Wu Wei

We won't build nuclear unless you fix it for us

French energy giant, EDF, owner of London Electricity, is setting stringent conditions before it agrees to a multi-billion pound investment in new British nuclear reactors says Sunday's Observer here

The demands throw into question the viability of a new nuclear programme that could cost £15bn and shine the spotlight on the willingness of private sector investors to become involved in such a high-risk enterprise without government support.

They come as Whitehall sources indicate serious disquiet in the Treasury over the possibility that costs will escalate and that nuclear generation will remain vulnerable to the volatile electricity prices that led to the collapse of British Energy in 2002, leaving taxpayers exposed.

Did I miss something? Didn't British Energy spend a long time saying it could never afford to build any new plants without a government subsidy? But that was before it went bankrupt trying to compete in the electricity market, and had to be bailed out with another subsidy.

So EdF would like:

· A streamlined planning system allowing approval for new plants within two years - avoiding the six-year marathon that engulfed the Sizewell B reactor in the 1980s

· Nuclear power to be counted as a non-carbon-emitting form of generation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme

· Political consensus for nuclear power.

In short, they would like the conditions they have in France, where there is not much else to compete with nuclear energy, and not much competition anyway. European Commission DG TREN where are you?

Of course their hands are tied by the contradictions between the Treaty of Rome which generally prevents state subsidies for one fuel over another and the Euratom Treaty which still allows special conditions for nuclear power "to ensure that the EU has a thriving nuclear industry". And why does it need that these days?

The First Hard Drive

IBM developed a gigantic 5 MB hard drive system for their RAMAC computer in 1956. Just imagine trying to cram this thing into an iPod. Or your house, for that matter... more from Retrothing here. The hairstyle is pretty retro too.

Nostalgia for the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and other delights of the 80s computing on this website.

Healthcare unrest Czech style

We couldn't believe we were seeing it on Channel 4 news:a former Czech Deputy PM slapping the head of the Heath Minister in full view of a conference of dentists, followed by a full fist fight.

Seemed it had nothing to do with dentistry, but with his wife. British politics is so dull!

Bet Patricia Hewitt is pleased not to be Czech. She was only booed by the nurses.

Here it is again on the BBC, with a video as well. Be sure to make sure the sound is on for that slap. Ouch, it really must have hurt.

An everyday sight in residential Oxford?

DSC00079 Originally uploaded by varske.

An every day sight in residential Oxford Originally uploaded by varske.

I've walked past the end of this street several times, but this time I went to investigate with the mobile phone camera. It is what it seems, a house with a hole in the roof with a large fish diving into it. The house is abandoned and looks rather sad, apart from the fish. But the birds sitting on the roof by the fish look very blase about it all, as if it's just what they expect.

Shame about the telegraph pole, should have cropped it, but I posted from the mobile direct, through Flickr to test how it worked.

A nerdy afternoon (updated)

Finally finished my last project by doing all the boring admin needed to get paid.

So I figured I could have an afternoon off and browse the web. Diggis a blog of news items which are reviewed by readers and then the most interesting ones (measured by click throughs and comments, presumably) make it past the"editor" and appear on the front page of the newspaper. There is a blog of the front page, a blog for articles submitted (for "voting") and a real time blog for seeing how things change.

By browsing on it, I found Google Notebooks, another bit of Google beta, but which works quite well for taking notes from websites. But I tried to copy the content into a blog post and you just get the plain text, which is not so useful. Still at least if you are doing research, you have a tool to keep everything together.

Update: not everybody likes it. Google Notebook sucks has some valid points with some better products to try. In particular you can't search your notebook (and what is Google famous for?) So off I go as recommended to:

Scrapbook: A top pick Firefox extension, it is something which beats eSnips, OnFolio and now Google Notebook at their own game. And it's free, fast and respects the way my notes look.

Shame I'm not using Firefox.

After that, I stumbled across 37signals, a site selling web based collaborative software, which is free at the personal level but they charge monthly for the multiuser version (for collaboration, it must be, I suppose). There are interesting applications for collaborative writing, and project management and you can use bits of the application for lists and business chatting. I think they are examples of social networking software or wikis.

The project management software definitely seemed worth a try. Now all I need is a new project. Maybe I will do a webpage for the Kosovo Photo Exhibition, using some of the other stuff.

Finally I signed up for Google's new web-based wordprocessing programme, Writely, which they just bought off the developers. How nice it would be to leave Microsoft behind. But unfortunately they are swamped and not allowing any more users at the moment.

Landscape

Landscape
Originally uploaded by amiripz.

No this isn't England, but somewhere in Kosovo. Not quite how you imagined, is it?

What are we fighting for?

Don't usually blog about Iraq, but this article on the mental health of the British military serving in Iraq rang a bell with something else I was reading.

Of course. you could say that anyone who joins the armed forces needs their head examining, but while there is some truth in that, the rest of us rely on them to do the armed service for us. (What do we expect then?)

British Army reservists fighting in Iraq are to get better mental health services following a shock new report. A study found 25% of part-time soldiers deployed to Iraq suffered common mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression. The King's College London report said this compared with only 19% of regulars.

Now the Government has said reservists will be treated by MoD medical services instead of relying solely on the NHS.

More than 10,000 British military personnel who served in the 2003 Iraq war or were deployed on subsequent tours of duty were questioned in the study.

So it's a large enough sample. That means around a fifth to a quarter of the boys in Iraq have anxiety and depression either there or afterwards. On the one hand I suppose you can feel reassured that they are still affected by their situation and not dehumanising the Iraqis like the Nazis did about Jews and Slavs, and the Americans did about the Vietcong. After that, fighting is little different from a computer game.

On the other hand, quite a lot of the army is decapacitated. It's no wonder that the MoD will arrange for military doctors to treat them rather than use the NHS. No doubt the military doctors will explain what is "normal" in wartime, rather than have our ordinary doctors being shocked at what is going on in Iraq.

In Eva Hoffmann's book After Such Knowledge about Holocaust memories and the experience of survivors' children, she suggests that post traumatic shock disorder (aka shell shock in the First World War) is little mentioned for the Second World War, except in the context of the Holocaust. I don't know how true that is, but she is not someone to make a statement like that without some research. She suggests that it is because everyone knew what they were fighting for (a just war?) whereas in the Firat World War, the pointlessness of trench warfare quickly sapped people's belief in what they were fighting for. The same could be true of long guerilla warfare, where the enemy is often invisible and so harder to visualise as human.

So can we expect a lot of mental illness for troops returning home? And will they be ignored like Vietnam vets?

The study also found British soldiers sent to Iraq coped with the psychological stress of war far better than American troops.

This was put down to the fact US forces had been involved in more fighting and British soldiers tended to be older and more experienced in warfare.

Could that also be because they are a peace-keeping mission after the war has ended? Most of the footage of Americans seems to show them fighting a war, and not doing any peacekeeping.

Database of cartoons

Ok they are political cartoons, you won't find Dilbert or Snoopy. And they are all from British sources, but they go back several decades, and are indexed so you can search on key words. You can find it here, thanks to The Glory of Carniola.

A search Steve Bell for Kosovo and Iraq produced the following:

The second image was downloaded as it was. I'm not clever enough to do html to put things on a slant.

The cartoons have explanations and background in most cases, so you can have the context explained. Usefull if you can't remember what it all was about, or weren't born at the time.

An own goal for Russia?

It seems that Russia's raising the price of gas in Ukraine has finally done something that no EU or World Bank advisory project has ever managed to do: make the Ukrainians interested in energy efficiency.

The full story here (borrowed from the Wall St Journal).

We shall see however. Things take a long time in Ukraine.

Off to Kiev myself next week, if the paperwork comes through in time.

Cakes and jokes at Cafe d'Europe

Cakes and jokes at Cafe d'Europe

courtesy of and continued by A fist full of euros