We haven’t mentioned our plans for a nuclear comedy lately. We’ve been working on it a long time now and are nearly ready to pitch it to a television studio. Here’s how it looks so far. This is the treatment which is the outline or synopsis…

Green Valley is your typical nuclear power station. The show’s theme tune is ‘Funky Town’. The usual things happen and hilarity ensues.

The first episode opens with our heroes reading the new poster on the staff notice board while drinking from the water cooler. The poster says ‘DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN’ and someone has spiked the water with radioactive tritium as a joke.

The security perimeter is guarded by the plant’s friendly janitors who one day have to chase off al Qaeda terrorists who have climbed a ladder and are pouring water through a hole in the roof. The plant’s security guards are incredibly paranoid. One day, when two pigeons land on the perimeter fence, the guards arrest them.

Occasionally earthquakes rock the plant but that’s not enough to distract the workers from their naps and internet porn. The site’s sharpshooters congregate in the canteen and compare how many radioactive seagulls they have shot that day.

The robots that work in the highly-radioactive nuclear waste storage facility have developed minds of their own. They keep hiding the waste from the plant’s workers. Their boss, Reactorsaurus, tries and fails to keep them in line.

Meanwhile, the workmen who have come to paint the outside of plant use heavy water from the reactor to mix the paint. After the reactor’s eighth fire, fire officers have to visit the plant to show the workers not to put flammable materials near anything hot.

There’s a PR disaster one day when the plant’s owner hold a press conference to celebrate Green Valley’s role in fighting climate change. It’s revealed the reactor is actually contributing to global warming.

A pipe has been leaking radioactive water at the plant for 14 months. The workers carry mops with them wherever they go. An accident is narrowly avoided only because one of the workers goes to the laundry room to wash his underpants and wonders where all the water on the floor came from. It is coming from the spent fuel storage pond.

(Continued on pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…)

Posted by Justin at 2:34 PM | Permalink

As we discussed yesterday, Vermont Yankee is a nuclear reactor with so many dangerous fault, defects and problems that if it was a house or a school it would have been condemned and demolished years ago. We just seem to be far more tolerant when it comes to problems with our nuclear reactors - Vermont Yankee isn’t alone in its pathetic decrepitude.

Take the two reactors at Calvert Cliffs which were shut down unexpectedly last week when ‘melting snow leaking through the plant’s roof’ and ‘trickled down onto an electrical breaker’. It really was that simple. To think we worry about terrorists storming nuclear reactors or flying jets into them. A reasonably determined al Qaeda operative could bring the nuclear energy sector to its knees with a ladder and a bucket of icy water.

Meanwhile at Hanford, America’s nuclear complex in the state of Washington and one of the most hellishly radioactive places on the planet, work to dig up waste contaminated with plutonium has had to be stopped…

Problems related to the incidents included hazards not being adequately identified and responsibilities of workers not matching their training or qualifications, said Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff in a weekly report just released. "Worker and management responses demonstrated a failure to implement lessons learned" from previous problems encountered by other Hanford contractors, the safety board report said.

A failure to implement lessons learned? What is it with the nuclear industry and its stubborn refusal to learn lessons or implement them? Imagine if you had a child like that – that kept reaching out for pans of boiling water in the kitchen despite being told not to over and over again, that kept trying to drink bleach – you’d being looking for some kind of therapist. The nuclear industry, may we remind you, is 60 years old. It really does fly against the theory of natural selection. Species of animal that behave like that tend to become extinct very quickly.

The radioactive seagulls are back at Sellafield. In truth they’ve never been away but it seems that the owners of the nuclear plant in the north west of England (another of the most hellishly radioactive places on the planet) have decided it’s time for another cull.

You see, the birds swim in the water of the outdoor nuclear waste storage pools, become contaminated and then take flight to bomb the surrounding area with radioactive poop. So Sellafield hires a sharpshooter who bags the birds whose carcasses – which are classed as nuclear waste - are stored in a big freezer on the site for safe keeping. Apparently there are 350 ‘mostly birds but also some small mammals’ in the freezer. (It’s good to know the number – the Sellafield Freedom of Information people didn’t want to tell us when we asked last year.)

Now, you’re probably asking yourself: ‘Why do they store nuclear waste in pools in the open air so birds can get in, get contaminated and then bomb the surrounding area with radioactive poop? Isn’t some kind of net or cover in order?’ To which we’d reply: 'Be fair. They’ve only been shooting at the birds for twelve years or so. We could blame Sellafield’s owners but it’s clearly a failure to implement lessons learned by the seagulls.'

Have a good weekend.

Posted by Justin at 6:55 PM | Permalink

To Dounreay now, on the north coast of Scotland, a place so contaminated thanks to the nuclear reactor there, the beach is closed and they have robot submarines combing the ocean floor in search of radioactive particles.

In July this year, two people working on the decommissioning of the reactor ‘were treated for exposure to radioactive material’. Earlier this month, weapons grade uranium previously ‘given up for lost’ at the site was found ‘in "nooks and crannies" of scrapped pipes that had been packed into containers’.

Closed beaches, robot submarines, contaminated workers and missing uranium. Sounds like one of the more ludicrous James Bond movies. What future for the Dounreay site? Suggestions from the public include a recreation centre, a tourist attraction, and… a hotel. Maybe the robots can be reprogrammed to serve breakfast once they’ve finished cleaning the beach.

Meanwhile in Bulgaria, we wonder what’s happening with the plans for the Belene nuclear reactor since German utility RWE withdrew its funding in October. The project’s website has been down, cancelled or otherwise missing since the beginning of December. If they can’t keep a simple website up and running, what hope for the reactor? No wonder the Bulgarian government has had to go to Moscow with their begging bowl.

Posted by Justin at 2:05 PM | Permalink

Here's Captain Wei Jiafu, the head of Chinese shipping giant COSCO, suggesting that nuclear reactors be used to power container vessels…

`…they are already onboard submarines, why not cargo ships?'

One word, Captain Wei: Pirates.

Posted by Justin at 5:03 PM | Permalink

Russia’s space agency is turning the clocks back to the 1950s. In a move straight from a bad Cold War-era science fiction movie, it is ‘planning to build a new spaceship with a nuclear engine’. Yes, (*big, serious film-announcer’s voice*) an ATOMIC ROCKET! Russian space chief Anatoly Perminov said a ‘preliminary design’ for an ATOMIC ROCKET! could be ‘ready by 2012’. It will ‘then take nine more years and 17 billion rubles ($600 million, 400 million euros) to build’ the ATOMIC ROCKET! Let’s ignore for the moment the wisdom of throwing megawatt-class nuclear reactors into the sky (the thought of one re-entering the atmosphere at 25,000 feet per second is certainly a sobering one). Instead, if we factor in the usual nuclear projections and predictions, the ATOMIC ROCKET!’s design should be ready sometime around 2020. It should be built sometime around 2035 and maybe, possibly, fly sometime around 2040. All for a cost of 75 billion rubles.

Meanwhile, the public and the private came together for French president Nicholas Sarkozy this week. Nicholas is famed for his tireless globe-trotting as the nuclear industry’s most ruthless salesman (rumours that he’s about to star as Ricky Roma in a remake of Glengarry Glen Ross have been denied). He just loves seeing tons of public money being wasted on useless white elephants. We did wonder where he got the idea for his nuclear boondoggles until we read about his personal presidential shower. It cost 245,000 euros of public money and he never used it. It’s a dirty business, the nuclear industry. When will Nicholas come clean?

And so to Iraq. ‘The Iraqi government has approached the French nuclear industry about rebuilding at least one of the reactors that was bombed at the start of the first Gulf war.’ This week, in continuing violence, 150 people were killed in two suicide bombings which raised questions about the competence of the country’s security services. The government has called for international support to help it combat terrorism. The country’s politicians are divided on laws needed to conduct national elections in January next year, and so threatening the country’s constitution. A new nuclear reactor? What could possibly go wrong?

(You can read more exciting Tale of Nuclear Insanity here, here, here, here and here.)

Posted by Justin at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We haven’t mentioned it for a little while but we’re still working on our comedy show set in the nuclear industry. The only worry we have about it is that some of the storylines we have planned, despite being true stories, will be rejected as too fantastical, outlandish, or just downright puerile.

Take the 40 contract workers fired or temporarily suspended at Canada’s Bruce Power nuclear reactor for ‘violating the company's code of conduct regarding Internet use’. Were the contractors, who were supposed to be refurbishing the reactor, merely updating their Facebook statuses or was there – if you’ll forgive us – something more single-handed going on? The company isn’t telling. Chief executive officer Duncan Hawthorne said, ‘you can fill in the blanks yourself’. We will, Duncan, we will.

Meanwhile, the big-hitters of the nuclear industry are getting together to establish a ‘European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy’ providing ‘theoretical and practical-based nuclear management education’ in order to train future ‘leaders in European nuclear corporations and institutions’. The thing is, when you consider that some of these big hitters include AREVA (whose flagship reactor project is running three years late and 2.3 billion euros over budget) and Vattenfall (threatened with ‘special supervision’ in Sweden and on its last chance with the Krummel reactor in Germany), you have to be slightly concerned about what kind of leaders this academy is going to produce. What’s the first lesson? Financial Mismanagement 101? Advanced Incompetence?

Speaking of last chances, it seems Scotland’s Hunterston B nuclear reactor may also be on borrowed time after the latest leak at the plant. Nobody was too surprised, Hunterston being one of the worst reactors in the UK for safety violations with a decade-long record of leaks and fires. Apparently there is a culture of ‘failures of management and supervision’ and ‘failure to use “best practicable means” to abide by the rules’. These people sound the ideal recruits to teach at the ‘European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy’.

Finally, on the subject of the nuclear industry and education, in a gesture we’re sure was in no way an attempt at buying popularity or scoring a cheap propaganda victory, the UK’s Oldbury Power Station has bought a whole three laptops for one of the town’s primary schools. No doubt the pupils will be crowding around their new computers and Googling their generous benefactor…

Posted by Justin at 6:22 PM | Permalink