A Place to Stand

   This is in today's Scotsman. It was sent out to a range of papers across the UK. If anybody sees it elsewhere I would be obliged if you let me know.  

For three months, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency had promised to declare Dalgety Bay’s beach “radioactive waste” if the Ministry of Defence did not pay an unspecified amount of Danegeld. It has not done so.

Now, suddenly, Sepa has lifted this threat – at least until next May. For years Sepa has claimed the proof that the radiation could not be natural is that it consists of particles of paint – but Freedom of Information requests on the subject have shown it either has no such evidence or is deliberately refusing to provide it.

For years it has claimed to have found the radioactive “daughter elements” of radium in the rock, though the only such element is the inert gas radon.

Again it can provide no evidence of this. Now Sepa has suddenly claimed to have found radium itself, but again refuses to provide the evidence when asked under the FoI. What is undisputed is that the radiation level is less than two-thirds that in any Aberdeen Street (Sepa’s own experts told it that years ago).that there is no evidence that it in any way exceeds that occurring naturally in adjoining beaches; or that the original radium could not have exceeded 0.26 of a gram (by comparison in a square mile of land one would expect 1 gram of natural radium, 9 tons of uranium and thorium & 1.5 million tons of soil).

Beyond even that, While it is widely claimed that radiation, even at naturally occurring levels, must be dangerous and the entire anti-nuclear scare is built on this claim, there is no evidence for that and never has been . Such evidence as there is points to close to natural levels of radiation being beneficial to life. When you think about it this is unsurprising since we evolved in the natural world  According to HL Mencken “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”. By his reckoning, the Scottish Government bureaucracy must be among the world’s most expert practical politicians - which goes far to explain our current troubles.

Neil Craig

    Editing in bold. They also changed the divisions I had made between paragraphs, which were, in my opinion, improvements. Which is why I am showing their paragraphs. Bearing in mind that space limitations exist I am happy with the editing here.

    I would also like to highlight this from the comment by UKIP Scotland in my Saturday article

I would issue a challenge to SEPA, to examine ANY Beach in Scotland, and I am practically certain that they will find radioactive "particles", some may be naturally occurring, and some may be "man-made", but moreover I would state that it will be impossible to distinguish between these two possible sources of any "particle" found.

   This seems a reasonable challenge which, if there is any experimental validity to SEPA's claims they could pass with ease. It also affects the scare story SEPA have run for decades about finding radioactive particles at Dounreay. Elsewhere we here good news about the "clean up" of Dounreay, which, if the beach radiation is natural, must be almost entirely an unnecessary picking of the public's pocket. 

In 2000 it had been thought cleaning up the site would take until 2063 at a cost of £4 billion. But by 2005, when the NDA was established, it was estimated the work would take until 2036 and cost £2.7 billion.

However, it is said the project should now be completed a decade earlier than that and for about £1 billion less.

   It will be interesting to see if SEPA feel able to publicly defend their case. Previously, apart from the claims proven false, they have not except to threaten legal action, against me. What is also interesting is the MSM coverage of this, or tather lack thereof. Only the BBC, whose headline is naturally both alarmist and supportive of SEPA and the Courier, but not the Scotsman, had reported SEPA's original announcement. Considering that the former PM had made this a personal issue and produced a Parliamentary debate, is an extraordinary lack.

   It is worth reading the full BBC article below the headline alongside SEPA's press release to see what an easy job "journalism" is if your only role is to reprint press releases from government sources, while censoring anything that might expand the story. Particularly egregious on the BBC's part here because the organisation, knows, beyond any dispute, that much if not all of SEPA's story they are reprinting, is factually untrue.