I Need Cheering Up.

Bugger this, I'm off to see Laughing Len.

More Nuclear Idiocy

A week or so ago there was this news about thechaos at the heart of Britain's nuclear clean-up industry, which reported that, due to various flaws within the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, £400 million had to be diverted from projects to boost sustainable energy to cleaning up nuclear sites. If that were not bad enough, the overall estimate for cleaning up these sites has risen by £10 billion over the last twelve months (when the figure was an entirely reasonable £73 billion). Do you really believe that this figure will not continue to be revised up? At the going rate, that's £833 million a month; just think how many illegal wars you could buy for that.

I have argued before that even the earlier figure (and even assuming US rather than UK billions) represented a substantial sum for each individual in the country that would be better invested in sustainable technology for each household, rather than these grandiose technological follies. If I can rehearse once again a metaphor I still like, here's another dreadful example of wizardry over witchcraft: your big flashy hi-tech solutions - Thorp, Mox, I'm talking to you - don't actually work. But to a certain mindset they are still a hell of a lot sexier than a couple of solar panels on every house that would unobtrusively do the job, they are gargantuan totems of a bold vision - which, as readers of Chris Dillow will appreciate, should immediately put us on guard - and I do think that the perception of size is important here: Nuclear power as a measure of national virility, and let's not mention the subtext of weaponry, even if it is the elephant in the room... The point about a white elephant, of course, was that it was gifted by the emperor to those he wished to destroy financially. Why the hell has Gordon put a dozen of the things on his own christmas list?

Hopefully, today's announcement by EDF that they are pulling out of their intended British Energy takeover will help hasten the collapse of this planned new generation of nuclear power stations. Nuclear is not the answer to energy security in the future, for the reasons laid out briefly here by Justin, and this new Greenpeace blog, to which the man McKeating will be contributing, should keep you up to date with the many flaws of the nuclear industry.

Joining the dots

I'm not sure I buy into the current media-driven furore about knife crime, but I guess that's the hook Rachel North needed to get this in the paper:

as we hold up our hands in horror at teenagers carrying knives, we turn on the news and see Iran test-firing missiles, America saying it will not hesitate to defend Israel, Israel brandishing its military hardware, hawks circling. The old, old game of brinkmanship, that fatal human lust for more territory, possessions and power is reported daily on our television screens. And we wonder that youngsters are gripped by the same dark desires? Of course they are. These are our children. They feel and do as we do.

Just so. This is what you get when you suggest that violence can be a valid solution in some circumstances: while there, sadly, won't be much debate about the first part of the proposition, you can get into a dreadful mess over the last three words...