Her Majesty The Queen Gawd Bless 'Er must have choked on her All-Bran as she surfed the BBC News website over breakfast this morning. In their background article on our Gordon Master's go-ahead today for another 456 nuclear power plants, the Beeb compared the UK's nuclear stance to other countries such as the US, France and Australia. Here's what they wrote about Oz:Australia produces no nuclear power. Plans to review whether the country should develop nuclear power were abandoned after Kevin Rudd, who opposed the move, was elected president in 2007.
Holy revolutions, they kept that quiet! No, no, it's a mistake of course, Kevin Rudd was elected Prime Minister not President, and Her Madge is still technically the head of state down under. They've rectified the error now, but I took the precaution of snapping the goof earlier in the day ha ha! It just goes to demonstrate that the cracks are beginning to show after the recent cutbacks at the BBC, where the news website is now rumoured to be down to just the 14 monkeys with typewriters.
And speaking of monkeys, EDF (or Electricité de France to give them their full title) have announced that they are keen to build four of Gordon's new glow-in-the-dark power plants. I don't know about you, but their inability to keep the lights burning around here for longer than a few days at a stretch hardly inspires confidence!
7 comments:
I've got a feeling it's only a matter of time with them down under. Maybe the newsroom was preempting the situation. Like they do with obituaries that find their way out when the subject is still here!
Re nuclear power, we're only a few miles away from a French station and if that does a Chernobil it's bye bye anyway so we might as well use some of our own power instead of importing it from abroad along with cars and electronic paraphernalia....maybe they could build a nice little one to serve Thanet on the Pleasurama site, underground of course. Imagine the interest to visitors of Thanet! There we are I've found a way to pay for all that burrowing!
Here is an example from 2006 Mitch:
Sweden — Sweden has shut down four of its 10 nuclear plants. Major faults were discovered after a serious incident at the Forsmark nuclear power station. A former director of the plant later said, "It was pure luck there wasn't a meltdown."
Closing the Swedish plants has instantly shut down about 20 per cent of Sweden's electricity supply.
So what happened? During a power cut, emergency power systems to the Forsmark plant failed for a full 20 minutes. If power was not restored there could have been a major incident within hours.
A former director of the Forsmark plant says, "It was pure luck that there was not a meltdown. Since the electricity supply from the network didn't work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe."
It appears that the fault in the backup power systems dates back to new equipment installed in 1993. So the faulty equipment, vital for preventing a meltdown, went undetected for 13 years. The same equipment is also installed on other countries' nuclear power plants. Germany is already checking its nuclear plants for the same fault.
Power cuts
Nuclear plants are vulnerable to power cuts. All nuclear plants need power to control them. If mains power is lost, back up power is used to control the reactor. This power is supplied by back up generators and there have been many instances where these generators have been faulty
Defective backup generators in situ and undetected, as faulty, in 13 years !!
We have had similar close calls at our nuclear plant (backups failing). The three backup power failures at Dounreay/HMS Vulcan triggered a four billion pound nuclear clean up and decommissioning.
But hey God forbid we talk about unreliable backup generators in the area where a major manufacturer of that genre is situate ?
ECR
I will email you with what I have found out by blogging as the Irritating Bloke re above ?
Anon.
Thanks for your research on the subject of what happens when disaster strikes, it made good if frightening reading.
As you know with all power generation and distribution there has to be an element of risk, hopefully covered by back ups. When and where do we stop backing up and how do these big conglomerates decide when which back up is sufficient.
While respecting the risks you so interestingly point out, we need that electricity stuff into the forseable future and I'm afraid everything has to be considered. They even tried that Orimulsion muck and look what that did to the Thanet laundry not to mention car paintwork and I forgot human lungs!
Good for Australia. The sooner they dispose of her parasitic majesty the better for them. If only we could follow...
Rule Britannia
Marmalade and jam
Five Chinese crackers up your a*sehole
Blam blam blam blam blam
Quite right M'itch, we do need electricity (if we're to maintain our 'all modern' lifestyle of fridges, computing and powered tin openers). Do we really need people being all precious about where it comes from, though?
Not the spirit that gets us to the top of mountains, eh?
Poor old Sir Edmund must be turning in his grave!
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