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Thursday, November 24, 2005

SCOTSMAN LETTER - MORE NUCLEAR

Letter published Tues in the Scotsman. This was in reply to a previous correspondent attacking the SNP's power policy. Mr Lochhead has actually said some quite sensible stuff about housebuilding so understands economics better than appears here.I assume he is merely defending an indefensible policy. Slight edits, which blunted the particular Scottish elements of my criticism & cutthe terrorism comparison, have been replaced & marked < >.
For Richard Lochead MSP to say that an independent Scotland would be able to end fuel poverty by supplying fuel from our own reserves, presumably at zero or artificially reduced costs shows a lack of economic understanding. Independence will not, of itself, increase our extraction rate, indeed the SNP have often suggested reducing it <, so anything used to subsidise heating must come from our export earnings. Robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't work forever even in government.>

I agree with him that fuel poverty is a serious problem particularly since we are going to lose the 45-55% of our power from nuclear generators & that, apart from replacing them, there is no practical way of avoiding blackouts. Extrapolating from Help the Aged's English figures at least 2,000 pensioners a year currently die because of fuel poverty in Scotland alone < annually, which perhaps puts terrorism in perspective.>

< SNP policy however would not help.> We know that nuclear power costs 2.3p a unit, the cheapest method, while wind costs 5.4p onshore or 7.2p offshore. Yet the SNP oppose nuclear & support "renewables". < In the South of England, where under 20% of power is nuclear, it may be possible to ameliorate blackouts by buying French nuclear, but, because of the distance, this is impractical in Scotland, For a party which trades on their Scots patriotism > their refusal to face the faults in a policy that is causing pensioner deaths < & will shortly cause far more here > is shameful.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

RADIO SCOTLAND - NUCLEAR ITEM

Radio Scotland rang me today & I spoke for a couple of minutes on nuclear power (I presume they were running through old emails or phone calls on previous phone-ins to find vox populii) (9.25AM ish). I may have spoken a bit fast but I got most of it out & managed to rubbish Alex Salmond's advocating burning more gas (it produces CO2 which violates Kyoto) & pointed out that an offshore windfarm he claimed would produce 1000MW (same as a nuclear power station) would only produce at best an average of a quarter of that because of wind variability.

Gary, the MC, also asked about disposal & I said that all the world's reactor waste, a cubic metre per reactor year, could, after 50 years, go into a 100M cube & would, because of the short half life of reactor waste, be down to a fairly safe level by then.

He also mentioned the ridiculous one about nuclear producing CO2 when you pour concrete to build them & I replied that at up to 1000 tons of concrete in the foundations of each windmill they produce proportionately more.

I also got in that we are going to have massive blackouts when Hunterston closes in 2011 & that nuclear costs only 2.3p a unit.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

CROATIAN LEADER'S BIOGRAPHY

I have been looking through the website of Joe Tripiciani < http://www.joetripician.com/balkanhistory.html >. Joe, is a science fiction writer (as an SF fan myself I can confirm that we tend towards being more liberal minded & generally smart than the average) who was hired by the Croatian regime essentially to show what a fine fellow Franjo Tudjman was but insisted on finding things out for himself.

Now lets make it clear that Joe does not fully share my views (few do) but has been there & got the T-shirt. He clearly supports a Croatian nation & indeed I support the principle that they had the right to choose separation, in the same way that I support Scotland's right ot do so - my opposition is that they do not have the right to insist on including territory whose inhabitants don't want to go & I suspect he would not really disagree with me there either.

Part of the reason for posting here is that I asked him if he knew whether it was true that Tudjman had been a Nazi during the war rather than a resistor. There is a claim that his war record only appears in 1944, as leader of a military unit, after Tito offered an amnesty to any enemy unit that came over. His opinion was that Tudjman was a Croat nationalist, who could be compared with Vladko Macek, a non-Nazi Croat nationalist leader who spent most of the war under Pavelic's house arrest, which I suppose implies that he could have served in Croat forces in very much the same way, apart from being an officer, that Mitterand, according to photos, did under Vichy. Or, of course, he could have been worse - we haven't really cleared this up but at least we have upper & lower limits - he wasn't really the resistance hero that the BBC said but need not have been worse than the German officers who fought for their country.

In email discussion with him I brought up quotations ascribed to Tudjman supportive of genocide & justifying Hitler on the grounds of the need to be "rid of the Jews" which he could neither confirm nor deny on account of finding Tudjman's book Wastelands of Historical Truth to turgid to finish. I regret to say that on checking with the author of To Kill a Nation he also said that he could not personally verify the quotations as he had got them from secondary sources.

This is not to say that Tudjman didn't say it, or that he didn't say very similar stuff. It is the case that his PR man James Harff of Ruder & Finn said Tudjman had been "very careless" in what he said & "could be accused of anti-semitism" (he was boasting at the time of his success in getting US Jewish groups to support Croatia which was after all a considerable achievement but one for which CNN & co should share the credit). However, having quite publicly & quite correctly accused our BBC, ITN & papers of deliberately lying over 15 years to assist in genocide I have a duty to acknowledge when I say something that cannot be proved.

It remains a fact that there used to be 560,000 Serbs in Croatian controlled territory, that there are now only a token few left, & that the UK government has said that only about 320,000 of them can be accounted for. This from Denis McShane whom I have previously mentioned regarding the Dragodan Massacre:

" According to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, approximately 320,000 Croatian Serbs left Croatia during that conflict. Of those 320,000, an estimated 110,000 have returned to their pre-war homes, leaving about 208,000 outside the country: 189,000 in Serbia and Montenegro, and 19,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "

In fact, as Mr McShane knows & everybody knew at the time virtually all the Serbs were expelled (560,000 not 320,000). Our government is unwilling to mention the missing 240,000 human beings but unless they can produce them Tudjman to a greater extent, & they to a lesser extent (under pressure from Germany & the Vatican) are clearly guilty of genocide.

I would, nonetheless, like to know what he said in the original Serbo-Croat edition of his book.

I WAS WRONG ABOUT WIND

I have said all sorts of stuff about windmills being insane, an expensive way of generating power, an eyesore (well thousands of eyesores) & only working 25% of the time. I have been to kind, except perhaps about the insanity. Professor Singer of SEPP found in German power company EON's report shows that not only doesn't it work but it even more doesn't work when you start producing a serious amount of it. In their case their windmills only get 18% usage. This drives a coach & horses thru' the Scottish Executive's plan to replace our 55% nuclear with a renewable target of 40% (obviously already somewhat artimetically challenged) (to be fair 10% of that is hydro but 10% of what we already have is hydro).

Scots should note that EOn is the company trying to take over Scottish Power.
The electric power company E.On operates over
40% of the wind power in Germany (more than the
entire installed USA wind capacity). In its 2005
Wind Report:
http://www.eon-netz.com/EONNETZ_eng.jsp
E.On states that in 2004 it had an installed wind
power capacity of 7050MW and an average feed-in
capacity of 1295MW (or 18.4% capacity
factor). Figure 7 of the E.On report, entitled
"Falling substitution capacity", states: "The
more wind power capacity is in the grid, the
lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace."

"In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with
a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW
(Source: Dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional
power production can be replaced by these wind farms."

As re-stated by Allan MacRae:
[Predicted 2020 traditional power actually replaced by wind]/[Predicted 2020
total nameplate wind capacity] = only
4%! Germany is now at 8%, which is bad enough,
but will decline to 4% if all goes according to plan.

So an analysis by a German industry leader says
it will install 12 to 24 times more wind power
capacity than the conventional power that the wind power replaces.

On this basis, I suggest they would have to give
away a wind turbine free with every Bratwurst to make wind power economic.

The more wind power capacity is in the grid, the lower the percentage of
traditional generation it can replace. Allan MacRae’s suggested new slogan:
"Wind power, it doesn't just blow, it sucks!"
At 18 times installed capacity to replace Hunterston & Torness would need over 12,000 windmills assuming the economy isn't growing.

KOYOTO - RATS BOARD SINKING SHIP

The North Koreans have decided they want the diplomatic kudos from joining Koyoto:
``North Korea appears to have had the Supreme People¡¯s Assembly ratify the pact,¡¯¡¯ he said. ``The North is likely to send its delegation to a United Nations meeting on global climate change in Montreal, Canada, on Nov. 28.¡¯¡¯

The Chosun Shinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper based in Japan, also reported that North Korea accepted the Kyoto Protocol in April as part of its efforts to join the international community in sustainable development.

Observers said that the North Korean move can be interpreted as its realization that the environmental issue has become one of the most important global agendas. North Korea has rarely attended international meetings related to the Kyoto Protocol.

``The U.N. agreement on climate change is an issue which no nation cannot ignore,¡± an official at the Ministry of Environment said. ``Aware of the international move on environment, North Korea is preparing for it.¡¯¡¯

PS the link has a download for Korean but since its default is English don't use it.

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