Why don't you build on flood plains?... Because they flood. What don't you put there?... A nuclear power plant.

The flooding which is affecting so many countries so badly has come to Britain and one of the worst affected parts of Britain is Cumbria, which encompasses the Lake District, a mountainous and beautiful part of England.
Written about by the Lakeland poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, the district was also loved by Beatrix Potter, the children's author and illustrator, who also farmed Herdwick sheep there and is credited with preserving much of the land which is now the Lake District National Park. According to Wikipedia, "She supported the efforts of the National Trust to preserve not just the places of extraordinary beauty but also those heads of valleys and low grazing lands that would be irreparably ruined by development."
Skip to 2015 and I have been re-reading the petition and pdf report in Radiation Free Lakeland by Marianne Birkby about the proposed nuclear plant, Moorside, in Cumbria.  This has been billed by the nuclear industry as the largest new nuclear development in Europe. There would be up to three nuclear reactors on what is currently farmland, woodland, hedgerows, marsh and shore in an area called Greenmoorside, which stretches from Sellafield to the villages of Calder Bridge, Braystones, Beckermet and down to the Irish sea.
This kind of countryside can hold substantial amount of water in the soil...Worms make straight tunnels up to the surface which allow rain water to penetrate to the deeper levels.  Certain types of soil can even hold up to twenty times their weight in water!  http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0100e/a0100e08.htm  and https://www.fginsight.com/news/aiming-to-increase-soil-organic-matter-content-by-20-per-cent-in-20-years-8371 This assumes, however, that they have not been built on!
As a matter of some importance,  the area planned for the Moorside development includes the floodplain for the River Ehen.
Now, according to the UK government's own live flood warnings, on December 29th the River Ehen was, at times, above the level at which flooding can occur at Braystones; on December 26th at Egremont; and on December 26th, 27th and 30th at Bridge Bleach Green Weir, at the west end of Ennerdale Water.  There may have been more occasions, but these are the ones I have in my screenshots.
I understand from the 2014 Radiation Free Lakeland report, that the plant site for each of the planned reactors would require 9.6 acres apiece and huge cooling towers perhaps another 15 acres. Maybe there would be giant cooling tunnels and heat exchange out at sea as well. How much concrete and steel and pipes would that take... and where would the flood water go, as well as the water in the soil which had been displaced by the buildings and roads and infrastructure? 
The River Ehen is a site of special scientific interest, as well as being very beautiful. The area is currently rich in its wildlife, and contains increasingly threatened species. It was supposed to have been left as a buffer zone around Sellafield, which apparently already has the largest amount of radioactivity on the planet.
Will the government listen to reason?  Well you have to understand what reason is, if you are listening to it.  According to The Guardian, Greenpeace has discovered that almost half of the areas fast tracked for new housing development by George Osborne, are on floodplains.  http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/dec/11/cumbria-george-osborne-build-homes-floods
If you live in the UK and you have time to sign the petition, as well as the one about flooding at Drigg, it would be greatly appreciated.  Sadly these aren't open to anyone outside the U.K.  But if you have got this far, thank you for reading the post and my very best wishes for the new year, which we saw in just over an hour ago to the hum of a helicopter overhead as the celebrations took place in London.

King Canute, rolling waves and proposed nuclear power plants.

As we waited under the bus shelter, where an unkind wind occasionally blew a swirl of rain directly towards us, we discussed today's situation and past predictions.  It was, after all, the beginning of the new year, and the thoughtful lady with the furled umbrella, reminded me that in the eighties, when computerization came in, we were told that we would all have so much spare time that when the schools closed and the children went home, they would be opened again for adults to study.
"Well that didn't last, did it?" she said. We agreed that people mostly work longer hours and have less free time than they did in a 9-5.30 era.
I remember the media telling us that there was going to be so little work for us to do when computers took the dross out of office work, that a whole new leisure industry was going to have to be born to give us something to do in our spare time, because we were going to have so much of it.
Um.... they didn't quite get that one right.
The thoughtful lady's bus arrived, the bus driver docking the front wheels carefully in the large puddle, so as not to cause a wave when he drove into it. 
I've made a few predictions myself that have gone horribly wrong and I can't blame anyone else for doing the same.  However, we can learn by our mistakes.
The version of The King Canute story that I was taught, was that he was surrounded by courtiers who were vying to flatter him in 11th century style one-upmanship. In order to teach them a lesson, he had his chair placed on the shore as the sea was coming in and forbade the waves to wet him.... Of course the waves still rolled in and of course he still got soaked and hopefully it taught his courtiers what he was demonstrating to them.
http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/Canute%20Waves.htm
I know I am not the first one to draw the parallel, but he was a king of England; this was an English sea that washed over him and now the waves are doing the same, but this time the threat is not to one man and his chair, but to an island and even a world, threatened by a technology that cannot be moved or dismantled for decades.
A few days ago, the former prime minister of  Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, who has switched from being pro nuclear to anti nuclear gave an enlightening interview,   http://nuclear-news.net/2014/01/13/japans-ex-prime-minister-koizumi-denounces-the-lies-of-the-nuclear-industry/
Currently, the British government is considering up to 50 new nuclear power plants  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/21/nuclear-plants-energy-plans
Meanwhile, in Fukushima, another coastal nuclear power plant, on a different island, water contaminated with radioactive isotopes such as Strontium 90 continues to be a horrible problem.  Anyone who has ever tried to stop water flowing from somewhere they didn't want it into somewhere they wanted it even less, may have some idea of how difficult it is to stop land water flowing into the sea and sea water flowing back into the land. The land doesn't stop at the sea edge does it?  It's just that the sea water comes up over it... King Canute knew this.
In Britain many coastal and riverside communities are still reeling from the floods. The Guardian  has a witness area for people to add their own photos and this is the link to the one I especially like.. for the words underneath! https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/52a028a8e4b0acc591790cd5/743301
The Environment Agency has a map showing river and sea levels. I was really impressed by it. http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/default.aspx
I hope they can keep it going..  There are apparently going to be massive front line cuts in the department. However, one map that made news in 2012 is set in the future. This is the map showing  nuclear power plant sites at risk of flooding in Great Britain in 2080.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/graphic/2012/mar/07/uk-nuclear-sites-flooding-map 
and http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/07/uk-nuclear-risk-flooding 
As I understand it, usually, people have to wait around 100 years before they can fully decommission a nuclear power plant.
http://enenews.com/nuclear-experts-one-century-before-japan-deals-with-fukushimas-melted-cores-more-likely-whats-left-of-reactors-will-be-left-in-situ-for-100-years-or-more-video 
So will the workers wear radiation proof diving suits or what? 

Hello ice age...Bye Bye Global warming. Please let's get rid of nuclear power before the freeze.

For years I have been getting fed up at at being told that nuclear power is zero carbon rated.  This is an absolute lie to me because, for a start Uranium mining is anything but low carbon, and the legacy of sickness and contamination of water and soil that goes with it can be devastating.  Are we human beings or unfeeling aliens?  I hope the former and no one on earth should wish this for their neighbour.
We have had yet another nuclear accident at Fukushima and it is still out of control and the Missouri River is flooding and apparently if one of the dams burst it will be a very serous scenario at the Nebraska nuclear plant..
The people of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, have recently said No to nuclear and countries like Norway made up their mind years ago not to go down that road. Surely this is the time to begin to close down the plants before anything worse happens. We know that the leukaemias will already come in a few years time, the hard cancers will follow some years later.... and they will. There will also be other diseases and abnormalities which will be genetic.
Now, if the scientists are right, we are almost certainly heading into a new mini ice age and that means that global warming won't happen.  This means that nuclear power industry simply can't use the carbon argument any more.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/  and, even sooner with the news: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
I personally think that peak oil will come upon us far sooner than most people are allowing for and that will have a huge effect on our contribution to global warming. I just don't want future generations to be trapped into drinking water which is radioactive, eating food which is radioactive and grown in soil contaminated with alpha particle emitters.  It won't seem funny to them, I'd guess when they know that they and their children are tasting the future and it's one of leukaemias, cancers and other diseases, and a genetic legacy they hadn't asked for.
Certainly, it probably is a fact that whatever these sunspots herald, the earth has a habit of going into another real ice age every 15,000 to 20,000 years and as we are around 18,000 years we may not have too long before this hits in again.
A lot of the things that have come out of the global warming theory are useful.  Every solar panel and wind farm out at sea, wave machine and tidal power station will be a boon and surely micro generation is a blessing. I love the idea of generating electricity at the site it is needed.  It's fun!
Keeping your home warm will be even more important and if nuclear power is allowed to be one of the future
mix, heaven help the poor people because according to the bright guys I've read,  the costs will be passed on in the electricity bill and they will be huge. Don't forget that decommissioning the plants after their twenty years or so, takes a huge amount of energy and costs a huge amount too, and we still don't know what to do with the waste, a lot of which which will be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. That will cost too. 
Anyway, grease the runners on the sled and hold onto your sweaters, because you may need them!!