Very much the same group of lefties tell us that we must decarbonise the energy production system in this country.

The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely determined by the interest rates one must pay on the debt contracted to construct the plants.

So why aren’t those lefties arguing that the government should borrow at very low rates to build the nuclear plants that would decarbonise the electricity production system?

All very puzzling really….

The wildlife-rich wetlands of Romney Marsh in Kent could become a radioactive dumping ground for Britain

Sounds a bit weird. Don’t you want some nice rocky area, not a low laying marsh?

Some nice already radioactive chunk of granite perhaps? Some Cornish or Aberdonian mountain?

The Japan Times reported on 29 March that radiation inside the vessel has reached 73 sieverts per hour – high enough to administer a lethal dose to a human in a matter of minutes, even to disable the robotic devices which are sent regularly into the reactor to monitor what is happening there.

High radiation levels inside a nuclear reactor.

Just fancy that, eh?

Russia: we would build safe UK nuclear plants
Russia’s state atomic energy agency has played down fears over its safety record as it confirmed its interest in building nuclear power stations in Britain.

No, just no.

Quite apart from anything else they’re possibly the most corrupt organisation I’ve ever dealt with. And yes, that includes both GAI and the North Koreans.

Nuclear power can’t happen without subsidy. So it shouldn’t happen.

Facepalm.

There is absolutely no argument where this is true of nuclear but not of renewables.

Understandably, Japan too is now in crisis, with just two of its 54 reactors in operation. Its government is drawing up new energy plans, but the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe have already urged their main electricity supplier to cease its reliance on nuclear power.

The report of the first independent, authoritative inquiry into Fukushima – published this week in Japanese – will only increase concern. It shows that a true catastrophe was averted not through the inherent safety of the technology, as nuclear advocates have been claiming, but through good fortune and the heroism of workers on the site.

“It was extreme luck that Japan managed to avoid experiencing the most disastrous day,” reported Koichi Kitazawa, a former head of the country’s Science and Technology Agency and a prominent member of the inquiry. It showed that there could have been a “devil’s chain reaction” of nuclear explosions. If that had happened, said Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, Tokyo would have been “finished”.

Err, no.

He’s mashed together two entirely different things.

The panel’s report reveals that although the public was being reassured there was no reason to panic following the March 11 disaster, government leaders were contemplating worst-case scenarios, including evacuating the capital.

“We were concerned that damage from the nuclear accident could lead to a massive series of chain reactions,” Yukio Edano, chief Cabinet secretary at the time, told the panel, according to the report.

The government by March 22 had ordered experts to compile a disaster synopsis that projected radioactive fallout to spike drastically in a radius of 250 km from the stricken plant and prompt evacuations in Tokyo.

The government, the politicians, misinformed as they were, were worrying about such chain reactions, explosions and radiation. That is not the same at all as the scientists saying that such would, might or even could happen.

The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant crisis was caused by Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s lack of preparation for huge tsunami and exacerbated by conflicting levels of authority and downright “distrust and meddling” by high-ranking officials, an independent investigative panel reported Tuesday.

“There were cases of excessive meddling (by the government) toward people working at the site,” and such actions did more harm than good, said Koichi Kitazawa, former chief of the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

It’s the reactions of the fuckwit politicians that he’s complaining about, not the science of the damaged nucear reactors at all.

Doesn’t that just beat it all? “Respected” journalist upends the meaning of an official report for some unknown reason. The worries about chain reactions and imminent disaster were politicians being ignorant but he’s reported it as being a warning from scientists.

One might almost suspect him of having an agenda on this matter.

Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said that he was “very concerned about the latest report from the IAEA”, adding: “We think Iran should understand the key to ending sanctions is in their own hands: they have a duty to co-operate with the international community.”

Well, yes, quite.

You see, the thing is, they’ve signed a treaty promising not to develop nuclear weapons. And part of that treaty is that they must cooperate.

They can withdraw from the treaty if they’d like to……

Although there is a scientific consensus that no exposure is safe, no matter how brief,

No love, there isn’t a scientific consensus that says that there is no safe level of radioactivity. Forget hormesis for a moment and just concentrate on the obvious fallacy of the statement. We’re all bombarded with radiation all the time. Everything from cosmic rays through to uranium in the soil to bananas and Brazil nuts. And while we do all fall down dead eventually we’re not all falling down dead from the radiation from these sources.

One favourite (and unchecked) story about Brazil nuts is that they are sufficiently radioactive that you would not be able to take them out of a nuclear power plant. They are over the limit for allowable radiation to leave the plant.

Oh, and given the amount of radiation that atmospheric tests put into the environment then we should all have fallen down dead by now if there really was no safe level.

We get the other great folly as well. The stories of really bad stuff happening are from the military bomb making plants. Sorry, but no, we cannot use the evidence of people, in the middle of the Cold War, making plutonium triggers as evidence against people producing electricity. That would be like using the evidence of copper sheathed bullets to argue against copper wiring.

And then we get the great one:

Then, Japan was hit by a tsunami, and the cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear reactor were overwhelmed, giving the world apocalyptic images of toxic floods and floating cars, of whole provinces made uninhabitable.

Well, yes, the tsunami killed lots of people, indeed. And the failure of the nuclear plant has killed no one. So we’d better abolish tsunamis then, eh?

Finally, what’s wrong with the whole piece, indeed, the basic mode of thinking behind it, is that it is looking only at absolute risk, taking no account whatsoever or relative risk. If we decide that we actually do want to have electricity then we need to look at which system of producing the electricity we desire kills the fewest of us. And in that nuclear wins hands down. More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US.

Oh, and coal fired power stations distribute more radiation around the world than nuclear power plants do as well.

But respek to Mr. Monbiot for (sometimes) following where the evidence leads him.

“This proposal will lead to a subsidised plant creating subsidised fuel so that subsidised operators can produce subsidised electricity ….”

That sticks it to those windmill and solar people! Yeah!

Hmm, what? They were talking about Sellafield?

Oh, sorry, mumble, mumble…..

Fuel rods inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have completely melted and bored most of the way through a concrete floor, the reactor’s last line of defence before its steel outer casing, the plant’s operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said in a report that fuel inside reactor No 1 appeared to have dropped through its inner pressure vessel and into the outer containment vessel, indicating that the accident was more severe than first thought.

The worst thing that could happen (and it’s possible to find this prediction if you’re prepared to wage through the CiF comments section) is that there would be a meltdown, as there indeed was.

A meltdown which would lead to a very expensive puddle of metal and that’s about it.

That’s why they have inner and outer containments, with concrete between them. Fuel melts, fuel rods melt, hit the concrete and solidify. And even if the outer containment is breached then there’s several more metres of concrete underneath which will solidify the molten metal.

You wouldn’t actually want it to breach the outer containment, of course. Get quite a lot of nasty (but very local, no great clouds of stuff like at Chernobyl) radiation.

Very boring, very expensive, puddle of cold metal.

It’s amazing how safe nuclear power is really…..

Fukushima nuclear plant could take 30 years to clean up

Removal of fuel rods and decommissioning of reactors could take decades, warns Japan’s atomic commission

So, err, how long does it normally take to decommission a reactor?

I have this vague sort of idea that you wait a decade or two anyway to get rid of the short lived isotopes before you start.

Concerns that contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had spread to Tokyo subsided on Friday after high levels of radiation recorded along a street in the city were linked to old bottles of radium stored beneath the floorboards of a nearby house.

Researchers had recorded radiation of 3.35 microsieverts per hour along a street in Setagaya ward, a higher level than in some parts of the 12-mile (20km) exclusion zone around the nuclear plant.

An investigation traced the contamination to several bottles that had been stored in a cardboard box beneath an empty house.

It’s not just that this has nothing at all to do with Fukushima.

Rather, that given the hysteria over Fukushima there are people all over Japan wandering around with Geiger Counters. And they’re finding all sorts of little hotspots of radiation.

Some of them, possibly, might be to do with Fukushima. But those that are not do show quite how prevalent radiation is and are thus something of a problem for those who say that even a teensie bit makes people fall over dead.

If, in possibly the first time ever that near an entire nation has actually been checked for hotspots, we find hotspots that don’t seem to have been doing any harm for however long, we do need to conclude that these low levels haven’t been doing very much harm, don’t we?

The powder they contain appears to be yellowcake uranium from neighbouring Niger. …….There are at least 10,000 drums with a total capacity of two million litres,…….. The International Atomic Energy Agency says it knew that Col Muammar Gaddafi had stockpiled yellowcake uranium near Sabha – a relic of the years when he tried to develop nuclear weapons after obtaining blueprints from the Pakistani scientist, AQ Khan. “We can confirm that there is yellowcake stored in drums at a site near Sabha in central Libya,”……A WikiLeaks cable disclosed that two years ago he was trying to sell 1,000 metric tons of yellowcake on the world market.

Annual global market for yellowcake is around 50,000 tonnes. So while it’s a decent amount it’s not an earthshakingly large amount.

Note that the IAEA knew it was there. Also, yes, it’s radioactive, not the sort of thing you’d use on the flower beds. But it’s not going to fry anyone who walks by it either.

It’s also entirely legal for a government to have this stuff. A country has the right to nulear power (most certainly if they’ve signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty) so it has the right to having uranium.

I do wonder though how long it will be before someone starts claiming that this proves that Ghadaffi was after a bomb. Still. For we knew that he was, in the past. This find is really evidence that he wasn’t still after a bomb.

He tried to sell the yellowcake he had: uranium it was quite legal for him to have but not legal for him to try to process into the bomb that he no longer wanted to. When he didn’t sell it he abandoned it in the desert rather than try and process it into bomb material.

I would take from that that he wasn’t trying to build a bomb.

But I wonder who will use the same facts to claim that he was still after one? Would be a nice justification for “intervention” after all.

Finally, if there’s 1,000 tonnes there it’s worth around and about $150 million. Happy to advise the new government on where to sell it….for a fee, of course.

No, legally, of course: the new government will be able to issue the relevant documents to allow sale and transport. Most likely destination would be a US reactor or three, after processing.

As many as 80 members of the Bavarian State Orchestra have refused to join a high-profile tour of Japan due to fears over radiation.

Is there radiation in Japan?

Sure, there’s radiation everywhere.

Are there dangerous levels of radiation in Japan?

Sure, there’s plenty of places with dangerous levels of radiation. But as long as you don’t try and stick your head inside a reactor Japan is no more dangerous than Germany.

In fact, as long as you stay more than a few hundred metres from the damaged plant itself you’ll almost certainly get a higher radiation does by hiking up an Alp.

Yes, radiation does increase at altitude.

And really, what has the world come to when Germans have become wimps?

We had a pretty good warning earlier this year, when the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused an even bigger tragedy when the Fukushima nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown.

20,000 people being crushed to death or drowned is a tragedy.

A few piles of very expensive scrap metal with no one killed is not a greater tragedy.

Vile, vile, creature.

Nuclear advocates say that only nuclear can now provide the quantity of energy needed for the next 40 years. But its critics point to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and possibly Japan, which have turned their back on the much-disputed power source.

Both can possibly be true: that some reject nuclear while nuclear is the only power source viable for the next 40 years.

Fukushima workers brave radiation and heat for £80 a day

Fears grow for inexperienced contractors working in Japanese heatwave to bring stricken nuclear reactors under control

Then when you read the story there’s absolutely nothing at all about the radiation being dangerous.

It’s actually about the fact that Japoan in the summer is a hot place. And people doing heavy manual labour in hot places face risks from getting hot.

The Guardian spoke to several construction workers, who said they were paid about 12,000 yen a day to clear radioactive debris left in the tsunami’s wake. By contrast, Tepco employees earn an average of 7.6m yen a year.

That “radioactive debris” seems to have just been slipped in there. No, no one is asking that peeps go and pick up a lump or uranium.

Note also the contrast between those two pay rates. The per day and per year. 12,000 a day for 250 days a year (a not unreasonable working year) is 3 million.

So the wage differential between nuclear engineers and manual labourers is two or three times. And the problem with this is?

Another piece in the same paper:

He says he has been exposed to five millisieverts (mSv) in little over a month – more than double the worldwide average background dose of 2.4mSv a year. While Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) engineers working inside reactor buildings are allowed an annual radiation dose of up to 250mSv, Rune’s firm has imposed a cut-off point of 30mSv for staff and 15mSv for casual labourers.

“I have about two months left before I reach my limit, but I’m hoping they will make an exception and let me work for longer,” he says.

5mSv? Cornwall perhaps? Aberdeen?

There’s really a lot of streching going on to make this radiation seem more dangerous than it is, isn’t there?

Revealed: British government’s plan to play down Fukushima

Internal emails seen by Guardian show PR campaign was launched to protect UK nuclear plans after tsunami in Japan

Given the fucking nonsense that was being published in newspapers like, erm, The Guardian, someone, somewhere, needed to start telling people the truth.

For example, there has not been one single death from acute exposure to radiation as a result of this earthquake and tsunami, nor do we as yet have any indication at all that anyone has been exposed to enough to produce a chronic or long term problem.

The reactor cores have melted, yes, they’re a puddle of useless metal now. We’ve had “meltdown”. And as I pointed out at the time, the effects of this on human health are so close to zero that we cannot in fact measure it.

Yes, it was indeed an appalling, Level 7, nuclear accident. And no one has died of it and almost certainly no one will die of it in the future.

And the reason that people needed to get together to try and point such things out is, well:

Louise Hutchins, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace, said the emails looked like “scandalous collusion”. “This highlights the government’s blind obsession with nuclear power and shows neither they, nor the industry, can be trusted when it comes to nuclear,” she said.

The lies and disinformation being spread by the cocksuckers at Greenpeace actually.

According to the survey, 1.13 becquerels of caesium-134 per litre of urine were found in an eight-year-old girl – the highest reading for that isotope. The highest reading for caesium-137 – 1.30 becquerels – came from a seven-year-old boy, Kyodo news agency said.

Given that no one’s rushed these kids into a lead lined ICU bed I assume that these aren’t in fact very high levels.

And I’ll also admit that I get very lost in these various radiation measurements. Rads, rems, becquerels, sieverts, there’re grays and joules as well aren’t there?

So, could one of you more mathematically inclined readers do me a favour and convert this into the banana equivalnet dose?

Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium,^[6] it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.