LET'S HAVE MORE OF THAT!!

Something rather odd going on.

"Wind of Change" understands that Mr Jeremy Vine was discussing the plans for the new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK on his BBC Radio 2 lunchtime programme. Our sources inform us that Mr Vine received a number of phonecalls from people living in proximity to the planned reactors.

Overall, everybody seemed rather enthusiastic about the new power stations. Fukushima hadn't bothered them? Oh no - you see, the thing about nuclear is that it's clean!

That's right. 'Clean'. Nuclear is the new renewable.

Meanwhile, any mention of windfarms in the media or on the 'net sets off a mini-Fukushima of its own. Windfarms, it seems, are the new nuclear.

Read a right-wing newspaper or read up online and you'd be forgiven for thinking that windfarms are pretty toxic. They are awful, inexcusable, utterly worthless eyesores that ruin your health. They stop people sleeping at nights, produce absolutely no electricity (except when they produce too much), they catch fire, fall over, frighten the horses and massacre bats by blowing their lungs to pieces.

By one recent estimate, snarled by someone on a website, wind energy is 3 - 15 times as expensive as nuclear. Yes, somebody actually made that claim. Because wind turbines are made out of precious metals and cost money. Nuclear, of course, is practically free.

Unless you count half a million years of hazardous waste. And the massive subsidies. And presumably the uranium doesn't come cheap.

But it's odd, isn't it? Even people who claim to be living near proposed nuclear power stations just can't get enough of them (nuclear's so clean, you see? It's like the new renewable) while anyone mentions windfarms and - whoosh! - there's an army of 'experts' out there ready to pounce.

The world, dear friends, has turned upside down.

This, it turns out, is a rather English thing. Scotland has decided on no more nuclear power stations. Fukushima went slightly pop, there was a meltdown and we're still not quite sure how bad the problem is. In Germany, this prompted a government decision to listen to the public and wind down the whole nuclear power thing. Switzerland came to a similar decision and Italy voted in a referendum to put a stop to their nuclear power industry.

A serious drought and rampant wildfires in the southern United States have caused a few jitters. The Los Alamos nuclear power facility is surrounded by wildfires and many people have been evacuated from the region.

Today, we hear that a nuclear power station in Scotland has had to close down because jellyfish have clogged up its water intake (without water, a nuclear power station is basically the world's biggest dirty bomb waiting to go of: think of your car engine running out of water and overheating, then think of the Apocalypse - that's the idea).

But the thing about nuclear is that it's so reliable. Which is why Britain's newest power station spent most of last year generating absolutely nothing. Nada.

When nuclear power stations suddenly go off-grid - happens quite a lot - then the Grid really has to deal with a sudden loss of electricity input. And then the buggers can be off-line for months.

At least the wind is fairly predictable, and windfarms produce electricity most of the time. And we don't all have to run for the hells in terror if a fire breaks out nearby. And if one does go pop, 80,000 people don't have to move away, possibly forever.

Bringing a nuclear power station back online a few months ago caused a sudden rush in the Grid's input and it a few turbines had to stop turning for a while to compensate for the overload. What happened? The right-wing press tried to make out that it was all the turbines' fault!! That was the occasion when they went from producing 'nothing' to producing 'too much' in one fell swoop. But if you think about it, it was actually the nuclear power station that went straight from producing nothing to producing too much. The wind turbines were just carrying on as normal. So who gets the blame?

There is a serious propaganda war going on out there at the moment. A huge number of lies are being spread about windpower. An enormous stinking great landfill of lies.

At the same time, there's a great deal of subtle and not-so subtle pro-nuclear lobbying going on. Can this really be unconnected to the anti-windfarm gobbledegook that is seemingly everywhere at the moment.

The nuclear industry is in this to win - there's a lot of money at stake here. There's also a completely fake and phoney line being spun out there that wind power relies entirely on government subsidies. Without all those huge and tasty subsidies being thrown about by HMG no one would even think of putting up a wind turbine. It's not true. But there is one industry which has always relied on MASSIVE government subsidies and is eagerly hoping for more. The nuclear industry.

It's so clean, you see? Nuclear, that is. Except that there's nothing much cleaner than the wind (though not around in Fukushima at the moment), and barely any waste at all at the end of the day - a concrete plinth, if that. Instead, say, of an environment of life-threatening danger which will last longer than any human civilisation. Funny - our local raving nimbies claimed that a windfarm of five turbines would KILL THE COUNTRYSIDE and CHANGE THE LANDSCAPE FOR EVER. A windfarm couldn't do that if it tried. A nuclear reactor could.

Sudden shutdowns. Crippling expense. Everlasting lethal waste. Radioactive leaks. Half a million years. Plutonium. Weapons. Terrorism. Natural catastrophe. Jellyfish. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Leukemia. Meltdown. Shortages. Yeah, let's have lots more of that.

People who campaign against windfarms are absolute tossers.