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…I try to write some jokes about nuclear energy. I was quite pleased with the al Qaeda one.

…or the nuclear industry and my part in its downfall.

There’s a big story breaking at Greenpeace today. Despite assurances from the nuclear industry that things had been cleaned up, Greenpeace has found that the villages near the uranium mines in Niger are still contaminated with radiation…

I’m extremely pleased to say that I played a small part in helping bring the scandal to light. Back in January I wrote a rather strident post for Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog about just what the French nuclear company AREVA had been getting up to at its uranium mines in Niger.

AREVA weren’t very happy about that and in their response they invited Greenpeace to go to Niger and see what was going on for themselves. The Greenpeace nuclear campaign accepted the invitation and this month, after much hard work and planning, sent a team to Niger. And they certainly did see for themselves… AREVA nuclear scandal: Greenpeace finds radiation on the streets of Niger.

Why history is against the government’s decision to allow nuclear reactor operators to dump low-level nuclear waste in landfill sites…

Meet Patrick Moore. He prefers soft to sandpaper.

Business Secretary John Hutton says a British nuclear ‘renaissance’ will create energy security, 100,000 jobs, and a vibrant export market.

Except… importing uranium doesn’t guarantee energy security, with the UK lacking a nuclear skills base workers for those jobs will have to be imported, and we’re up against well-established multinational corporations who have the nuclear market sewn up between them…

John Hutton says it’s a ‘no-brainer’ – I agree.

If nuclear energy companies were cat breeders.

I’m now a contributing editor at The Sun – Tabloid Lies. I’ll be reporting on the masterful prose provided weekly by one of Britain’s best-loved politicians.

I’m helping Greenpeace break a big news story today. All is not well at the construction site of Olkiluoto 3, the world’s largest nuclear reactor…

For the past few weeks I’ve been helping Greenpeace put together a new blog, recording and commenting on the various incompetencies, radioactive leaks, cover-ups, accidents, spin, radioactive leaks, empty promises, contamination, massive cost overruns, radioactive leaks, substandard reactor construction, and radioactive leaks that dribble and gush from the nuclear energy industry.

The blog is now officially live and can be found here at Nuclear Reaction. The nice people at Greenpeace have let me take some of the Chicken Yoghurt snark over there with me.

With nuclear, not a day goes by without a jaw-dropping news item. The industry news is chock full of ‘NO WAY!’ moments. Much of it is darkly, surreally comedic. If you were to write a sitcom that involved some of the nuclear incidents I’ve blogged in the last few weeks, the show would bomb as too far-fetched.

The nuclear power plant that is actively contributing to global warming. The Japanese nuclear recycling plant which will release a collective dose of radiation in the next 40 years equivalent to half of that released during the Chernobyl disaster. The Canadian nuclear plant where they lost a piece of the reactor radioactive enough to give you a year’s worth of radiation exposure in a few minutes.

The American nuclear waste storage facility with the $32 billion cost overrun. The French rivers that had ‘only’ 18,000 litres of uranium solution poured into them this month. The 100 workers at the same plant who were ’slightly’ contaminated this month. The other French nuclear leak this month, from a pipe that had been faulty for ’several years’.

The Philippine nuclear reactor which took eight years and $2.3 billion to build, took 32 years to pay off and never produced a single watt of electricity. The nuclear insider who says it’s ‘difficult to have an intelligent conversation about costs’. The state of the art French reactor with substandard welding in its steel lining and cracks in its concrete foundations.

The Japanese plant built in an earthquake zone and then closed when there was an earthquake. The miraculous Indian nuclear deal that made the bedridden walk and set the imprisoned free. The taxpayers who’ll bail out the nuclear industry in the event of an accident.

And that’s just for starters. All this and more are at Nuclear Reaction. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wish we were making it up.

(This is the penultimate instalment in my protracted quest to give The Blog Digest away for slightly less than you can now buy it for from an Amazon affiliate. Or at least to give the jokes I sweated over for the chapter intros another run out)

Shuffling off – Death

Death, like syphilis, incontinence and vegetarianism, is all very well unless it’s happening to you. Then it’s not so much fun, obviously. Here we’ll explore the deepest of mysteries, examine the greatest of levellers and try not to get too down about the biggest of bummers.

To paraphrase Malcolm in Macbeth, nothing in this life becomes us like the leaving it. There seems little point in worrying about it other than to rail against the unjust deaths visited upon so many in the world today. And also, to make peace and reconciliation with the fact that we ourselves will one day, to quote more Shakespeare (Hamlet this time), shuffle off this mortal coil. (No, I’m not convincing myself either.)

In other words, this is a chapter in which we reaffirm that death is like a Cliff Richard record at Christmas: there is no escape. It’s a bad business, to be sure.

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(This is the latest instalment in my protracted quest to give The Blog Digest away for slightly less than you can now buy it for from an Amazon affiliate. Or at least to give the jokes I sweated over for the chapter intros another run out)

Blood, Sweat and Beers – Work and Play

Life, as a great man* once said, is the name of the game, and I want to play the game with you. Did you know that in an average lifetime we spend around 25 years asleep and six months on the loo? We also spend about 20 years at work and 10 years eating. That only leaves around 15 years for the pleasures of drinking to excess, smoking, le cinéma de Bruce Willis and vigilante campaigns against paedophiles.

Let’s face it, work is a hateful activity. Anybody who says they enjoy their job is a teetotal sociopath with a threadbare social life. This chapter consists of a vicious critique of the bitter ennui that is working for a living. It’s tempered by a vibrant celebration of those priceless jewels of hope, joy and wonder snatched from the claws of the beast known as work-commute-sleep-work, along with other meditations on the human condition.

* Bruce Forsyth

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You can now get The Blog Digest for a penny. Ask them for a discount.

You can get The Blog Digest on Amazon for two or three pence. I get ten percent.

Oh, boo hoo…

The government has abandoned plans to impose a pre-9pm ban on junk food TV advertising when it unveils its new anti-obesity strategy tomorrow, safeguarding more than £200m a year in TV advertising revenue.

No doubt there will be those who are upset, though I’m not sure why. Anyone who thinks they can appeal to an advertising executive’s sense of morality clearly needs to see a doctor.

You’d have more joy asking it to levitate above Birmingham than expecting the advertising industry to set aside the entrenched hatred of humanity that allows it to be so successful. And as for expecting this government to raise our kids, well, it’s doing such a good job with everything else, isn’t it?

So, what’s the solution? I’m afraid most people aren’t going to like it. Don’t want your children watching adverts trying to sell them an early death? Then don’t let them watch the channels showing those ads.

This might come as a surprise to some but there are television channels out there that don’t show adverts. Apart from that one that shows the Fantastic Four cartoon and Captain Scarlet, the commercial channels aren’t really worth watching anyway, are they?

Take some personal responsibility (remember that?). The kids nagging for a mechanically recovered burger or a bucket of antibiotic-and-abscess chicken? Say no. Go on, try it. Advertising execs aren’t forcing you to watch the adverts or buy the slop. They’re just laughing themselves sick in swanky bars while you and your porcine brood are blaming everybody but yourselves.

Another piece from me over at Liberal Conspiracy on how, despite the government calling for more political engagement with the public, they’re not exactly making it easy for us.

(Comments off here – please chip in over there if you feel like it.)

My first post for Liberal Conspiracy is up.

(I’ve turned the comments off on this post so I don’t get two parallel discussions.)

The Blog Digest 2007: You And Me Against The World – Activism

It’s true to say that while blogging has proved the ideal inducement to people sitting on their arses, it’s also provided many incentives for people to get up off them as well. If you’ve got a cause, blogging is the perfect medium for rallying others to it.

Coupled with other online tools (Pledgebank.com, where people pledge to perform a certain action, and WriteToThem.com, which allows you to email your MP), blogging has become a real force, if not exactly for holding Authority to account, then at least for going a long way to informing it of what it is its true bosses (that is, us) are thinking and want.

Here, amongst other articles calling for awareness of important issues, we see how a cause, a blog and a little bit of good old-fashioned pluck, can bring about real results.

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I’ve got a piece about the Alisher Usmanov affair up at Index on Censorship.

The Blog Digest 2007: Confusing Power With Greatness – Politics

Those readers who aren’t fans of drama, democracy, or tales of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, should skip to the next chapter. Whoever says politics is boring deserves a wet slap, this year more than ever. To try to chronicle everything that has gone on in British politics this year would fill this volume and beyond. And being a political blogger myself, I was very tempted to try.

We’ve had the resignation of Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader and the election of Ming Campbell as his less than sparkling successor; Tessa Jowell’s moody mortgages; David Blunkett resigning (again); John Prescott visiting a billionaire businessman’s ranch to talk about cowboys but not casinos (Prescott’s sexual shenanigans are dealt with elsewhere in this book); the passing of the Identity Card legislation (I think it’s safe to say that there isn’t a single British blogger who’s in favour of that); the Tories’ ascendancy in the opinion polls despite their lack of policies; and continuing speculation about when Tony Blair might retire to the US lecture circuit. And more…

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The Blog Digest 2007: We’ve Had A Bit Of A Falling Out – War

From the smallest playground spat to intercontinental nuclear exchanges, fighting in all its ugly forms is regarded by all right-thinking people as A Very Bad Thing. Unfortunately, these days, right-thinking people aren’t allowed within 500 yards of the apparatus of power and this is where it’s got us. The last one to come close was probably Mahatma Ghandi, and look what happened to him. Somebody shot him.

Conflict is a subject with many contradictions. Glass someone in the pub and you’re a common thug; push the button on half a million* Iraqis and you’re a statesman. As the soldier says in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: ‘I killed 15 of those buggers. Now, at home they’d hang me; here they’ll give me a fucking medal, sir.’

Here, some of Blogland’s foremost thinkers attempt to traverse the moral minefield that is Fighting Each Other, whether it be in Iraq, on the home front of the War Against Terror in London, or raking over the coals of World War II.

* At the last estimate, according to research published in The Lancet.

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The Blog Digest 2007: The Honourable Member – Sex

The beast with two backs. The mattress mambo. Touching the Void. Posting Yul Brynner first class. Where would the British be without euphemisms for the sexual act? In possession of a much more mature attitude towards sex, no doubt, but having fewer laughs along the way.

This year’s rash of political sex scandals (is that the appropriate collective noun?) heaped yet more ridicule on politics and politicians. The avid interest and disapproval aimed at those affairs by the media and the public showed us to be simultaneously – and paradoxically – both prudish and prurient.

Sex still sells big. It’s to be wondered how much envy plays a part in the voyeuristic intrusions we make into other people’s sex lives; is it that we would quite like to be doing those kind of things with our own John Thomases and Lady Janes?

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A pressie arrives in the email from the lovely Matt Buck – his cartoon that introduces the chapter on Sex in The Blog Digest.

DO NOT click here.

The Blog Digest 2007: Politics For Pretty People – Culture and Media

‘In the future,’ Andy Warhol famously said, ‘everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’. As it turns out, Warhol, the dear old over-rated charlatan, was of course wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. His 15 minutes was an average figure. The world is seething with infuriating nonentities and spectacular mediocrities who have enjoyed simply hours of unearned fame while far greater talents freeze to death on the streets of Britain every day having had not even a nanosecond of recognition. Add all those times together and divide by the number of people and you get 15 minutes. QED*.

Fortunately, The Blog Digest is seeking to redress this imbalance by featuring in this chapter only articles of culture and refinement. Big Brother and its sub-human denizens, for instance, are afforded the space and respect they deserve (that is, hardly any). Celebrity pin-cushion and alleged popstar Pete Doherty also features but only as the untalented berk he is rightly regarded as being. So pull up a chaise longue, uncork the laudanum and wallow in the best, and a little of the worst, that British culture had to offer this year.

* This theory will be proved if it takes you longer than 15 minutes to read this book.

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I never did thank all the people who bought The Blog Digest 2007. So, thank you all. I thought about having a party at some point and inviting everyone who did buy it. I know a nice little telephone box near me where we could meet. I’ll provide the bar and buffet – a couple of cans and a bag of Cheesy Wotsits should do it.

Anyway. To show the 99.999999999999999999999999 percent of people who haven’t seen the book just what great things were contained within, I thought I’d post the links to all the blog posts it collects. (If for no other reasons than I sweated blood over the ‘jokes’ in the chapter introductions and was quite pleased with one or two of them, and I’m a good little recycler.)

You can then print off the the posts, staple them together and make your own personalised Blog Digest. It’s a shame I can’t link to the excellent cartoons that Matt Buck did for the book, introducing each chapter. The one of John Prescott shagging an enormous pork pie should be in the National Gallery.

First up, coming shortly, Chapter 1: Politics for Pretty People – Culture & Media.

Hello you. I’m Justin McKeating and I’ve been fortunate enough to be writing for The Friday Thing for nearly a year. You may remember me from such conceits as the geriatric Indiana Jones or that bit about Tony Blair dreaming about being buggered by his many victims.

If I could plead your indulgence, I’d like to say a few words to mark the passing of a dear friend. I hope many of you are as upset as I am as the sun sets on TFT. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

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