#Hinkley Point

[supplyside]

Big Carl - World's Largest Construction Crane - Hinkley Point, Sommerset, England nuclear power plant

[funeralprocessor]

POV: You just activated your contraption in Nara City on July 8, 2022

[zvaigzdelasas]

Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.

The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve. This sounds like great news for the EU, which recently pledged to triple its solar power capacity to 672 gigawatts by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.

In reality, though, it has caused a crisis. Under the EU’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan”, 40pc of the panels to be spread across European fields and roofs were meant to be made by European manufacturers.

However, the influx of cheap Chinese alternatives means that instead of tooling up, manufacturers are pulling out of the market or becoming insolvent. Last year 97pc of the solar panels installed across Europe came from China.[...]

The best estimates suggest that about 90 gigawatts worth of solar panels are stashed around Europe. That solar power capacity roughly equates to 25 large nuclear power stations the size of Hinkley Point C.[...]

The sheer scale of the problem was revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It warned that although the world was installing at record rates of around 400 gigawatts a year, manufacturing capacity was growing far faster.

By the end of this year solar panel factories, mostly in China, will be capable of churning out 1,100 gigawatts a year – nearly three times more than the world is ready [sic] for. For comparison, that’s about 11 times [!!!!] the UK’s entire generating capacity.

For some solar power installers, it’s a dream come true. Sagar Adani is building solar farms across India’s deserts, with 54 in operation and another 12 being built.

His company, Adani Green Energy, is constructing one solar farm so large that it will cover an area five times the size of Paris and have a capacity of 30 gigawatts – equal to a third of the UK’s entire generating capacity.

“I am installing tens of millions of solar panels across these projects,” says Adani. “Almost all of them will have been imported from China. There is nowhere else that can supply them in such numbers or at such prices.

“China saw the opportunity before others, it looked forward to what the world is going to set up 10 years on. And because they scaled up in the way they did, they were able to reduce costs substantially as well.”

That scaling up meant the capital cost of installing solar power fell from around £1.25m per megawatt of generating capacity in 2015 to around £600,000 today – a decrease of more than 50pc – making it cheaper than almost any other form of generation, including wind.[...]

“Up to 2012 there was a healthy looking European solar panel industry but it was actually very reliant on subsidies and preferential treatment.

“But then European governments and other customers started buying from China because their products were so much cheaper. And China still has cheap labour and cheap energy plus a massive domestic market. It’s hard to see Europe recovering from those disadvantages.”

Trying sososo hard to make this sound like a bad thing [23 Mar 24]

[cetaceous]

Big Carl, the World's Largest Crane lifts a Steel Dome on to Hinkley Point C’s first Reactor Building Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Station, Bridgwater, Somerset, UK image credit: Ben Birchall/PA via: The Guardian

[oldguydoesstuff]

Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station in Somerset, England. (1965)

[mariacallous]

The attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the nation.

While speaking to a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 13, a 20-year-old man fired at Trump. A bullet appears to have swiped Trump’s ear, drawing blood, before the former president ducked beneath the podium, surrounded by Secret Service agents. He insisted on standing up as his security detail gave him cover, pumping his fist into the air and yelling to the crowd: “Fight!” A firefighter and rallygoer named Corey Comperatore, who dove on his family to protect them from the gunfire, did not survive.

The horrendous incident rightly earned strong condemnation from across the political spectrum. “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” said U.S. President Joe Biden. “It’s sick—it’s sick.”

The violence instantly became a moment for politicians and pundits to call for calm and pull back from the toxic polarization that has left Americans bitterly divided. “Violence is infecting and inflecting American political life,” an editorial in the New York Times lamented. “It’s not who we are as a nation,” Biden said in his remarks the following day.

But is it? Much of the reaction downplays just how pervasive violence has been in U.S. history. Although the ideology of American exceptionalism pushes Americans to think of their country as fundamentally different than other nations that have been wracked with these kinds of events, the truth is that the United States has a long and sordid history of people who try to solve political differences using bullets rather than ballots.

Violence is one of the reasons that the U.S. electoral system has always been extraordinarily fragile. It has taken heroic efforts to maintain the republic that Benjamin Franklin, one of the country’s founding fathers, famously warned would be necessary to care for and protect.

The common perspective that violence is somehow un-American misses a key point. The normalization of violent rhetoric in recent years is so dangerous not because it constitutes a fundamentally new turn in U.S. democracy, but because it taps into a deeply rooted history that Americans ignore at their own risk. The reality is that assassinations and assassination attempts targeting high-level officials have been taking place for decades.

The United States has sadly had many political leaders, presidents, and prominent candidates killed. The price that President Abraham Lincoln paid for trying to preserve the union and bring an end to slavery was John Wilkes Booth murdering him on April 14, 1865, in Washington, D.C. In July 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield, who died in September. The nation had barely caught its breath before an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz killed President William McKinley in 1901. And Americans would mourn collectively after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.

The count of these four slain leaders does not include the many serious assassination attempts that failed, such as when President Franklin Roosevelt was nearly killed in February 1933 by an unemployed tradesman named Giuseppe Zangara. President Gerald Ford survived two attempts to kill him within weeks in 1975. President Ronald Reagan’s life was almost brought to an end by John Hinkley Jr. in March 1981. Like Trump, Reagan managed to manage the crisis to his benefit. Reagan and his team downplayed the severity of the wound. He and his team shared jokes to emphasize perseverance, such as his telling the surgeons: “I hope you are all Republicans.”

Candidates for the presidency have also been targets. On Oct. 14, 1912, former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, running as a third-party candidate, was fired at by John Schrank during a campaign rally. An eyeglass case made of metal and the thick text of the copy of his speech in his pocket saved his life even though a bullet penetrated his chest. Roosevelt refused to go to the hospital and instead went on to give his talk. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” Roosevelt said, “But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”

Most baby boomers remember when Sen. Robert Kennedy, after winning the June 1968 California primary, was slain by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Four years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who became infamous for his staunch opposition to racial integration, was partially paralyzed a bullet during his run for the presidency in 1972.

Violence has also afflicted Capitol Hill. The Yale University historian Joanne Freeman writes that violence in the pre-Civil War Congress was as American as apple pie. Freeman took the classic story of the pro-slavery South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks beating Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane and revealed that it was not an anomaly. By the 1850s, members of the House and Senate were coming to work armed and loaded, and they frequently engaged in physical conflict on the floors of the chambers as tensions over slavery mounted. Freeman documented more than 70 acts of violence between congressmen in the tense period between 1830 and 1860.

Civilians have also deployed violence against legislators. A man named Carl Weiss took the life of Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, a potential candidate for the presidency, in 1935. On January 8, 2011, Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was badly wounded after being fired upon in Tucson; one of her staffers and five others were killed. In 2017, a 66-year-old man named James Hodgkinson gravely wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise during a practice for the annual congressional baseball game. Even family members can become victims, as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, experienced in his home when a conspiracy theorist David DePape bludgeoned him in October 2022.

At the national level, violence has not been confined to politicians. The United States has also lost the leaders of many movements along the way. The streets of the cities were on fire after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down in Memphis in April 1968; three years earlier, Malcolm X had been killed as well.

The United States has also seen immense electoral violence at the local level. The Jim Crow South was a political system where institutionalized violence was essential to the disenfranchisement of Black Americans. In states such as Mississippi, Black residents understood that they faced immense risk when they traveled to the courthouse in an attempt to register to vote. Another civil rights leader, the charismatic and inspiring NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, was struck down outside his home on June 12, 1963. T.R. Howard, a surgeon and civil rights leader, said in his eulogy for Evers: “For 100 years, we have turned one cheek and then another. And they have continued to hit us on both cheeks, and I’m just getting tired now of hurting in silence.”

This year is also the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—were murdered by the KKK and allied police officials because they were partaking in the voting rights mobilization that inspired young people around the world. And much of the country, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, was horrified a year later on March 7, 1965, now called “Bloody Sunday,” when police and white mobs brutally attacked nonviolent civil rights activists who were marching from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights legislation. Photographers captured the horrific images when troops fractured the skull of John Lewis, a leader from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and future member of Congress.

On Nov. 27, 1978, Dan White, a former member of the board of supervisors of San Francisco, shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who had become a heroic figure within the gay community. And since the tumultuous 2020 election that culminated with the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, 40 percent of state legislators polled by the Brennan Center for Justice have reported receiving threats.

The United States has many wonderful characteristics, but violence is one of them as well. As the historian Richard Slotkin has written in his classic works on the subject, violent mythology has always been deeply embedded in American culture. More recently, the historian Steven Hahn has traced the powerful impact of illiberalism, which has included electoral violence, since the founding of the country.

None of this unsettling history should discount the dangers stemming from the very real uptick in violence and violent threats that government officials have faced in recent years, which have reached elected officials, judges, and even poll workers. The current atmosphere is indeed one of heightened danger. Just because conditions have been bad in the past does not provide comfort in current times.

Yet history should send a strong warning about the dangers of politicians and others who use violent rhetoric. Indeed, this warning was often made to Trump, both when he was president and after, about his willingness to incite crowds. These calls to action tap into a treacherous component of U.S. culture that is often right beneath the surface.

The attempt to kill Trump should be a chilling reminder of how easy it is for some Americans to trigger a lethal tradition. Americans have seen the ugliness too many times before to act like this doesn’t usually happen here. It does.

[man-and-atom]

We have repeatedly pointed out that claims about the cheapness of electricity from wind and solar mean remarkably little in terms of the actual cost to the consumer. In Switzerland on 22 April, an erroneous forecast of solar feed-in led to a generation deficit of about a gigawatt, which lasted for several hours. This was made good at a cost of around 30 million Swiss francs by purchasing make-up power at a price of up to CHF 12 000 per megawatt-hour.

At that price, the £89·5 (CHF 102) per MWh guarantee to Hinkley Point C, widely derided as the foremost example of long-delayed and over-budget nuclear power, looks reasonable. So it is not surprising that a new study from a group at the Eidgenossisches Technisches Hochschule (Federal Technical University) has stirred up controversy.

The conclusion is simple, and in its broad outlines, is nothing that hasn’t been recognized since the 1970s. In the harsh climate of Switzerland, energy consumption is particularly high in the winter, but solar power is available only in the summer. Hydroelectricity, which undergirds the Swiss power grid, has good years and bad years (which is why Switzerland began building nuclear power plants in the 1960s). With an annual electricity demand estimated, on the basis of electrification of transport and heating, at 113 terawatt-hours (compared to a 2023 consumption of 66 TWh, although a Government study, assuming strong conservation measures, anticipates a demand of only 80—90 TWh by 2050), it would be necessary to transfer tens of TWh from the summer to the winter months. Pumped hydro is far cheaper than other storage systems, and the Alpine topography of Switzerland makes it feasible on this scale, which is not true of most countries.

The ETH group estimated that a combination of pumped hydro with electrolysis plants and hydrogen storage facilities to allow for winter operation of gas turbines, enabling decarbonization with renewable electricity, would require investments of CHF 563×10⁹, about 70% of present annual GDP. By contrast, baseload nuclear, requiring about 8 GW of generation, should cost CHF 48×10⁹.

Critics insist that the future cannot be simply extrapolated from the past, but this seems like the notorious “and then a miracle occurs” mathematical proof. With a short timeline for decarbonization, a “wait and see” approach cannot be taken. It is also suggested that time-of-use pricing might reduce the annual load variation somewhat, and that nuclear may be more expensive than predicted. With a differential of more than a factor of ten, however, it seems that there is plenty of room for the overall conclusion to remain broadly true. Against this, of course, is current legislation mandating a “nuclear exit”. Fission is a route to decarbonization which is more likely to succeed, because it imposes less hardship.

[mmoxie]

Part 5- Liability

Everything fell away. No old man with his maglite, no predictable cabal of local manipulators. It could be taken for granted that the world was trying to kill her- how would that be different from any other day in the past twenty years?

She didn't know that they could see the fire. If she had, she might've pretended she knew how to wield it. Vomited an arc of blinding orange into the night air to show she meant business. Instead, she grit her teeth, unaware of the trails of smoke sifting between them, and bore down on the stranger in the overstuffed suit.

His Minnesotan accent bothered her. She didn't feel like taking excuses from a guy who sounded like an extra in Fargo. He reached for his radio and she swatted it out of his hand.

"Who," she repeated, her eyes shining with naked hatred, "put you up to this, huh?"

He pivoted at the hips and threw out a meaty hand- only to retract it, rather than grab her wrist, when he saw the crackling fire climbing up her arm.

"What the hell are you? You sick? This, uh- spon- spontaneous combustion?!"

She didn't answer. He didn't like that.

"If you're dyin', just go ahead and die. Don't wait for me to finish you off!" He scoffed exaggeratedly and swung himself out of her reach.

She lunged at him, a moment too late. The oldster's maglite connected with the back of her head in midair, driving an eruption of pressurized fire out of her lungs. She saw both figures blown away at different angles, into the darkness, as she suddenly soared up, screaming and flailing limbs.

A huge gouge of burnt grass and smoking earth marked where she'd taken the blow and lost control- and if she didn't think of something fast, it would serve has her reentry target, too. No point in all the blazing and blasting if she was going to land right back in the middle of it with broken legs.

Let's see...

In the comfortable, going-to-die dilation of time, she flipped through the mental rolodex for action plans.

Bruce Willis? No, don't need to crash a Honda.

Rudy Ray Moore? God no, but I need to watch Dolemite again.

Mark Hamill? Not a lightsaber or pair of Chanel boots in sight.

Wait.

Roddy Piper. Keith David. '88. It was a long, ugly fight, six minutes at least of slamming into pavement and shattering windows. That's how two evenly-matched jocks take care of business.

And that's just it- that's how they're going to fight me. Low, dirty, direct. They might have guns, they definitely have flashlights. Distance is death maybe, up close is death absolutely.

Her mouth was full of ash. All her teeth seemed to be there, but whatever bits stuck to them from her last break were carbon dust, enough to make her cough. The coughing snapped her out of her momentary trance, and made her realize she had finished falling up, and was now on the return trip.

Fuck. Solved the wrong problem.

With no plan for her landing, she could do little but scan the scorched lawn for her opposition. They were split into two groups- one getting the story from her former coworker, and the other crowded around the Minnesotan, checking on his burns.

Damn, damn, damn. Ralph Hinkley. Christopher Reeve. Baxter Stockman. Wilbur and Orville fucking Wright, someone tell me how to fly!

Sorry, Seebs.

--That was odd. She thought hitting the ground would be the worst thing she ever felt- but this sharp ache through her core, seconds before the splat... it was as if a vice had tightened around her whole body and cranked down until she burst in all directions from the pressure. A dark little voice mocked her as she resigned herself to die.

"Typical. Give up again. At least they'll call you consistent."

Oh, you wanna see giving up?

It incensed her with the kind of outrageous hatred for a person that one typically only finds in a bathroom mirror. She threw out her arms in a last-ditch attempt to spread out her impact, maybe save a bone or two for the police to find. But there wasn't any crunch, and no blood or bone or viscera or identifiable scraps of a meatball sub from three hours prior.

Dani had spent her whole life folding to the greater will. Whoever signed the checks that paid the bills, whoever put the roof over her head, whoever shoved a pack of cigarettes in her hand in 1983 because she "would look hot" smoking one. Sure, what the hell. What the hell to all of 'em. It's no skin off her nose. Just a few seconds of time, and you got plenty of those here on good ol' Earth.

Except, when the chips were down and there were only a few seconds left, she found that they were HERS.

These creeps weren't going to give her answers. They were a frat, a country club- a big club, some Carlinite spirit murmured in a far-off corner of her brain- and you ain't in it.

"Same one they use to hit you over the head."

The ground had been the greater will, rushing up to flatten her. And for the first time in her entire life, Dani refused to fold. She erupted with open flame, the air shimmering around her, the grass curling into embers, and made herself a meteor. Her back and shoulders dug through the dirt, carving a long trench that sizzled and smoked- but ate every bit of her impact. Loose rocks tore at her skin, but she fared no worse than a gash up the arm. When she stood, intact, she heard hoarse gasps and the cocking of several guns.

Holy shit, I almost abandoned Seebs.

She looked out at the crowd under their spotlight, her eyes smoldering in a wreath of flame that covered her from the waist to the shoulders.

They almost made me give up on my boy!

"You fuckers almost had me! You were this close!" She held up a pair of pinched fingers and let out a loud, miserable laugh. "Suicide by politician. I look like Budd Dwyer to you?"

She strode into the spotlight and pointed at the old man. He took a step back, but bumped into someone behind him- older still, and in a gray suit, who grunted and shook his head.

"Give him his money. What he expected, not whatever crap you tried to pull." And count yourself all kinds of lucky I can forgive a bump on the head, you old bastard.

"And you," she squinted at him. "Pack it up elsewhere. There ain't gonna be a job to come back to."

"She's threatening us," the man in the gray suit groaned, looking expectantly at some of his larger colleagues. His voice was nasal and needy- the audacity of a motherfucker who had everything, sounding like that.

"Let me cut it down to just one." She wheeled around, a trail of flame following her accusing hand. "The rest of you want out in one piece? Give me the man who wanted to play Caesar tonight."

There were yelps, scuffling, swearing, and the shape of a former fellow goon darting off into the darkness, before the enormous Minnesotan stepped forward, holding a smaller man by the scruff of his neck- or at least the scruff of his crisp white button-up.

"Smart businessmen know when to cut and run." She looked past the scrawny man in the giant's grip, and to the rest of the murmuring crowd. "You've cut!" Her left index finger jutted at the captive. Fire poured from her mouth in a liquid arc that rolled through the air, an orange wave of anguish surging toward the crowd.

"Now run!"

They scattered. All but the little one, suddenly her sole audience, dumped on the ground by a giant in a poorly-tailored suit, currently booking for the horizon with perfect ear-to-pocket running form.

"They sold you out. Tell me something- are you surprised?"

She crouched, and saw the sweat beading on his forehead. Even in the harsh spotlight, her incandescent glow was blinding.

He refused to answer. Dani grabbed him by the collar- and then the knot of his tie, when she realized how quickly his shirt was turning to cinders.

"Are you surprised, Gaius Iulius Caesar?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?!" He was shrill and creaking with every other word. Maybe the threat of being cremated has him going through puberty all over again.

"I bet you got a big laugh out of the room when you proposed, what, betting on some goon fights to liven up the evening?"

He swallowed. Dani's expression flattened, and she exhaled a gray cloud through grit teeth.

"What was your first job, ah-" She raised her eyebrows. "-Didn't catch your name."

"My firs- what? Listen, I'm- I can give you whatever you want. I- we've got money. You know that. My name? I'm Sean. You know, Mayor Sean?"

"Answer the question, Sean. First job."

"Why?"

"If you don't, me and you will do a little experiment. See if a single Sean is as good as firewood on these cold desert nights. Who knows? You could be the economical choice."

His eyes widened. She went on.

"Or, because I want to get to know you. You like that better?"

Oh, how she relished this. She had never had the power to fuck with someone before. She could tell him whatever the hell she wanted. It was enough to make her dizzy.

"I- I cut lawns for my folks," he said. He was blinking a lot. Smoke must be stinging his eyes.

"Real job. Someone else cutting the check."

"I pushed carts at Gwep's for a couple months, but... that was like, punishment, for crashing the car I got for my birthday."

"Haha, yeah. Working retail, that's punishment alright." She relaxed her grip on his ashen remnant of a tie and instead grabbed his shoulder. He screamed, but she stared at him and made him listen to the sizzle beneath her palm.

"I did that for twelve years, Sean. Thought I'd be done in a couple months too, right back to college. Woulda been jockeying the camera for the Channel Nine News by now, but... you know what they say at Wilson Titlee, Sean?"

Anguished and terrified, he shook his head.

"It's right under the logo. You deserve it. I see those three words when I close my eyes to sleep, Sean."

She lifted her hand, and his face was a rictus of horror at his own ruin of a shoulder.

"Do you think I deserved it, Sean? The dreams I had before people like you took hold of my life- I gave them up over and over and over again. Just to keep a roof over my head while I 'waited' to go back to college."

"Nobody-- nobody deserves anything!" Ooh, maybe he's made of more than tissue paper after all. "You earn it in this life! That's what I've always been told."

Nah.

"You got the money on you, Sean?"

"I got my money." He shivered with pain and honest-to-Christendom pouted. Dani wasn't having it.

"Who's your favorite Marx brother, Sean?

"What? I'm not- what the fuck? You think I'm a Marxist?"

Holy shit. Come on.

"Sean." She ran a hand through his hair. The gel caught fire before the strands, but after a few seconds, she had torched him into a flaky, blistery tonsure.

"You need to appreciate that making conversation with me is the only thing keeping you secured to this mortal coil. So I need you to dig deep, and strike those burnt-out neurons together until you get a roaring fire full of shit I want to hear. Favorite Marx brother."

"I don't know who the fuck you're talking about!"

"Mine's Groucho. You probably know him. Cigar, big eyebrows and mustache- ooh, the Genie turned into him in Aladdin.

--You know, 'No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.'"

"Well, I guess- I guess he's my favorite too. I, yeah, I do remember that from Aladdin! Haha, see? I- I know stuff."

"Mm. Anyone ever called you a coward, Sean?"

He balked at that, and actually wrenched himself away, scrambling to his feet. "I'm not afraid of you," he hissed, half from pain and half a jab at bravado.

"That doesn't make you not a coward. It just makes you a liar, and we already knew that."

She advanced on him. "How about what your friends call you?"

He seemed so small, like a child looking up at the glow of a shop window in the middle of winter. For a moment, his contempt was consumed by the strange magic of it all. A fire elemental advanced on him. If that could be real... anything could be. Even heaven. Even hell.

"I'm going to end your life tonight, Sean."

The slack look on his face bordered on numb awe. He wasn't a deer in the headlights- he was a cow caught in the tractor beam of a UFO.

"They abandoned you for the same reason they abandoned me, and everyone else at the bottom. You might have cost them something."

She set both her hands on his neck and stared into his eyes.

"You and me? We're the same."

She tightened her grip and filled his chest and throat with living fire. Ribs cracked as the hollow parts of him filled with exploding oxygen. Every strained breath he sucked in stoked the embers she'd pressed into his skin. He cooked in her hands for a long time, until the fire had gone out of her and he was nothing but ash. Tears streamed down her face, cutting lines through the thick layer of soot, zigzagging over her cheeks and down her neck. Her arms swung down at her sides, and she let out a short, quaking laugh.

"A liability."

<-Prev Next->

[maxwellgeosystems]

[christinamac1]

North Somerset Council says no to 'crazy' EDF salt marsh plan

Chard and Ilminster News, By John Wimperis, 15 Nov 24 NORTH Somerset Council is set to urge the government to block “crazy” plans to flood hundreds of acres of farmland near Kingston Seymour. Power company EDF wants to turn a huge swath of farmland by the village into a salt marsh to make up for fish killed at Hinkley Point C. But councillors are calling for EDF to drop the plan and instead…

[hackernewsrobot]

Hinkley Point C: Building Britain's first nuclear reactor in 30 years

https://www.building.co.uk/buildings/hinkley-point-c-building-britains-first-nuclear-reactor-in-30-years/5130997.article

[kfydyyuh]

Britain's pursuit of Chinese investments, such as the Hinkley Point C deal, amidst U.S. concerns, demonstrated a balancing act between economic prospects and security, undertaken independently of U.S. positioning.

[gatherround]

We've all at least seen clips from Erin Brockovich, right? Where Julia Roberts rattles off the extensive health conditions of one family, among 600 plaintiffs:

Did you catch the name of the company who sponsored the local swimming pool? Or who the lawyers are representing in this scene:

Yeah, this is based on a real person and a true story. PG&E had a natural gas pumping station by a town called Hinkley. From the 1950s until 1966, they used a chemical called chromium 6 to prevent rust. Chromium 6, however, is extremely toxic. It causes nasal and sinus cancers, kidney and liver damage, damage to the reproductive system, stomach cancers, damage the skeletal system, heart problems, tooth decay, developmental delays, miscarriages, and so much more.

It seeped into the towns water supply, contaminating the water they drank, bathed in, cleaned with, swam in, watered plants with, and were constantly exposed to. Every adult, child, pet was exposed, and hundreds had devastating health consequences.

And PG&E knew -- at one point, they started delivering bottled water to the town, while privately acknowledging but publicly denying that the water was contaminated with chromium 6.

This was in the 90s -- and the water there is still contaminated. A team that PG&E was required to fund as part of a historic class-action settlement says "It ranges between maybe something like 30 to 40, 50 years. So groundwater cleanups, they take a really long time to do." (source)

Unfortunately, the problem of contaminated drinking water is much wider than just PG&E, and is something that the real Erin Brockovitch continues to fight against. And the problem of chromium-6 contamination specifically is not limited to PG&E or Hinkley.

But....yeah. PG&E is....not so great.

it was weird living outside california for the first time and learning that in most locations people DON'T have personal beef with their electrical utility??? massachusetts was like "eversource: it's fine? i don't really think about it." meanwhile i'm pretty sure everyone in california loathes pg&e passionately

[man-and-atom]

The so-called “N-Stamp”, the certification that your organization, processes, and people are equal to the task of achieving the extreme quality requirements demanded for products to be used in civil nuclear energy contexts, is difficult and costly to acquire and maintain. British industry gave up on it ― because they had no new orders. Now they’re getting that capability back.

You can’t “suspend” an industry for years and then start it back up. If you try, you’re liable to find that it’s almost as difficult as building that industry was in the first place. When the French government agreed in the 1990s to a “pause” in ordering new nuclear power plants, they set up the delays and cost over-runs which have plagued the EPR projects at Flamanville, Olkiluoto, and Hinkley Point. Need we add that this is exactly why the anti-nuclear campaigners demanded it?