Secret report reveals catalogue of blunders at Sellafield (UK)

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/article316607.ece

A devastating "catalogue of dubious practices", including sabotage and safety measures based on "guesswork", at the Sellafield plant treating Britain's most dangerous nuclear waste is revealed in an internal report seen by The Independent on Sunday.

The whistleblowing document says that the plant - hitherto thought to be one of the better-run ones at the controversial Cumbrian complex - is "potentially dangerous" and is "becoming difficult to operate properly". One of its section headings reads: "Homer Simpson works at Sellafield".

The revelations could not come at a worse time for the Government and the nuclear industry. Tony Blair is pressing for the building of new reactors in Britain, against stiff cabinet opposition, after announcing a review of the issue in his Labour Party conference speech on Tuesday.

And on Thursday British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which runs Sellafield, decided to try to sell off almost all its remaining business, including the treatment plant. The document is a shocking indictment of the 250m waste vitrification plant (WVP), which binds the most highly radioactive and dangerous waste produced by the nuclear industry in glass so it can be stored and disposed of easily.

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died from the leaky pipe which caused so much agony among poorly educated twits here some months ago. In fact, Cumbria has been depopulated along with huge sections of Wales.

New Orleans? We don't give a stinking shit about New Orleans! It's the crucibles we care about - they really scare us, man, they got radiation.

Unbeknownst to the newspaper reporters who offer us this wisdom about the Sellafield "disaster," the alleged cracked crucibles don't really dwarf global climate change as an environmental concern. It is not really obvious - except to institutionalized (as in having spent their entire lives in a single institution as opposed to getting a real job) intellectual isolates - that the cracked crucibles do not magically render burning fossil fuels perfect just because fossil fuels aren't (gasp fear fear scream terror terror horror panic paranoia) radioactive.

I note that for $250 million dollars, one could buy 50 magical mega"watts" of solar power, which, depending on the weather, might be equal to 12 megawatts of real capacity. Somehow this never happens though. Despite all the sexy proselytizing on the subject, 40 years of hearing about magic "save the day" solar, with cheering from nearly everyone, all we are lacking is the industrial sized plants. Could it be that it really doesn't work?

But let's get back to the cracked crucibles at Sellafield, which mesh so nicely with the "leaky pipe." Let us assume for a moment, even knowing that the media is a very poor interpreter of reality, that all the claims of this newspaper reporter are true and that Sellafield is very badly managed and horrible cracked crucibles are adding to the vast overweening tragedy of the cracked pipe:

We hear all the time about "potentially dangerous" situations with all things nuclear, but we hear very little from the same twits who offer these tidbits about fossil fuels, unless of course, someone tries to take the fossil fuels away - in which we hear all sorts of crying from the spoiled brat drinking brigade.

All energy is "potentially dangerous" as the world will find out when the real depth of the contamination - much of it from the oil industry - of Louisiana becomes apparent. It is "potentially dangerous" to wade through oil slicked waters past dead bodies to try to "acquire" (if you're white) drinking water or loot (if you're black" food. Many people think that these things are exacerbated by global climate change.

It is also "potentially dangerous" to live in Africa and have your crops fail when you're trying to feed your family. Many people think that such events will be exacerbated by global climate change.

It was for instance, a "dubious practice" to sink the nation's energy future in a set of oil and gas platforms in the thermally unstable Gulf of Mexico and coal mines in West Virginia - but you would have the ability to think to understand that.

It is all so "becoming difficult to operate properly" in a world where climate instability causes droughts and vast overpowering hurricanes, but you would have to have some experience of the real world, as opposed to a life long comfy niche in an extended high school, to get a tiny little head around that fact.

It is a twit notion to pretend that every cracked vial, every tiny leak viewed in isolation is a tragedy in the nuclear case without reviewing the risks of it's alternatives. Nuclear energy will never be risk free - because no energy form is risk free. This is because - except, of course, in the rarefied world of third or fourth tier college freshmen who will nod at any notion, no matter how absurd, to suck up for grades - energy by it's nature is dangerous. Just ask the people in Iraq. They know.

To paraphrase Salvador Dali's remark on his art: It is not that nuclear energy is so good, it is that the other forms of energy are so bad.

And now for a caveat for what I am about to say: I don't watch TV very much and I've never seen "The Simpsons" or for that matter any other cartoon sitcom, though of course one hears about these things invariably through osmosis. Still I expect that those who confuse Homer Simpson with reality - there are disturbingly too many of these mindless TV zombie lotus eaters these days, most of them continuously higher than kites - are simply revealing the very, very, very, very, very poor quality of their minds.

Let us review some recent (and not so recent) evocations from the anti-nuclear crowd, ad nauseum:

1) Nuclear power is too expensive.

2) Nuclear power is dying on economic grounds.

3) Nuclear power is dangerous.

4) The world is abandoning nuclear power on environmental grounds.

5) No new nuclear capacity is being built.

6) The world is running out of uranium.

7) Chernobyl is the worst environmental disaster ever.

8) Everyone opposes nuclear energy.

9) The world is going overwhelming solar.

10) Solar energy is cheap.

11) Solar energy can meet all of the world's energy needs.

12) Commercial nuclear power is the only form of energy that has subsidies in any form.

13) It is more appropriate to focus on the fear of nuclear energy than the fear of fossil fuels.

14) Nuclear terrorism is more important, common and deadly than oil related terrorism.

15) Most nuclear operations are about to cause deadly failures and any malfunction in any nuclear operation will likely result in mass death.

16) The world rush toward solar power will shut all nuclear operations down.

17) The purpose of the nuclear industry is capitalist corporate greed, while the purpose of the solar industry is marketing-free nobility and international socialism and goodness and kindness.

18) People who actually understand nuclear operations fear them.

19) Solar energy causes no pollution and no risk whatsoever.

20) Risk assessment is nonsense.

Because I was once young and dumb myself, because I was once so naive to not only believe but to mouthe some of these precious bits of wisdom, I love to put these hallucinations in the light of day, the peak of daylight being the few minutes a day that a PV cell actually produces a solar "watt" that is equivalent to a physicist "watt." Shit, am I glad I don't get that wasted and that isolated. I'm glad I grew up. I'm glad that I've had some feedback from someone other than the credulous suck up freshmen. I'm glad I've lived in the real world, with all it's problems, threats and difficulties. I, at least, will have had a chance to have done something useful.

http://larouchein2004.net/pages/questions/youth/030201penn008.htm

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Question My question is, why should we have nuclear power, versus solar power, and how exactly the gang-countergang operations work, with a lot of these modern leftist movements? So, that's my question.

LaRouche: Okay. Because solar power is idiocy. Actually, solar power is nuclear power. Where do you think you get solar power? From nuclear fission and fusion, in the sun.

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Now, the point is... Now, this goes back to a piece of scientific idiocy, which was understood already -- the problem was understood by Plato, already. The concept of power, as opposed to that idiot Aristotle's concept of energy. So, when people talk to you about nuclear energy, or solar energy, they're Aristotelean idiots, who shouldn't be talking. They should be monkeys, and not talk. They can chatter, but not talk.

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Now, compare the energy flux densities of various modes of power generation. Solar power is the least efficient. As a matter of fact, the use of solar power is insane. Because solar power has a very important use on this planet. Light. Light. What we want is more vegetables. We want more foliage. We want the deserts to bloom. What we want to do, is we want to get areas which are too hot, to cool down. We want more moderate weather. We want to turn the deserts into areas where people can live, under normal conditions.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: