Bewitched by the Nuclear Pied Piper

Starry-eyed
On Tuesday the Brown-Sarkozy love-in will commit us to a new act of nuclear insanity.

They will obliterate from their memories the £73 billion UK cost to clear up our nuclear power legacy. It’s Omerta too for MOX – which threw away another £473 million of taxpayers’ cash and left us a dangerous nuclear transport dilemma.

Joyfully Brown will embrace another nuclear dream based on new generation of nuclear power. Gordon and John Hutton are as starry eyed about the promise of ‘new nuclear’ as past generations were about the past nuclear electricity that promised to be ‘too cheap to meter.’

The word ‘nuclear’ is the irresistible Pied Piper lure to those who are scientifically illiterate. Will anyone paused to look at the evidence of ‘New Nuclear’. The French persuaded the Finns to build the first one in their country.

The Finnish Government ordered its Olkiluoto station it on the promise that it would be cheaper than renewables. That idea is now in tatters. It’s already two years late in its construction.  Put another way, a 54-month project still has 44 months to run after it has been going for 36 months

The full cost of the project was initially projected a €3bn. The total cost is currently  standing at more than €4.5bn and rising. In early documents, the company referred to employing a total of about 2,000 people on the site. The number is already 2,600.

Will any small voice be raised on Tuesday to ask, if ‘New Nuclear’ is better than the past financial basket-case of old nuclear why is the French station in Finland over-manned, 2 years late and over budget by £2 million?

Cherished ugliness
Phew. That’s a relief!

The London based 20th Century Society recently made a request to Cadw to list the dreadful Bettws Comprehensive Scholl building as a good example of the Brutalist design style. It could then be preserve for posterity to marvel at our stupidity.

Good Brutalism?  It represents the lowest point of the clumsy, ugly concrete invasion that blighted the urban landscape in the sixties. Many were car parks. They all looked like car parks. It was an artistic perverse extravagance to be enjoyed by self-indulgent consenting architects in private.

Bettws never worked artistically or educationally. Concrete cancer is eating it away; the bulldozers will do the rest. All Newport will celebrate.  The Welsh Assembly Government have refused to list this  horror.

If the 20th Century Society wants to preserve monumental monstrosities, chose one nearer to where you live. London, isn‘t it?

Obvious, really
Leafing through the ‘God Delusion’, I sympathised with author Richard Dawkins complaint that all the media interviewers on his thoughtful book asked the same irritating question. They always do.

" Don’t you agree that the worst atrocities in recent history by Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein were committed because they were all atheists?"

After a while Dawkins found the put-down answer. ‘No it was because they all had moustaches.’

Hail and farewell

The weather was treacherous this afternoon.

After several hours of continuous sunshine, I decided it was safe to brave the biting wind and walk along the splendid Ridgeway at Newport’s Allt-yr-yn.

I had not got far when this ominous cloud appeared. Time to retreat to my car to hide from a vicious hailstorm.

Global warming?