Spin, not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the Government's chosen method of communication. Ordinary people are dangerous. Ordinary people might ask a question which throws a politician 'off message'; the Cabinet member might reveal himself or herself to be a human being like us, and not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might tell the truth.

Ann Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004

STOP PRESS

Blow that idea

Wind generator supporters seem reluctant to spell out how much land would be required for a wind far which would be equivalent to a large fossil-fuelled power station. How many wind generators would be required, for instance, to replace the Aberthaw B coal-fired power station with wind power?

Aberthaw B has a capacity of 1,500 MW. If we take as a representative source a 2MW wind generator (no small beast), whose load factor is typically 33% compared to Aberthaw B's 80%, calculations show that 2,400 such generators would be required.

The largest wind farm in England and Wales, in number of generators, is Llandinam, Powys, with 103. They're not large generators - but have a look at the site and try to imagine the impact of 2,400 large wind generators on the landscape. A large coal-fired power station takes up about 2 square kilometres: 2,400 wind generators would require 600 square kilometres.

No right-minded person could countenance such an act of vandalism. Are the supporters of wind generators in denial? Dave Haskell, Boncath, Pembs. Daily Mail, February 2, 2006

COLD FACTS

Last Wednesday (December 28, 2005) was the coldest day in the UK for many years with -10°C recorded in several places. The Met. Office wind speed statistics show that at 6pm, when daily demand for electricity peaks, only one of the 70 Met offices was recording a wind speed of more than 9 knots.

The Government keeps telling us wind energy is the answer to our future energy problems - not surprising, as 11 of 18 DTI advisers are executives of wind energy companies - but, below nine knots, wind turbines don't turn.

So, on the coldest day for decades, when electricity was needed most, wind turbines would have produced virtually nothing, and any homes relying on such machines would have been without heat and light. The Government's reliance on wind energy is hopeless inadequate. Gigantic wind turbines are desecrating the finest scenery in the UK for no appreciable gain.

Letter from Lyn James Jenkins of Gwbert, Cardigan to the Daily Mail, January 2, 2006

NUCLEAR WASTE

As regards getting rid of (nuclear) waste, writes Michael Hanlon, Science Editor of the Daily Mail, on November 24, 2005, it is a serious but not insumountable problem. One option is 'deep burial', where waste is placed such a vast distance down that it cannot pose a threat. Another idea is to take waste to a depth where it actually 'melts' into the hot rock.

Webmaster's note: The volume of highly radioactive, long lifetime nuclear waste produced, if all the energy needs of one person for their entire lifetime were met by nuclear power alone, is the size of a medium sized chicken's egg.

Link between nuclear power plants and leukaemia ruled out

By Emily Cook - Health Reporter - Daily Mail, July 20, 2006

Youngsters in affluent areas are more likely to develop leukaemia and other childhood cancers, scientists said yesterday. In the largest stud y of its kind, experts found that those from well-off families have a greater chance of developing diseases such as cancer of the blood, bone and organ tumours. Children brought up in big houses in rural areas are also more susceptible to cancer than those who are reared in crowded cities.

The figures show children in Buckinghamshire are 22% more likely to develop the disease than those from Merseyside. But the landmark report - which analysed more than 32,000 cases of childhood cancer from 1969 to 1993 - ruled out links between nuclear plants and leukaemia.

The researchers from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, (COMARE) found childhood cancers are not even distributed across the country and occur in 'clusters' according to affluence and isolation. Scientists do not know conclusively why this happens. Bur they think one explanation might be the 'dirty hypothesis' which suggests that children brought up in too clean an environment develop impaired immune systems. This has also been proposed as the trigger behind increased rates of childhood asthma.

COMARE chairman Professor Alex Elliot said: "If you're wealthy, you tend to live in a big house with more land around it, and have contact with fewer people. But if you are from a low socio-economic groups and live cheek by jowl they you come into contact with a lot more people and either your immune system is changed a lot early on or you are less vulnerable to the population mixing theory.

COMARE is a committee of medical and scientific experts which offers independent advice to the Government. Professor Elliott is a nuclear physicist who works in the Department of Clinical Physics and Bioengineering at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow.

The researchers had set out to study clusters around nuclear sites but discovered an altogether different and unexpected pattern. Professor Elliott said they were 'as convinced as any scientists can be' that nuclear sites were not responsible for higher rates of leukaemia or lymphoma, with the exceptions of Sellafield in Cumbria and Dounreay in Scotland.

Wind farms a wasteful blight

There is too much spin in Renewables

Mankind is not the guilty one in global warming

Nuclear is not hot air

Free, Plentiful and Fickle

Sheer folly of wind farms

The future's black without nuclear swop

Nuclear, not wind, is the answer

Chernobyl's 'nuclear nightmares'

Nuclear power won't need tax cash

For once Blair is right. But who trusts him now?

The price of going green

CHERNOBYL: did it really kill 1,000 British babies?

Why Russia has done us a big favour

Terrible oil pollution legacy will last years

Blair poised to say Yes to more nuclear power

The future lies in nuclear fuel

Prepare for the nuclear power option

Wind farms a load of hot air, says David Bellamy

Blow for (wind) turbines

For the past week, a high pressure weather system has been sitting over most of the UK, resulting in sub-zero night temperatures, fog - and no wind.

As an addition to the renewable energy debate, can the national Grid tell us what contribution wind turbines are making during this period to our electricity requirements as a percentage of the total possible capacity of such turbines?

From Raymond Dauncey, Erdington, Birmingham - Daily Mail, Nov. 24, 2005

Power chief warns of blackout threat

Britain faces major blackouts in the next decade, it was claimed yesterday. Andrew Duff, chief executive of RWE npower, told an energy conference that Government action was needed to avert a power crisis.

Mr Duff said a combination of factors could hit supply. First, coal power stations will have to be overhauled before 'green' legislation from Brussels is introduced in 2008. Some will be closed because they are unworkable under the new laws.

Mr Duff warned the conference organised by the union Amicus, that uncertainty about how the Government intends to implement the legislation could mean investment is not made in time. He said that in addition the Government has yet to spell out limits on the amount of carbon dioxide permitted under separate EU legislation.

And third, many nuclear power stations are coming to the end of their life, further hitting the supply of electricity. Amicus also warned yesterday that Britain faces an energy 'catastrophe' as the nation becomes dependent on foreign imports from insecure places to supply most of its energy needs.

Reported in the Daily Mail, March 2, 2005

Lucrative savings

It's hardly surprising that Nigel Doughty, the owner of the world's biggest wind turbine maker, has given Labour £250,000. A big wind turbine rakes in about £300,000 a year in subsidies - much more than the value of the electricity it generates. All electricity users pay this as a little extra on their bills. The Energy White Paper estimated it would pay out the equivalent of a £1billion a year wind-fall to renewable (mainly wind) energy firms by 2010. Meanwhile, CO2 emission saving will be less than 1,000th of total world emissions, as the Government's own figures show. Doughty's gift is a cynical ploy - and a rather mean one, too. Letter from Dr John Etherington,Llanhowell, Pembs. - Daily Mail, June 1, 2005

Blair-fuelled deception

Reports that a hydrogen-fuelled bus generates 'zero emissions' (Mail) are, I'm afraid, a deliberate decep[tion by the Government.

The hydrogen on which the bus runs was generated from grid-electricity, from a coal or gas-fired power station which had already spewed its pollution over somewhere like the Trent Valley. All the bus has done is to transport its pollution from the city centre to the countryside.

Hydrogen, as a vehicle fuel, isn't zeo emission 0 unless it's derived from nuclear power. Letter from Ralph Ellis, Chester - Daily Mail, June 21, 2005

CHERNOBYL: did it really kill 1,000 British babies?

Should we build new nuclear power stations?

Gone (nuclear?) with the wind

Let's go nuclear!

Britain must go nuclear to help save the planet

Who loves power stations burning oil, coal or gas, especially the larger ones boasting towering chimneys belching sooty smoke, and hyperbolic structures breathing water vapour? But do we love wind farms any better - fields full of tall towers, their long slender blades rotating when there's enough wind? And, of course, we all hate nuclear power that produces life-threatening waste lasting millenia.

All wind .....

Keith Waterhouse - Daily Mail, April 21, 2005

Whenever I hear anyone refer to the world we live in as 'our planet', I am immediately suspicious of their motives.

You only talk about 'our planet' if you have ideas about its station, leading to wild surmises about its future and usually containing the statistic 'as many as one in five'.

So in the row that has divided environmentalists as to whether giant wind turbines should disfigure our National Parks, I am automatically on the side of the anti-wind farm greens and against the pro-wind farm greens with their exaggerated fears for 'the planet'.

Wind farms are a fad, a craze, generating tiny amounts of electricity compared with conventional power stations, at the cost of disfiguring the landscape as far as lost horizons.

Wind farms will come and go, as windmills them-selves did. The drawback is that you cant convert them into cute places to live in when their limited work is done.

The costs of nuclear plants are not so high -

Letter to Daily Telegraph, May 9, 2005 from David Evans, Santon Bridge, Cumbria

SIR - I applaud your leading article (May 6) calling for a new and enlarged programme of nuclear power stations. However, you were mistaken to claim that 'nuclear power is expensive because the capital outlay is heavy'. In fact, it is the lowest-cost form of large-scale electricity generation. The Royal Academy of Engineering recently reported that the relatively high initial cost of nuclear plants is more than balanced by the low running costs (including fuel) and their long lives (60 years for today's designs)

Waste disposal is only a small proportion of these low running costs. If there is a problem, it is one of public perception, and the nation needs strong support from the government to help solve it - something that so far has been sadly lacking.

Letter to Daily Telegraph, May 9, 2005 from Robert Pale, Newton Stewart, Dumfries

SIR - All the calculations about dangers from nuclear waste are based on outdated knowledge, which raises the cost to a ridiculous level. The present safety limit of one millisievert is less than I would be exposed to travelling from Kirkcowan to Creetown here in Galloway.

The limit could be raised to 500 millisieverts, which, far from causing harm, would be beneficial by creating radiation hormesis, which has been proved to prevent cancers and other illnesses.

But we all love power. What would we do without it. No lights or TV, no fridge or washing machine. The Dark Ages would, literally, be with us without those little switches and taps on walls giving us light, heat, water, TV, radio and most anything else, at a flick of our finger.

But in the middle of the last century, 50 - 60 years ago, we did have a dark age that killed us. It was because we burned coal in power stations and, more dangerously, on open grates in our homes. It produced the killer smog that cut down the elderly and the frail of all ages. Nuclear Power was to be our salvation. Used in the dying days of World War Two, it

had ended Japanese resistance abruptly, saving the lives of millions of American and British soldiers. Transformed for peaceful purposes in the Fifties, it was to produce electric power for homes and factories, reducing the need to burn filthy coal. Oil and gas resources were not considered plentiful enough to be available for more than a few decades.

The sixties and seventies saw growth of nuclear power throughout the world, led by Britain, the US and Canada, with the USSR and France not far behind and Germany, Italy, Japan following eagerly. The leaders chose different designs. Britain survived an early scare with the accident at Windscale, Cumberland, to use pressurised gas cooling, others choosing different variants of water cooling. Discoveries of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and around the globe, put heavy nails in the coffin of our age-old, dirty source of power, coal.

Britain had learned lessons on nuclear safety early. Design, operations, maintenance and training were subject to rigorously controlled procedures that ensured all accidents were minimised and serious ones eliminated. The same was not true of the US and USSR; they paid a heavy price in the eighties, the Americans at Three Mile Island in 1979, the Russians at Chernobyl in 1986. The consequences for nuclear power were catastrophic.

In nearly twenty years since then not one nuclear plant has been constructed anywhere in the world, with active programmes to close and decommision those that are still operating. Britain currently gets 25% of its power from UK nuclear plant as well as from nuclear plant in France (via power cables under the Dover Straits). There are currently no plans to invest in new nuclear plant to replace those nearing the end of their life.

With both oil and gas in plentiful supply around the world and off the British coast, and no satisfactory solution to the disposal of nuclear waste that had dogged the industry from its conception in the Fifties, there was not a cloud on the electrical power horizon. That is, until the spectre of global warming struck the world in the late nineties of the twentieth century to become the nightmare of the twenty first.

Global warming - and few doubt that it has begun - is caused by greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, etc.) emitted in huge volumes from burning fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas. Fissile and fossil fuels are damned for different reasons, leaving the energy field open for the darlings of the Green movement - wind and wave power, and photo-voltaic cells.

But it was not that simple - nothing ever is. Only wind turbines are remotely reliable enough and they are grossly uneconomic as well as being hugely unsightly for most lovers of open green fields. The real impetus behind construction of wind farms is not the environmental or economic benefits to customers, but massive government subsidies. For every wind turbine you see, alternative power sources have to be available in case the wind drops and causes power cuts. Celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, remarks "only nuclear power can now halt global warming" in his article entittled: "Nuclear Power is the only green solution" in which he urges a radical rethink on climate change.

France is living proof today that nuclear power is safe. Almost 80% of its power needs are met from uranim fuel and we in England regularly import about 2000 MW of their output to add to the 20% of our demand met by our own nuclear power plant.

Alex Brummer, City Editor of the Daily Mail, writes on June 3, 2004: "The fall-out from the Iraq war, in the shape of disruption of Western oil markets, hammers home the inadequacy of our energy policy. The idea that building a few ugly wind-farms can resolve the problem of energy shortages is laughable.

"Yet this is central to the Government's plans," he goes on, "because of cowardice in addressing an insatiable demand for the modern gas guzzlers and controlling the environmental hot potato of nuclear generation."

Unless a decision to build new generating plant is made very soon, it is the opinion of energy experts that power blackouts, like the one in London on August 2003 that trapped 250,000 commuters, are likely to become much more frequent.

Economics is the least important issue holding back building of nuclear power stations. Far more important are the following:

Not in my back yard: But nuclear plant can be built on sites where old nuclear plant has been decommissioned, so avoiding the need to find more sites for new power stations.

Storage of radioactive waste after processing: The volume of high level waste created would readily find storage space on the nuclear power station site itself, so avoiding problems of identifying remote areas for long term storage which have bedevilled the industry to date.

Terrorist Hijacking: Handling highly radioactive waste needs costly specialised equipment and highly trained staff. Terrorists can do more damage with less effort using chemicals and low level radioactive materials from hospitals to make so-called 'dirty' bombs.

And, remember, every small wind powered turbine must be backed up by an equal source of oil, gas, coal or nuclear power in case the wind drops just when the national load is highest - or there will be power cuts. Your lights will go out or you'll be trapped in the underground. This letter may help you make up your mind.

Wind power to replace 1,000 megawatt reactor requires 150,000 acres.

Do you want nuclear plant built on existing nuclear sites rather than have thousands of wind turbines on swathes of green acres of our countryside, or built off-shore - a serious hazard for shipping and our fishermen.?

Agree strongly
Agree
Disagree
Disagree strongly
Don't know
Don't care

Please click one of the links above to cast your vote

Current results

Current and prospective Parliamentary candidates of all Parties running for election could share a platform at public forums in every constituency. They would be presented with the results of polls on this issue expressed by the majority of voters in that constituency.

The candidates could be asked if their own views and that of their Party manifesto corresponded with the polls, and if not, how they intended to represent the will of the majority of local voters. Local and National Press, Radio and TV coverage would be arranged and the results published on this web site.

Here is another powerful strategy for using your vote effectively in the forthcoming General Election. Send your sitting and prospective MPs a letter defining your requirements if they want your vote. This example deals with the proposed EU Constitutional Treaty.

Your letters would end: "If you do not answer this letter, I shall take it that you intend to follow the Government line. I shall act accordingly in the forthcoming General Election." Here's one letter you should write at once:

Dear (your local Labour MP)

Despite his absolute and unequivocal assurances over the past year of the serious risk to our security of Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', Prime Minister Blair has admitted, that the threat was non-existent. For that critical error of judgement and for his gross incompetence in handling this very important issue, I ask you to take immediate steps to ensure that Tony Blair does the honourable thing and resign without delay..

I would therefore be much obliged if you would propose and help mobilise a Parliamentary vote of 'No Confidence' in Mr Blair which, despite Labour's huge majority, would leave the PM with no option but to resign.

If I get no reply to this letter, I shall assume you will continue to support Mr Blair as our Prime Minister. In such circumstances I shall not vote for you in the forthcoming General Election.

Signed:

Or why not create a questionnaire that you send to all the candidates in your constituency, getting them to give yes/no answers to questions of your choice, and ending it with the same paragraph(above).

It is high time for the people of this United Kingdom to stop allowing themselves to be manipulated by politicians. We need our representatives in Parliament to genuinely reflect the view of the majority in their own constituency, even if this means going against their personal and/or their party's policy. While they may argue their case, hoping to change the minds of the majority in their constituency, they should ultimately be obliged to reflect the majority view of those who elect them.

It will be argued by politicians of all parties that most voters don't have the knowledge necessary to express an opinion on important subjects at issue, and that our vote is a form of delegated democracy. We should argue that it is their duty to ensure that we voters do have ready access to such information as is necessary to form an intelligent opinion. That, after all, is one main purpose of Opposition Parties in our Parliamentary Democracy.

Most important of all, such proceedings would rekindle in voters their latent interest and obligation to cast their vote, knowing that the candidate of their choice would be more likely to act in accordance with their wishes. A much higher turnout in elections would be the result.

Contact your local Party Chairman. Gain his support for setting up public forums in your constituency on these, as well as any other relevant topics, well before the next General Election expected in 2005. You should then, depending on the integrity of the candidate of your choice, feel fairly certain that your view on any subject being debated in Parliament will more accurately be reflected by your representative in that assembly.

If you have suggestions for additional subjects, or material to include in the pages linked to the subjects listed, please contact the webmaster.

Silent Majority Speaks

Let's go nuclear!

Britain must go nuclear to help save the planet

Wind power to replace 1,000 megawatt reactor requires 150,000 acres.