leukemia clusters and nuclear plant.
This prompted the German Federal Radiation Protection Agency (BfS) which funded the study to call for further research:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2994904,00.html
Given all this it is no surprise that more recent (but inevitably far less publicised) epidemiological studies have found no correlation between childhood leukemia ‘clusters’ and proximity to nuclear plant.
For example, here’s the abstract from Schmiedel et al. (2010) (emphasis added):
No evidence for a ‘spatial etiology of childhood leukemia’. But thanks for introducing the child cancer scare story anyway.