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.

Flood defences and nuclear power are expected to receive funding from the green investment bank, according to detailed plans for the new institution set out on Tuesday by Vince Cable, the business secretary.

It’s sensible of course, nuclear is indeed part of the solution to our climate change problems.

But there is that rather large section of the green movement which insists that nuclear power is the very devil itself. Which is going to make it all really very amusing.

Which head is going to explode first? Please make your bets in the comments.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. confirmed a meltdown of fuel rods in two more reactors at its Fukushima nuclear plant, which has been emitting radiation since an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling systems.

Fuel rods in the No. 3 unit started melting on March 13 and those in the No. 2 reactor on March 14, Junichi Matsumoto, a spokesman at the company known as Tepco, told reporters in Tokyo today. The fuel dropped to the bottom of the pressure vessel after melting although the damage to the vessel is “limited,” he said.

This nuclear power stuff’s pretty damn shit hot safe, innit?

Aboslutely everything that could go wrong did: the 5 th largest earthquake of the century, a 30 foot tsunami roaring in at 500 mph, the inevitable human errors, and nuclear power, qua nuclear power,  killed fewer people than die falling off roofs installing solar panels of the kind championed by Mr. Leggett.

We’ll obviously have to ban solar power then because of the dangers it poses, eh?

The fuel in reactors No 2 and 3 is suspected to have melted amid reports that the operators Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) failed to cool the plant in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The news came only days after it was confirmed for the first time that a meltdown had taken place in the No 1 reactor only 16 hours after the earthquake and tsunami hit the plant.

And just look at the comments section: outright denial of reality all over the place.

It’s weird how science gets used in certain quarters.

It’s scientifically proven that we face resource constraints, scientifically proven that we’ve peak oil, scientifically proven that there’s climate change: but when it’s scientifically proven that a cherished prejudice isn’t true then bollocks to science, eh?

That’s (no, really!) the view of the Low Carbon Kid.

Incredibly this man used to be employed by DEFRA to tell us all about climate change.

No, really, there is.

In his article on “the confusing world of radiation exposure”, readers’ editor Chris Elliott was right to point out that getting a whole year’s sunshine in an hour would fry him to a crisp (Open door, 4 April). Radiation dose rate is important. What he didn’t say is that “dose density” is important too.

The “sievert”, as Elliott says, is a dose unit for quantifying radiation risk. He did not add that it assumes dose density is uniform. “There are many kinds of radiation”, he says, but he does not mention how they differ. In fact, external sources like cosmic rays and x-rays distribute their energy evenly, like the sun; others, notably alpha-emitters like uranium, are extremely uneven in the way they irradiate body tissue once they have been inhaled or swallowed.

Now it is true that having a piece of uranium lodged in your lungs is different from having a piece sticking to your skin. It’s also true that having a piece of uranium in your lungs presents you with other problems than radiation: it is a heavy metal, after all.

But how different is it?

ICRP has admitted that its model cannot be applied to post-accident situations. Fortunately the European Committee on Radiation Risk employs weighting factors to modify sievert-based doses for internal exposures. This won’t cure the mess in Fukushima but it will mean better public protection.

Hmm, the ECRR eh?

The European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) is an informal^[1] committee formed in 1997 following a meeting by the European Green Party at the European Parliament to review the Council of Europe‘s directive 96/29Euratom, issued in May of the previous year.^[2]

Ahhh….so we’re supposed to be taking our measurements of how much worse it is from a self appointed group of greens (even Greens) who have already decided that nuclear’s bad, M’Kay?

Y’know, while that actually is how much public policy is made I rather think that’s not how we would like public policy to be made. Better to get the science from scientists rather than ideologues, yes? The latter being all to prone to policy based evidence making.