Weatherlawyer wrote:
....

I am not validating anything Tory BLiar has said about nuclear fuel.
The man is a maniac lickspittle and should be shot out of hand not
respected as a leader of men.

Agreed.

A recent programme on the TV showed that small doses of background
radiation seems to alleviate cancers in that the genes to fight them
seem to be initiated in people who live in regions with fairly high
natural radiation.

Work on the Chernobyl site seems to back this idea up. Less people were
known to have died directly from the disaster than are killed each week
on the roads in the UK.


A curious and interesting program, both in its timing, its content and
its general conclusion.

If true, it propbaly means that there is no nuclear waste problem at all.

Low level waste could be dumped in landfills with no real problem.

High level waste could be reprocessed and the materials used in
processing kept for a few years and dumped likewise.



Another pundit or (schill?)

Shill. No 'C'.

this week told an interviewr that more
people die from fall out from coal fired generators than nuclear
reactors and that the health and safety record of hydro-electrical
power is terrible.

Indeed. IF the results of CO2 emission turn out to be about a million
times worse than the worst nuclear accident ever (Chernobyl) then we
have some thinking to do.


I wonder if they include the body count for the Hoover dam. (The site
engineer responsible should have been hanged by vigilantes for that and
all of the US congress or whatever their parliament is called with
him.)

But until nuclear power design, cost and management and everything else
is openly discussed, the only way to maintain good safety specs is that
everyone responsible for building them should be forced to live the
rest of their lives near them until the reactor is long closed -when
their kin will be responsible for their oversight until the waste
denatures to safe levels..

Suits me. You can shove one in my back garden.


I can't see Tory BLiar pushing that one through under those
circumstances. But this is a democracy so who is going to stand for
that sort of protection?


The real effects of long term exposure to low level radiation are really
an unknown.

The only data points we appear to have - that was a very interesting
program - are naturally 'hot' places, Chernobyl, and workers routinely
exposed (the airline crews)

There is IIRC some evidence that whilst low level generalised radiation
is not harmful, a 'hot spot' from e.g. a particle of plutonium that
gets inhaled, and stick in a lung, can be a starting point for a cancer.

I suspect that the number of cases of skin cancer due to global warming
far exceeds the number that may or may not be due to the nuclear industry

A far as cancers from Diesel engines go..I think you would be
surprised..the upshot is that conventional fossil fuel is nasty
dangerous and very polluting, and nuclear is not by and large.

The biggest problem is that rational debate is hampered by emotional
response that compare nuclear power with nuclear weapons. Which is a
sane as comparing a domestic oil boiler with a fuel-air bomb..and would
see every bag of flour taken off the shelves as a 'dangerous explosive'
(ever made a flour bomb? Try it!)

By the way I refute the 'snipped' part of your post where you equate
Britain's post war ills with development of nuclear technology. Unlike
the germans who declared bankruptcy and were then given Marshall Aid to
rebuild, England was hugely financially in debt to the USA, which gave
no aid, and instead sucked just about every bit of technology we had in
exchange.