Hinkley
One of the Queens personal representatives in the Westcountry is reported to be better off to the tune of £50 million after selling a slice of her magnificent estate to be a site for a nuclear power station. Lady Elizabeth Gass, who is the Lord Lieutenant of Somerset, is reported by the Sunday Times to have become a beneficiary of Britains dash for nuclear power with the sale of 230 acres of Quantock Hills land to energy company EDF.
Western Morning News 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Scotland
Plans being considered by the industry regulator could undermine the prospect of new UK nuclear power plants. The cost of feeding the north of Scotland’s renewable energy into the national power grid could fall by 80% under the proposals. A study carried out for Ofgem suggested the change would boost the case for building wind and marine turbines in and around Scotland. The costs were estimated in a draft pricing and investment model. It suggested the access charge for wind and marine power from the north of Scotland would fall from £24 per kilowatt to less than £5. Sharing the costs equally across the UK would remove the financial incentives to build any new nuclear power stations, and shift a projected £17bn of nuclear investment to other technologies.
BBC 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Radhealth
Letter: On a recent university field trip to Chernobyl, we learnt that one of the main risks from radiation fallout is not so much the direct exposure as you pass through an area of concentrated contamination, but the risk of ingestion of radioactive particles in dust, dirt or water, which stay in the body permanently after exposure, dramatically increasing the risk of cancer and other diseases. We were also told alpha, beta and gamma radiation differ in that alpha particles do not travel far through air, and thus were not easily picked up by our radiation counters. Thus my exposure to alpha particles (highly dangerous over short distances) was unknown, although my exposure to other particles was negligible. The risks posed by nuclear energy, both personal and to society, seem to be a classic case of black swan logic: so unlikely as to be unintelligible through normal statistical methods, but occurring often enough that they cannot be treated as outliers and ignored as spurious. In this era of hopefully evidenced-based policymaking, such information must be more widely discussed if a sensible debate over nuclear energy is to be had.
FT 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Dalgety Bay
FORMER Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for urgent action to deal with radioactive contamination on a Fife beach. Brown, the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, has confirmed he intends to meet with the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, to discuss the discovery of more than 200 particles at the beach at Dalgety Bay in the past few months.
Sunday Herald 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Proliferation
Letter: I feel it necessary to respond to the naive letter from Tony Benn et al. Nuclear weapons are the greatest threat to human survival ever invented. Benn is old enough, as am I, to remember that some 150,000 human beings were evaporated in August 1945. What is not generally realised is that the weapons used in Japan were mere firecrackers compared to what is available today. We must now consider the instantaneous deaths of millions. The cause of non-proliferation was greatly hampered by the lies of Bush and Blair over Iraq. But there is a real and increasing threat. There is no military need or use for the horrible instruments. Not from Israel, and certainly not from the UK, where £25bn is foolishly allocated for their renewal. Israel is the only country with such arms whose very existence has been threatened by Iran. And Iran has directly violated the non-proliferation treaty for decades, not years, as carefully documented by David Albright and colleagues at the Institute for Science and International Security. The poison of weapon development has spread from North Korea to Libya, even to Syria, all regimes with the blood of their citizens on their hands.
Guardian 13th Nov 2011 more >>
David Lowry & Colin Hines: Your editorial’s defeatist acceptance of nuclear proliferation was correct on one point: that the non-proliferation treaty is flawed. Its central delusion is it assumes nation states can be persuaded not to turn the knowledge learned in running nuclear power into developing nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and potentially Iran illustrate the colossal folly of such an approach. One immediate measure should be to insist that France wind up the extraordinary industrial partnership between the Iranian state Atomic Energy Organisation and the French state-owned nuclear fuels company, COGEMA, a joint venture in uranium enrichment.
Guardian 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Iran
US president Barack Obama has said economic sanctions against Iran to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have “enormous bite,” and he will consult with other nations on additional steps to ensure that Iran does not acquire an atomic weapon.
Telegraph 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Searching for help, President Barack Obama lobbied the skeptical leaders of Russia and China on Saturday for support in keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed menace to the world, hoping to yield a ‘common response’ to a crisis that is testing international unity.
Daily Mail 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Barack Obama defended his sanctions against Iran claiming they have ‘enormous bite’ but wanted to work with Russia and China to find more ways of halting the country’s nuclear program. The President was speaking at a press conference after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Hawaii yesterday. Earlier Obama has sought support from Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev and China’s Hu Jintao but both men were largely silent on the issue of Iran.
Daily Mail 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday the full extent of Iran’s nuclear programme was not reflected in a recent U.N. report, which said that Tehran appeared to have worked on designing an atomic bomb.
Reuters 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Japan
A professor from the University of Tokyo has even estimated that it would cost up to U.S. $10 trillion dollars, amounting to approximately 10 years of the national budget, if the soil and road surface of radiation-affected areas are to be cleaned up. The damage is so much that the Japanese government would go well beyond bankruptcy.
Market Oracle 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Germany
Despite Germany’s Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (German Development Bank) being set to underwrite renewable energy and energy efficiency investments in Germany worth $137.3 billion over the next five years, Merkel’s government has now announced that in addition to going green, it will also build a dozen coal-fired power plants as part of the country’s future energy mix. In order to assure the energy transition, the government also plans to subsidize new natural gas power plants as well.
Commodities 13th Nov 2011 more >>
Test Veterans
A former RAF navigator has claimed the size of a nuclear bomb detonated during tests in the 1950s could have been three times bigger than the Government officially stated, in evidence which could that prove crucial for more than 1,000 service veterans suing the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for upwards of £100m.
Independent 14th Nov 2011 more >>
Belfast Telegraph 14th Nov 2011 more >>
