Rob Edwards

Bird and Fortune on nuclear power

A irresistible seven minute clip satirising the government's decision to build more nuclear power stations.

PFI: the £50 billion scam

from Sunday Herald, 18 May 2008

Private companies could pocket up to £50 billion in profits from investing in schools, hospitals and other public building projects, an investigation by the Sunday Herald has revealed.

Local authorities, health trusts and other public agencies will end up paying up to twice as much as they need to for the 700 developments planned or built under the UK government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

The revelations, based on tens of thousands of pages released under freedom of information laws, have confirmed critics’ worst fears. PFI has turned out to be “a huge scam”, “a total taxpayer rip-off” and “a cynical accounting fiddle”, they say.

Dangerous waste for Africa seized

from Sunday Herald, 18 May 2008

Two shipments of potentially dangerous waste en route to Africa have been seized by Scotland’s environment watchdog, the Sunday Herald can reveal.

The shipments are now under investigation by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) as part of a major new crackdown on illegal waste exports. This is the first time that such action has been taken in Scotland.

Wild land wins overwhelming backing

from Sunday Herald, 18 May 2008

It’s wild, it’s out there and it matters to almost everybody, even if they hardly ever see it.

Scotland’s remote and untamed mountains, moors and glens have been given overwhelming backing in a major new opinion poll for the government’s conservation agency, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).

Over 90% of people interviewed from across the country said they thought that it was important for Scotland to have wild places. Of the 1,304 who were questioned, only six suggested that wild land was not important.

Time to lance Blair's plutonium boil

comment, from The Guardian, 14 May 2008

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Take the plutonium produced by nuclear power stations, mix it with uranium and make it into a new fuel for reactors to burn. Call it nuclear recycling, so that it sounds environmentally friendly.

That - or something like it - was the rationale for the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to give the go ahead in 2001 to the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP). Costing an eventual £490 million to build, this was meant to convert Britain’s stockpile of foreign plutonium into a mixed oxide fuel for selling back to foreign customers.

Blair took the decision against the advice of his then environment minister, Michael Meacher and environmental groups. But it was a boost for the flagging nuclear industry and, in retrospect, a foretaste of the government’s current enthusiasm for a new nuclear power programme.