Nuclear power

It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can be whatever they want to be, the military should be abolished and everyone will be happy except for the Jews, who are to be hounded and vilified and attacked. Zack Polanski’s Greens are the embodiment of what the American writer Rob K. Henderson called ‘luxury beliefs’, which are beliefs in the main based upon fictions – and they are soaring in the polls.

To enrich or not enrich? This seems to have been the question dividing Iranian and American negotiators, and there are swelling choruses in Tehran and Washington who hold strong views on the matter. In a report leaked to Axios, it appears that during the last round of talks, the US gave Iran a proposal that would allow limited low-level uranium enrichment for a specified period. The proposal suggested that Iran would be forbidden from building new enrichment facilities and must dismantle “critical infrastructure for conversion and processing of uranium,” adding that research and development on centrifuges would also have to stop. Sanctions relief will only come once Iran is demonstrably adhering to the terms of the deal and has clearly paused its underground enrichment activities.

California has gone full pagan — it lives and dies by the weather. Over the last few days, the state’s power grid has groaned under the strain of a massive heatwave. Combine that with a hydropower-sapping drought and you’ve got a recipe for blackouts. While major weather events pose challenges for any electricity system, California’s has become uniquely vulnerable to blackouts thanks to an over-investment in weather-dependent wind and solar. Every night during the heatwave, solar experiences its scheduled defeat at the hands of sunset and Californians are left praying for the wind to blow and and the imports to flow.

Sir Ed Davey has called on the government to ‘keep the British taxpayer out of’ the Sizewell C nuclear plant, arguing that a part nationalisation of the project would ‘be a total betrayal of taxpayers and cost every household in Britain a small fortune’. Ministers are reportedly considering plans to strip the Chinese state-owned energy firm CGN of its 20 per cent stake, bringing the costs onto the Exchequer’s books. Mr S is pleased to see the Liberal Democrat leader stand as a lone voice for fiscal prudence — particularly because he hasn’t always been opposed to cripplingly costly nuclear deals. Between 2012 and 2015, Davey served as secretary of state for energy in the coalition government.

Days after a nuclear power plant began spewing deadly radiation, the ruling Communist party pushed ahead with a huge and self-indulgent celebration of the sort that had become a hallmark of its rule. This was no time for bad news, and the party delayed, dithered and hid the truth about the deadly events that were unfolding.  That was the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Soviet leaders allowed Kiev’s International Workers’ Day celebrations to go ahead. The participants, meanwhile, were oblivious to events at the stricken reactor just 60 miles away.