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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.

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.

Martin Bright at the New Statesman asked me to write a guest post for his blog about the Tim Ireland/Guido Fawkes skirmish.

You can read it here.

UPDATE: The post is now reproduced below the fold.

(more…)

I did a little rooting around in the 18 Doughty Street archives and found the Vox Politics show that I appeared on this week.

Watch me here (windows media) in all my fat glory. The lager and sausage roll diet is clearly not working.

The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze is out. I’m in it, writing about “astroturfing“.

Once you get past a few of the pieces’ sniggering schoolboy prurience with regard to ministers’ sex lives, particularly (backs against the walls, lads!) those of gay ministers, and what I thought was a innuendo-stuffed misrepresentation of the Ken Livingstone/Oliver Feingold fiasco, the book is actually a pretty good primer of the high crimes and misdemeanours committed since 1997.

I was asked to write a piece for this week’s Press Gazette which you can see on the Press Gazette blog (one of whose contributors is the estimable Martin Stabe) or here’s a PDF version of the page. The article is a comment piece in which I try very hard to be nice about newspaper blogs. Go and have a look and then come back and rip me to bits.

As I say in the piece, I’ve also been invited to write for the Guardian’s new über-blog, Comment is Free. With 200 contributors (199 better known than me) it remains to be seen how prominent my guff will be, but hopefully I’ll be in there somewhere.

I don’t have any details on when the blog actually launches other than it’s very soon. I haven’t seen the site yet either but will give the heads up as soon as I can.

Right, I’m off Up North for the weekend to have a decent pint and one of my Dad’s fry-ups. Back Monday.