the single greatest quote in public relations history

L’armée marche à son estomac, n’est vrai?

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,”

Thpfff, nothing to hide nothing to fear and so on.

The good thing about that technology Nabs is that our robots could just be programmed to retreat west, and then we win: a kind of Russian winter for bio-fueled invaders.

PS: Our robots will run on sand and rocks and blowflies.

And even if the concept is never fully um…fleshed out, you gotta admit the first sentence of para 4 is probably the single greatest quote in public relations history.

I’ve got to go to the city to see my dentist, so I’ll have to be on my bike soon.

Chernobyl is history and sad as it might be has pretty much nothing to do with the future. Barry Brook, whose interview on Counterpoint inspired my post, says Three Moile Island hurt no-one and shouldn’t happen again. He says this of modern plants:

Modern reactors are designed on the principle of being inherently safe, and what that means is they have a number of design principles that are based on the laws of physics. So in order for them to melt down or explode there would have to be an extraordinary set of circumstances where you would have multiple systems failing, and in the new reactors that are being proposed, even more than that, you would have to have the laws of physics being violated, which of course is not particularly likely.

They will be the better, he says, for being factory manufactured in modules and shipped to site, as is now happening in China and India.

That doesn’t mean we are home free and I don’t pretend that I’ve addressed all issues in my post.

I did read somewhere in the last few days that global warming is costing 300,000 lives each year. I tend to be sceptical about such figures in part because they don’t count the other side of the ledger, lives not lost in places where it is very cold. But global warming and CC will exact their own toll in human lives as we proceed, especially if we don’t successfully mitigate.

However, British nuclear power plants are rather different to ones in the rest of the developed world.

As noted in the article, they were very thermally efficient but horribly complex.

Given that the fuel is extremely cheap but precision pipework is very dear, they optimized for the wrong thing.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/rant/torness.html

The guy’s got a few Hugos and Nebulas under his belt so he’s certainly not making it up.

Your scepticism about nuclear power under capitalism is reasonable, but the reality in practice is that nuclear power is nowhere going to go anywhere without significant state financial support and intervention which makes it a lot more accountable than coal is in capitalist society. While there are pressures to protect the bottom line, and cut corners, the legal scope for the full coal use cycle to poison the commons and truncate the lives of the populace is far greater.

Now in Australia, given that even most conservatives don’t want nuclear it isn’t happening on any foreseeable timeline — so the qustion is moot, but there are places where nuclear will be the least evil — or at least part of it, and here we ought to focus our efforts on ensuring they do things properly.