Busy Busy Busy...

Well there goes another month & a half and not a single blog post! Following the blockade I took some time out as I felt quite exhausted, I did a bit of reconnecting with my garden and got a major bit of landscaping done that had been a work in progress for nearly two years finished!

Also whilst trying to have a bit of a break from computers there has been a rash of public events that we have dutifully attended. It's interesting actually that despite whatever the government and the industry would have people believe, Fukushima has definetely changed the landscape for nuclear technology.

In the last month and a half I've attended a debate in Exeter, A so-called Science talk in Radstock and a panelled discussion in Bristol.

The Exeter debacle I mean debate
A debate in Exeter put on by the debating society - that one was a bit of a joke really, aload of public school kids who are being raised with some sense of an idea that they're here to rule us (the masses) and who were more pre-occupied with their 'rules' of debate than they were in the topic, this was evident in their choice of speakers - a panel of four 2 for & 2 against, of these 2 were MEPs one was a local political party member and one was EDFs head of policy on nuclear.


I'd have had some faith in the quality of the debate if there had been anyone on either side who had any knowledge of nuclear safety (I know it's an oxymoron putting the words nuclear and safety in the same sentence). You know a regulator maybe or even someone responsible for 'safety' from both sides of the argument would have been a good start - anyway I felt that the pro-side did their usual deliberate misleading of the public i,e trying to make some comparison between the 'dose' people are getting from living in the southwest from naturally occuring RADON with having a nuclear power station on your doorstep (yeah right?!) Also the qualtiy of quesitons from the audience were on the whole pretty poor really like one person who was concerned that lightbulbs in a nuclear power station have to be disposed of as radioactive waste (yes the are treated as very low level waste) never mind actually addressing the real issue of radioactive waste i,e high level heat generating waste that needs to be isolated from the environment for timescales way beyond human experience! Unfortunaelty, as valiant as the efforts were that were made by the anti- speakers they just weren't informed enough about their subject. but then I'm sure that was the intention of the debating society when they selected their speakers.

Needless to say it was a very frustrating experience as the couple of questions that we did manage to ask were twisted into being a different question, I'd like to think that they had just misunderstood my question but actually I felt that they understood it perfectly well they just decided to rephrase my question into a quesiton that better suited them! very weird experience. One of my colleagues also asked a question that again they tried to evade answering all of this lead to some heckling and eventually as the 'president' of the debating society got himself a power trip on and tried to eject us all from the hall, they successfully got one of us out and then one of the anti-speakers galled at seeing the way the organisers man-handled an older woman from the room refused to take part any further in the sham of a debate! At this point as the debate fell apart we decided that we would leave also as there wasnt really much more to see! Outside we had some interesting conversations with the token police man and also the speaker who had left as well as getting to leaflet all of the students, what a crazy way to spend your friday evening!


Interestingly they're now planning a debate about why they should give the BNP a platform and here below is a photo of one of their number showing their true alliegences... 

The president of the Exeter debating society

The Radstock Science Museum Talk
This event had been advertised (misleadingly) as a talk about Hinkley B, i thought to myself now why would EDF go anywhere and only talk about Hiknley B when they've got a planned programme about new build planned that they're having to run around defending, I didnt for one minute think that EDF were going to show up anywhere and not talk about new build, so I decided to go along. I was late getting there as got lost a little on the way. However fortuitously, I arrived just in time to see them end their discussion of Hinkley B and to start their 'talk' about Hinkley C, I waited patiently scrawling notes as I listened, there were so many lies and ommissions in their talk that I really didnt know where to begin when it came to questions!

I'd decided I'd wait until I'd heard some of the questions from the floor before I asked one. 


It was interesting to note that at the age of 36 I was the youngest person in the room (most of whom grew up in the atomic age thinking it was and still is the best thing since sliced bread). I find this quite disconcerting as it is an issue of intergenerational equity like no other, in fact historically the whole notion of intergenerational equity is one that arose from the concerns about leaving radwaste for future generations as some kind of 'legacy' I don't like that word a legacy seems like something most people would be glad to have, I see leaving radwaste for future generations as a problem, is like going and doing a big fat toxic Sh*t on your great great great grandchildren!


Anyway I challenged the claims that EDF were making and surprise surprise this met with some hostility from the old pro-nukers in the room  who will be dead and gone when ny kids are living with the consequences of their decisions, in fact one of them was so disgusted with my lack of support for EDF that she tried to offer me my money back to leave - so much for a science talk eh? when people feel so threatened by the what is being said that they cant even handle hearing it...


The EDF guy got quite flustered by my questions and at the end of it made a point of thanking me for asking them, whilst one of the female members of staff made excuses for the title of the talk saying that that was their fault that it had been misadvertised, meanwhile another campaigner suffered a tyrade of abuse from a member of staff at the front door whilst attempting to gain entry to the building including insults and assertions about her age - poor show radstock science museum.


It just goes to show that there is no scientific objectivity especially when it comes to nuclear power, judgments are clouded by a refusal to acknowledge the emotional aspects of this issue and the refusal to accept the legitimacy of emotional ways of knowing and understanding. This leads to a whole load of people who pretend to have access to some sort of objective reality when their positions are as much affected by emotion as the next persons, except they just won't acknowledge, meanwhile these people think that they are in a position to attack anyone who takes account of and legitimises the emotional aspects and issues involved with decisions and positons on an issue.

This came issue of emotional intelligence and reality came up again in the final event - the Bristol event Nuclear Communities Listen, and be heard.


Nuclear Communities - Listen & be heard


This event, was by far the best constructed, although I still found some problems - mainly to do with the issue of emotion as outlined above and also by the gender skew in the panel (not one woman).

 For this event there was a panel of speakers 3 each side, in terms of acadeamia most of them could be considered to be 'authoritative' being was they were doctors & proffessors and experts in their field plus one from EDF and one from Greenpeace (actually it was Greenpeace UKs Chief Scientific officer Doug Parr).


Anyway they all gave their brief 10 minute presentations - the most boring for me was the civil servant guy from DECC, he attempted to baffle people with b***sh**t as he used overly complicated graphs that were outside the comprehension of a lay person (unless he was prepared to spend a lot longer explaining it than he did), I saw this as deliberate obfuscation, one of the first things I learnt at uni was how to target your work to a specific audience according to their level of knowledge understanding, his presentation should have been geared towards a lay audience given that it was a public meeting not using technical graphs that were overly complicated..

Anyway he seemed to do an about turn from what has been the government rhetoric on this issue since 2006,that is he said "We never said that we need it" when being challenged by a member of the audience about government policy, this was an important remark for me especially when the government have very loudly and decisively been claiming over the last few years that "we need it". It was just as revealing as a DECC persons admission at their consultation last year (pre-Fukushima) that they knew they might only get one or two!


My observation throughout the presentations that was the subject of my questions was that although each and everyone of the speakers alluded to the issue of Fukushima they all came at it in a very abstract way, there was talk about the costs, the technicalities of how the incident occurred (interestingly the line put out by the UK nuclear regulators was that the Tsunami was the event that caused the damage - where it is now a well known fact that the reactors were leaking radiation before the Tsunami hit indicating that they had in fact been damaged by the earthquake.


Anyway like I said they all took a very technocratic view and position on Fukushima regardless of what side of the fence they were on so to speak, so I asked them if they were aware of what was going on on the ground in terms of health for the Japanese people and in particular the children, in response to my question they did all engage with the issue of health detriment and there was talk of the KIKK study and the COMARE reports.

I had to remind them that none of them had actually addressed my question and I was for a change afforded the opportunity to fill them in a little on the levels of radiation that people and especially children are living with in Japan and the fact that adverse health effects and deaths amongst children are being experienced already.




I have an idea developing about how to address this issue of ignoring emotional intelligence, particularly where it is seen as a feminine trait  and is scorned by the technocrats in our society. I'll share my idea at some point later!