Terrorism Arrests at Sellafield
There have been arrests under the Terrorism Act at Sellafield.
I have been over nuclear facilities in both the UK and the United States and am pretty sure, that untrained people without the right technical background could learn anything of use, that they couldn’t get from something like Wikipedia or Google. They certainly wouldn’t get inside.
In fact all they’ve done is draw attention to themselves and get arrested.
I’d do them for wasting Police time.
Paranoid About Japan’s Nuclear Plants
Everybody seems to be paranoid about Japan’s nuclear power stations.
I’ve been over several nuclear power stations. Would I be worred to live anywhere near any of them? Possibly, but only one that was in the United States that was a site in a very restricted position. I believe it has since been decommissioned. Look at these pictures by Sizewell. But these two stations were built in an area with little population and no earthquakes.
Properly designed, built and managed, we should have little worry about nuclear power plants. What we should worry about though is chemical plants and other industrial processes, which are close to centres of population.
Japan has built nuclear and chemical plants in areas with high seismic activity. I suspect that they won’t be doing so in the future. But what will that do for the Japanese economy?
The Car Park at the End of the World
Or should I say the end of Suffolk?
To many it would be an odd place to go for a walk. But the beach is pleasantly part-sand, you have lot of birds, including kittiwakes nesting on the rigs, interesting plants and protection from the wind because of the dunes. There is also a nice cafe and toilets.
Who would have expected it all, in the shadow of two nuclear power stations?
In the 1980s, I went over Sizewell A, which is the square station in the front. It is a Magnox station, was built in the 1960s and will soon be completely decommisioned. To plan their annual shutdown, they had one of the best planning systems, I have ever seen. It was a long white perspex wall, where the critical path network was drawn and updated. Different colours meant different things and through the months before the shutdown, all information was added in the correct place. Like everything I saw on that visit, it was all very professional.
I must relate a hunting story about Sizewell. We were hunting from Knodishall Butchers Arms and were about a couple of kilometres from the sea with Sizewell A in the distance. You might think that we were all against the station with its environmental implications. But being on the whole practical people we realised that you have to get electricity from somewhere and that the plant was a large local employer in an area of the country, that had suffered large job losses with the closure of Garretts of Leiston. But what really annoyed us, was the fact that the local farmer had grubbed out all of the trees and hedges. It was like riding in a lifeless desert.
I feel that we must build more nuclear power stations, but perhaps more importantly, we should be more economical with our energy use. Incidentally, as Sizewell is well connected to the electricity grid, from works we saw yesterday, it is being used as a ditribution point for the electricity generated by offshore wind farms. But I for one would not mind seeing Sizewell C and possibly D added to the Suffolk coast
Nuclear Waste
I have been over several nuclear power stations and on the whole they weren’t a chilling experience, where you felt that any minute, you’d be engulfed in some radiation-related explosion. At only one did I feel a bit uneasy and that was because the site was untidy and cramped. It just didn’t have the aura of being well-run that I got from say Sizewell A or AEP Cook. But I visited this plant twenty years ago and it has operated safely since.
But when I saw an article entitled, Areva plans new reactors that make nuclear waste disappear, in The Times on Monday, I was initially sceptical.
But it does look that it may be the solution to the problem of nuclear waste. I hope so!
What puzzles me about the story is that the technology was first proposed in the 1950s. If it is that good, why hasn’t it been developed earlier.
The Anonymous Widower 