Nuclear power is deadly

In the wrong hands, that is. In the right hands, it’s by far the safest form of energy – of those that can actually meet all our needs.

(This is an important qualification because, to do the job of a few nuclear power stations, wind farms shilled by our Luddite lefties would have to cover every square foot of British territory.)

Witness the fact that 60-odd years of nuclear power in the West haven’t produced a single fatality. Desperate for scaremongering stories, Western hacks had to describe as ‘disasters’ accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima, leaving one to wonder what word they’d reserve for mishaps in which people actually died.

During the same period, hundreds of oil workers perished in capsized offshore platforms, and tens of thousands of coal miners died of black lung. Actually, since wind turbines are made of steel, it takes about 1,020 tonnes of coal to match 1 MW of coal-fired capacity with 1 MW of wind-produced energy. So how many black lung cases have been caused by ‘safe’ wind farms? Incidentally, even radiation levels around a coal mine are much higher than right next to a nuclear power station.

Yet it’s nuclear energy that’s still being portrayed as murderous. And so it is – when produced by the Russians. This melancholy conclusion is inescapable for anyone following the news – and putting it in historical context.

There’s currently a tremendous spike in radioactivity all over Europe, especially France. These seasonal glad tidings come from a leaking nuclear plant in the Urals, courtesy of which laymen like me have learned about yet another isotope, ruthenium-106.

I have to thank the Russians for expanding my education in this area. For example, had they not used polonium-210 to murder Alexander Litvinenko, I would have known nothing about that isotope other than its name.

And I hadn’t even heard of cesium until the French found traces of it in mushrooms imported from Russia. Those girolles have been subsequently withdrawn from supermarkets, while I ponder the inadequacy of the English gastronomic lexicon.

Though girolles and chanterelles are different, if related, and girolles are much more widespread, we describe both as chanterelles. To our credit, many French people don’t know the difference either – but they now know not to eat Russian girolles, or for that matter chanterelles.

Moscow authorities have denied that ruthenium-106, along with cesium, polonium, iodine-131 (also leaked over the high-rent part of Europe) and Roman Abramovich, is yet another toxic import of Russian provenance. But then they would, wouldn’t they?

Rosatom, the owner of the leaking Mayak plant, has issued a statement to the effect that there have been no accidents at any of its facilities and, even if there had been, no ruthenium-106 would have been released.

That’s all right then. Who could possibly doubt the Russians’ word when it comes to nuclear accidents? The answer is, anybody familiar with their track record.

Thus the Mayak nuclear-bomb factory near Chelyabinsk had 34 accidents between 1953 and 2008. The worst of them, in 1957, released 100 tonnes of hot radioactive waste, contaminating an area the size of Western Europe.

None of the disasters was officially reported. All were emphatically denied when ‘vicious and unfounded’ rumours began to circulate in the West.

Note, however, that the Mayak accidents – both at the reactor and nuclear bomb factory – began on Stalin’s watch and continued well into Putin’s, with the same veracity of reporting throughout. This proves the point I often make: post-perestroika Russia is but a continuation of the Soviet Union by other means.

Who’s in charge at any particular point makes no difference whatsoever. Thus Gorbachev, elevated to secular sainthood for replacing a communist state with a kleptofascist one, lied with customary Soviet ease about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Russian reporters flooded into Chernobyl, interviewing ruddy Russian lasses holding rosy-cheeked babies and laughing at Western hacks with their rumour-mongering reports. Had the westward winds not made Geiger counters go haywire in Scandinavia and Scotland, the catastrophe would have been hushed up like so many others.

Mayak and other accidents testify to the dangers presented by nuclear power in the hands of backward nations, such as Russia. However, it’s not backward in scientific thought and technological ingenuity, far from it.

But scientists and engineers, no matter how brilliant, are hamstrung in the absence of a first-rate infrastructure, both physical and metaphysical. The physical kind involves management structures, supply systems, quality controls, distribution networks. The metaphysical one involves a conscientious and ideally sober labour force blessed with a universal work ethic.

In those areas Russia isn’t so much third Rome as third world, which is why she is perfectly capable of turning the whole globe into a Chernobyl. But nuclear accidents and even disasters are in a way a win-win situation for Russia.

Ever since it became clear that only the West’s nuclear weapons were capable of checking Russian aggression, the Russians have been sponsoring rabid anti-nuke propaganda in the West. And various Soviet fronts, such as the CND, our own hatchery of Labour high command, have campaigned not only against nuclear weapons but also against nuclear power stations.

As a result, both France and Germany are phasing out their nuclear reactors, a criminal strategic folly that’ll leave Europe at the mercy of major hydrocarbon suppliers, such as Islamic countries and Russia.

Our gullible public avidly gobbles up lies about nuclear power, and every Russian accident makes them even more credulous. Then again, our progressive education has destroyed the people’s ability to think analytically about anything.

So why would they be able to think properly about nuclear energy? No reason at all.