Tuesday 31 May 2011

German Children, Swiss Children, Norwegian Children...

     German Children, Swiss Children, Norwegian Children, amongst others, all have parliaments who want to safeguard their futures. Are British Children's or American Children's futures something that their governments have the right to risk? and do we have a duty to neighbours who want to have a nuclear free future not to pollute their countries?  It can be done and the countries who are the most progressive in true green renewables will surely be the countries who prosper.
     We are also told that the global temperature is rising too quickly. What part do the billions of gallons of sea water whose temperature is raised up to 25 degrees F,  by once through nuclear power plant cooling systems, play in this temperature rise and can anybody tell me if this heat is taken into account when the carbon footprint of nuclear power plants is worked out?

A typical once-through cooling system draws into each reactor unit more than a billion gallons of water a day, 500,000 gallons a minute.... from  NIRS  http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/licensedtokill/executivesummary.htm

Saturday 28 May 2011

It was an ordinary Sunday morning,... but radioactive water was seeping into the laundry room

Yes it was... One of the contractors working on the decommissioning of the Sizewell A nuclear power station in Suffolk in the U.K..decided to wash out some dirty clothes and while he was in the laundry room he spotted something out of the ordinary: radioactive cooling waster which was leaking out of the pond which holds the reactor's extremely radioactive spent nuclear fuel... No... none of the alarms had gone off and Yes..by the time the next patrol came round, the pond level would have gone down enough to expose the nuclear fuel rods. Potentially, they could have overheated, caught fire and sent a plume of radioactive contamination along the coastline.. or which ever way the wind blew.  Does the scenario sound horribly familiar?
This is very well reported in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-waste-nuclearpower  but the episode took place on January 7, 2007 and when was it reported? June 11, 2009.  Why the gap, when it was so significant?
     This report  from the HM Nuclear Installation Inspectorate was obtained under the freedom of information act by John Large, when he was compiling a dossier for the local "Shutdown Sizewell Campaign, otherwise would we have found out?
     The U.K is ringed with nuclear power plants and this government would still like more.  This is a link to a dynamic map, to show what would happen if there was an accident at a nuclear power plant in Britain, it's from No 2 Nuclear Power and you can make the wind blow in different directions. http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/Chernobyl-UK.php
    I don't suppose the leaking water looked different to any other leaking water, but the contractor knew it was...what if he hadn't.  Would you know? Why did it take an independent nuclear consultant to ferret this out?  Luckily there are a few.
     Do you feel confident that we won't ever be in a similar situation to Japan?  We don't have earthquakes of that ferocity, but even if less people would develop cancer some years later, if that cancer is the one which affects you, it probably doesn't make too much difference how many other people are suffering in the same way, except for the NHS resources to treat you. 
     
 

Tuesday 10 May 2011

People can hack into a car's microprocessors, "Stuxnet" happened, now we're told about "Stars" how safe are nuclear power plants ?

Did you know that cyber criminals can use the microprocessors in cars to disable, track or cause the car to malfunction?
Apparently so! Microprocessors, and there are a lot of them in modern cars… seem to me to be just waiting to be hacked. 
From what I can recall reading yesterday (!) horns have already been made to blast and cars have been disabled, and apparently it has been proven that the pressure checking system in the tyres can allow a car to be tracked, while I gather one of the universities managed to write a program which would disable brakes!!!
Now this is just cars.  Do you remember the Stuxnet story that came out about the virus being fed into the nuclear power plant in Iran last year?  O.K. well,  how many of you read the more recent update from Iran that they have been infected with another virus the call Stars.  I remember reading a comment at the time that  Stuxnet wasn’t that clever a worm and that it was probably masking an attack by much more efficient virus.
O.K. So as usual this sent me thinking… Like isn’t it a tad arrogant to assume that just because one or two countries together or separately, are capable of messing up a targeted nuclear power plant,  no one in another country or even the same country but with a different agenda, couldn’t have a lot of fun with any nuclear installation, cooling system or even waste disposal, just by sitting back and firing a few extra neurons and flicking a few keys? Especially if there were a bunch of guys who really enjoyed this kind of thing ?
Just wondered??

Source for car information http://cybercrimenews.norton.com/articles/car_computer/index.html

Saturday 7 May 2011

Christian fiction

It seems a long time ago, but it isn't so long. It was the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century and things were not well for many poor people.  The enclosures act had  forced many of them off the land, and into the cities or made them emigrate to America. They no longer had the right to gather firewood from the common and  even cooking their own food became a problem. Those places which had been theirs and their forefathers to roam and  live on, were no longer theirs.
In a few places, there were Christians who cared, who didn't want to see their fellow villagers ousted and reduced to poverty and then treated like criminals through no fault of their own... villagers often had to work as roundsmen to qualify for poor relief and the system was abused by the farmers and overseers.
One village where there were Christians who were prepared to help and who were in a position to do so, is the place I describe in Where The Fox Goes.
The first part of the story is set in the end of the last century, less than twenty years ago, when people discover that the same land is threatened by developers.  They love the wastelands, the woods and the allotments, but they are in the middle of a recession, jobs have gone and homes are on the line. What can they do?

www.insideoutsider.co.uk     Ebook, Epub or pdf,  £1.00