This is not protest. It is terrorism.

Protestors attempt to shut down a coal power plant.

Excusing all the usual crapola of aggrevated trespass, intimidation, vandalism etc, deliberately trying to trip a steam engine doing upwards of probably 5GW of heat is just plain dangerous. It is a serious threat to the integrity of system and puts the safety of the workers at great risk.

This is violence, carried out by a clandestine group, to pursue a political goal. That's pretty much terrorism in a nutshell.

Of course, coal power is hardly the most benign of utilities. Wanting to eliminate it is not an unjustified goal, but the ends don't justify the means especially when the means are just plain stupid.

You've got to love the staggering hypocrisy of this lot though. One of them is brandishing a banner saying, "We are armed with peer-reviewed science." So they'll have a total love in with the scientific establishment when they like their conclusions, but completely turn on them when that same community advocates nuclear power and GM agriculture.

Norman Borlaug has died

Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95.

Not many people know who he was. He was an agricultural scientist who travelled around the world during his professional life enhancing farming technology in famine-prone areas. In 1970 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

It is estimated that thanks to his work, over one billion people were saved from starvation. That probably makes him the greatest hero who ever lived.

Yet his monumental achievements go unrecognised because far too many of the commentariat are too into this "natural", "organic" fad to approve of Borlaug's proliferation of sophisticated agricultural technology. But that changes nothing. Norman Borlaug saved more lives than anyone on Earth and he did it by using that which is our species' most powerful attribute: the ability to create, use and improve tools. This ability is far greater than the ability to feel smug for using a hemp shopping bag.

That being said, plastic bags are deadly if you're a hydrocarbon gas detection system.

Dying can change your life

If anyone flew with bmi last month, you might have seen an article in their inflight magazine entitled, “Does Colour Affect Your Wellbeing?” It’s a promotion for this curious product called Auric Colours developed by a company called Sentient-Light (a foreboding name from the outset). It’s all about these – well – dyes I guess, made from the usual valued rocks, metals and minerals like gold and pearl and amethyst, etc. What these dyes do is stimulate your energy centres somehow.

Why would we want to stimulate our energy centres? Usual reasons associated with Newage (pronounced to rhyme with sewage): good health, wellbeing, blah, blah, blah. Personally, I prefer Feng Shui. At least they’re promising you money from their expensive musical chairs.
Anyway, the article is good for a laugh. Here are some of the highlights.

The influence of colour on our wellbeing has long been recognised –with evidence
dating back thousands of years to the ancient cultures of Egypt, China and
India.

Not untrue. Aesthetics is very important in affecting our state of mind, and colour is a major part of that. Why do you think Microsoft devote so much effort to eye candy to their operating systems? Make it pretty and the punters will come. I personally love the Olive Green style on XP. It makes me much happier to work than with the default blue scheme.

Modern science has now proven that everything has an energy or electromagnetic
field.

Okay now the bullshit starts flying. Firstly, energy and electromagnetic field are two entirely different things. Where you find an electromagnetic field, which is a force field, you will find an energy field, but energy fields will also be present due to other forces like gravity. They are wrong when implying that an energy field is synonymous with a force field.

Secondly, everything does not have an electromagnetic field in any meaningful sense of the word. Yes, the charged particles that make up matter at the subatomic level have magnetic fields, but on the macroscopic scale, a plank of wood, for example, will be electromagnetically dead.

This is what really sucks about newagers. They latch onto a scientific concept, abuse the terminology, such as misunderstanding the distinction between force field and energy field, and then claim that science backs up their snake oil.

Colour is central to this energy and affects us on all levels – and forms what
is known as our own personal aura.

Newage clap trap. Colour is our brains’ interpretation of wavelengths of visible light. The electromagnetic field generated by a desk lamp has no colour. The light produced by the desk lamp will have a certain spectrum to it, which we will see as colour, but to apply that colour to the magnetic field in the wire is nonsense.

A personal colour consultant can help you discover which colours will benefit
your overall health and vitality.

I’ll do that now for free. Green and yellow and blue will leave you alright. Brown will lead to dire consequences. What’s my reasoning? Green and yellow is the colour of Earth, which is at zero volts. Blue is the colour of neutral, also at zero volts. Blue on the other hand is the colour of live, which is at 230Vac. Touch that wire and you’re fried!

Auric Colours (developed by Sentient-Light) are a unique range of aromatic
pigments that can be used to tap into the power of colour by stimulating our
energy centres through the fundamental senses of sight and smell.

Colourful and nice smelling? Okay, that sounds quite neat. You don’t need to dress it up in pseudoscientific rubbish about energy centres. This shit about it a load of crap and you know it. It sounds like you’re going to paint an electrical substation. Just say you have some nice smelling dyes.

The articles carries on for a while with reference to the particular manifestations of their products, mostly cosmetics, but there’s also a picture of a pendant, which is a vile of their dye, but looks like those anti-theft devices you sometimes see in clothes stores. They quote much from a representative named Sonal. She says,

My intuitive sensitivity enables me to tune in and usually I have a flash.
I’ll think, ‘If this person used green, their communication would be more
natural and dynamic.’

Like a tee-totaller trying to understand alcoholism, I’m at a loss to explain how anyone could take this guff seriously. Communication skills are something which a lot of people do require and receive training to get them up to a better standard. This profession is a particularly soft “science”, and so your mileage may vary from quite useful to utter bullshit. However, if your couch suggests that being made up like an Orion slave girl is a useful exercise, presume the worst.

In the interest of fairness, this is their website. They even have a shot of the Voyager magazine article.

http://www.auric-colours.com/

It's actually happening!

OK, so I haven't been paying attention lately, but while I wasn't looking, the energy companies have actually got serious about new nuclear build in the UK.

RWE and E.On this year have set up their joint venture. They've already secured land 6 weeks ago in Anglesey for Wylfa C and in Gloucestershire for Oldbury B. They want to get the plants operating by 2020. Shame it has to take so long, but then 6 GWe is a fair chunk of electricity and the EPR (currently the favourite, but the AP-1000 could be the winner), is a sizeable specimen of criticality.

In addition it looks like RWE has got options to purchase land in West Cumbria near to Sellafield at places called Kirksanton and Braystones.

Meanwhile, EdF, which took over British Energy last year (shame but inevitable lets be honest), has its eyes on Hinkley Point and has got the backing of electrical distributor, Centrica, to press ahead.

This isn't just talk now. Wheels are actually in motion. Proper plans are being laid down. The ambitions are pretty big. I'm sure these first taste of Generation III+ will prove reliable and safe. If it can prove economic to boot in a way that the current technology in Britain didn't, then it will be the first in a wave of nuclearification.

Nuclear is on, in case you forgot

Man, this government is slow!

The cabinet officially gave the green light to new nuclear power station a year ago and yet only now we're hearing they're starting the process to select new sites.

The quartet named this time includes Sellafield, Wylfa, Oldbury and Bradwell. Only Bradwell was named before. The other three were Sizewell, Hinkley Point and Dungeness.

Wylfa is a probably a good move, although probably a little too late. There is a aluminium smelters nearby, which has depended on the current Magnox reactors there for their energy. The local community (for the most part) and the trade unions are strongly in support of replacing the facility so that the Anglesey Aluminium facility can continue to operate. Even the Plaid Cymru assembly member has voiced some support. The question remains whether the proposed Wylfa B can arrive in time, given how much the government is dragging their feet.

Sellafield seems out of place given that most of the energy consumption is in the South of Great Britain, but the infrastructure is in place (Calder Hall used to operate there) and it is obviously convenient from an operational point of view to have fuel cycle facilities right next door.

Oldbury is well placed in Gloucestershire as Bradwell is in Essex.

What happened to Dungeness, Sizewell and Hinkley Point is unclear. They could be brought up at a later time in the process although the on-again-off-again talk about prospective sites makes it look like this is just going round in circles. Sizewell will be active for a long time to come given the prescence of the newest reactor and Hinkley Point and Dungeness both have AGRs meaning they still have some life left to them (though Dungeness was probably dismissed because of its proximity to Heathrow - can't make it too easy for the Usual Suspects to fight a war on two fronts).

This is the first signs of progress we've heard for a while. I hope things really ramp up now. Recession aside, we need to get to work on infrastructure replacement as soon as possible.

England is fucked!

Yes, we all know coal power is not exactly the stuff of sunny days. It is dirty way of generating electricity that spews ash and acid into atmosphere in copious quantities and leaves even larger quantities of mercury and arsenic laden solid waste to be dumped into substandard landfills.

Nuclear power on the other hand is just lovely. A small amount of actinide can keep a large power station going for years producing nothing but a small amount of contained waste, which, although extremely dangerous when handled irresponsibly, is easily handled.

None of the above makes willful damage of a coal power station on the basis of "I know better than society" acceptable. Yet that is just what a jury has said about Greenpeace's vandalism of Kingnorth power station in Kent.

Yet again, their criminal behaviour is excused because they claim "to have a point to make." It's easy, as many in the blogosphere have done, to knee-jerk against juries for this and claim that pulling proles off the streets to do the business of judgement is a misallocation of talent. But really the problem with the crap jury is not that it was a jury, but that it was crap.

The really serious issue here is that an ugly precedent has been set. From now on, Greenpeacers will be able to run amok in England with impunity causing whatever damage they want to whatever they want and yet get off scot free by simply claiming it was "to protect the environment". They'll attack more power stations, or all varieties. They'll attack cars. They'll attack roads. They'll attack planes. They'll attack ships. They'll attack oil installations. Nothing is safe now because this jury have told Greenpeace that they can do what their heart tells them. The tragedy for England is that Greenpeace's heart has long since been corrupted and now is irreversibly separated from its brain.

Also stemming from this is the exacerbation of the energy crisis. Britain needs new heavy duty power stations; nuclear would be best of course, but maybe a coal unit or two may also be needed. Companies like E.On are the ones that would be providing this. Yet, England seems to be doing everything in its power to make it clear they're not welcome. For a start, the British government is considering expropriating their profits with this windfall tax nonsense, which will send a message that there is nothing to be gained from investing in England. But now, we have the English legal system saying that even if they do decide to make a big investment, it could be attacked and destroyed with impunity by militant environmentalists.

The risk is now too high for very little gain. No need to ask the last person to leave England to turn out the lights. There won't be any lights left.

On the other hand, maybe this is an opportunity. Since it is now precedent in English law that it is okay to cause criminal damage provided it was to prevent more damage elsewhere, surely that means it's okay to torpedo Greenpeace marauder vessels. After all, we're only protecting people's livelihoods by attacking their tools of piracy. Now that's an idea!

Chernobyl revisited... or visited for the first time in fact

I finally put my money where my mouth is and went to Ukraine to visit Chernobyl in person, along with a bunch of plane spotters (gorgeous Tupolev-104 at Kiev Aviation museum by the way).

I must admit to not being particularly well prepared... or rested. So I tried to grab a few photos with my phone. The others all had fancy SLRs and the like. I'll grab a few off them in time, particularly of Pripyat where I didn't get anything. But in the mean time, here is what I got. It covers the basics.

Dare thee enter the Zone?

(Suggest viewing it in Firefox. IE isn't paying attention to anything I say.)

Piper Alpha - 20 years on

Watch the memorial.

(Picture from geograph.org.uk until I get down to Hazlehead Park to get my own.)

Australia has officially gone nuts

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has this charming and entirely not morbid game.

Australia is quite renowned for its wonderful climate. I think the ABC people have spent too much time appreciating it (it's ozone depletion I tells ya!). What moron thought it was a tactful thing to do to create a game for children which tells them they should drop dead (or as the graphic implies, explode)?

Running through the Australian averages, that hedonistic lot, living to the ripe old age of 19 (that is the average life expectancy down under, isn't it? We rarely see anyone older in all that Aussie programming we get up here.) should actually be dying at around 9 years old because it's then when they've used up their share of resources. I'm not quite clear what the magical resource ration is or how they came to that number.

So this game, aimed at "educating" kids, probably around the age of 9 or 10, is telling them they have to end their lives for the good of the planet. Assholes!

If they wanted to put something about calculating carbon footprint, why couldn't they be polite and make it something like this? Phrasing it in terms of when you need to commit ritual suicide is just sick!

Now on to the their (ab)use of "science".

Questions 1 & 2 are about getting around. What is your common mode of transport and how guzzly is it? Simple questions. Simplistic even. Too simplistic. The BP calculator allows you to specify multiple modes of transport and how often you use them, giving a more accurate picture of your transportation habits. Hell, ABC don't even allow you to specify a usage. And don't give me bull about "it's for kids" because the next question about flying asks for distances. And besides, if you're collecting information to tell users when they should die, you had better damn well take the time to get right.

On question 7, it's the usual where's your electricity come from question. Click on the dog and he'll tell you about Australia's electricity. Did you know that residential electricity accounts for 84% of that country's greenhouse gas emissions? Well, maybe if Australia would goddamn use some of the goddamn uranium sitting in the goddamn ground, that goddamn number wouldn't be so goddamn high. Hint, hint. Oh yeah and the dog says that renewables has nearly zero greenhouse impact, which is more pork than the goddamn Aussie pig.

Question 8 is about garbage. More porkies being told here. First is that we need to reduce landfill to avoid methane emissions. Modern landfills harvest methane as an energy source. A renewable energy source since there's always more organic waste. And no bull about a landfill crisis. Anyone trying to say that a country the size of Europe with all of 20 people living there has a landfill crisis is clearly detached from reality. The other thing is that recycling means less energy consumption than making things a new. Sporadic truth. Some things are less energy intensive to landfill and replace with new materials. Some things are less energy intensive to recycle. It varies with the substances involved and the external factors too. This blanket "all recycling is good" is just dogma. Some is good, some is bad.

So ABC says the average Australian carbon footprint is around 25 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. BP says the average is 14. So which one, or possibly both is pulling the number out of their arse? Well all this rests on assumptions, which you can pick at your discretion. I'd go with BP. Yes, they're an oil company, but they employ engineers who know things, whereas ABC employs journalists who don't. Easy choice really.

Now I raise my right hand and recite this oath:
I, on my honour, do solemnly swear to never moan or rant about Green sanctimony in the United Kingdom again. And whenever I get the urge, such as whenever Caroline Lucas appears saying completely stupid things on Question Time as she did last week (like public transport in the country. What an idiot! Yeah it's really possible to devise a practical and environmentally beneficial bus service in Aberdeenshire), I will revisit that link and be reminded that it could be worse. I could be living in Australia.

(Okay I didn't really take the oath, because moaning and ranting is what blogs are for.)

Everything is wrong with this

Over at the always excellent Depleted Cranium last week, the topic was GM foods. At comment 16, we catch the first appearance of Debs in this thread, a girl apparently training to be a case study in a critical thinking class.

The problem with GM crops is that we start to think that man is capable of doing
better than nature.

But we can! Ever seen a strawberry that grows in the wild? It's rubbish. The strawsberry's we buy are the product of centuries of selective breeding with a helpful dose of agricultural technology.

We know nature made these plants a certain way for a reason and because they’re
natural our bodies are able to digest them because we coevolved.

Nature has no reason for doing anything. Nature is just... er... something not man made. Whatever it is, it has no intelligence, no reason. Save the intelligent design rubbish for the next Creationist convention.

Now we start saying that the way to do it is to take a gene from this plant and
put it here and this plant and put it here and move this one here. It’s
Frankenstein!

It's been ages since I've read Frankenstein, and I never did read it very thoroughly, but wasn't the story about the ignorant, hysterical masses reacting negatively to Frankenstein's originally benign creation and then driving the being to murder? And Dr. Frankenstein himself was quite superficial too. The moral being that hysteria is your own undoing (well that might not have been Mary Shelley's intended moral).

We don’t know what we’re doing because the system is beyond what we
understand and it exists a way for a reason.

While there is much more for us to learn, we do understand the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. To imply we don't understand genetics is simply a self-confessed ignoramus assuming that no-one could possible be more educated than herself.

We will only show how little we know when it comes back to haunt us. This
happened many time before for example nuclear we thought we understood and then
found out that it was blowing up in our face and ruining everything.

Although Debs fails to demonstrate sufficient to convince me that she doesn't think nuclear reactors are blowing up on a weekly basis across the world, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she means Chernobyl. It wasn't a lack of understanding that led to that accident, it was a lack of responsibility.

We can’t afford to ruin all our crops and pollute them with our chemicals that
were never meant for our bodies or the world!

A little apocalyptic foreboding always helps when feeding your prejudices. Who is it that never intended these chemicals for our bodies? This "nature" intelligence? Pure superstition!

All I know about it is the ppl who really care about the earth and the future
and being sustainable are all against it for good reasons. I’m
not an expert on it and I bet anyone who wants it either isn’t or maybe they are
and get paid for it, but those of us who care about it can tell you every
environment group that looked at it saw the problems right away!

Classic poisoning the well fallacy. Define anyone with a contrary opinion as either being a corporate $hill or just plain stupid. Never consider that you may be wrong.

Everyone who cares and knows feels the same way and they’re the ones I
would like to listen to.
Why should I believe you? You’re for it and that’s
why I’m not about to trust you!

Circular argument. "I only trust people who say X and I believe X because people I trust say it."

I suppose it's nice to live in a cozy bubble where you think it is rational to only listen to people who tell you things that reinforce your own prejudices.

Debs seriously needs a lesson on rational thought possibly with a wack on the head if it'll help knock some sense into her.