Los Alamos Fire risks Plutonium Waste Stores

The city of Los AlamosinNew Méxicohas a population of eleven thousand people and 30,000 55 gallon drums of contaminated plutonium waste. The drums are not stored where people live but close by in the open air in the grounds of the Los Alamos National Laboratory which was famous for developing the atomic bomb. People and [...]

Standard Assessment Procedure and Reduced Data Standard Assessment Procedure – flawed tools in the toolbox

One of the reasons why the microgeneration of energy (which is the use of small household technologies to generate energy which is created and used on site) is employed so infrequently is that there is little government support of it in the United Kingdom. Microgeneration is wrongly seen as a lifestyle choice, rather than an [...]

The UK’s Energy National Policy Statement

There is some difference I suppose between a National Policy Statement and a National Policy, but the subtlety is beyond me. I should not waste time on semantics and assume that the Energy National Policy Statement is simply national energy policy written down, or in other words, national energy policy. The government has published its [...]

The Green Deal needs a small but essential fix

The Renewable Heat Incentive will enable householders to pay for the cost of their solar thermal and similar installations from the savings that they will make over a ten year period. The way that fuel prices are rising many people will find themselves financially better off within the first ten years and having had the [...]

Everyone makes mistakes

Sometimes governments get details wrong. A policy that they devise from the best of intentions may, when the rules are put together, have some flaw which renders the policy less effective. When the flaws are pointed out, if the government remedies them, the opposition will loudly proclaim that the government does not know what is [...]

The Energy Tipping Point of Mr Laidlaw

Mr Sam Laidlaw, Chief Executive of Centrica, said at the recent Economist Energy Summit that he believes that we are rapidly approaching a tipping point in energy. Presumably a tipping point occurs when the old regime of there being sufficient energy to meet the world’s needs changes to there being insufficient energy to meet the [...]

There is no Greek Financial Crisis

There are many crises in the world today; there are wars in Afghanistan and Libya, there is unrest in Syria and insurgency in Iraq and many people are losing their lives, but the crisis that is dominating the news today is what is called the Greek Crisis. Greece has as a sovereign nation borrowed money [...]

Banks Selling Investments

The history of banking is not a glorious history. Frequently small and sometimes vicious money lenders managed to acquire a cloak of respectability which covered their hideous bodies by making a lot of money and becoming indispensible to people who wanted to borrow money in order to make a lot of money of their own. [...]

Floods and Fires at Nebraskan Nuclear Plants

After Fukushima the world knows that you should not build nuclear power reactors in places where there are likely to be earthquakes. The world also knows that they should not be built close to seas where tsunamis may strike. We will add to the list of places where not to build nuclear reactors and we [...]

Emission Trading – Structurally Defficient

Virtually everything can be exploited or misused. The internet is a powerful force for good and evil. Armed forces can be saviours or destroyers of life. Religion can be misrepresented or communicated perfectly. Humans are the element that can turn a device from one than helps into one that hinders and obstructs.