Oh. Oh. It appears that those solar cells on which we bet the atmosphere...

[intaglio]

7. My, my

How very Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

So a manufacturer ripped off a company or failed its quality control, an installer failed to ensure that it's inverters or it's switchgear and its blocking diodes were up to scratch. Millions of people were exposed to radionucliotides as a result.
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Oh, wait - no they weren't so exposed

Let me tell you a story about a nuclear power station, it was built really early on in the nuclear era and nothing went wrong. It didn't meltdown like 3 reactors at Fukishima or the one at Chernobyl or Idaho Falls or the one at Luzern 1962 or Sosnovyi Bor in 1975. It didn't kill workers by radiation like the one in Tokaimura. It didn't poison vast areas of the Irish Sea and contaminate the surrounding countryside like Windscale. It was hardly involved in poisoning the countryside at all unlike Chernobyl or the Kyshtym dump or the Hanford nuclear reservation.

It is true that intermediate level waste was the source of at least 1 hydrogen explosion and that the intermediate level waste was sunk in a shaft filled with groundwater. It is also true that remains of fuel rods litter the sea floor nearby and that the beaches have been closed for the foreseeable future.

Part of the establishment, it is true, were test reactors but apart from their additional load of waste they hardly feature. No the reactors I am talking about were designed to produce electricity, electricity too cheap to meter. They have produced a lot of electricity but every single watt has been subsidised from the public purse as all nuclear reactors are subsidised; be it in France, England, Japan or the good old US of A. Never have the reactors I am describing produced electricity at a price sustainable by the market.

And now they have to be dismantled. Amazingly this is supposed to be complete by 2025, the hundreds of tonnes of contaminated coolants, the 10s of 1000s of cubic metres of soil and similar volumes of liquors and similar volumes of intermediate wastes. This clean up is supposed to include the 100s of tonnes of high level waste in the nuclear reactors an environment only just imaged for the first time in 50 years. This dismantling is supposed to be done by robot because no human can survive in the containment building. Except no-one has built a robot that can function in high radiation environments for more than a few hours.

Next we come to the elephant in the room, all this waste will not just vanish; no magician will wave a magic wand and the radioactivity vanish in a puff of fairy dust. Every single cubic metre and tonne will have to be treated, cased, diluted and buried except there is no facility that can do this as yet, there is no safe burial site and every single gramme and cc will have to be subsidised by the public purse.

Tell me again how good nuclear power is ... I need a laugh.