Tim Worstall

Two people were confirmed dead and dozens injured on Sunday when a gas power plant exploded in Middletown, Connecticut, it has been reported.
And also a point to be made about the safety of different forms of generation.
This one accident in a gas fired plant has killed more than the entire US civil nuclear program.
So much [...]

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Only a handful of countries have the expertise and technology for nuclear reprocessing, in which spent nuclear fuel rods from power stations are chopped up and boiled in acid to extract uranium and plutonium for reuse in a reactor. The by-product is a concentrated form of vitrified nuclear waste that is [...]

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“At the minute, it would appear that more people are damaged by sunbeds than by nuclear power in the UK,”
Sounds about right.
And of course there are benefits to nuclear power beyond turning that strange orange colour.

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Yamaguchi recounts how he was stepping down from a tram around two miles from the hypocentre of the bomb that detonated above Hiroshima. He was temporarily blinded, lost the hearing in one ear and was badly burned on much of his upper body.
Upon his return to his engineering company in Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was recounting his [...]

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It also complains that the reactor design was submitted in feet and inches rather than metric figures
Well, what do you expect from an American company?

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Horrible:
In the first half of this year, 1,175 people died in pits across China, a fall of 18.4% compared with the same period last year, the state administration of coal mine safety said.
That’s more than have been killed by all nuclear power plant accidents everywhere, everywhen.
Yes, including Chernobyl.

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The Government is considering fresh tax breaks for Britain’s nuclear power industry that could smooth the way for the construction of a new generation of UK reactors, The Times has learnt.
Whitehall insiders have told The Times that officials at the Department for Energy and Climate Change have been studying the possibility of [...]

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Government officials have drawn up secret plans to tax electricity consumers to subsidise the construction of the UK’s first new nuclear reactors for more than 20 years, the Guardian has learned.
This is hardly surprising.
Solar is subsidised, wind is subsidised….so why not nuclear?
For the point is that fossil fuels are still the cheapest way to generate [...]

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Iran has the know-how to produce a nuclear bomb
This isn’t rare know-how nor is it tough to get. TGive me enough highly enriched uranium (or, better still, give me half a dozen people you don’t mind dying and I’ll tell them what to do from afar with the HEU) and we could get a bomb [...]

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So, a question.
The widow of Ferdinand Marcos disclosed last week that she is pushing her son Ferdinand Jr, 51, known as “Bongbong”, to stand for president next year.
…
He was educated at Worth, a Benedictine boarding school in West Sussex.
I remember, when I was at the prep school there, seeing the limo coming to [...]

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To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes [...]

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This poses an interesting question really.

Normally scans to diagnose a new cancer or determine if it has spread would be carried out within one or two days but some patients are being forced to wait up to a month.
Hospital across the country are affected and at some points individual trusts have been working at only [...]

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However, in a statement, EDF Energy said: "As regards prices in France and the UK, the reason that French electricity bills are lower is nuclear power.
"Customers in France benefit from low-carbon electricity which is 80 per cent generated by nuclear power plants. Most of the [...]

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So why is Iran being persecuted under the non proliferation treaty while Israel is not?
(Hmm, hmm? Tell me that you bastards who support Israel and demonise Iran, bastards!)
As is pointed out in the comments, because Iran has signed the NPT and Israel has not. There is thus no legal justification for doing anything at all [...]

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Excellent little comment at CiF:

Electricity Generated by Nuclear Power 1970-2006 = 2,080,435,274 MWh
Estimated Decomissioning Cost = 85,000,0000,000
Cost per MWh [...]

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Yes, our Gallic cousins have allowed some uranium to leak into a couple of rivers. On the scale of disasters, this really isn’t high. Depending upon who you believe there’s 350 kg to 75 kg of uranium been released into the environment. Yes, no doubt this will be used as an argument against nuclear power.
Worth [...]

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Via, we get this.
Absolutely stunning stuff.

Now if 64 kg of uranium can poison seventy thousand people. How many people will two thousand tons kill? The numbers are staggering, that’s more than twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s. Forty percent of the Gulf War veterans are on “Gulf War Syndrome” disability from uranium poisoning. Seventy Three thousand of [...]

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Colombia’s government has claimed that Leftist rebels were plotting to make a "dirty" radiological bomb after security agents seized 60 lb of low-grade depleted uranium.

Maybe they were plotting to do that: but it wouldn’t work very well. Depleted uranium is chemically, but not radiologically, dangerous.
Then again, it would set off  a screaming panic which is [...]

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Well, maybe this isn’t all that bright an idea.

An ageing car ferry will ship hundreds of pounds of bomb-grade plutonium from Britain to France this week with just a handful of armed guards to protect it from terrorists.
The ship, a former roll-on-roll-off ferry which has not been identified for security reasons, will take the cargo [...]

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The most serious objection is not safety but "nuclear blight", the probability that government and energy firms’ cash, engineers and project management capacity is swept up in this great nuclear South Sea bubble and nothing is left for other renewables.

Halleluljah! Polly has actually managed to grasp an economic concept. And she’s even grasped the correct [...]

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