A Place to Stand

Dear Andrew Neil, BBC and Katherine Hamnett,
                                                                              On This Week on Thursday a fashion designer Katherine Hamnett was given nearly quarter of an hour to propagandize against nuclear power, a subject on which she admitted ignorance in the introduction, pointing out that she was a fashion designer not an engineer.

      In her puff piece I do not think there was a single thing which she said which was unambiguously true and most of it was the precise opposite of truthful. Or perhaps you can point to such a statement?

       Clearly anybody who claims nuclear is expensive and windmills inexpensive can never, ever, under any circumstances be automatically assumed to remotely honest on any subject whatsoever
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       From her own site, where she must have had more time to consider her statements and which, I assume, the BBC "researcher" checked out before she was invited we find an almost equally ridiculous farrago of lies:
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"A major study conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) into the dangers of low-energy, low-dose ionizing radiation concluded that there appears to be no safe radiation exposure level. LIE There has not been any actual study of that LNT theory. There has only been an agreement to treat it as if it were true in line with the precautionary principle.


Meanwhile, Sellafield nuclear power station is discharging 2 million gallons of radioactive waste water into the Irish sea every day. LIE it isn't radioactive by comparison with water, or many other materials elsewhere in the world.

Downs Syndrome births amongst ex-pupils from a school in Dundalk, on the Irish sea, were found to be 89 times higher than the national average. IMPLICIT LIE because there is no reason to believe there is a connection. One might equally blame this on Ms Hamnett invoking the powers of her satanic master to achieve this. Nor is the alleged ratio important. There are roughly 10 deaths from peanut butter allergy annually. In all these cases such deaths occurred roughly 600 times above the national average for their council wards. If the BBC have denounced clothes designers for causing this through black magic I would like you to provide a link.

Incidences of leukaemia are higher than normal near nuclear power stations and atomic research establishments. LIE This has not happened in all cases and is an example pf the peanut butter comparison given above.

No safe solution has been found for dealing with the problem of nuclear waste LIE it can be buried, glassified or even subducted in areas where the Earth's mantle is being covered. None of these have proven impossible, or even particularly difficult, in engineering terms and I challenge anybody to show otherwise.
Radioactive waste from nuclear power stations remains dangerous for thousands of years. LIE Reactor waste is highly radioactive precisely because it has a short half life and is safe within 50 to 100 years and less radioactrive than the ore it was mined from in hundreds. Britain has 2.3 million cubic metres of nuclear waste stored around the country IMPLICIT LIE since much of the "radioactive waste" is less radioactive than mnay natural rocks and sands. (click here to see the sites http://www.corwm.org.uk/content-659). It will cost £85 billion to clear up. THORP, BNFL´s re-processing plant at Sellafield has been unable to vitrify (safely dispose of) the amount of nuclear waste it was designed to deal with LIE It has not been permitted to which is not the same as unable in engineering terms, and is due to close in 2010. BNFL posted losses of £1 billion for the year ending 2003.

Nuclear energy does not make economic sense LIE France produces 80% of its electricity and not only sells it at 1/4 our electricity prices but profitably sells it to much of the rest of Europe. The opposite is true since if our indusrty had energy costs 1/4 of what they are (or less) it would be very much more competitive and we could achieve the sort of growth rates seen in China.
It cannot exist without huge public subsidy. LIE It can and does almost everywhere it is allowed to

The £56 billion of taxpayers' money being used to fund the clean up of the UK´s current nuclear sites (run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority), could instead buy 50 GW of installed wind capacity, equivalent to 20% of the UK´s electricity needs. (Greenpeace) IMPLICIT LIE since that money is not being spent taccording to engineering need but is a subsidy to the Luddite scare industry

British Energy, the UK´s only private nuclear operator, avoided bankruptcy in 2003 via a multimillion pound Government loan and a public bailout package worth £4bn.LIE BY IMPLICATION The "bankruptcy" was achieved not by conventional financial failure but by regulatory fiat imposing an articu=icially low sale price - as soon as it was achieved the government upped the prices, grabbed billions in profits and sold it off for more billions to Japan.

In March 2006, the Sustainable Development Commission, the government´s advisory body on sustainable energy development, published a new report that concluded that investing in nuclear power was not the answer to climate change or energy supply. Read the report: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/060306.html LIE BY IMPLICATION The implication being that the SDC is an impartial body rather then a government funded quango existing to oppose nuclear and support "sustainable" development...
Nuclear power is not sustainable LIE It can be sustained from proven resources (uranium in sea water) for at least 5 billion years which makes it far more "sustainable" than windmills because the hills they deface will have worn down & been covered by the sea several times by then
There are only 50 years´ worth left of high-grade uranium ores. If the whole world were to run on nuclear, there is only enough uranium left to power it for 12 years. LIE See above.

Nuclear power is accident-prone LIE Over the last 20 years before the current earthquake nuclear power acidents had killed a total of 2 people in Japan. This is in an industry that has generated around 20% of world electricity. Since the Tsunami the total remains the same since no deaths have occurred because of the reactor accident. By comparison coal kills 150,000 annually (ie 3 million over 20 years). Even windmills, which produce a miniscule amount of world power, has killed 50 people. Artihmetic proves that nuclear is unarguably hundreds and arguably many thousands of times safer than any other comparable world industry.

Nuclear power is prone to accidents due to human error and carelessness, and there have been several major accidents. In the last 2 years alone there have been two major radioactive leaks in the UK. One major leak at THORP, Sellafield remained undiscovered for 8 months and has been classified as a level 3 nuclear incident (the 1986 Chernobyl disaster listed as a level 7 incident, and the 1979 Three Mile island incident as a level 5) (INES) LIE None of these have killed or inhured anybody. By comparison clothing (Ms Hammett's own industry) kills 120 people annually in the US alone (which implies at least 60,000 worldwide over the same period). If she were not personally wholly corrupt she would be willing to appear on This Week, next week, to admit that her own industtry is 30,000 times more accident prone than nuclear power. If This Week is equally uncorrupt, they will braodcast it with or without her.

 nuclear power is unsafe, uneconomic and unnecessary. LIE safety an economy have already been dealt with. During the December freeze when Britain reached its maximum power use ever and any serious failure of supply would have meant millions of people exposed to temperatures of down to miinus 20C nuclear power supplied 13% of capacity directly and most of another 2.7% in pumped storage. By comparison windmills provided 0.2%. For anybody not committeed to massive deaths nuclear was "necessary" then.
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   The BBC is legally committed to "due balance". To maintain such a blance between ignorance and knowledge; lies and truth; attacks on one indusrty and another; and indeed supporters of mass killings of British people and opponents the BBC simply must give equal coverage to the other sides.

   The This Week must give equal time to somebody who is not ignorant of the nuclear industry and is willing  to tell the truth.

    The BBC must also give equal time to somebody who wants to make equally ignorant and unfounded attacks on the clothing fashion industry. I am willing to offer myslef in that role. My knowledge of fashion is as lacking as Ms Hannett's of nuclear engineering (as my friends can testify). I would be willing to appear on TV to say that fashion designers are witches, in league with the devil and through their practice of the satanic arts are responsible for everything from peanut butter allergies to tsunamis. This is clearly no less truthful than your previous broadcast andcan be better supported by evidence (in that substantial numbers of deaths from these causes do actually happen). It is unarguable that "due balance" requires it.

    For an expert on nuclear power I suggest you apply to SONE. Just as Greenpeace is committed to ignorance, lies & mass killings in opposition to the nuclear industry SONE is committed to knowledge, honesty and human betterment. Should the BBC ever wish to achieve "due balance" between these positions it would certanly wish to bring the number of TV appearances of SONE representatives up to tha those of Greenpeace. My impression is that the current ration is 10s of thousnads to zero fot ignorcnce (simoilar to the ration boasted by the BBC of their promotion of catastrophic warming alarmism to their allowance of the scientific sceptic view). It is perhaps over-optimistic to hope for the BBC ever standing for the truth but legally this overwhelming imbalance in favour of lies, Luddism and ignorance is in clear breach of your charter.


PPS In light of a comment here I extend that invitation to ANY anti-nuclearist anywhere in the world to point to anything that I have said that is a lie and provide factual evidence for the accusation. ANYBODY.