Nuclear: trainee journalists to pose questions, Tory speech and Windscale

Over the last couple of days I've had phone calls from a couple of trainee journalists at Cardiff Journalism school who will be taking part in an exercise next week at Oldbury Power Plant. The exercise apparently involves checks to safety and emergency procedures in the event of an accident - most likely taking the form of a leak/evacuation scenario which will be attended by local police, fire and plant staff.

Photo: If it had flooded evacuation for thousands may well have been necessary?

The exercise is designed to test the know-how and general ability of the press officers and staff at the plant on dealing with the press should a similar situation arise. The students have been invited along to produce a newspaper front page and spread afterwards as part of an assessment, as though the leak or fire has actually happened.

There are many issues to raise here as Emergency procedures in my view are wholly inadequate in terms of a nuclear incident - see talk re nuclear we had on Tuesday this week from top nuke scientist John Large - he highlighted serious concerns - like for example that computer models take a while to run to show where needs to be evacuated - plus in the past we have raised issues about plans for distribution of potassium iodate tablets, evacuation plans for say half a million people etc - see Glos Green party website for more on that and re letters written to Disaster Planning Officers - the recent flooding in Gloucestershire also highlights that services were stretched to limits - concerns were raised that if the sub-station had flooded and cut power, many thousands would have faced evacuation.

Clearly there should also be questions as to why this plant should have been allowed to continue to operate when there have been so many problems.

Anyway I wasn't intending to ramble too much on this topic now - wanted to highlight here a speech by the Conservative Dr Liam Fox. He started - "I want to begin with three simple facts. (1) In 1997 Technical Area 18, a highly secure area of Los Alamos National laboratory in New Mexico, was successfully breached by US special forces in a special security exercise. They were able to steal enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb. (2) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the German government reported more than 700 cases of attempted nuclear sales, including 60 instances that involved seizure of nuclear materials. And that was only in the first three years. (3) Following the collapse of the Taliban after the invasion of Afghanistan, American forces uncovered details of an Al Qaeda nuclear planning cell. Osama bin Laden has called for the killing of 4 million Americans." See his full speech here.

The first point he makes is another example of concerns re safety - Greenpeace seem to have also walked in to virtually every nuclear power station in this country - see news release re the 'Kapow' they projected on to Oldbury. Anyhow it is great that Dr Fox is raising concerns but he doesn't come to all the right conclusions - certainly safety and security need raising - but where is talk of Britains role - we are promoting nuclear - indeed how much more unfair is it to say we need nuclear for our defence, energy security and to tackle climate change but you can't have it - the reality is, as this blog and others have shown, nuclear is not the answer to climate change, or energy security and only leads to a more unsafe world. We need to become a leader in renewables rather than wasting billions on Trident and 2 new Aircraft carriers.

This week saw the 50th anniversary of the Windscale fire on October 10th 1957 - the first serious nuclear accident - a reactor fire at Windscale (now called Sellafield), three years after the first nuclear power station was opened. Since then, there have been other serious nuclear accidents - in the UK - Douneray, Chapelcross and THORP, in Japan - Monju and Tokaimura, and in the USA - Three Mile Island - and of course parts of the UK are still contaminated by the fallout from Chernobyl.

The Windscale anniversary is surely a sobering reminder that nuclear power creates horrific dangers for humanity and the natural environment. The fire spread radiation across Britain - Tuesdays nuke talk this week had a map showing the effects on populations for many hundreds of miles. It was like some horrifying event from a science fiction movie. The very name Windscale was changed to Sellafield as a public relations move to make nuclear power more acceptable....