Nuclear

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

Channel 4 made a multi-part series of programmes with this title.
The sub-title was: The dramatic, shocking story of Britain’s race for the nuclear bomb, the devastating fallout for the servicemen at the tests, and the veterans’ long fight for justice'.

I watched all the parts, and made notes.
Then I typed up the notes and followed up mentions and links to produce this document.

The UK government proposes to build nuclear power plants totalling 24 GW.
This implies Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and about six more of similar size.
The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.
Yet nuclear power has no future, as shown in this document of 3 pages with 52 references.

The first section shows that nuclear fuel may be effectively exhausted before 2050, when the climate targets should be met.
The second section shows that the costs of nuclear power have risen over time, and are now uncompetitive.
So nuclear power must be replaced by sustainable and affordable options such as energy savings and renewables like wind, solar and storage.

The third section shows that nuclear power conflicts with energy savings and renewables, so impairing the business case and deterring investment.
So the UK should phase out nuclear power and join the rest of the world in deploying energy savings and renewables.

Although this document is published after the latest Government and Labour Party proposals,
I have published many earlier documents on nuclear power, dating from 2006-0-19. (See below).
Most notably, my report on the Fukushima disaster was published on 2012-04-11, with copies sent to several MPs and Ministers.

The new UK government appears to support the previous government’s proposal of building new nuclear power plants.

The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.

However such nuclear proposals are nonsense, as shown in this 4-page due diligence assessment.

The Manhattan Project in the US covered every stage of the production of nuclear weapons. This included the mining and refining of uranium, enrichment to 80 to 90% U235 for uranium bombs, fuelling nuclear reactors with uranium to produce plutonium, and reprocessing the spent fuel to extract the plutonium for plutonium bombs. It was recognised from the beginning that these processes and plants would give rise to radioactive releases that would be harmful to the plant operators and the general public, yet they were never informed. This continues to the present day, when the nuclear weapon and power industry does everything in its power to deny and understate the many and extensive harms done to all living things. To this has been added the use of uranium in bunker-breaking bombs and tank-busting shells, that spread the dust so formed over their own forces, the enemy forces, and innocent bystanders, harming them all for generations to come. The human harms include many and extensive cancers, and also non-malignant diseases such as stillbirths, deformities and mental impairment and heart disease. With so much harm already done to humans that will take up to lifetimes to express, and so much nuclear debris laying in wait to harm even more humans, it is essential to identify every strategy and measure that can reduce the total harm.

This document covers the first warnings of nuclear harms in the 1950s and - following studies beginning in the 1960s - five books of evidence by Dr Ernest Sternglass in 1981, Mr Harvey Wasserman et al in 1982, Dr John Gofman in 1990, Mr Paul Zimmerman in 2009, and Professor Chris Busby et al in 2010.

Around September 2021, the European Commission considered the inclusion of nuclear power in the taxonomy for future investments in energy.

This was based on a single report from the European Joint Research Centre, which still has close links with the nuclear industry and is widely perceived as playing a promoting role for nuclear energy within the European Union.

The JRC Report ignored the report of the German Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply of 2011, which had lead to Germany phasing out nuclear power by 2023.

The European Commision also ignored 'Sustainability at risk, A critical analysis of the EU Joint Research Centre technical assessment of nuclear energy with respect to the "do no significant harm" criteria of the EU Taxonomy Regulation, of 2021-09 by Dr. Christoph Pistner, Dr. Matthias Englert and Dr. Ben Wealer, for the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

Nuclear fusion power on earth poses extreme technical challenges.
One is the attainment of at least 100 million degrees C for long enough to produce net energy.
Another is that any power plant fuelled with Deuterium and Tritium must 'breed' enough Tritium to sustain itself.

Yet fusion power is futile because it cannot be deployed at a meaningful scale before 2050.
This is the target date for Zero Carbon - hopefully limiting Global Warming to less than 2 C.
So by this date all energy must be supplied from proven renewable sources such as Solar Photovoltaics, Wind Power, Hydro Power, sustainable Biomass and Solar and Deep Geothermal Heat.

The Fukushima disaster was aggravated by the personnel being responsible for multiple reactors under emergency conditions.

There had been no testing or drills of Station Blackouts and Loss of Cooling Accidents in the 40 years since the reactors were built.

Once reactor meltdowns and radioactive releases had occurred, they had no means of mapping the fallout to guide evacuation.

The later Abe government coerced ‘voluntary’ evacuees to return by stopping their housing subsidies after only six years. Many still resist returning, despite the hardships.

The Abe government also sought to restart the 39 remaining operable nuclear power plants, but succeeded with only a few. Nuclear power is still strongly resisted by most Japanese.